Apparently so… I’ve been using Tellme and its services for a long time. Some of them were extremely good - such as the Traffic Report application which then got phased out once the government implemented local 511 services such as the one in Arizona.
On the other hand, Web 2.0 seems to be surrounded by a series of keywords such as blogs, podcasts, social networks, etc., one of which I really felt would apply to Tellme. But then today I was reading a report from the Web 2.0 Expo talking about the Top 5 Web 2.0 services from the conference, and certainly enough, Tellme was at the top of the list thanks to its new downloadable application that allows you to get useful business and directory listing information on your mobile devices and phones.
In particular, I think the multi-modal functionality provided by the application is a clear indication of how companies can leverage some of these Web 2.0 technologies. In the case of Tellme, you can call in and find 411-like information using speech recognition, you can send a text message with your request, or you can download the application to your phone and get the results displayed on the phone screen.
Kudos for Tellme for *discovering* that users not only want features, but want control over the interactions as well as freedom of choice on how the want to interact with it. Any other applications like this out there?
May 2nd, 2007 at 8:03 am
Well, for traffic information, traffic.com has those same features, except perhaps SMS. Their IVR could use some tweaking though. TellMe’s is nicer, when it has the data you want, which is happening less and less as they sell 511 applications to state governments, as you mention.
Todd