Yuuguu Takes Desktop Sharing Mobile

UK based Yuuguu will officially launch at DEMO today with a cross platform desktop sharing platform that also works on mobile phones.

Yuuguu, a name apparently derived from the Japanese word for fusion, enables users to see, share, and control other computer screens and applications. Yuuguu supports web browsers on any device, notably on mobile phones providing anywhere access and flexibility.

Suggested uses include team members working on a project or by friends sharing applications.

Yuuguu also includes low cost voice conferencing services for one-to-one and one-to-many voice calls.

This is a close to saturated vertical, and I’m tempted to say that a startup entering the space must have rocks in their head, or something completely different. Mobile desktop sharing is fairly new, however I couldn’t get it to work. Issues aside, Yuuguu’s idea is sound, with a lot of potential.

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Vlingo: Voice Enable Any Mobile Application

People really hate cell phone keypads for data entry.

Anyone who’s called customer service knows voice guided phone applications aren’t new, but they’re a good way to navigate menus and enter text. And applications like Spinvox which incorporated speech recognition to turn verbal voicemails into written text messages, and TellMe, which uses voice recognition to power local search, are useful and popular.

Cambridge-based Vlingo wants to make voice enabling applications easier, by using their own speech-to-text J2ME/Brew application API (Windows/Symbian later this year). With the API, developers will be able translate a user’s voice to text, and use it in their application as if typed directly into the program. One of their first examples was for local search and shopping. Vlingo voice-enabled a text box on the program you could fill out by holding down the talk button and saying a phrase, like “Pizza in San Francisco”. The system then fills in the form with what you said, letting you modify the text normally if it gets it wrong.

In our trials the system generally worked with my Californian accent. However, an Australian accent had very little luck, highlighting the difficulties of internationalizing speech recognition. Often speech recognition companies make their jobs easier by limiting the vocabulary or training the system on a comprehensive lexicon of words and accents. But due to the breadth of their effort, Vlingo had to take a more general approach, using machine learning through statistical analysis so the system could work in a wider array of uses. There’s a demo below.

Their system starts with a basic statistical language model to make the best guess about what you say. It then improves upon that by taking into account context, and positive and negative user feedback down to the individual. Context helps the system by narrowing the number of possible words you said. For instance, if the context is an address, the number of possible street names is limited to the ones in the city. User feedback correcting the system’s output or leaving it be helps the system learn how you speak (e.g correcting Austin to Boston).

It’s a very ambitious project, but the team behind it comes with some significant experience in the speech recognition space. The two co-founders (Mike Phillips and John Nguyen) worked for SpeechWorks, which was acquired by ScanSoft, which then renamed itself Nuance. Nuance most recently paid $293 million for VoiceSignal, a company using speech recognition for mobile search in 21 languages.

Vlingo plans on monetizing the service by charging developers on a cost per month or per user basis. They’re a team of 13 with $6.5 million from CRV and Sigma Ventures.

Acquisition for Clipmarks

New York based Clipmarks, a del.icio.us-like social bookmarking service, may have been acquired by Forbes. We have no information on the size of the transaction, but my guess is that it was on the very low side.

The service allows users to bookmark all or a portion of a web page and annotate it. It is then shared with the community and popular new bookmarks are “popped” to the top of the site. In some ways it is more competitive with Digg than Del.icio.us since popular stories are linked from the home page. See our post on Digg-like competitors from earlier this year where we talked about Clipmarks and others.

I never took much of a liking to Clipmarks - it wasn’t as interesting as Digg and was lost in the sea of social bookmarking competitors. But I congratulate them on the acquisition and look forward to seeing what Forbes does with it. I wonder if Condé Nast’s acquisition of Reddit last year prompted Forbes to take a look at some of the available competitors out there.

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