I traveled to Silicon Valley last week and, shortly after I arrived, stopped in to see Steve Larsen at PhoneTell in Menlo Park. I've known Steve for more than 12 years, through several startups he's helped launch and build. He joined this firm as CEO this past fall and recently relaunched the startup with a new name and branding at the TechCrunch "Disrupt" conference, held last month in New York City. Steve is just an amazing startup guy. The Energizer Bunny has nothing on this dude — trust me. Great team builder, excellent communicator, and pitchman extraordinaire. No better combo for a startup CEO in my book.
What's PhoneTell about? It its own words, it creates "intelligent, relevant smartphone
solutions to help users manage high-quality
connections with friends, colleagues, customers, and providers of goods and
services while they're on the move."
Beyond that, "by connecting PhoneTell users to merchants close to them,
when the user is searching for that particular merchant’s product or
service, we deliver high-quality leads."
So, that's Steve above holding his Android phone showing the cool PhoneTell app. It just came out for Android 2.0-2.1 OS. He was jokingly holding it up to my "camera" so everyone could see it… :-) But, alas, it's just a studio-grade handheld digital audio recorder — so we, uh, were simply left to describe it for all of you in my audio interview below. 
Thus, I'm including a couple of screenshots here, so you don't have to rely on our bad acting.
You can download PhoneTell for Android here. Me? I'll be all over it once the iPhone app is available. Probably when I get my new iPhone 4 (soon).
The link to our chat is below. I think it's about 18 minutes, but I have no idea. I just hit the start and stop buttons. Thanks, Steve! And good luck with PhoneTell.
• Download or listen to Graeme's interview with Steve Larsen about PhoneTell's plans to make your mobile life soo much easier… (MP3)"
Clustrix is all about clustered database systems for Internet-scale applications. It claims the first solution to "combine the high scalability of NoSQL key-value stores with robust relational database functionality, immediate transactional consistency, and seamless deployment of SQL." Lest you think it's blowing smoke, the company was funded last month to the tune of $18 million by Sequoia Capital, U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), and ATA Ventures. 
Recent Comments