Friday, January 19, 2007

Business risk: Talkr.com, a terrific service, is in trouble.

Talkr.com illustrates the attraction and risk of mashups. Talkr.com is a text-to-speech service for blogs. It allows users to click to listen to particular posts or to subscribe to an RSS feed of the spoken version of the blog -- it automatically turns the blog into a podcast.

The audio version is valuable in at least two ways -- it makes the blog accessible to blind people and you can listen to it while away from your desk -- while driving, exercising, etc.

Adding audio to this blog took only a few minutes -- the power of mashups!

That is all good news. Now the bad news. Talkr.com is up for sale because they are not generating enough revenue.

This is another illustration of the business risks we talked about in an earlier post.

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