Evoca

Sector: Mobile applications, Audio, Social networking

Headquarters: Savannah, GA

Management: CEO Murem Sharpe and COO Diego Orjuela are co-founders, they’re joined by a team with broad business experience.

Funding: Privately funded.

Secret Sauce: Evoca makes it really easy to make and upload voice recordings from your mobile phone. It bills itself as making it easy to create, organize, search, and share voice recordings, and is available in a free version as well as a $4.99/month one that lets you record Skype calls and gives you many more recording minutes. Evoca’s suggested purposes are myriad: audio-wedding guestbooks, capturing oral history, podcasting made quick and simple, business “notes to self” or conf call recordings with an optional fee-based transcription service, sample audition music, greetings on social networking sites like MySpace, etc., etc.

Naturally you can also use your computer or other device for Evoca recordings if you’d sometimes prefer to use higher-quality mikes than those in your mobile. Once you’ve uploaded a file (or by setting default preferences) you can decide if you want to make a recording public or keep it private or want to charge for it. In the grand Web 2.0 spirit, you can also tag recordings, use plug-ins to easily add them to your blog or social networking page, make your recordings available under various Creative Commons licenses, and subscribe to RSS feeds of Evoca recordings. In addition, the company offers a premium “virtual voicemail” service, and the company just announced its in-browser recording tool, which lets visitors to your blog or page leave audio comments. And with full-fledged Spanish versions already available, Evoca is doing a good job reaching out to the Spanish-speaking community.

Overall, Evoca looks like a cool toolset that’s decided to market itself to the general public rather than merely to the most nerdy among us–something that ended up working pretty well for certain earlier startups.

Seen and Heard: Personal Democracy Forum’s Micah Sifry just interviewed Evoca’s CEO, after discovering the service’s use in an Ohio political campaign. Mashable still likes Evoca, saying, “Evoca is a really solid service, and it’s one of the easiest ways to get a voice recording on to hi5, MySpace, Xanga, Piczo or your blog.” TechCrunch noted that Evoca’s sound search feature “uses speech recognition to recognize search terms in sound files, and is provided by Podscope. Finally, users can set a price for others to listen to a file, and proceeds will be sent out monthly via check. Evoca is clearly an ambitious project. The main issue is whether or not they can get and stay ahead of Odeo and become the brand people think of when they want to record and share audio files online.” And Robin Raskin called the service “the bomb,” saying, “For those of you in the audio-know, think of Evoca as a stripped down version of GarageBand or Audacity, but totally web-based. For the uninitiated: You will be recording audio and saving it to the web, then if you like, sharing it via an RSS feed or embedding it in your application–in under 10 minutes. In essence you’ll be podcasting without even giving it a second thought.”