LONDON, February 16 /PRNewswire/ --

- Six Languages on Five Continents and New Hires in Europe and Latin America Confirm SpinVox Global Ambition.

SpinVox, the founder and global leader in Voice-to-Content messaging, has announced the launch today of Portuguese and Italian as the fifth and sixth languages in its multi-lingual service offering, as it targets the expanding Brazilian, Portuguese and Italian telecoms markets.

SpinVox is now the world's largest private speech technology company and conceived, designed and built the world's first Voice-to-Text messaging service which is already available in Spanish, English, French and German via 13 carriers - such as Alltel (Verizon), Movistar Chile, Vodafone Spain, Telstra and Vodacom - on five continents.

SpinVox enables people to receive their voice messages converted to text as an SMS on their mobile phone and/or as an email on their PC screen or PDA. Converted voicemails can now be read quickly - it is seven times faster to read a voicemail as text, than it is to dial-in and listen to one - and as digital content they can be sorted, saved, prioritised and responded to as an SMS, email or by voice.

Adding Portuguese to our language line-up gives us access to a marketplace of 240 million potential new customers, whilst Italian could help SpinVox access the 90 million mobile telephone lines in that marketplace, says Christina Domecq, CEO and co-founder, SpinVox. More importantly, it increases the number of carriers who can benefit from the revenue uplift that adding SpinVox brings to a network. We've seen call completion increase as much as 30 per cent, as the calling party is confident that their message will be seen in minutes, rather than listened to hours later, and call continuity increase by another 60 per cent.

Now anyone in Brazil can experience the Portuguese SpinVox service for themselves, by phoning one of two demo numbers +55-11-4063 9945 (São Paulo) or +55-21-4063-9945 (Rio de Janeiro) from their mobile phone, speaking a message and having the content delivered back to them as an SMS.*

Italians keen to try the service for themselves can call +39-066-220-7193.

New Leading Hires for Italy and Latin America

To drive the the success of the new languages in-country - SpinVox has hired Fabrizio Minei as General Manager, Italy Director Business Development EMEA and Oscar Rodriguez, General Manager, Latin America.

Our ability to hire such expert talent to the international SpinVox team shows the momentum we're gaining as we launch with carriers around the world, adds Domecq. Now, interest from countries asking us to develop SpinVox in new languages is driving us to invest in Portuguese and Italian in the first half of 2009, with more languages on the roadmap, continues Domecq.

Fabrizio Minei

Minei brings telecoms expertise in the Italian marketplace from his six years at Telecom Italia where he rose to Regional Director Europe, based in London and his role as managing partner of telecoms consulting firm IMONT in Rome, where he advised companies such as Vodafone/Omnitel, TIM, and Telecom Italia.

Minei joined IMONT from Global Metro Networks in Milan where he was responsible for starting-up its Italian operations and deploying a metropolitan area network (MAN) in Milan for the sale and lease of dark fibre.

Minei also brings to SpinVox extensive contacts and experience from across Europe, from a variety of international roles including Managing Director Italy and Vice President EMEA, of Primus Telecommunications where he was responsible for its start-up operations as well as its successful business development in the region.

His most recent role was General Manager, Italy and Regional Director, SEMEA for Visto Corporation, the US-based world leader in push email technology.

Minei started his career at Olivetti, with stints in Moscow and Istanbul for the company and is a graduate of the University of San Diego, USA with an MBA in International Business and of the Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza, Rome where he studied business and economics.

Oscar Rodriguez

Rodriguez served as CEO of Avantel, a leading provider of telecommunications products and services to business, government and residential customers in Mexico, for six years. There he presided over a structural transformation of the company, to a fully integrated tecommunications service provider. He also served as Technology Advisor of Grupo Empresarial Angeles, a privately owned services and broadcasting company with over US$2billion in assets.

Rodriguez brings more than 20 years experience at IBM, where he held a number of positions including corporate VP sales and operations; and VP for Latin American Distribution and Business Partner Sales when he doubled business through distribution channels and reduced distribution expenses by 40 percent.

Rodriguez was educated in Mexico at Universidad Anahuac and Universidad de las Americas and in the USA at California State Polytechnic University.

SpinVox Service Portfolio

As well as negotiating deals with carriers, the SpinVox team also expects to introduce the service to a wider marketplace of enterprise and media partners who can make use of the full range of SpinVox services - from SpinVox Enterprise Voicemail, SpinVox Callmail for call centres or even SpinVox Blog and SpinVox Social Networks - which allows people to update their blogs or social networks just by using their voice.

*International call charge will apply if number called from Portugal.

About SpinVox

SpinVox is the world's largest commercial speech platform and is implemented as a carrier-class cloud service which is used daily by tens of millions of people for automatic delivery of converted speech to SMS text, email and web environments.

By pioneering significant innovations in speech recognition and mass market services available through any network worldwide, SpinVox(R) has created the fastest-growing form of messaging: Voice-to-Content(TM) in order to deliver new value from everyday user behaviour.

SpinVox services are available directly on http://www.spinvox.com, through leading carriers and through new media, Unified Communications and other service providers globally.

At the heart of SpinVox is its ground-breaking Voice Message Conversion System(TM) (VMCS) - protected by over 60 patents worldwide - which works by combining state-of-the-art speech technologies with a live-learning language process. Developed by the Cambridge, UK-based SpinVox Advanced Speech Group; VMCS now serves users across five continents in English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Italian.

SpinVox is now live with Alltel, Cincinnati Bell, Sasktel, Rogers Wireless, Telus, Telstra, Vodacom South Africa, Vodafone Spain, Movistar Chile, Livejournal and has announced a deal with Skype.

Free trials of the SpinVox Memo, Blast and Blog services are available through the website, http://www.spinvox.com. To find out about free VIP SpinVox voicemail trials please contact the SpinVox press office on spinvox@porternovelli.co.uk.

For Media Enquiries, please contact: Jane Henry, Global PR Director, +44-7941-941-794, Jane.henry@spinvox.com