Voice Commerce And MyVillage.Com Team Up To Launch 121 Voice-Enabled Communities Across The UK

Published 7th February 2006

. 97 local communities in London and 24 other major cities and towns across the UK to benefit from feature rich online communication network

. Comprehensive ‘local’ content combined with sophisticated voice technologies provides one-stop-shop for the online community

. CastAlive! broadcasting technologies to deliver latest information on local offers and advertising to opt in groups

London, 7th February 2006 – The Voice Commerce Group (www.voice-commerce.com) today announced a partnership with MyVillage.com that will enable users and advertisers of the online local news, information and listings portal to benefit from a complete integrated communications experience.

Voice Commerce’s Whitephone technology wraps around MyVillage.com’s existing content to provide a fully branded, VoIP-enabled service that offers a unique range of internet telephony services including free calls to PCs, low cost phone calls globally and voice & video messaging to ‘passport’ members. In addition, advanced features including CastAlive! broadcasting and click-to-talk – where users can be alerted to local, relevant offers by opting in for details on news and deals in their region – are also to be deployed delivering a near real life experience to the 121 existing local community websites.

President of the Voice Commerce Group, and founder of WorldPay, Nick Ogden explained: “This is a major step in providing a real life online experience to communities that can be either geographic or interest based. MyVillage.com users will benefit from a rich range of voice enabled communications technologies as well as the latest news and views on what’s on and where to go in their area. Imagine being able to log in to your local community portal, view a restaurant that you’d like to go to, talk to a friend through your PC about their experiences of it and then call the establishment direct to book a table, the exact location of which you can see in front of you. And do all this in a matter of minutes and completely free of charge. That’s what this partnership will deliver.”

Voice Commerce is rewriting the rules for online communication and the search and retrieval of information on the internet. The company’s technologies have all the functionality that other individual web-based VoIP services offer such as Skype, Google and MSN. However, Whitephone seamlessly integrates with or wraps around any existing internet content providing communication capabilities that are white labelled as a company’s own solutions. In addition, WhitePhone enables a range of unique revenue making opportunities through its broadcast internet advertising technology, CastAlive! – enabling website owners to become interactive broadcasters delivering video and voice broadcasts of their own (or from paying advertisers) to opt in customers.

Roifield Brown, CEO of MyVillage.com commented: “This is a really exciting deal for us. We already provide our subscribers with a unique offering of local content and latest news from across the UK and Whitephone adds another dimension to our service. Adding voice into the equation is the natural next step and the added value that will be created through Voice Commerce’s solutions will enable us to grow our existing user-base and expand into more local communities in the future. Amazingly it took less than a week to configure the Whitephone system to wrap around MyVillage.com.”

The Voice Commerce Group believes that many existing websites will start to change the way that they function to improve their customer communication. Nick Ogden continues: “We believe that internet voice technologies will transform the online experience as voice within the internet environment will naturally have a far greater impact than just providing free telephone calls. Voice commerce delivers solutions to online businesses, which provide their customers with a dynamic new online experience, simply mirroring the way that we all actually talk in our normal lives. All e-businesses will eventually adopt voice technology and we are offering an immediate competitive edge to these companies enabling them to differentiate themselves from other websites and ensure they retain their customers’ attention.”