So I’ve had this service for a while called youmail. It does all sorts of stuff like records professional greetings, assigns specific greeting to specific callers etc. It transcribes your voice mail so you can read it in email and sends you txt messages as well… cool service for $9.95 a month or whatever. A couple days ago Google announced that you can assign you’re own number to their service and it does the exact same thing… only it’s free. I got an invite a while ago and didn’t use it much as it was more like Skype Voice mail… but now that you can use your current cell phone number… it’s killer. Transcribes voice mails, allows for custom greetings… even the SMS Text messages it sends you have a preview of the voice mail someone has left for you !!! Sick !!! But alas, here’s why they’re dangerous… I’m all about start-ups and entreprenuralism so it saddens me to a degree to see that with a little development time someone like Google can get into a space they weren’t even in, and immediately take out the competition. All the time I would get questions, “who’s that on your voice mail” you have an assistant or something ? I would always tell them, “no… it’s this cool service called youmail, you should check it out” no one ever did… at least as far as I know. However, everyone has heard of google. So the ability for them to hear about this service from google has just exponentially increased over any marketing program that youmail could hope to put together…. so there you go… in a matter of months google has entered a new space and will be in the process of killing another start-up. Therefore I’m torn… Google … Good or Evil ? I guess only time will tell.
Posted via web from @johnhaden
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