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Google Finds its Voice in a Voicemail-Email Mashup

The future of the phone gets a bit closer to reality today with the introduction of Google Voice. The key feature of Google Voice is that it recognizes the words in a voicemail message left for you, and can then email the transcript to your inbox or deliver it to your phone via SMS--kind of like having a digital personal assistant managing your calls for you.

The service is a direct descendant of the technology acquired when Google purchased Grand Central in 2007. That company specialized in giving users a single contact phone number that could automatically route calls through to your cellphone, office or home phone. Google seems to have taken that idea and added its own web-based spin, and mixing the speech-recognition technology developed under the Goog-411 directory service.

You can also have Grand Central SMS texts received or sent by your phone, and you can make calls to numbers in the U.S. or overseas from your cellphone, home phone or PC using the service.

The only charge, it seems, is for international numbers, which requires you to pay using Google Checkout.

The mashup between voicemail messages left on a device and email is the most interesting aspect of the technology, of course: It's one definite direction for the evolution of personal communications, and it's especially handy in situations where you'd need to listen to a voicemail but can't--if you're in a long business meeting for example. And the "one number" feature of Grand Central, is definitely useful in a world where we have home, business and cellphone numbers; all of your contact needs are rolled into one system, alongside Gmail. That's assuming your provider of choice is Google, of course. Whether Google will include Voice in its new "behavioral profiling" targeted advertising is unclear. 

The service starts today for existing Grand Central customers, with Google "opening it up to others soon." 

[Googleblog via Reuters] 

10 Danger Signs for Business - Part 2

Last time, we discussed 5 of the 10 signs that your business may be heading for trouble. All involved looking at the structure of your top line, your sales. Now we want to move on to the next five signs.

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#6 – High employee turnover

When you lose employees, customers are affected – they deal with less experienced people who don’t know your business or the customer’s needs as well as long-time employees.

There’s a concept from Harvard Business School called The Service – Profit Chain. It says that employee satisfaction leads to customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction leads to revenue growth. And revenue growth leads to profit growth.

So the chain starts with employee satisfaction. High employee turnover is often a sign of unhappy employees. That is why this is such an important early warning sign. Plus the costs of training people so they’re fully productive are significant.

#7 – Costs rising faster than sales

Costs rise for a number of reasons. As your sales rise, so will your costs. If they don’t, why do you need that cost at all? So rising costs are expected. However, it’s a bad sign if costs are rising faster than sales. You have less and less profit on each dollar of sales.

#8 – Disproportionate purchases from one vendor.

Sign #5 was being too dependent on a single customer. We don’t want to be dependent on any vendor either. This applies not just at the enterprise level, but within product categories as well.

If you’re too dependent on any one vendor in any one category, your vendor may have too much leverage in your business. They can pass on cost increases to you that you may not be able to pass on to your customers.

So it’s important to diversify your vendor base or at least have a back-up plan for needed supplies. Maybe you still use your vendor, but you know who you would go to if need be.

#9 – Unwarranted increase in receivables

It’s great to make sales, but not if you don’t get paid! That’s worse than not making the sale at all because it costs you money to make a sale. Slow paying customers also create problems because you can’t pay your bills with receivables; you need cash!

This is one of the biggest challenges facing small businesses right now. Their customers are paying slower, which means receivables are growing. Make sure you’re the squeaky wheel – you have to keep after them, make some noise, so you stay high on the list. Consider offering a discount for early payment or, even better, change your terms to cash-on-delivery if possible. And best of all, ask for prepayment. But that’s a whole other show!

If you can’t afford to offer a discount, make sure you’re charging a late fee and notifying your customers regularly of their balance due. Get on the phone and call them. See when they will pay and then follow-up if they don’t.

#10 – Unjustifiable inventory build-up

Depending on your business, inventory may be even less liquid than receivables. First, you have to sell it; then you have to collect on the sale.

Inventory that’s not turning over is dead-weight. So if your inventory is building up too fast, your business will likely experience a cash crunch at some point. Get slow moving inventory out the door, even if you have to give it away!

How does that help, you ask? Because space is costly for any business. And shelf space is an incredible asset for retailers. Having a product sitting there as dead weight costs any business a little bit; it costs retailers a lot!

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Thanks so much for reading our post today. Join us next time when we ask, “Do we need to take the social out of social media?” Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

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(Image in today's post by asifthebes)

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