Hello all - I found you because of your yahoo voice connection - I have read about you  all ( see your own website page below )  and where you come from and am impressed - seriously.

My name is Mark Aldiss and for the last 20 years I have been poor and ill (Epilepsy- Grand Mal Epilepsy keeps taking chunks out of my memories - three years worth on one Saturday morning!, Depression and a heart attack - plus a few other odds and ends- and not too happy about it). I am on the mend now and I am trying to get the expertise together to build a core unit based on the principles of a research project I have carried out during my illness' I called it projectbrainsaver ( http://www.projectbrainsaver.iofm.net/index2004.htm and http://projectbrainsaver.com ) because part of it's aim is to help with the growing problem, World wide, with mental illness and social tensions.

In 2004 we knew, thanks to a lot of input from Autonomy in Cambridge and Belgium and Okana in the UK, that it would be possible to take the speech comprehension - etalk active agent (?) and feed it back to the client using all the skills of the profiling side of Autonomy to add to the quality of the return  fed information - with the Voice Stress Analysis kit available  - BT are giving away free High Definition hub phones which give you the quality of phone needed to gather serious amounts of data on a persons state of mental health when you can hear them clearly...

Because of the use of phenomes and the ability to calalogue them by area, or even family , you could have used this during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to get families back together quicker - the last child found the rest of her family three months afterwards.

I  need this kit, lots of other people I have talked to like the sound of it too. Mike Phillips, with your links to Carnegie Mellon University and then at the Spoken Language Systems group at MIT working on core technology for automatic speech recognition. - you will have an interest here, I hope, as I have been asked to join in with the SALT Specialist Interest Group at Bangor University - by Dewi Bryn Jones and Delyth Prys. They just did a report of SALT and where it is and going and your centre was one that they interviewed in depth.

I focussed a lot on Autonomy kit for the build of the first setup because of their IDOL power. That and the fact that their softsound technology - seen in Audentify and Aungate - and later on with Virage, could return to screen, and therefore to anywhere, cogent information

Any chance you could all, or any of you, look at projectbrainsaver and see if you could help us pull the first core setup together?

I have a mentor from the Prince's Trust, Prime Cymru, helping to pull this together and would relish the input of a bunch of people who, hopefully will understand and enjoy the uses I want to build this for.


http://projectbrainsaver.com

http://www.projectbrainsaver.iofm.net/index2004.htm

contact us -you said... so I did! (-:

vlingo
17 Dunster Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Telephone: 617-871-2987
Fax: 617-868-0227

Email: [email protected]

board of directors

Dave Grannan – vlingo Dave is President & CEO of vlingo. He joined vlingo in 2007 from Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone maker, where he was a General Manager and responsible for leading Nokia’s entry into the mobile email market.

Grannan has extensive experience in the mobile and software industries and a proven track record for launching and growing new businesses. Prior to Nokia, Grannan held various executive positions in the wireless and software industries. Early in his career Grannan was part of the communications industry group at Accenture, where he advised new entrants in the PCS market on market entry strategies, and from there he joined Sprint PCS as a General Manager to help launch what became the fastest growing US wireless carrier. Later, Grannan served as President and CEO of Geoworks, a global wireless data software company. Prior to joining Nokia, he was vice president of partners at Openwave.

Grannan started his career in the US Marine Corps where he led a unit responsible for the deployment of spread spectrum wireless position location systems in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in Kuwait and Iraq. Dave holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mike Phillips – vlingo Mike is Co-Founder and CTO of vlingo. Mike has been active in the speech technology world for over twenty years. He started his career as a researcher first at Carnegie Mellon University and then at the Spoken Language Systems group at MIT working on core technology for automatic speech recognition. In 1994, he founded SpeechWorks based on technology that he and others had developed at MIT.

Over the next ten years, Mike and team grew SpeechWorks from a small startup in a new market into the market leader in the now established market for speech enabled call center solutions. SpeechWorks was responsible for many of key innovations in use today in the speech recognition systems deployed throughout the world.

In 2003, SpeechWorks was acquired by ScanSoft (now named Nuance). Mike joined ScanSoft as CTO and oversaw technology integration and development across the product groups. In 2005, Mike left ScanSoft to spend a year as a visiting scientist at MIT before starting vlingo in the summer of 2006.

John Nguyen – vlingo John is Co-Founder and VP of Engineering of vlingo. Prior to vlingo, he was at Groove Mobile, a leading mobile music platform provider, where he was VP of Engineering. At Groove Mobile, he recruited the technical team and managed all research, development and operations of the critically-acclaimed music application for many mobile operators, including services with Sprint, Bell Canada, Orange, and 3. In addition, he initiated Groove Mobile's key innovations in mobile content search, superdistribution, and recommendations.

Prior to Groove Mobile, Nguyen was Senior Director of Network Speech Products at ScanSoft (now Nuance) where he joined as a result of the SpeechWorks acquisition. At ScanSoft, he managed research and development on all network speech recognition products, including the core speech-recognition engine and application modules for enterprise, auto-attendant, and directory assistance. Prior to ScanSoft, he was Director of Speech Products for SpeechWorks where he managed research and development on the speech recognition engine and platform.

Nguyen holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from MIT and B.S. degrees in Math and Computer Science from MIT.

Izhar Armony – Charles River Ventures Izhar joined Charles River Ventures in 1997. His investment focus is on software, services, and Intellectual Property. He is currently a director of BusRadio, Gridstone Research, iSkoot, July Systems, vlingo, Optaros, ThinkFire and Virtusa. He is also a member of the Advisory Boards of the Invention Science Fund and the Invention Investment Fund. Previously, he served as a director of Guardent (acquired by VeriSign, Nasdaq: VRSN), iBasis (IPO in 1999, NASDAQ:IBAS), iPhrase (acquired by IBM, NYSE: IBM), Yantra (acquired by Sterling Commerce), Global Food Exchange (acquired by Instill Corporation), Celarix (acquired by GXS) and ThinQ (acquired by Saba Software, Nasdaq: SABA). He also invested in Oberon, which was acquired by OnDisplay (then Nasdaq:ONDS).

Prior to joining Charles River Ventures, Izhar was with Onyx Interactive, an interactive training company based in Tel Aviv where he served as vice president of marketing and business development. Izhar also served as an officer in the Israeli Army for four years prior to Onyx.

Izhar earned an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Tel Aviv in Israel.

Bob Davoli – Sigma Partners Bob joined Sigma Partners in 1995 and has 25 years of experience in the high technology industry. His ability to identify and motivate innovative founding teams has been an essential ingredient of his investment success. Bob regularly leverages his deep operational experience and technology intellect to support the firm’s portfolio companies.

Most recently Bob was President & CEO of Epoch Systems, the leading vendor of client-server data management software products. He sold the firm in 1993 to EMC for $141 million. Previously, he was the Founder, President and CEO of SQL Solutions, a leading purveyor of services and tools for the relational database market. Bob sold SQL Solutions to Sybase for stock eventually worth over $100 million. Bob served as an executive officer of Sybase for over two years.

In recent years, Bob has appeared three times on the Forbes’ Midas list, a ranking of top venture capitalists. He also appeared on the cover of Business Week in a features story describing how VCs thrive through good and tough times.

Steve Boom – Yahoo As senior vice president of Yahoo!’s Connected Life division, Steve Boom has global responsibility for Yahoo!’s mobile business, including mobile products, partnerships and advertiser offerings. Under Steve’s leadership, Yahoo! has aggressively established itself as a leader in the mobile Internet. Yahoo!’s flagship mobile products, such as Yahoo! Go and oneSearch, have won numerous industry awards and redefined the mobile Internet user experience. By combining its consumer product innovation with strategic partnerships (including AT&T, T-Mobile, América Móvil, Telefónica, Apple and Nokia) and industry-leading advertising platforms, Yahoo! has positioned itself to capitalize on the explosive growth of this new medium.

During his more than ten years with Yahoo!, Steve has held several senior management positions. He began his career in Yahoo!’s London office as business development director, responsible for strategic alliances and new business models for Yahoo!'s European operations, with a particular focus on the European telecommunications and financial services markets. Steve then launched the European operations of Yahoo!’s Enterprise Solutions initiative, served as managing director and later relocated to the US to take on global responsibility for Enterprise Solutions. Most recently he oversaw the company’s broadband partnerships and services, working with companies including AT&T, Rogers, BT and Verizon.

Prior to Yahoo!, Steve was an attorney with the Venture Law Group in Silicon Valley, where he was responsible for advising high tech clients such as Yahoo!, Intel, and numerous Internet startups.

Steve holds Bachelors of Science and Arts degrees from Stanford University and a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School.

Jeffrey D. Dunn Most recently, Jeff served as both the Chief Operating Officer of the Nickelodeon Networks group and the Chief Executive of Nickelodeon Film and Enterprises. The Nickelodeon Networks group was the largest business unit within its parent MTV Networks and was comprised of some of America's best known media brands: Nickelodeon (America's highest rated cable network), Nick@Nite, TV Land and Spike-TV. Under Jeff's leadership, Nickelodeon became the first ever TV brand to build a significant business off air. Nickelodeon Film and Enterprises included divisions operating in the digital media, feature film, video and casual games, consumer products, magazine and book publishing, live theatrical, hotel, restaurant and theme park industries. In less than ten years, Jeff built Nickelodeon into the world's largest digital media business for kids and the third largest licensing business in the world. Today, Nickelodeon is among the globe's most well-known and diverse brands with activities in more than a dozen industries in 167 countries.