Vaestro: Audio Forum Software
One line pitch
Vaestro is audio forum software that you can use on your web site for free, talk to your friends, use for eLearning purposes, host interactive podcasts, or use it like an audio blog.
Team
- Saibal Dey – Business Head and Technical Director
- Matt Ready – Founder
Pain
Text based forum softwares are used on hundreds of thousands of websites to carry out discussions on a daily basis. However, this kind of software is unable to convey the most basic structure of a discussion – emotion. No matter how many words a user types, there is always a gap between their feelings and words. Also, when someone has a lot to say, they have to type out a lot of words which is time consuming and inconvenient.
Solution
Vaestro is audio forum software that you can use on your web site for free to talk to your friends, host interactive podcasts, use it like an audio blog etc. Vaestro is divided into Channels which are divided into Forums, which, in turn, contain Topics. In short, each Channel can be thought of as a placeholder for Forums and Topics. Anyone can create a free account on Vaestro and can then create their own Channel and Forums. Once this is done, they can proceed to create their own topics of discussions – on voice. Vaestro has a Flash based Recorder/Player which enables a user to record their messages on voice for others to listen to and comment on them. If someone does not want to go into the trouble of creating their own Channel or Forum, they can always do a search on Vaestro and take part in an existing discussion on a topic of their choice. Since Vaestro is voice driven, hence it helps in: 1. Expressing one’s emotions when posting a message. If you are angry, sad, happy, crying, sarcastic etc., you don’t have to type out “I am angry at this”. You just let your voice do the talking – literally. 2. People no longer have to type out long posts for minutes on the end. All they have to do is speak out their feelings for as long as they want. 3. People do not have to be live on “chat” with each other to hear each others voice. No matter which timezone you are in, you can always leave a message for others for them to listen to at their own convenience.
Technology
PHP/MySQL AJAX Flash Remoting Audio Streaming with Red5 Server
Market
The market size is huge! – Schools and colleges can use Vaestro for eLearning. – People can use it for discussions. – Friends and families can use it for leaving messages for each other when they are in separate locations and time zones. – Bloggers can use it for audio blogging. – Companies can use Vaestro to setup a feedback system for their customers to leave them messages. – Vaestro can be used as a personal messaging system between it’s users.
Business Model
Vaestro has 2 types of channels – free and private. Free channels are visible to everyone whereas private channels are visible only to the channel owner and his/her invited people. Private channels cost only $4.99 per month. More monetizing features related to discussions, downloads etc. are being added at the moment and will be made live in the coming months.
Competition
All text based forum softwares.
Milestones
The most important step is to make Vaestro more user friendly so that even a novice can use it to it’s full potential. The next important step is to make the Recorder/Player more enhanced and with tools to use in discussions, making them more interactive. Also, a series of other features have been lined up to make it one of the coolest tools on the web in the near future.
Conclusion
Voice is going to be the next big thing on the internet. Voice discussions, voice mail, voice searches etc. are going to emerge as strong areas of implementation over the next 2-3 years. Hence, Vaestro is a pioneer in this field since it is the first voice driven forum software created.
VentureDig’s Take:
So my initial discovery of Vaestro’s offering was a bit slow. I thought, “What exactly does forum software encompass?” What helped me understand their product was understanding the pain they intend to mitigate: lack of emotion offered through most web products. On the web, most communication is driven through your words; however, most emotion is communicated through voice. For this reason, Vaestro combines audio with traditional message boards. Not a bad thought, really.
However, what’s critical with message boards is getting a problem solved. That’s what the main purpose of message boards are. You go there to post a problem, and hopefully, some kind soul will solve the problem. After that, others with the same problem use google and find a thread where a similar person has had the problem, and has had it solved.
The search component is critical and it needs to still be present within Vaestro’s offering. If there’s valuable data/answers in audio format through Vaestro, but nobody can find it (through search engines), then that’s a problem.
If each audio question/answer/recording also includes a transcript for search engines, that will be critical and will easily fix the problem.
This one is a long-run play as the audio tools for the average/middle-class internet user is still growing.
All the same, the software Vaestro uses is top notch and worth checking out.
Bottom line: Keep your eye on this one.