So while other Silicon Valley denizens seem a tad more humble this year, McCue has lost none of that zeal. Tellme, a voice portal and infrastructure company, has used its capital to lure some of the brightest minds from the Web portal world, talent from both Netscape, where McCue was vice president of technology, and Microsoft. Tellme has created a voice interface for a rich universe of information, but it's not quite a voice translator for the Web. No one goes to the Web to get a taxi to pick them up. But Tellme has a feature to let mobile users do just that.
Information is pared down to be useful in the small bites people can process over the phone.
About 85 percent of Tellme's calls come from land-line phones, giving the company a real market now. It expects the mobile user base to grow dramatically both as mobile usage increases and as travelers become aware that they can get local information on the go through a simple interface. Tellme receives millions of calls a month, and each month that number doubles, says McCue. Because he was able to lure people from the top browser makers, McCue says his team understands the voice portal in a way that others do not. We are the ones who get it.