MobileCrunch wrote a few days ago that Verizon expected customers to send over 300 million text, picture and video messages on New Year’s Eve between the hours of 12 p.m. and 4a.m. ET New Year’s Day.

Hopefully, people had a few minutes to sent some voicemails as well. And with a combination of a late night, general merriment and plenty bottles of champagne, we bet you all have a few good ones to hold onto for a long time. Whether they were declarations of love, general craziness or ramblings that simply didn’t make sense, use your GotVoice to down them to your MP3 player and build a little playlist of your favorite ones. They’ll be great to listen to later in the year.

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Another letter in:

Dear folks at Got Voice,

Quick story for you. My Aunt called and left me a message a few weeks ago. She said she wanted some book from Pope John Paul II for Christmas. I mentally noted it. “Pope John Paul. Book. Got it.”

Then about a week later I went to Amazon and looked for books by Pope John Paul II. Did you know he wrote a ton of them? I didn’t. Uh-oh. Which one did she want? It’s not like I could go and call her back.

Then I remembered that the voicemail was probably archived in my Google mail A couple of quick searches later, text of my aunt’s voicemail was on my screen, and I was one Copy and Paste from buying the present. Thanks for helping me out this year. I’m telling everyone I know this story.

- Liz B, Sacramento, CA

Thanks Liz. If you have your own story, email us.

The GotVoice Affiliate Program, managed through Commission Junction, continues to be one of the top performing ways for bloggers and retailers to sell products involving mobile technologies. And our 7 day EPC’s are up with some of the major cell phone carriers in the U.S.

With 2008 being the “Year of the Mobile Phone,” we expect these numbers to grow across the board. And we want to use this area as a forum to get feedback from our best partners - you - and gather suggestions on how we can help bolster your sales efforts.

Voice to Text is poised to explode next year, so tell us what you need to maximize the amount of money you are making from your web site. You can email us or send us comments here in the blog.

Rich Tehrani does a nice job of covering the Visual Voicemail space this week over at TMC.net. His review is fair across all companies in the space, but his main point is extremely important (though buried at the bottom.)

“Regardless of which service you choose, voicemail to text/visual voicemail is a fantastic productivity booster. I would imagine that students and smartphone users should also want to try the technology out for themselves. It is one of those really fantastic productivity enablers you just don’t expect to be so useful. Once you try one of these services you will wonder how you ever lived without them.”

It must be December, because everyone is either recapping what happened in 2007 or predicting what will happen in 2008. And of course, the Old Grey Lady will be leading the way.

David Pogue of the New York Times asks if 2008 is the Year of the Cell Phone. He argues that 2007 saw the marriage of cell phone to Internet (though he accidentally forgot to mention GotVoice). Definitely a worthwile read.

Business Wire brings us a release from the Mobile Marketing Association, featuring new data from their third-annual Mobile Attitude and Usage Study.

Particularly relevant to the world of Voice to Text and Visual Voicemail, is that “54 percent of 13-34 year olds use SMS for social networking, while 44 percent of 13-34 year olds said they use text messaging for flirting or dating…”

Also noted in the survey results: “Teens and young adults use text messaging more than any other demographic. People ages 13-24 send and receive the most – more than 50 messages per week – while half of all survey respondents use text messaging at least once a week.”

And one last thing we found interesting - “Sweepstakes and voting campaigns are the most widely used types of mobile marketing. The second most common type is receiving alerts about products, services, accounts.“

All of this data points to a single trend - More people are using SMS more often, for more types of services. Receiving SMS Text versions of Voicemail is already rapidly rising, and all signs point toward it continuing its ascent.

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Well Happy Thanksgiving. The team here at GotVoice sends along our holiday wishes, as well as some ways to impress Aunt Betty and others with your GotVoice service while lounging around the living room.

1) Have the nieces and nephews call you and leave a voicemail. They’ll think it’s so cool that their voice automatically turns into a text.

2) Take your older relatives to a computer and show them you are keeping an mp3 archive of every voicemail they send you. This works especially well if you have young children. Tell the grandparents they can call 3 month old junior, and you’ll save the voicemail so he can listen when he’s older. Then watch them tear up.

3) Send everyone in your family a Happy Thanksgiving message. Do a quick Broadcast to the whole family, and watch the whole room check their Voicemail at once. Then watch them laugh as they marvel at the new technology you have discovered.

4) Finally, when you are doing receiving accolades for being the “cool uncle” tell everyone they may see their own subscription in their stocking this year. Thanksgiving accolades and Xmas presents people want all at once.

Have a great Thanksgiving. - GotVoice

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Apple’s iPhone is certainly the current rage in consumer technology today.  And we’ve been getting a steady rate of new emails asking how GotVoice features compare with that of the new iconoclastic device.

Well, for one thing, with GotVoice, you can get one of the iPhone’s most popular features, Visual Voicemail, on any smart phone. You don’t have to buy a new handset or switch carriers.

But in addition, the GotVoice Services enhance your phone experience with other tools – some of which are not part of the iPhone feature set - such as voicemail delivered to your email as MP3’s, Visual Voicemail, Broadcast Calling, Silent Calling and now Voice to Text Transcription.

Let us know what features are your favorites.

It’s been a while since we talked about it, so we want to remind everyone about the GotVoice Affiliate Program. If you write about technology, mobile, gadgets, travel, services for the deaf, SMS, VoIP or other related news, then be sure to join the program and make a few bucks off the products you like.

• Earn $15.00+ for every user who starts a free trial of GotVoice Premium.
• Drive traffic to customized product pages through specially designed links and ads that allow us to track sales and traffic.
• Receive the best customer service and account management possible through our dedicated affiliate team and Commission Junction.

More details are outlined here.

KIRKLAND, Wash. – October 1, 2007 – GotVoice, Inc., the voice messaging company, today announced Hawaii-based Oceanic Time Warner Cable has deployed the GotVoice service to over 200,000 subscribers of its RoadRunner high-speed Internet service and Oceanic Digital Phone service. Oceanic is the first cable service to deploy GotVoice, enabling its broadband phone customers to create and send voice messages as well as visually interact with their home and cell phone voice messages in email or online at the Oceanic Web Portal…[cont]

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