Anton’s Hat

So Pat Phelan of MaxRoam is at it again. The serial entrepeneur and telecoms disruptor has launched a new speech to text service for twitter. It’s not a general lifestreaming tool it’s twitter only and they’ve planned for a million sign ups over the next year.

The investors behind this are Pat Phelan of Cubic Telecom/MAXroam, Sean O Sullivan and Ivan MacDonald of Dublin based Dial2Do, Florian Seroussi of Global Roaming and David Marcus of Zong. The technology behind these companies is what powers twitterfone. Geneva-based VOX telecom provides calls routing, Redwood City, California-based Zong powers mobile enrollment and transactions, MAXroam powers the telephony intelligence system and Dublin firm Dial2Do supplies the core speech recognition which is at the heart of Twitterfone. Dial2Do CEO Ivan MacDonald who I had the pleasure of meeting recently at the Web2.0 Expo said,

“We’ve been involved in the space where the phone system meets the web for a long time now, and naturally we’ve been fascinated by the rise of Twitter. Increasingly, we’ll see “web 2.0″ services that people use primarily from their phones. Projections are that mobiles will become the dominant way of accessing the Internet, and a lot of this will be done via voice interfaces. We are very pleased to see Dial2Do add even more value to an already extraordinary service.”

Pat himself had this to say “We built this because we are all avid users of Twitter and have made some excellent business connections and friendships from it. We decided to see what we could contribute to the service and with our telecoms backgrounds the Twitterfone idea fitted perfectly”.

Like everything that’s cool, Twitterfone is in invite beta at the moment meaning that only those that have been sent invites can join up. I’m told that there will be regular releases of invites and as I said earlier Twitterfone says they have planned for a million sign-ups over the next year. Naturally enough it’s already on TechCrunch and been covered by Damien Mulley (who has had a deft hand in the PR) and quite a few other blogs and I expect there to be a bit of noise about this one.

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops…

(Disclosure: Pat Phelan is an advisor to Benchd)

I just got my new seesmic account  (Thanks Halley) and I have to say it’s some pretty cool shit. This is famed French blogger Loic Le Meur’s new video blogging/podcast/twitter affair.  I love it but haven’t put anything up yet because my Webcam is all broked up.

This does have huge implications for Bench’d  and all sports content websites and I’ll be reviewing the whole video podcasting phenomenon over on www.benchd.com/blog and what that means for us in the next few days. Hictu run by Italian Voip entrepeneur Luca Filigheddu is also running in this space. Luca’s usual business is Voip so this is a departure for him. Watch out for developments. He was in the Valley at the same time as the Paddy’s Valley crew and he made some of the same mistakes as us (going to the WorkIT.com Silicon Valley mixer specifically) but a fantastically positive guy who I’ll buy a coffee for next time I see him for sure, maybe even lunch, but not through paypal. I might even go visit him in Italy (well I do have relatives there).

In the meantime if you’re jealous or want to know what it’s all about just ask me.

Peace out brothas…