Richard Sprague WebLog : tellme

Happy to be owned by Microsoft

sprague — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:57:09 GMT

Mike McCue, founder of Tellme is quoted in the Seattle P-I:

"We are pretty much doing everything we were doing before -- just a lot more of it," said McCue.

We had a nice offsite meeting with our Tellme friends last week and I can say the same thing. The Redmond people and the Silicon Valley people are working more together now than ever. Those of us who came here via the acquisition route have no regrets.

Live Speech

sprague — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 07:41:47 GMT

I've been busy with Response Point the last few months, but my old speech team hasn't stopped working. Today, together with the Windows Live team, they released to the world some very cool ways to search from your mobile phone. Try any of the following:

Browse to http://m.live.com
Download a client (complete with SR) to your Windows Mobile or Blackberry phone: http://wls.live.com
Dial 1-800-CALL-411

One of the cool things about that last one is that it works on any phone, "smart" or not, but you can still text message the results to your mobile phone. For example, I sometimes check a listing from my dumb analog home phone and have the results sent to my mobile as I head out the door.

I've been using all these services for several months now and I don't know how to live without them.

Tellme Wow

sprague — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 01:00:00 GMT

It's official: the Microsoft Speech Deal of All Time: we announced that Tellme is now a part of Microsoft. My boss is in Mountain View today to meet the new people.

You'll hear a lot more about this in the next few weeks. And meanwhile, I'm not the official voice of Microsoft on this, so everything I say should be taken as my own personal opinion (and plenty of people are expressing their opinions).

But here's briefly what I think: Data is what drives speech recognition, and Tellme has it by the truckful. It's extremely important in speech to get actual users using your system, because every call and every interaction is new data that will improve quality and accuracy. A significant fraction of the U.S. population has called Tellme, which is an asset that will mean huge improvements to all of our systems.

I'm also looking forward to working with the people I know from my old days in Silicon Valley. Their offices are just down the street from my old neighborhood, so I get misty-eyed just thinking about Silicon Valley and all the fun things they do down there. Turns out there are several ex-Microsoft people there too, which should help in the transition because it means they already have a lot of the same DNA.

update: I keep mistakenly spelling 'Tellme' incorrectly with an inserted capital M, so I edited this post to use the correct orthography.

What it feels like to merge with Microsoft

sprague — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:36:00 GMT

The last time I quit my company to look for a job, I joined a small start-up company in Silicon Valley. It had fewer than 100 employees and everyone was extremely smart, hard-working, and in love with our technology. Many of us had specifically chosen to work for a startup because it was a start-up: zero bureaucracy, common mission, small org where everyone knows everyone.

When a big "change in financial structure" happens, only a few key people are involved in the discussions (for obvious reasons). But I worked in the business development group at the time, so we kindda knew that something was up long before any official announcements. The company CEO was doing secret Sunday afternoon meetings (with Bill Gates, it turns out), mysterious guests would arrive from out of town and stay holed up all day in a conference room, and my VP boss was always flying back and forth from Seattle.

Once the deal was signed, a few of us were told the details so we could contact our customers and partners to give them a secret heads-up. Then the marketing, PR, HR, and others teams all went into overdrive to prepare for the public announcement. Of course the news was leaking quickly the whole time, so we all had to pretend nothing was up when the press called, while at the same time being sure not to say anything that was a complete lie.

Then one day the CEO called everyone into a mandatory company-wide meeting at a nearby hotel ballroom (our offices didn't have any conference rooms big enough) and he broke the big news. Then he had to leave early to join with various big shots at Microsoft to do a press conference.

The next few days and months were extremely fun. We were the center of attention in all the press, customers and partners -- who previously thought of themselves as the Big Guys and us as the Little Guys -- suddenly switched roles and were eager, almost desperate, to expand their relationships with us. But the best part was suddenly having access to all the wonderful resources of Microsoft, while still having that start-up soul.

That's why I still don't use the word "acquisition". A good relationship is more like a merger: they get something and we get something. And for me, at least, it's worked out pretty well -- I'm still here, ten years later.