New App. From Providence Startup Mosec Transforms CRM Software

An online poker player, a child actor and a mixed martial arts fighter walk into a tech startup.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

When Allan Tear introduced Mosec Co-CEO, Bernard Huang at Betaspring’s 2011 Demo Day on September 8th, he wisely included the above resume highlights of Huang and his cofounders thereby guaranteeing the rapt attention of the audience for the duration of Mr. Huang’s pitch.

At stake for Mr. Huang’s young company is the negligent underutilization of the voice as a tool for mobile organization and smartphone adaptation by a huge chunk of the world’s workforce.

A former professional online poker player, Mr. Huang first introduced the crowd to Joe.  “Joe is your typical salesperson,” Mr. Huang said and continued, “He makes tons of sales calls every day and uses Salesforce to manage his customer relationships.”

“However,” Mr. Huang added, “Joe can’t use his CRMs effectively on the go, especially when he’s driving.”

What’s a CRM?

For those of us not conversant in management speak or familiar with the incalculable acronyms tech-savvy businesspeople use, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a popular business approach to managing client interactions.  Web applications like Salesforce, Highrise and Batchbook are like 21^st century appointment books on steroids.

A cursory perusal of the Wikipedia’s CRM page reveals a whole host of variations including meat-and-potatoes basics like marketing, customer service and social media.  For the more expert, perhaps more fortitudinous among us, the categories get more complicated and deserve their own explanations: analytics, sales force automation, etc.

How will Mosec help Joe, our typical salesperson, on the go, trying desperately to type a note into his Android phone while driving, drinking coffee and reading the Wall Street Journal?

Mr. Huang continued, “His follow-up notes often come out looking like this.”  An image of an Android smartphone display then filled the screen behind Mr. Huang complete with the gibberish: “ibterested in invfestig 100k in mosec twam – sunnary beisoagwi…”

There are about 36 million other “Joes” in the world at the moment according to Mr. Huang.  Mobile professionals like lawyers, politicians, realtors, financial advisors and mortgage brokers are just the tip of the iceberg, asserted Mr. Huang.

By translating voice information to text, Mosec could help fulfill the often-empty promise of the ubiquitous phrase, “hands free.”

“Meet Mosec,” Mr. Huang announced, “your own personal mobile secretary.  After each call, Mosec takes a voice note, transcribes it and attaches it to the contact in the CRM.”

“By using voice input,” Mr. Huang added, “you can directly say what you need into your CRM anytime and anywhere.”

Mr. Huang went on to explain that the CRM industry has more than tripled its revenue in the last five years as the number of mobile professionals continues to steadily increase.

“The next steps,” Mr. Huang told the New England Post, “are to improve the voice transcription and move on to different platforms like BlackBerry.”

Mr. Huang and Mosec cofounders Austin Ball, the former child actor, and David Pham, the former MMA fighter, plan to stay in Providence for the time being and get Mosec off the ground.

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Short URL: http://www.newenglandpost.com/?p=4182

Posted by Soren Sorensen on Sep 19 2011. Filed under Featured - For home page featured article, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry