Archive
Get The Gist™
HulloMail promotes convenience. What with the sending, receiving and sharing of your voicemails being an instant process, would it be possible to make our app even better? After hearing the feedback from our loyal consumers, we came up with a solution to make the receiving and checking of voicemails an even simpler process. This is an exciting moment for us all, as we can now proudly introduce our new and long-anticipated transcription feature, Scribe™ !
Scribe™ is HulloMail’s new transcription service, which has a fun and interesting product under its name - Get The Gist™, which transcribes the first 10 seconds of your voicemails, using only machines (yes no humans), to give you the gist of what the message is about, before you’ve even listened to it. Ten seconds may not sound like a lot, however it only takes a few words to express a message, so Get The Gist™ has you perfectly covered. Picture how useful this will be where it’s inconvenient to pick up the phone, have a glance at your received message and … get the gist of it! Simple.
Available only to subscribers, Scribe – Get The Gist™ can be purchased via the in-app store for £1.49 for up to 50 messages, over 30 days. That’s $1.99 in the US and €1.59 in Ireland. As with other transcription services, Scribe™ aims for the most accurate transcriptions possible, however external factors have an influence and may affect the transcription of messages – a bad phone line for example.
Enjoy the new feature! It’s going to completely change how you experience your voicemail service, in a totally awesome way.
Natalie Bell
Welcome to The H-Factor!
My intentions regarding my recent excitable outbursts on various social media sites have been to create the element of anticipation, wonder, and perhaps even mild confusion. I do believe that I have succeeded – if not on the excitement front then at least on confusing a great deal of people. Either way, you are all interested.
The good news is that I have not lead you all astray, and there is actually something worth your time behind all this build-up.
I present to you the HulloMail H-Factor Christmas Singing Competition!
I know what you’re thinking. “What a long-winded title…” Well to be perfectly honest with you it is simply known as ‘The H-Factor’, but some room has to be made for description. I would like to stress that The H-Factor is nothing like The X-Factor – at least not in the sense of name, nor the sense of employing a rather [incredibly] intimidating [deluded] judging panel. This is merely for some festive fun! There will be no real ‘judgement’ beyond that of deciding which entrant wins the prize.
Oh, did I forget to mention what the prize is? It’s an iPad 2 WiFi, you know, no big deal …
This is, after all, a Christmas competition – therefore all you have to do is send us your best renditions of your favourite Christmas carols, sung by you, via Hullo message!
The competition begins today and will finish at midnight (GMT) on the 3rd of January 2012, so you’ll need to warm up those vocal cords and get singing sharpish! Your recording can be one of yourself, a friend or family member, your children, a hobo on the street – anyone you like! Whoever has the best entry will win an iPad 2 Wifi plus a free subscription to HulloMail SmartVoicemail for one year – two runners up will also win a years’ subscription each.
The winner and the runners up will have their entries posted on the HulloMail Facebook page, for everyone to hear! What are you waiting for? A bus? NO. So get singing!
UK & USA residents can send Hullos here: 7777888999
Ireland residents can send Hullos here: 777888999
Alternatively, everyone can send their Hullos to this email address: hfactor@hullomail.com
Just to make your lives that bit easier. You’re welcome, you don’t have to thank me *grins in a smug manner*
If you feel you need a reminder as to how Hullo messaging works, do not fear young squire, simply visit our website for help: http://hullomail.com/uk/sendhullos.html
Merry Christmas!
Here’s your chance to flex your creativity muscles!
A while back, I thought I’d give my friend Joe a call to arrange to do something, as I had not seen him in what only could have been a million years – I can’t remember what I suggested, probably to go to the pub [standard]. Or cow tipping?
Anyway, his phone rings. And rings.
He then suddenly picks up: ‘Hello?’
Elated I reply, ‘Hey Joe! How are you?’
‘I’m good and how are you?’, he inquires.
I begin to answer, preparing to discuss possible pub crawling [cow tipping?] scenarios, until I hear this obnoxiousness down the phone:
“HA! Just kidding, I’m not actually here, leave a message”, followed by the familiar ‘beep’.
Needless to say I was hurt. Well not entirely hurt but I was mildly disgruntled to say the least. Yet somewhere, Joe was undoubtedly laughing to himself, thrilled that he had managed to fool me – on top of just about everyone else [as it turned out]. He personalized his operator voicemail message deliberately just to mess with our heads, knowing the affect it would have on his sober and significantly cow-less friends.
It does go to express, however, how much fun one can get out of certain voicemail features, which leads me to my point – here at HulloMail we’re always thinking of new ways to make your voicemailing experience a pleasant one, and believe there should be fun ways in which you are able to bring your own personality to the app.
Thus, I place emphasis on our Individual Greetings feature in the paid-for app! Those of you who have subscriptions to HulloMail SmartVoicemail are able to record unique greeting messages for each of your contacts – which they will hear upon leaving you a voicemail. When you think about it, this is incredibly useful for conveying a simple message that doesn’t need a lengthy phone call to describe, such as ‘Hey Bob, I’ll be in meetings all day today, will call you back this evening.’
Perhaps you will record a fun or silly message for a sibling? Then have a separate more personal recording for your significant other. Or maybe you will follow Joe’s example and relentlessly annoy your friends to the point of them wanting no further contact? [Joe now resides in Mexico. Whether this is due to his personal commitments, or that we chased him out with pitchforks and torches, is irrelevant].
You may be thinking ‘How is this any better than standard voice-mail services, where you can record yourself in a similar way, as Joe did?’ Well my answer to you, reader, is this: firstly, it just is. Secondly, this feature’s uniqueness derives from your ability to have a different greeting per contact – it’s more personal and a lot more fun.
Make the most of the feature and be creative! And Joe, upon your return from Mexico, we’ll go on a pub-tipping-cow-crawl…[??]
Natalie Bell
Android catches up with iPhone and outshines BlackBerry
We have recently witnessed an interesting transition with regards to the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android smartphones. As you know, these are our main supported devices at HulloMail, and there has been a shift with regards to ‘ranking’, as it were, amongst subscribers in the US.
One year ago, we observed the number of subscribers to Android beginning to increase. This has accelerated dramatically within the last 3 months – surpassing BlackBerry subscribers. The iPhone, however, has remained a comfortable constant and continues to be our app’s highest grossing device out of the three.
The following article depicts the shift in subscriptions with regards to BlackBerry devices in the US, and makes for an interesting read: http://bit.ly/rAQRT
Natalie Bell
Anti phone-hacking voicemail upgrade, now available for BlackBerry
As you all know [or may not know, and if you don't know, where have you been exactly?] today is our dear friend James Murdoch’s ‘Day of Reckoning’, as Reuters aptly phrased in their covering story yesterday morning (read their article in full here: http://reut.rs/tYfgJC).
According to Reuters, Murdoch is set to face a special committee for questioning – with regards to the recent phone-hacking scandal in which his company has been involved.
It is in light of this [and for a bunch of other nice reasons] that we beautiful people of HulloMail wish to announce the release of Access Control for BlackBerry. Having already successfully introduced our anti phone-hacking component to the iPhone and Android apps, we are pleased to say that the BlackBerry app now encompasses the same qualities . As with the iPhone and Android, this new element for BlackBerry will provide you with additional protection against phone-hacking; employing a prevention and detection mechanism that renders all unauthorised attempts to access your private messages completely pointless.
Within the BlackBerry app, Access Control offers you the option of blocking all ‘call-in-access’ to your account, so that messages can only be retrieved from within the HulloMail app itself, and your email account. You can also decide if you wish to receive a notification for each time your messages are accessed, for easy monitoring. In addition, Access Control enforces PIN entry, if you prefer to call-in to retrieve your voicemails.
Please be wary of other third-party voicemail providers who do not enforce PIN entry with their service!
In short, all our supported devices now come with the protection you need. Your messages are safe.
Natalie Bell
>HulloMail selected as a Tech Media Invest 100 Company
>
>Awards, Awards, Awards
>
>Swine Flu? No, Feature-itis!
>
What’s Feature-itis?
Feature-itis is a disease that’s rife in technology start-ups, symptoms begin at an early stage and can be difficult to diagnose until it’s too late. Many start-ups, in my experience, seem to begin around the idea/vision/capability of one person, this in itself is not a bad thing. We only need to think about the multi-million dollar empires built around Richard Branson’s and Sir Alan Sugar’s ideas and vision, for example. However the problem starts when this vision does not follow the basic marketing principle of creating and delivering goods and services that meet and exceed the needs and wants of the consumer. Creating a particularly acute case of Feature-itis as it means you are creating, building and deploying features, and in some cases products, that no clear demand has been established for.
Is there a cure?
The good news is feature-itis is treatable with the right marketing intervention, although the path to recovery can be a rough one. It’s critical that the marketing influence in these start-up organisations realises the symptoms of Feature-itis and intervenes quickly to avoid further infection.
Prognosis
Even though the future for a start-up with Feature-itis is not always bright and can lead, at worst, ‘direction infection’, this is not always the case. There are some instances were innovation has been disruptive enough to change behaviour, we only have to look at cases such as the iPhone, Twitter, MySpace etc. Twitter and MySpace are especially good examples as they did not have the large brand backing that the iPhone did. There is no doubt that there are exceptions to the rule, as with everything, however in order to avoid a Feature-itis outbreak in your start-up business you need to stock up on marketing expertise and vitamin C!
