In 2000 my team at TMC received a call from a new company named Blue Silicon that received around 70+ million dollars to form a company that would integrate voicemail across disparate systems. The company launched at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo and in a keynote session the response from the audience was very very encouraging.
It seems the problem the company was solving intersected with a corporate need.
Shortly thereafter, the telecom bubble burst and funding for many new companies in telecom and datacom was ceased. Blue Silicon closed was forced to cease operations.
I couldn’t help but think of Blue Silicon when I read this Wall Street Journal story about Mediaware Communications, a new company allowing a user to have a web browser interface to a variety of telecommunications services from disparate providers.
In the article there is a comparison of this solution to the way Slingbox works – in both cases you are able to remotely access a service. But in the case of Mediaware, you are able to access your voicemail via a web browser and in so doing you are able to dramatically improve it.
I tried to access the company’s service but could not find them on the Internet. I spent a few minutes Googling and then gave up. I tried a Yahoo! Search – something I haven’t done in years and the first response was a web page from Mediaware founder Frank Huguenard which seems to have been written before he had funding.
This web page gives some idea of what the service could be like but it is unclear how many items on the wish list are actually in the product. Still, I am impressed with some of the ideas here and there is room to integrate a web browser with disparate telephone services and voicemail systems.
The only question I have is where on earth is the website? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a service that let us accurately find the websites we are looking for?
Technorati
Del.icio.us
Slashdot
Digg
twitter![12420506412[1].jpg](http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/assets_c/2009/06/12420506412[1]-thumb-150xauto-6495.jpg)
As heart tucking his story is (especially his encounters with VCs and Ooma), what he is proposing is not that unique. Many have proposed the same at different levels. The trouble is in distributing either the software or the custom hardware to the consumers. He probably should try to approach PhoneGnome to see whether he can partner with them. After all that box is a perfect platform for his ideas and they have a partnership program in place.