Reposted with the following addendum:
All IMO and DYOR as I have in writing the following:
Despite the deceptions/deflections/muddying of the waters/name dropping... it has been clearly established NOR does not have a Patent for VM.
The patents are clearly outlined on NOR web site:
https://norwoodsystems.com/about-usThere are 4. They are old. They precede VM.
But NOR teasaes with:
"A number of other patent applications relating to aspects of Norwood’s products and services have also been filed."
Key: filed. Not granted.
And it gets better because... filing Patents is not secretive. The whole idea of filing for a Patent is for the Patents to be examined and for others to contest. It is public knowledge.
As such, NOR does not have a moat to protect this technology.
Indeed there are many competing variations on a them.
One of these was highlighted on here (by DC, I think):
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/11...-christchurch-startup-has-the-answer#commentsThere is a lot of info in this article and even more insights in the comments below.
The investors of this version of Visual VoiceMail, and there are many versions, talk about training the App to understand Kiwi accents.
Think about that for a moment in the context of NOR taking 12+ months to implement with Spark.
This suggests that NOR VM was:
1. Not ready for commercialisation with a carrier and/or
2. Lacking accuracy
As such, NOR is not scalable.
A company can create a moat through widespread, rapid adoption leaving little incentive for others to build a better mousetrap.
Transcription and translation is very difficult. Google is not 100% accurate with Speak to Text nor Translate. But NOR has somehow found the secret sauce? I highly doubt it.
I have stated many times countries such as Russia, India and Thailand do not use VoiceMail. You can now add China to this growing list based on chats I had with former colleagues and friends in China. So there's 1/3 of the population which is out of reach.
I conducted an experiment on Viber with my daughter last night. My phone default language is English; whilst my daughter's is Russian. Viber has the ability to translate messages by accessing Google Translate in the background. But here's the thing: if I send my daughter a message in Russian and she selects translate, the message is repeated in Russian.
How does NOR VM handle different language defaults? Just another complication affecting scalability.
In a multi-cultural society like Australia with many first generation arrivals, think how many different accents of English there are plus the different languages spoken at home.
Now add a level of difficulty in a country like the US which like Australia, is multi-cultural and has many regional accents.
In summary:
No moat
No scalability
(20min delay)