By Allan Maurer

CHARLOTTE—You’re buzzing down the highway and remember you have to send a message to your CEO about when you’ll arrive. You pick up your mobile device, speak your message, and YAP’s fast servers translate your speech-to-text when you send the message.

YAP, one of the presenting companies at the Second Annual Southeast Venture Conference at Tysons Corner, VA, Feb. 27-28 (www.seventure.org), is still beta testing its speech to text technology and adding new features.

Now, COO and co-founder Victor Jablokov tells TechJournal South, the service also monitors messages for key words such as “weather,” so that it can push weather or other information, including ads, to the user in a “bubble.”

“If you mention coffee, a bubble to a Starbucks ad might appear offering to locate the nearest Starbucks to where you’re standing,” Jablokov says. “You don’t have to leave the user interface to seek information. It’s much a simpler and faster way to get content.

Some other firms claim to offer a similar service, CEO Igor Jablokov told TechJournal South when it exclusively reported YAP’s first funding, but they use humans not servers to do the voice-to-text translating.

Seeks $10 million
“Their approach is questionable for your privacy, their delivery takes minutes while Yap’s a couple seconds, and they will have challenges scaling,” the company says.

Founded in 2006, YAP has raised $1.5 million from private investors and is seeking an additional $10 million in venture backing. The eight-employee company sees teens and young adults who use text messaging frequently as its first major demographic market.

Victor Jablokov says improvements underway make the YAP system “more of an ask anything client.” It listens for those key concept words and automatically connects to Google, Amazon, or weather sites. That might bring an offer to view a movie trailer, a song soundbite, or a store locator up in the bubble.

Jablokov notes that Bill Gates speech at the recent CES event suggested that the next wave of technological advances will change the way we interact with computers and digital devices. “Speech recognition is just one aspect of that,” says Jablokov.

“The chips and servers are fast enough now where it’s becoming a reality. We have better mobile phones, faster data networks, and a robust backend that can do these interactions.”

The backend clusters of Dell servers provide the speed and speech-to-text translation that is still questionable on a normal home PC, he says.

But, “the magic isn’t in the hardware, it’s in the software,” says Jablokov.

YAP is still in its pre-launch stage but has already won recognition from TechJournal South and TechCrunch, among others.

“We feel we can get some high level partnerships to aid us in distribution,” says Jablokov. It hopes to have its platform on the market this year (2008). “We’re getting close to our next round of capital and have strong potential investment partners. We expect to close a second round in the second quarter.”

In fact, he notes, that’s one of the reasons the company goes to events such as the Southeast Venture Conference. “Especially for an early stage company, you get a lot of bang for the buck,” says Jablokov. “We meet a lot of potential distribution partners who attend the same conferences.”

On the Web: www.yapme.com

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