A "Blippy For Voicemail," Audioo Is A Fun Privacy Disaster Waiting To Happen

Audioo bills itself as the “Blippy for Voicemail”. As you’re probably aware, Blippy lets users share information that’s considered to be really private by most people (credit card transactions) with others – and sometimes, much more than just transactions.

Audioo basically lets you do the same thing, but with voice mails.

You can use the service to upload select voice mails or your entire Google Voice by forwarding or using the Firefox add-on, record one with your computer mic, upload, call a dedicated phone number to leave one, or send from your handset. Once they’re in there, Audioo automatically transcribes them – if they aren’t already – and lets your voicemail stream ‘followers’ check them out.

Users also get to edit, tag, categorize, delete and favorite voicemails.

That way, the startup aims to build the largest, searchable archive of the human voices, including localized real-time streams and trending topics, and to monetize the aggregate data by matching it with contextual advertising units.

Obviously, Audioo’s model raises some questions on both copyright and privacy, but if Blippy can attract users then I suppose Audioo will, too. It’ll probably be even more fun when someone finds a loophole and gains unauthorized access to a person’s voicemail archive.

Audioo has raised $100,000 in funding from DFJ Frontier. The company was founded by Ryan Born (CEO), Yuri Baranov (VP Product Development) and Ben Padnos.

Feedback from the judges:

Philip Kaplan (Blippy): Interesting analogy … you should have demoed more actual interesting content.

Josh Williams (Gowalla): what are the privacy implications? will it be socially acceptable to share someone else’s voice messages?

Jeffrey Bussgang: the searchable aspect is great, but I feel like you failed to convince us with a really compelling use case.