YouMail by Zeacom

Sector: Mobile Applications, Messaging

Headquarters: Irvine, CA

Management: CEO of Zeacom Miles Valentine leads a team of execs with wide experience in the software industry.

Funding: Incubated by parent company Zeacom, known for its call-center applications.

Secret Sauce: YouMail lets you personalize your mobile’s voicemail greetings. Currently available as a free beta, the service lets you, for example, record one greeting for your co-workers, another for your mom, and another greeting–or perhaps insult–that doesn’t let the caller leave a message for people you don’t want to talk to. (The latter is known as the highly popular “DitchMail” feature.)

To get started, go online to youmail.com, where you sign up, record greetings, and associate them with the relevant caller-ID numbers; the service works with Verizon, Cingular, and T-Mobile phones. You can switch back and forth between checking your received voicemails on your mobile and via YouMail’s website, which gives you access to advanced voicemail management features. And coming soon: the ability to use custom .wav files as your greetings. Altogether, if it follows through on its initial promise, YouMail–like early providers of ringtones and ringback tones–might able to nicely capitalize on its obvious appeal to consumers eager to personalize their mobile lifestyles.

Seen and Heard: MobileCrunch foresaw a bright future for the service, saying, “The premise is simple and every immediately “gets” it which is one of the most critical things when attempting to gain massive traction. Youmail is all about personalizing your outgoing voice mail message so that it is different–and personalized–for each different caller ID that gets your voice mail instead of you.”