Melbourne based Chinswing, an audio bulletin board, quietly launched with minimal angel funding a couple of weeks ago. The concept is pretty straight forward. Members kick-start a discussion thread by leaving an audio rant under the appropriate category channel (health, computer, etc.) with a relevant title and tags. The discussion thread is a series of boxes, filled by users recorded comments in the order they are recorded. Each comment box also has space for a few lines of text describing the comment. Developments in each subject channel and individual discussion can easily be followed via RSS, watchlist, and podcast. Threads can be played all the way through linearly or you can start playing further down the thread. This makes for a very simple way to consume the audio, but the linear format robs the system of the meandering sub-threads that sometimes spiral off comments. In order to post your own comments, you have to download and install a small .msi (Microsoft Installer) file with the recording software included. Considering the the simple play/pause/record features of the client, I would have much rather had the recording program run embedded in flash, like the karaoke service Singshot, or audio mixing site Jamglue. There have been a couple other stabs at services like this before: the now defunct Audioblogger, Wildvoice, Snapvine, and Evoca. Unlike Chinswing and Wildvoice, Snapvine and Evoca are not destinations for conversations, but instead syndicate their technology as a blog plugin (Evoca) or flash embed (Snapvine). Evoca allows comments to be recorded off your computer or phone, while Snapvine relies on users dialing in by phone. Being a destination and allowing for only one mode of commenting (audio) may serve to stymie Chinswing’s potential growth. Without the potentially viral capability of their own widget, Chinswing has to build a community around their site from scratch. Their support for only audio comments also leaves out any text commenters that want to pitch in their two cents to the discussion. Video sites like Youtube or audio site like Odeo have gained a lot of user interaction by supporting text replies. → Read More
Savannah, Georgia based Evoca’s new service to record and publish voice recordings has a number of features that allow it to stand out from the “click, record” crowd. I have been in contact with founders Muren Sharpe and Diego Orjuela since December, and tonight they gave me a complete overview of the service. This young space is already crowded – competitors include Odeo, Springdoo, YackPack, Waxmail and others (of these, Odeo clearly has the branding lead). I can see each of these companies struggling to find the right business model, feature mix and consumer messaging. Evoca has a strong case for getting it at least mostly right. And just to get it out of the way – what I consider to be the killer feature to pull ahead of the crowd, and of course what none of these companies have yet, are even simple tools to edit, enhance and otherwise manipulate a recording. This would be a sort of online and stripped down version of open source audacity. Evoca’s core features include a very easy way to record a sound file via a computer microphone or from calling into a phone number (Odeo also has a call in recording feature). With Evoca, however, you can also upload a sound file, or even record a skype call directly. As a Mac user I have very few options for recording Skype calls (even Audio Hijacker doesn’t yet properly record Skype calls on the new Intel Macs, and as far as I can tell this is the first product to allow this). PC users have other options for recording Skype, including hotrecorder and Outlook-based Skylook. Evoca’s Skype recording feature is (for now) limited to one hour recordings and requires a premium account, which costs $5 per month. Once a recording is created or uploaded, users have the ability to add tags, an image and a description, put it into an album and set it up as a public/shared/private file. Groups with multiple users can also be created. If the files are public, an RSS feed is available. Since others can comment on each file as well, Evoca has basically created a podcasting blog for each user. Add editing tools as I mention above, and they have a very nice platform. Files can be accessed via a flash player on Evoca, or downloaded as MP3. There are other useful features as well, such as → Read More
San Francisco, CA
