So you can check your e-mail wirelessly. Talaris Corp. says “so what?”
How about reserving a table at a nearby restaurant for that important work lunch? How about scheduling a conference room during a busy business convention? Or how about getting a late-night call to set up a critical business meeting on the other side of the country, and being able to reserve an airline flight out, a limo to pick you up and a plush hotel room-all using your mobile phone and all after midnight?
“It is definitely an interesting service,” said Jennifer DiMarzio, an industry analyst with Summit Strategies Inc.
It’s a service Talaris officially launched last week, one aimed at the estimated 35 million mobile business professionals who have to waste time working as their own secretary.
“Mobile professionals … really lack any formal administrative support,” said Roman Bukary, the senior director of product marketing and strategy for Talaris. “This translates into a huge bottom-line expense.”
San Francisco-based Talaris, a privately held company with about 80 employees, was formed in late 1999 and was until recently called Gazoo Corp. Talaris spent its formative years researching its intended market: the mobile business professional. The company found that mobile workers spend between five and 10 hours a week managing basic activities that are not directly related to their job-reserving hotel rooms, arranging conference calls and more personal activities, such as sending flowers. According to Talaris’ calculations, bigger companies could be losing hundreds of millions of dollars through employees’ unproductive hours.
If every employee had a personal secretary these chores wouldn’t pose a problem. However, as Bukary puts it, that’s “not quite feasible,” especially in the current economic climate.
So, what to do?
Talaris began working on a virtual secretary, one that resided on the Web but could be accessed through a variety of devices, including mobile phones and personal digital assistants
“We could not dictate to a mobile professional that they had to use a laptop,” Bukary said. “Wireless is one access point into the overall solution.”
Talaris’ virtual secretary is an automated system that records a user’s request-dinner at 7 p.m. at an Italian restaurant-and then searches a variety of databases for a match. User preferences are pre-installed on the service so it knows which restaurants are closest. If possible the service uses a restaurant’s online booking service, and if not it actually calls the restaurant and plays a pre-recorded message: “If you have a table available at 7 p.m., please press one or say `yes.”‘
But that’s not all. Once the reservation is made, the service alerts the user of the time and place, and even enters the information into the user’s calendar and content manager. If plans change, it can reschedule and even alert other co-workers-through their calendars-of the new time and place.
“It really lets people do what they’re paid to do,” Bukary said. “Not only can you use this for business, you can also take it home with you.”
The virtual secretary is always on, and simply waits for businesses to open before attempting to make reservations. Talaris boasts that it offers more than 70,000 services through the virtual secretary, including conference call booking, package shipping and tracking, scheduling courier services, online document printing and shipping, rental car reservations, sedan and limousine scheduling and even flower delivery. Talaris uses a variety of service aggregators like Datalex, Dynamex, eCourier, Intercall, Latitude, NowDocs, Zagat and others to bolster its offerings.
In order to access the virtual secretary, users simply tap through the menu of commands on their desktop, phone or PDA. The commands are tailored to the user-knowing, for example, with which airlines they have frequent flyer miles-and the particular company-knowing if it has discount rates with certain hotels.
“All those elements exist on the product today,” Bukary said. “We felt we had a compelling application.”
Talaris is just now getting ready to offer its application to individual companies, wireless carriers and others that might be interested, including PDA companies. Bukary said Talaris hired a director of sales only a few short weeks ago.
“We are now approaching customers,” he said.
“It’s a very sound idea,” Summit Strategies’ DiMarzio said. “Definitely there are going to be more companies in this space.”
DiMarzio said Talaris’ virtual secretary expands the services market by giving restaurants, hotels and other businesses access to mobile professionals. In addition, Talaris combines all of these services in an understandable way.
“Talaris pulls them all together for you,” she said.
While Talaris has the backing of a variety of major companies-executives from Ariba, Commerce One, the GSM Association, Sun Microsystems and Cisco sit on Talaris’ board of advisers-DiMarzio said the company will have to move fast to beat out potential competitors.
“Who can gain the most traction first is the question,” she said.
