Kelly Fitzsimmons

Founder, HarQen

Voice 3.0: Emergence of Relevant Voice Platforms (RVPs)
23 minutes, 10.9mb, recorded 2011-06-28
Kelly Fitzsimmons

Listening to Kelly Fitzsimmons it is clear that the "what," data, has no meaning unless one also knows the "why." In order to understand why, we need to relearn the value of the human voice and to realize that, until now, voice has been kept almost completely outside of the meteoric rise of information systems. But we are on the threshold on a new era in which voice is the new web.

As new platforms and infrastructure are emerging to bring voice into data management systems, this sector may play a crucial role towards the morphing of the telecommunications industry into the knowledge management industry. Business intelligence consists of voice records as well as text. With VoIP systems being programmable media, we will have experiences that live only in voice.

This will need change in micro-incentives involving a "what's in it for me" orientation. An example of a change that would cause people to step into the unknown is an experience such as spending the first 15 minutes of a conference call trying to make the phone system work. There also are macro-incentives that will cause telecomm to re-emerge in a different form. Voice is just another data type now. Although voice has been the golden goose for telecomm, voice minutes have not declined but revenue has—and data is not making up the difference. The challenge is to figure out things that people are willing to pay for, and Kelly offers some perspectives on how people are willing to pay to make the pain go away.

At the end of the Q & A, Kelly expressed a call for action: As technology development can go in multiple disruptive directions, it is necessary to figure out how to bring efficient voice back into people's practices. In the future there could be a "voice cloud," and text could be more of a display mechanism for voice. Hear in this talk how this is being done now, and its direction for the future.


Kelly Fitzsimmons, after the sale of her fourth company, founded HarQen in 2006. HarQen, a Voice Management platform company, has assembled a top-tier team of Voice 2.0 experts. Collectively, HarQen's team has generated over $500MM in voice-related exits -- selling previous companies to British Telecom, Telefonica and 3Com. Prior to HarQen, Kelly founded, led and sold several companies in the information security space, including Neohapsis and Sun Tzu Security. She graduated from the University of Rochester (BA) and holds a Masters degree from Harvard.

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