To help elicit your feedback, we’ve got a great little contest for you. Just tell us what you’d want Vlingo to do for you and you’ll be automatically entered into a contest to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card!

Entering is easy!
1.Follow @Vlingo on Twitter, you must follow @Vlingo before you enter. Just go here, it take two seconds Vlingo Twitter Page

2.To enter, tweet what you would have your perfect virtual assistant do for you. Your tweet must include the hashtag “#HelpMeVlingo @Vlingo”

Multiple entries are OK! Each tweet you do will count as an entry. Be sure to include “#HelpMeVlingo @Vlingo” in your tweets.

For example: I want my virtual assistant to translate my emails in French #HelpMeVlingo @Vlingo

Good luck!
The Vlingo Team

But today we’re going to take a second to offer up some pointers for getting the most out of our newest feature on Android, the Vlingo ActionBar.   The new ActionBar allows users to access all of the functionality available on the Vlingo Virtual Assistant by typing commands instead of speaking.  This enables you to use Vlingo even when it isn’t convenient to talk to you phone.  Like when you’re at a noisy restaurant or a quiet coffee shop.

As you all know by now, it’s tough to explain what we’re all about.  So we built a little video to show you a few cool demos related to the ActionBar.

Android Users – We’d love to hear what you think.  Are you liking the new ActionBar?  You find it easy to use and helpful when you’re on the go?  Any changes you’d like to see?

Please share your feedback with us in the comment section.  Thanks so much!

Android Users,

Since launching our virtual assistant on Android way back in May, we have had some pretty exciting updates. In August, we made Vlingo totally free to download on Android Market. In October, we introduced the InCar feature, the first and only completely hands free way to message, call and get directions when you’re on the go. Now we have a holiday treat that may be our biggest update yet: codenamed Oyster.

As much as I’d like to spill the details, I’m not at liberty to say any more. But if you want the scoop as soon as it’s available you can:

We’re so excited we had to let you in on our secret. As much as we could, at least.

Talk to everyone very soon!

Cheers,

Team Vlingo

I’ll quickly set the scene for you – a  group of friends walk by a warehouse in a local neighborhood and see an older man struggling to restore a carousel on his own. The friends stop to help.  Now here is where you will see Vlingo in action….one of the friends uses Vlingo to send out a Tweet asking his friends to come help!  Check it out below!

While you can view it here on YouTube also be on the lookout for this commercial as you watch all those old holiday movies on TV, during your Soaps or even during those weekend football games!

We’re very happy to report that a new Vlingo for iPhone release is now LIVE in the App Store.  The latest version of iOS introduced a few quirks that we’ve been able to fix.  The update released today includes:

** Please Note: You must be running iOS 4.1 in order to download the Vlingo update**

Thanks to all who reached out via Twitter and Facebook the last couple months, alerting us of any issues you encountered.  We appreciate the feedback, and just wanted to let you know that we were listening.  The app should be all shined up for your speaking pleasure.  Enjoy!

Cheers,

The Vlingo Team

Back again for the second installment of our tutorial blog series covering the most useful voice commands.  If you missed the first post, check it out for a helpful Android voice command list featuring local search and reviews.

Today we have a short video that shows you how you can easily share Vlingo with your friends.  There’s a new feature that makes it easier than ever to pass on the good word to any of your Android voice contacts if you’re digging what Vlingo’s laying down.  Check out the demo below…

What do you think?  Will you share Vlingo with your friends?

Vlingo Tweet Week 2010 (Cue guitar solo from “Rock You Like a Hurricane” and commence the B-2 bomber flyover.)

All week long, we will be releasing Twitter themed excitement. In part to coincide with the 140 Conference in NYC, in part because we find Twitter and all of our fans who follow us @Vlingo to be generally radical (launch pyrotechnics). To commemorate our First Annual Tweet Week, there will be blog posts, updates from the 140 conference where we will be hanging with our friends from Jabra, and (hooray!) giveaways. To kick off what promises to be a fun week, we present to thee . . .

How Tweet It Is: iPad Giveaway from @Vlingo

Been dying to get an iPad but don’t want to pay for it? Well here is your chance. Just follow these 3 simple rules and you will be entered to win an iPad!

1. Follow @Vlingo
2. Tweet: “Vlingo lets me update Twitter using my voice! Follow @Vlingo and RT this message for a chance to win an iPad”
3. Do so before Friday April 23rd at 5pm ET. That’s when the contest ends – nothing lasts forever, after all.

One lucky @Vlingo fan who tweeted the above message (or something pretty close) will walk away with a brand spankin’ new iPad (crowd roars).

Check back each day this week and stay tuned on Twitter as we release other exciting updates throughout the week.

Our current BlackBerry & iPhone users LOVE to update their Twitter status using their voice. Check out the word clouds below to see some of the most popular Tweeted words!

BlackBerry:

iPhone:

Erin Keleher, Senior Marketing Communications Manager, Vlingo

The first data point is that Vlingo has a very high retention rate of approximately 75%, which is the percentage of a given month’s users that come back and speak to Vlingo again the following month. According to this Nielsen study, the retention rate is a factor that determines the potential reach an application can have. You can see in the chart below that Vlingo positions very high in the curve, giving us a good shot at having up to 60% of market penetration.

[click on the image to enlarge]

The second observation has to do with the rate at which different users use Vlingo. We found out that Vlingo has a broad appeal across our user base, or in other words that Vlingo usage is very spread and not concentrated in a few power users. To understand this point in the context of other popular applications let’s take a look at the chart below done by this Harvard Business School study. The green line at 45 degrees shows a hypothetical situation in which everybody uses an application or service exactly as everyone else. This is very unlikely to happen in the real world, as there are always users that are more active than others. In this context Vlingo for BlackBerry and Vlingo for iPhone are widely used across their user base – the top 10% contributes just around 40% of the content – in a way comparable to how social networks engage their users. On the other hand, examples of applications that are very concentrated in prolific users are Twitter and Wikipedia where the top 10% users account for 90% of the contributions.

[click on the image to enlarge]

The fact that Vlingo shows such a balanced and equitable usage among its users is a very good indicator. It reveals that Vlingo is flexible enough to accommodate the different needs of its big user base and not just target a small nice group of power users.

To be clear, the fact that Vlingo is so engaging does not imply automatically that a massive audience is guaranteed. But it indicates a very high potential and encourages us to make Vlingo better known every day.

Luciano Tourn, Marketing Strategist, Vlingo.