Tim O’Reilly makes an interesting point when he notes that TellMe took a huge leap in voice recognition capability when it launched into directory services. Nothing changed from a technical point of view but they had a larger data set to work from. And there is that term again, DATA. Ditto now with Google Translation services.

So perhaps “Crowdsourcing” and “datasourcing” are now coalescing….

Another way of looking at this is “what is your distribution channel to customer data?”. If you make directory enquiries through TellMe or Google, you will also probably hand on your mobile phone number (hey, so we can text you back the information!), which of course is linked to your account information (on google, or MS), and when the Telco’s go all Adserving friendly (as per Telco 2.0) then your GPS data gets handed over.

So the questions I have for every service provider I can think of is “do you know what data underpins your competitive advantage and what is your data acquisition strategy” For the simple start up company perhaps the question is “what makes your data sets interesting to GYM?(Google, Yahoo, Microsoft); what is your data acquisition strategy, and what is the time value of this data acquisition path?”

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact