SayNow helps musicians call their fans

<<<... Though the system is still in private beta, beta testers and my own initial exploration of the system make it clear that SayNow has been put together very professionally. For such a seemingly lightweight use, this is an application that’s had some time invested in its development. Voice recognition and an ajax web interface that responds to your phone activity give the system a great feel. To see a SayNow MySpace widget in action, check out featured artist AM Kidd’s MySpace page. Among the featured artists using SayNow are several with tens of thousands of friends on their MySpace acount. I think this is service is going to be met with a definite demand in the social media market. It’s not a cool technology looking for a market. The long term revenue model appears to be wrapping phone messages in advertising; something I expect will be quite viable if the service catches on. I don’t think that people will mind hearing a company name and one line of advertising before or after their message - in exchange for communicating with an admired musician. Before I used SayNow to send a few messages, I wasn’t excited by the idea. After trying it out, taking a look at the team behind it and thinking about the business model, though - I’m convinced that this is a startup that could go somewhere.