Comunicano

Mobile Tech Finds Wine in No Time with New OCR Integration into Vivino App

Scan Success Rate of 86 Percent Now Achieved for 13M Wine Labels in Growing Vivino Database 

Copenhagen, Denmark (May 23, 2013) — Vivino, the highest ranked wine app in the U.S. App Store, has integrated new Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to improve the service’s overall match rate. One year ago, 48 percent of wine labels were successfully matched. Today, that match rate increased to 86 percent due to the improved OCR technology.

Vivino is the wine app for wine lovers and offers an easy way to discover, rate and share wines tasted. Users simply snap a photo of a wine label using the Vivino app, and the image is then matched against a database of more than 13 million labels to return the wine’s producer, brand, name, varietals and vintage.  

Heini Zachariassen, Vivino founder and CEO, said scanning a wine label may sound easy at first blush (pardon the pun), but some serious OCR technology has been built into the Vivino app to make the user experience even more seamless than before.  “The new solution combines optical character and image recognition that enables higher accuracy and better differentiates mixed fonts on colored backgrounds and curved surfaces, all of which are technical hurdles that we’ve been able to overcome.”

The app automatically captures all of the information from a wine label and matches it to Vivino’s internal database that contains an extensive list of wine ratings, producers, names, varietals and vintages.  Once a match has been found, the information is then saved to a user’s library, thus eliminating the need to manually input or change information once the wine label has been scanned.

The free Vivino app is available on iPhone/iPad, Android and BlackBerry (BB10) platforms. Visit www.vivino.com to learn more or download the app.

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About Vivino

Founded in 2009, Vivino is now the #1 wine app on the market. It helps wine lovers, whether novice or pro, discover and rate wines tasted with ease. The free mobile app allows users to take photos of wine labels and using unique image recognition technology, matches them against a database of more than 6 million wines. Vivino connects wine lovers via a network of posted reviews and allows users to share their experiences via Facebook, Twitter and email. The app is available on iOS, Android, and BlackBerry (BB10).

Phone.com Named Finalist For the Garden State Entrepreneur Excellence Award

NEWARK, N.J. – May 20, 2013 - Phone.com, a cloud-based phone company focused on small businesses and entrepreneurs, was named a finalist for the Garden State Entrepreneur Excellence Award.

This is the first year the award has been given. The New Jersey Chapter of Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) and The Star-Ledger and NJ.com have partnered to create the first annual Garden State Entrepreneur Excellence Award to honor New Jersey-based companies that exemplify the entrepreneurial spirit of the state.

The award allows area entrepreneurs the chance to be recognized by highlighting their drive, perseverance, business creativity and success stories. The award will be given in three categories separated by 2012 revenue levels.

“We are thrilled to be announced a finalist in this award’s first year,” said Phone.com CEO, Ari Rabban. “We understand the hardships entrepreneurs face and because of that, our focus is largely on helping entrepreneurs and small businesses.”

Award winners will be announced at the gala, and will receive a year membership in the NJ Chapter of EO (valued up to $4,700) for qualifying businesses. Non-qualifying winners will receive a year of coaching from EO. 

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About Phone.com
Phone.com® is a cloud-based phone company offering a variety of innovative and economical business and home phone services for entrepreneurs, home offices, small businesses and individuals. Powered by advanced VoIP technologies, the company offers Phone.com Virtual Office for small businesses, Phone.com Virtual Number for individuals on the go, Phone.com Home Phone Plus for consumers and Phone.com Mobile Office and Mobile VoIP.

About Entrepreneur's Organization
EO is a global organization that provides an infrastructure to help entrepreneurs continue to grow their business themselves.

About The Star Ledger
The Star Ledger is the leading source for business news in New Jersey

Truphone First to Offer Shared International Mobile Plans for Business

International Minutes, Messages and Megabytes All in One Rate Bundle

Las Vegas  – May 21, 2013 – Truphone today became the first mobile operator to offer shared international mobile service plans for data, text and voice.  The plans allow businesses with employees based abroad and with employees traveling internationally to share local minutes, messages and megabytes from a single bundle when in the ‘Truphone Zone.’   

Business customers will enjoy shared mobile usage at home in the USA and feel at home in Australia, Hong Kong, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.  Additionally, businesses receive wider benefits from Truphone’s unique approach to international telecommunications, including better call quality, a single voice and SMS mailbox, all combined with a superior mobile data experience, and a single bill to manage users across territories.

Shared international pricing plans are a new innovation in the telecommunications marketplace made possible by Truphone’s unique global GSM network architecture. This network effectively eliminates the barriers of cost and complexity that prevent people from communicating internationally with the same attitude and effectiveness as they do in their home territory.

The problem this innovation solves is real and acute: according to research from CCMI, forty percent of large enterprises either require their employees to curtail their voice and data usage while traveling or forbid it altogether due to the extraordinarily high costs of international roaming.

“When business people are on the road, they need to stay connected. And it shouldn’t matter whether you’re in Los Angeles or London – you just need to make the call, send the file – get things done, and done quickly. These road warriors are powering the US economy, and it’s up to network providers to help them make it happen,” said Pascal de Hesselle, vice president, marketing at Truphone. “Truphone’s international shared plans keep business people productive, affordably connecting them with their colleagues and customers around the world.  We’re proud of this industry first.” 

Truphone also provides business customers with local numbers in multiple countries on a single SIM or device, so contacts can always get in touch on a number that’s familiar to them. And if the user is anywhere in the ‘Truphone Zone,’ the calls are local calls.  These additional numbers are always on, and always routed automatically – so users have a consistent and unified calling experience.   

Germany, Poland and Spain will be added to the ‘Truphone Zone’ later this year.

Truphone will be exhibiting and sharing information during CTIA in booth 3918 and at the Mobile Focus media event on May 21^st, at the Mirage Hotel.  For more information on Truphone, especially the new Shared and Regional Plans, please visit www.truphone.com.

EDITOR NOTE

Review accounts of Truphone services are available on request. 

For more information, to arrange an interview, source imagery or anything else, please contact Adrianne Buchta at abuchta@comunicano.com.  

ABOUT TRUPHONE

Truphone is the only mobile operator in the world that expands the reach of businesses beyond the borders of their home country. Truphone achieves this by providing multiple international numbers on a single SIM, enabling businesses to make international calls that are treated as local calls and providing contacts a direct way to get in touch on a local number. Truphone’s approach also eliminates or reduces mobile roaming costs for voice and data services, keeping staff better connected when they travel.  The company’s patented SIM-based offering works in more than 200 countries.  Headquartered out of London, Truphone has offices across 4 continents and continues to expand aggressively with backing from investment companies such as Minden, Vollin Holdings and Eden Ventures. Our clients include Fortune 50 and FTSE 1000 companies across multiple sectors.

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Infographic: Adaptxt® Keyboard App for Android Can Save Legal Professionals Nearly $1,000 with Industry-Specific Dictionary

SAN JOSE, Calif. (May 20, 2013) — When legal professionals must manually enter specialized words on their Android smartphones or tablets, the wasted productivity can be close to $1,000 per person. KeyPoint Technologies’ Adaptxt^® smart keyboard app eliminates that waste by providing 35 industry-specific dictionaries, a selection that no other stock keyboard or keyboard app can match.

For each industry, KeyPoint works with top linguists to handcraft specialized dictionaries, eliminating the need for Adaptxt users to create their own custom dictionaries for their professions and avoiding the nightmare of “dumb” autocorrect. This feature saves users a significant amount of time and money. For example: 

• The Adaptxt legal dictionary includes more than 6,000 terms.

• If an attorney had to manually enter just 4,000 of those terms over the course of a year’s work, it would require nearly 11.1 hours. That’s assuming each word took 10 seconds not only to type but then to go back and override the stock or app keyboard’s correction, which is based on a general-purpose dictionary.

• An attorney's median wage is $86.86/hour, so manual entry would waste about $964 worth of productivity. This loss increases exponentially in law firms with dozens of associates and partners or government agencies with hundreds of attorneys.

The industry-specific dictionaries also avoid problems that occur when a multi-syllable term is typed incorrectly into a stock or app keyboard, which then adds the mistake to its dictionary for future use.

“Adaptxt enables law firms, financial institutions and other organizations to maximize employee productivity and minimize potentially costly mistakes due to misspelled words,” said KeyPoint’s VP of Marketing, Ronald Brown. “We believe this is an untapped market opportunity and have the experience and resources to expand our dictionary content starting with the legal industry.”

There is a cost for accuracy, whether people realize it or not, which are summarized in a new infographic, available at http://www.adaptxt.com/beta/adaptxtindustrydictionaries.jpg. For example, the 4,000-word finance dictionary can save a senior accountant more than $250 in input costs alone.

Adaptxt also offers 78 language dictionaries. KeyPoint plans to develop additional consumer and enterprise dictionaries this year.

Adaptxt uses algorithms and artificial intelligence to identify unique words and phrases that each user enters and adds them to a personalized custom dictionary that supplements any industry-specific dictionary that the user chooses to install. Adaptxt is fundamentally different from – and superior to – traditional predictive solutions, which simply hunt for a match in a predetermined dictionary lexicon, then automatically change what users type, forcing them to go back and manually correct the platform’s mistake.

The Adaptxt keyboard app is available now for free from Google Play Store (https://play.google.com), where it consistently has a 4.3 average user rating. After installation, users select which language or industry dictionaries they want to add. Each industry dictionary is available for 99 cents.

The Adaptxt 2.0 keyboard works with any smartphone running Android 2.1 or later. The Adaptxt 2.1 keyboard works with any tablet running Android 2.2 or later. For more information, visit www.adaptxt.com and www.keypoint-tech.com

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About ADAPTXT, a KeyPoint Technologies Innovation

ADAPTXT dramatically improves people’s ability to quickly input their ideas, words and commands into Android devices of all kinds.  Using the latest advances in linguistic science and artificial intelligence to anticipate users’ meaning, ADAPTXT’s smart keyboard applications make human/machine interaction dramatically more enjoyable, personal and accurate.  Developed by KeyPoint Technologies UK, ADAPTXT represents the leading use of predictive computer input technology in the market today.  Founded in 2004, KeyPoint Technologies is headquartered in Glasgow, Scotland, an epicenter of linguistics, with additional offices in India, Japan, China and the U.S.  The company is a trusted partner for OEMs, platform providers and developers.  KeyPoint Technologies is privately owned. More information can be found at www.keypoint-tech.com and www.adaptxt.com.

iotum Announces Acquisition of Freeconference.Com to Expand Its Web-based Audio Conferencing Services

TORONTO, May 15, 2013 – iotum, operator of the popular and versatile teleconferencing service Calliflower.com for small business, today announced it is expanding with the acquisition of California-based Global Conference Partners, provider of FreeConference.com and associated teleconferencing services. 

Jason Martin, president and CEO, said iotum is acquiring all of the assets of Global Conference Partners, a portfolio company of American Capital, Ltd. (NASDAQ: ACAS).  In addition to FreeConference.com, the transaction includes InstantConference.com, GlobalConference.com and several other international brands. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The conferencing properties acquired from GCP will continue to be offered from Glendale, Calif.; no employees will lose their jobs as a result of the acquisition, said Martin.  Calliflower also will continue as a conferencing service, he said.

“It’s a natural fit,” said Martin. “The Global Conference properties nicely complement Calliflower where we’ll quickly realize economies of scale even though all conferencing services will continue under separate brands.

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About iotum

iotum is a privately-held operator of online collaboration and conference calling services. iotum operates the popular Calliflower teleconference platform, which has introduced a number of teleconference innovations since its introduction in 2007, and services medium and small businesses and organizations. iotum was founded in 2006 by industry legend Alec Saunders, who joined BlackBerry as vice president of developer relations in 2011. Based in Toronto, Canada, iotum’s customer base is worldwide. For further information, please visit www.iotum.com  

About American Capital

American Capital is a publicly traded private equity firm and global asset manager. American Capital, both directly and through its asset management business, originates, underwrites and manages investments in middle market private equity, leveraged finance, real estate and structured products. American Capital manages $21.2 billion of assets, including assets on its balance sheet and fee earning assets under management by affiliated managers, with $117 billion of total assets under management (including levered assets). Through an affiliate, American Capital manages publicly traded American Capital Agency Corp. (Nasdaq: AGNC) with approximately $13 billion market capitalization and American Capital Mortgage Investment Corp. (Nasdaq: MTGE) with approximately $1.5 billion market capitalization. From its eight offices in the U.S. and Europe, American Capital and its affiliate, European Capital, will consider investment opportunities from $10 million to $750 million. For further information, please refer to www.AmericanCapital.com.