I had an interesting call with the CEO of Evoca, Murem Sharpe (that’s her in the photo to the left holding the phone), about what they’re doing a few weeks ago. If you recall I previously wrote about ATDC companies that didn’t drive their own public awareness. One of the companies that does seem to own their public persona is Evoca. They have a nice looking site as well as an updated blog (although the last entry right now is dated December 28, 2007).
The reason it has taken me so long to write about Evoca is first, there has been a lot of good stories to write about but second, I needed to figure out what I thought of their business. In a nutshell, Evoca lets clients convert audio into an embeddable online audio clip. Nothing spectacular, right? Well, their hook is that you use a regular phone to do it. So the idea is that usage is vastly simplified since most everyone knows how to use their phone or cellphone to make a phone call.
Evoca has some interesting client wins including the Discovery Channel and has even been used by President Bill Clinton. But I’m really struggling to see how I could use this service myself. Maybe it’s because I’m not a Skype user (Evoca provides free call recording on Skype). Or maybe it’s because I would often rather chat on IM, email, or in person rather than on my cell phone (I was recently called a Luddite by a friend because I don’t do mobile email - I just like to say that I rock it old school). Judging by the list of recent Evoca recordings it seems like a lot of folks use Evoca in other countries. Maybe we just don’t get “it” in the U.S.
The competition in this space is pretty fierce. There are a lot of companies doing telecommunication related stuff including Grand Central (acquired by Google), Jangl, Jott, Yap, and Jajah. Not to say that any of these companies is directly competitive but it wouldn’t take much for one company to bleed over to another. For example, Grand Central already allows users to embed voice mail messages they receive onto a web page.
Evoca has built their system to be highly scalable and I noticed that they were serving content off of the Amazon S3 service which I talked about before in relation to JungleDisk. Murem also told me that they are using the open source Asterisk project as their platform through which phone calls get convert into audio files.
Evoca is a virtual company with people spread in multiple states. Murem told me that there are about twelve active employees and the company was founded in July 2005. The company has been completely bootstrapped over this time with no outside funding.
I’ll keep an eye on this one to see how it evolves and if I can figure out a way I can use the technology. I still haven’t figured that part out yet. Maybe I need to get a technologically current cell phone first. Nah…
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