BeVocal Gets its Business Finder to Market in 45 Days with Kivera
BeVocal voted number one Voice Portal
Just 18 months after inception, BeVocal, Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif., has emerged as a leading force in the voice portal field - winning Best of Show at Upside Events' Digital Living Room 2000 as well as both the Investor's Choice and People's Choice awards at Upside Events' Showcase 2000.
BeVocal offers a simple, elegant voice interface that lets customers call a single toll-free number, 1-800-4BVOCAL (1-800-428-6225), for everything from driving directions to flight information, stock quotes, weather, traffic and more.
Its most recent success is the BeVocal Business Finder, built in collaboration with Kivera, developer of a sophisticated, flexible location technology designed to deliver location information to a wide range of platforms, including wireless application protocol (WAP) for wireless phones.
"What immediately impressed us was the fact that they could prove to us that their platform worked. They pulled out a WAP phone in the middle of our first meeting and showed us searching and proximity searching right then and there," said Vipul Vyas, BeVocal's business development manager.
BeVocal and Kivera
BeVocal uses Kivera technology to transform raw data from Geographic Data Technologies (GDT) and spatially process it to run on BeVocal's proprietary applications. Kivera also supplies BeVocal with a spatially searchable database of Yellow Page listings compiled from raw data from infoUSA.com, the leading Yellow Page supplier on the Internet.
Working jointly, the BeVocal/Kivera team conformed business names for easy searching by a voice application. For instance, Jack's Chevron and Ali's Chevron were conformed so that a customer could find a nearby outlet using the familiar name of Chevron.
BeVocal also leveraged Kivera's powerful search function that pinpoints for the caller the number of outlets any business operates within a specified radius. With a simple voice command to BeVocal, the caller can then connect to any one of the outlets or request driving directions to that location.
BeVocal is able to run the entire Kivera-generated process on their own servers, providing the company with optimal control over latency and uptime.
What BeVocal is saying about Kivera
"It's amazing that we did this in 45 days, from negotiating to spec'ing the product to getting it out there in the market. There was a lot of cross-company teamwork that had to happen in order to make that possible," Vyas said. "We're looking at Kivera as a long-term partner because of the richness of their offering and their knowledge of the spatial data market," he continued. "As a young company, they were able to be flexible and respond to what we needed. Working together, the end result was exactly what we had envisioned at the outset."
"the end result was exactly what we had envisioned"
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