Excite@Home offers free voice mail
The service, expected to be announced as soon as Monday, follows similar offerings by start-ups such as OneBox.com Inc., San Mateo, Calif.; Telebot Corp., San Francisco; and uReach.com Inc., Holmdel, N.J. But the larger Web profile of Excite, (Nasdaq: XCIT)one of the busiest sites on the Internet, could quickly raise awareness of the new technology, analysts said.
Excite, of Redwood City, Calif., and General Magic, of Sunnyvale, Calif., declined comment. But people familiar with the plan said users would be able to go to Excite's site and register for a free phone number. The number won't ring a real phone, but friends or customers can use it as a place to leave a voice mail message or send a fax. Those messages would then be translated into computer files and sent to e-mail accounts offered by Excite, where users could click on them to play audio files of voice-mail messages or to see faxes, these people said.
The service is based on technology developed for General Magic's primary product, Portico, which is a fee-based personal digital assistant that can deliver messages to users over the phone or the Internet. Portico also uses speech-recognition technology to allow users to access messages and even their address books and calendars over the phone.
OneBox, which announced its service on June 7, said 17,554 people had already pre-registered for the service, expected to launch at the end of this month. Telebot, which launched in February, says it has more than 35,000 users, and uReach, which launched in May, says it expects to have more than 30,000 users by the end of this month.
The deal could do much for General Magic's struggling business. It's stock, which hit a high of $15.375 about a year ago, has been trading near $5 for months, in part because few users signed up for the company's Portico messaging service, which costs users an average of $17 to $100 a month based on usage. In March, the company reported a wider-than-expected fourth-quarter loss of 51 cents a share on revenues of $126,000.
On Thursday, shares of General Magic closed at $3.8125. Excite@Home shares closed at $51.935.
Last week, General Magic announced another free service, myTalk, through which users can have their e-mail read to them over the phone.
These services are the latest in the territory referred to as unified messaging, giving users the ability to collect all of their messages in one place, such as an e-mail box, Web page or over the telephone. So far, however, few such services have gained widespread acceptance because they have been expensive and difficult to use.
The free offerings should eliminate the price barriers, but Bruce Kasrel, an analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. is still not convinced that they will immediately lead to widespread adoption. "It would help the awareness factor but I don't know that it would accelerate usage that much right out the gate," he said adding that most unified messaging services are "still pretty clunky."