Tycoons Row

Founder Chris Brooks of Talkr, walked-the-walk and talked-the-talk, and is ready to take his company to the next level. Talkr, based in Durham, NH is a text-to-voice program which can actually read the words of your blog posts back to you. This company was started in March of 2005 and less then 2 years later, Brooks is putting it up for sale on Ebay. This is an outstanding program. Think of Talkr as the software program Dragon Naturally Speaking, but in reverse! Using Dragon Naturally Speaking, you speak the words and the software will write it for you. In the case of Talkr, you write the words, and you will receive (in Talkr’s case) an automated female voice.

The reason I list Dragon software similar to Talkr, is the simple fact of the scalability and usability of Talkr vs. a corporate software program that has been around for years. Dragon, is self-contained meaning that you can’t plug it in on a website, it’s not widgetized, there’s no developer API for it. With some good hacking it could be done, but it hasn’t been. Talkr, on the other hand has this ability to be placed on any website and the options for the end-user usability of a service such as this are very strong with some corporate backing.

Talkr is free, however offers monthly subscription based servcies. There is Talkr basic and Talkr premium. Premium is a service which costs $8.95 monthly. This service allows you to download up to 50 hours of audio a month. Basic is only $4.95 per month where you can download 20 hours of audio monthly.

Richard MacManus writes about Talkr here at Read/Write Web. For a strong technology service such as Talkr to be put up for sale in the beginning of the year in 2007 may bring about a trend in other start-ups that has started within the last 2 years, which is already happening. The trend is the lack of monetization of products or services and also the user acceptance and marketing. One way that start-ups need to look at is not only their business model but also their specific business plan. There may be crucial elements within the model or plan that the company may be missing. In this case, founder Chris Brooks states on his blog,

“..the companies that monetize podcasts effectively today have full-time ad sales force. And, although I have immense respect for the people that spend hour after hour on the phone selling ads, it isn’t a skill that matches my skillset.”

There are many great uses for this type of technology. Just think, hard copy magazines are not able use a service like this. What it is definitely great for is to increase your audience size. For readers that have vision issues, this type of service is perfect. I think larger corporations should take a look at revolutionizing themselves and create joint ventures with services such as Talkr. For example, what if Fortune Magazine online or even Maxim online had this type of service integrated into their websites for their written content areas. Not only they would be able to increase their readership, but also, increase a persons productivity. Now, a person will be able to multi-task: read, listen and view more pages!

Talkr is up for sale at Ebay.