Meet the Internet’s Next Frontier: Hypervoice

Announcing the launch of the Hypervoice Consortium to provide a forum to define standards, capabilities and applications for Hypervoice conversations

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (Nov. 30, 2012) — During his presentation Wednesday at WebRTC Conference & Expo, Martin Geddes, a well-respected telecom expert and founder of Martin Geddes Consulting Ltd., announced the launch of the Hypervoice Consortium, whose principle mission is to advance Hypervoice standards, capabilities and applications. Telefonica Digital, HarQen and Voxeo Labs have joined Geddes as charter members of the Hypervoice Consortium.

Hypervoice is an emerging model for organizing and navigating voice conversations. By converting voice into a native web object, Hypervoice conversations become searchable, findable and shareable – in any language.

For example, enterprise social media conversations exist only in text today. By moving voice into the activity stream of our daily online workflow, Hypervoice conversations are able to transcend the limitations of text and become searchable, shareable assets. The emerging Hypervoice model allows us to solve one of the most vexing business problems today: meeting internationally across multiple time zones.

“We are excited to support this initiative both because it extends the reach of voice and because it makes working globally ever so much easier,” said Tracy Isacke, Head of the Silicon Valley Office of Telefonica Digital. “Being part of a leading telecommunications company that operates around the globe, this innovation will help us internally and externally,” she added.

“The ability to annotate audio conversations provides tremendous business value, as people can now discover the information shared in meetings and, more importantly, take action on it without losing the context in which it was shared,” said Alan Lepofsky, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.

Another one of the early Hypervoice evangelists is Jason Goecke, President & CEO of Voxeo Labs.

“With the launch of Voxeo Lab’s Ameche, we introduced the world’s first communications platform as a service. We are working now to provide operators with Hypervoice-enabled applications on the Ameche platform, which will allow carriers to embrace Hypervoice fully as a key innovation,” said Goecke.

In October 2012, the first Hypervoice application was showcased at Oracle OpenWorld by one of the consortium’s co-founders, HarQen, an early pioneer in intelligent voice services. HarQen added Hypervoice conversations as a service to Oracle Social Network, allowing collaborators to go from typing to talking, and then capturing their conversations, with just a click.

“Hypervoice conversations hold the promise of enabling a whole new paradigm for human communications,” said E. Kelly Fitzsimmons, Co-Founder of HarQen. “We are eager to partner with others via the consortium to help ensure the richness of future applications.”

If you are interested in joining the Hypervoice Consortium, the team will be hosting a virtual conference on Wednesday, December 12 at 12pm ET. Details of the event are available at www.Hypervoice.org/workshop.

About The Hypervoice Consortium

The mission of the Hypervoice Consortium is to bridge the gap between voice, the Web and telephony by providing a forum to further the development of standards, capabilities and applications and to cultivate the ecosystem of the larger Hypervoice market. The Hypervoice Consortium welcomes thought-leaders in web applications and platforms, voice technologies and telecom.

HarQen Promotes Ane Ohm to President and COO

Founder, E. Kelly Fitzsimmons, to focus on the emerging Hypervoice market

Milwaukee, WI (November 27, 2012) — HarQen is pleased to announce that Ane Ohm has been promoted to President and Chief Operating Officer. She has been instrumental in bringing HarQen’s products to market and in growing its base of Fortune 500 customers.

Co-Founder E. Kelly Fitzsimmons will transition out of her CEO role by the end of 2012 to focus on efforts to define and shape the emerging market for Hypervoice conversations, a new paradigm for organizing, performing and navigating voice conversations. She will remain on HarQen’s Board of Directors.

“After working closely with Ane over the last two years, I know HarQen is in very capable hands,” said Fitzsimmons.

Prior to HarQen, Ane led a turnaround and positive exit as President of LaserNet, Inc., a statement print/mail company. Before LaserNet, she was Vice President at Pinstripe, Inc., where she played a key role in the company’s rapid growth in recruitment process outsourcing (RPO). Before joining Pinstripe, she held various leadership roles at Strong Financial Corporation, including Vice President and Director of Mutual Fund Administration. Ane started her career as an auditor with Coopers & Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) after graduating with a Bachelor of Business Administration in accounting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“It’s a perfect time to make a transition,” added Fitzsimmons. “Ane is superbly qualified.”

“I’m delighted to step into my new role and lead HarQen through its growth curve,” said Ane Ohm. “I’m grateful to Kelly for pulling together such an outstanding team. It is an honor to work at HarQen.”

“This operational change expands Ane’s key role in growing HarQen, freeing Kelly to help define and establish standards for the rapidly-emerging Hypervoice market, in which HarQen is an early player with disruptive technology,” said Lauren Flanagan, Chairman, HarQen and Managing Director Phenomenelle Angels Fund and BELLE Capital USA, LP.

HarQen was an early adopter of Hypervoice conversations, a term first introduced by Martin Geddes, a well-respected telecom expert and founder of Martin Geddes Consulting Ltd.

“By linking what we say to what we do in our daily workflow, Hypervoice conversations will transcend the limits of telephony in the enterprise,” said Geddes.

HarQen Introduces Hypervoice at Oracle OpenWorld

ORACLE OPENWORLD, SAN FRANCISCO, October 3, 2012 – HarQen, creator of Symposia, has introduced Hypervoice, a new paradigm for organizing, performing and navigating voice conversations. Symposia’s Hypervoice capabilities have been integrated with Oracle Social Network via Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service to help drive efficient and effective sales conversations.

By transforming voice into a native Web object, Hypervoice breaks recorded voice down into smaller bits of audio that can be searched, shared and secured independently. Just as hypertext took text from linear to dynamic, Hypervoice takes voice from real-time, linear conversations to dynamic, asynchronous communications.

“Hypervoice links what we say to what we do,” said Martin Geddes, a noted telecom expert, futurist and editor of Hypervoice.org, “creating a unified activity stream of everything we say and do.”

During Oracle OpenWorld, the integration of Symposia’s Hypervoice capabilities into Oracle Social Network that customers access via Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service will be demonstrated, including how its users can link, tag and easily share small parts of their conversations as easily as they can share text. With HarQen-enabled CallMe functionality, users can join, interact with and review conversations all directly within the activity stream.

“Oracle Social Network is valuable for partners as it interoperates with other Oracle applications, including Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service,” said HarQen Co-Founder & CEO E. Kelly Fitzsimmons, who presented as part of Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange at the “Develop Premier User Engagement for Social Business with Oracle WebCenter Suite” session.

“Thanks to this platform, HarQen has been able to integrate once and serve many applications simultaneously,” said Fitzsimmons.

One of the primary benefits of Hypervoice is being able to share quick highlights from a conversation with stakeholders not on the original call.

Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service users will be able to capture important sales calls, using their notes as the natural markup of the audio being recorded. Conversation elements will now be searchable in both text and voice – in any language – and easily shareable with select colleagues.

In addition, Hypervoice will help trace crucial agreements back to the point of decision. For example, users will be able to find and listen to the exact point in time when parties reached agreement during a contract negotiation.

“Given the importance of linking what we say to what we do, ultimately Hypervoice conversations will replace telephony in the enterprise,” said Geddes.

HarQen is a Gold level member in Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN).

About HarQen

HarQen unleashes the richness of information trapped inside conversations – transforming talk into actionable insights. HarQen’s award-winning Intelligent Voice Services enable conversations to be captured, enriched, organized and shared – improving collaboration and adding an entirely new layer of business intelligence to existing data management systems. Milwaukee-based HarQen was founded in 2007 and is privately funded.

About Hypervoice.org

Hypervoice.org represents a consortium of ideas gathered from top industry thought leaders defining the future of enterprise telephony. Noted telecom expert and futurist Martin Geddes is the editor.

For more information on Hypervoice:
Web http://Hypervoice.org
Twitter #Hypervoice

Trademarks

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Hypervoice is a trademark of Hypervoice Consortium LLC. HarQen and Symposia are trademarks of HarQen, Inc. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

HarQen Adds In-Browser Recording to Voice Advantage

Job candidates can now use Voice Advantage anywhere they have an Internet connection—with cost savings for international job interviews

MILWAUKEE, Jan. 18, 2012 — HarQen, Inc., today announced the addition of in-browser recording to Voice Advantage, its flagship product that lets users use their phone and a simple web-based dashboard to create and distribute custom, recorded phone interviews. For the first time, job candidates will be able to use Voice Advantage anywhere they have an Internet connection and browser.

Voice Advantage in-browser recording is a free upgrade to Voice Advantage customers, and does not require any software download. All that’s required is a PC or Mac with a microphone. Users now have complete flexibility to use either a telephone or the in-browser recording feature to record their conversation.

Voice Advantage candidates can now record interview answers using their PC, Mac microphones or their telephone.

“As HarQen expands our reach internationally, Voice Advantage has already solved international interview scheduling problems by allowing recruiters to record interviews that candidates can take at any time. Now with in-browser recording, candidates can respond to interviews with their computer instead of a phone. This combination provides employers a powerful and cost-effective alternative to high international recruiting telephony costs,” said HarQen CEO E. Kelly Fitzsimmons.

In addition to international cost savings, in-browser recording also allows candidates to participate in self-service voice interviews at kiosks in regional offices or retail locations. This is a very convenient option for drop-in candidates to progress quickly in the interview process without additional burden on recruiters.

In-browser recording is also being added to HarQen’s newest product, Symposia, which adds presentation, collaboration, archiving, note-taking and sharing tools to any conference call.

Availability

Voice Advantage in-browser recording is available immediately as an option for all Voice Advantage.

In-browser recording for Symposia will be available to beta customers immediately.

Symposia Helps Providers Save the Conversation

HarQen’s white label solution allows telecoms and collaboration service providers to employ game-changing new technology—and integration with enterprise systems—to capture the value otherwise lost in business conference calls

MILWAUKEE, DECEMBER 8, 2011 — HarQen, Inc., whose products unlock the value of the human voice in business conversations, today announced the immediate availability of HarQen Symposia to deliver the conference call of the future. With Symposia, business conversations are no longer just about listening; communications can now be captured, shared, enriched, searched, and analyzed—all of which makes insights actionable.

HarQen’s Jeff Fitzsimmons, co-founder and VP of product development, will debut Symposia and speak today at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference in San Francisco.

Symposia is a cloud-based collaboration offering that dynamically transforms any conversation into an interactive synopsis that lives long after the conference call, meeting, webinar or presentation has ended. Symposia’s hosted voice management platform and API enables the configuration and deployment of enterprise grade, white-label solutions, making Symposia compatible with applications and business environments such as collaboration and telecom service providers, Salesforce.com, SAP, and Oracle.

With Symposia, conversations are forever accessible, interactive, and useful for specific business purposes in the proper business context. Customer communication can be conducted and accessed in CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications and job candidates can be interviewed and archived right in the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) environment. In addition, Symposia provides an in-depth set of analytics that enable businesses to gain critical insights into their performance.

“Symposia lets communication services deliver an entirely new level of value for their customers,” said Fitzsimmons. “Why are we sending our top resources into meetings to share their valuable ideas and then throwing them all away when the meetings are over?”

Because Symposia collaborative notes and collective feedback on calls, events and meetings, can be navigated, analyzed and shared with individuals or groups (even those unable to participate), the most relevant audio snippets that capture the essence or details of any insights can be gained without having to listen to the entire session recording. Symposia lets users pluck back the few minutes that really matter. For example, participants can quickly review detailed information about a follow-up item discussed in a meeting. A VP can review the conversation around the specific slides that matter to her in a presentation that she missed, and the moments where customer support resolves a tricky customer issue can be shared with the entire support team. And this value can be realized globally.

“Since we focus mainly on collaboration and activity-based organizations, Symposia is equally valuable in any language,” said Fitzsimmons. “There is a tremendous amount of business intelligence and huge competitive advantage to be gained by capturing and organizing these important conversations that happen every day.”

“There were over 45 billion minutes of conference calls through more three dozen different conference service bureaus in North America in 2010, with minutes growing at about 8 percent per year,” according to Elliot Gold of TeleSpan Publishing Corporation, which has tracked the conference call industry for over 30 years.

Availability
HarQen Symposia is available immediately as a SaaS white-label service for collaboration and communications service providers.

Renowned Voice Strategist Joins HarQen as Chief Intellectual Property Officer

Jim O’Shaughnessy adds HarQen to his storied career in global IP positioning

HarQen today announced the appointment of Jim O’Shaughnessy as its chief intellectual property officer responsible for expanding HarQen’s patent portfolio to maximize market opportunities globally. O’Shaughnessy brings more than three decades of strategic expertise to HarQen’s intellectual property initiatives.

As a partner with Foley & Lardner LLP in the 1990s, O’Shaughnessy helped grow Foley’s practice into the then largest intellectual property practice worldwide. Recruited away by Rockwell International to be its Chief Intellectual Property Counsel, he was responsible for successfully compiling and then selling Rockwell’s expansive voice-patent portfolio to Aspect Technologies in 2004 among a range of other duties in the intellectual property space.

“I have had the good fortune to know and work with Jim since my earliest days as an entrepreneur,” said HarQen CEO E. Kelly Fitzsimmons. “Jim understands the global nature of the unfolding competitive landscape and possesses the rare expertise necessary to align HarQen’s intellectual property strategies and portfolio with the extraordinary market conditions today.”

In little more than the past 90 days alone, more than $18 billion has been spent acquiring not companies, but voice-related intellectual property. These transactions have included Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings for $12.5 billion; the purchase of Nortel patents at auction for $4.5 billion by Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Ericsson and others, and IBM’s sale of more than 1,000 voice patents to Google for $1 billion.

“We view Voice 3.0 – which distinguishes itself from Voice 2.0 by the ability to monetize voice as content — as an emerging trillion dollar market,” said Fitzsimmons. “And it’s clear we are not alone.”

“HarQen is a trifecta for me — smart and highly energetic people who are defining new market opportunities,” commented O’Shaughnessy.

“Were any one missing, I would be too,” joked O’Shaughnessy.

O’Shaughnessy views intellectual property as the DNA of the organization and has played a vital role in its development and positioning for many Global 500 companies throughout the Americas, Europe and Austral-Asia. He has also served as an expert witness in several patent-infringement cases, including the Ronald A. Katz Technology Licensing LP litigation.

O’Shaughnessy received a Bachelor of Science degree in Materials Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before earning his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1977. Currently, he serves on the Board of Directors of Rovi Corporation (Nasdaq: ROVI) and the Council of Advisors of The National Institute for Play.

Startup Creates Jobs, Attracts Investment in Wisconsin

Milwaukee-based HarQen plans to use latest investment capital to expand team and intellectual property portfolio

Creating jobs and attracting financial backing from investors in Wisconsin is nothing new for Milwaukee-based startup HarQen, Inc. Now in the midst of another successful round of investment funding, HarQen exemplifies the type of women-led entrepreneurial companies that are doing their part to get the economy moving again.

HarQen Co-founder and CEO E. Kelly Fitzsimmons joined a number of other women entrepreneurs and investors today at a statehouse news conference to discuss investing in Wisconsin sponsored by Springboard Enterprises.

Fitzsimmons said HarQen, a four-year-old innovator in enterprise communications with a focus on collaborative voice services, has already secured more than half of the $4 million Series B funding effort it launched only a month ago.

“HarQen has been oversubscribed in every round of financing, with the majority of our capital coming from Wisconsin investors,” she said.

“The purpose of this round is to expand our Wisconsin-based team, beginning with the addition of a chief intellectual property officer,” Fitzsimmons said. HarQen has five U.S. patent applications pending and plans to expand its IP portfolio internationally.

Since 2007, HarQen has created 25 jobs in Wisconsin during the height of the economic downturn. With the current financing and growth trajectory, HarQen plans to hire dozens more, she said.

“We have been proud to lead all three financings for HarQen to date,” said Lauren Flanagan, HarQen’s board chair and general partner of Phenomenelle Angels Fund. “We were able to gather together a great group of fellow Wisconsin investors, including Silicon Pastures, Women Angels, Wisconsin Investment Partners, and Capital Midwest.”

Flanagan credits Wisconsin’s Act 255 as being very helpful in securing HarQen’s financing from local angels to date. She also was quick to praise the Wisconsin Technology Council and Springboard Enterprises for their support of HarQen.

Recently, HarQen made Wisconsin and its angels proud by being honored as the Angel Capital Association’s (ACA) 2011 Silvertip PwC Entrepreneurship award winner. HarQen was chosen out of 170 other ACA portfolio companies for its ability to scale revenue.

Taleo and HarQen Partner to Deliver an Integrated Voice Interviewing Solution

HarQen, Inc., a leading intelligent voice services company and pioneer in virtual interviewing announced on September 13, 2011, that HarQen’s flagship product, Voice Advantage™, is now integrated into Taleo’s (NASDAQ: TLEO), Talent Management solution and available via Taleo’s Solution Exchange.

The integration provides unprecedented insight into the talent lifecycle and promises to deliver greater efficiency to HR professionals leveraging Taleo’s applications.

Read more here: http://bit.ly/oXC6mq

Voice Assist and HarQen Form Strategic Alliance to Deliver Next Generation Conference Call Capabilities to Carriers and Enterprises Alike

LAKE FOREST, Calif., Aug. 23, 2011 — Voice Assist, Inc. (OTCBB:VSST) and HarQen, Inc., today announced a strategic alliance designed to deliver a carrier-grade conference calling solution, which promises to redefine standard bridge call capabilities. The innovative solution allows participants to initiate a call with spoken commands, take notes with their voice, and then have the call organized so that it can be searched, reviewed, analyzed and shared afterward. The combined solution eliminates the logging of call details into popular CRM solution, such as Salesforce, as well as all the team’s notes, PowerPoint presentations, images, and original voice contributions would be organized automatically and ready for review.

“Voice Assist is pleased to be chosen by HarQen to provide hands-free, voice-enabled commands to better enable the conference call experience safely while driving,” said Michael Metcalf, chairman and CEO of Voice Assist. “This agreement demonstrates our commitment to expanding the capabilities of Voice Assist’s unique voice services platform.”

Voice Assist and HarQen have teamed up to provide a better way to conduct more productive and efficient meetings than ever before. Voice Assist is the leading cloud-based platform provider for enabling enterprise and telephony services through voice. Voice Assist’s Voice Mode™ is changing the way business is done, making workers safer and increasing their productivity with the most basic of all communication tools – the human voice. An end-to-end solution, Voice Mode™ allows conference calls to be initiated and notes taken via spoken commands that are non-disruptive to other call participants.

HarQen uses voice technology to streamline business processes through voice capturing and collaboration, and has enjoyed significant success with its Voice Advantage virtual interview product for recruiting. Through this alliance, the companies plan to leverage their expertise and award-winning technology to create a next generation of voice-enabled conference bridge solutions that will be integrated into CRM applications, such as Salesforce, and other data management applications.

According to a survey published by the Annenberg School of Communications at UCLA and the University of Minnesota’s Training & Development Research Center, executives spend upwards of 50% of their time in meetings.

“Up until now, we have not had an easy way to initiate a conference call nor a meaningful way to organize, access or share these meetings later,” said E. Kelly Fitzsimmons, CEO of HarQen. “Voice Assist is made up of true industry pioneers and experts. We believe that the combination of our team’s talents and award-winning products will forever change the way people think of voice communications.”

About HarQen

Founded in 2007, HarQen unleashes the richness of information trapped inside conversations – transforming talk into actionable insights. HarQen’s award-winning Intelligent Voice Service enables meetings, interviews and other business conversations to be captured, enriched, organized, navigated, shared and analyzed – improving collaboration and adding a new layer of business intelligence to existing data management systems.

For more information, visit www.harqen.com.

About Voice Assist

Headquartered in Lake Forest, Calif., Voice Assist is a hosted speech services company that enables voice in any application, network and device. The company’s cloud-based speech platform eliminates the need to use a keyboard or keypad to interact, and enables users to communicate, connect or transact using any application on any phone or IP-connected device. The Voice Assist platform includes a fast and safe way to make calls, manage your e-mails, send text messages and post to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter by voice commands and provides a scalable solution for developers to add voice to any application.

For more information on the company, visit www.voiceassist.com.

Forward-Looking Statement: Forward Looking Statements such as “We believe that the combination of our team’s talents and award-winning products will forever change the way people think of voice communications.” involve risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to functionality of our technology, and any other difficulties related to risks and effects of legal and administrative proceedings and governmental regulation, future financial and operational results, competition, general economic conditions, and the ability to manage and continue growth.

Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual outcomes may vary materially from those indicated. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements we make in this news release include market conditions and those set forth in reports or documents we file from time to time with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to revise or update such statements to reflect current events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

Breathing Life Into Dead-End Conversations

HarQen Introduces Symposia™ at eComm 2011

SAN FRANCISCO, June 29, 2011 — Imagine being able to share the two minutes that matter from any conversation, anywhere. It would be the death of dead-end discussions and circular meetings, where we find ourselves endlessly “recapping,” “regrouping” and “getting up to speed.”

“The amount of information lost in our daily business exchanges is truly extraordinary,” said HarQen CEO E. Kelly Fitzsimmons. “By not capturing conversations in a trusted system, we are asking people to memorize all their conversations and then recall them accurately in an instant. No wonder we feel increasingly overwhelmed by communications today.”

This week at eComm 2011, HarQen, Inc. will demonstrate Symposia, a new cloud-based offering that dynamically transforms any conversation into an interactive synopsis that lives long after the conference call, meeting, webinar or presentation has ended. With Symposia, organizations can capture and enrich conversations so greater insight can be retained and shared; ushering in a new era of business intelligence.

“HarQen Symposia is an example of how voice is evolving,” said Rich Nespola, Chairman and CEO of TMNG Global. “HarQen has figured out how to monetize voice by transforming it into valuable, reusable content.”

HarQen Symposia converts conversations — in all their various forms and languages — into searchable, referenceable and actionable insights. Initially, Symposia will be focused on use cases for sales-related presentations, customer-service exchanges and account status calls. HarQen is integrating Symposia into key Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs), such as Salesforce.com, leveraging their privacy and security features.

Symposia allows conversations to be captured as they occur, both visually and aurally, and then enriched collaboratively with notes, tags or uploaded imagery via Smartphones, using classic social media conventions. With this approach, participants can organize the content around key ideas, themes or action items, so the key information is always accessible and sharable.

“Prior efforts to isolate phrases and assign meaning largely missed the boat,” said Dan Miller, Senior Analyst at Opus Research. “Context, sentiment and much of the meaning is distilled out of conversations when voice is rendered as text and then subjected to analysis according to static business rules,” explained Miller. “Even with ‘state-of-the-art’ recording and analytics, there is no timely way for people to find and share what they found to be the most important parts of ongoing interactions.”

Symposia unleashes the wealth of information trapped within conversations by allowing users to:

  • Capture on-the-fly conversations via voice, tags and images from Smartphones
  • Enrich meetings with dynamic collaborative content — without technology barriers
  • Organize sales calls within CRM solutions and review unfiltered customer reactions
  • Navigate in any language with multiple ways to find key information anytime, anywhere
  • Share insightful exchanges via existing data management systems using HarQen’s API
  • Analyze what webinar attendees find important and share in real-time

Availability

Symposia will be available later this year.