Check out Smart Bear Live –  Loveline for Startups Episode #2. Lots of interesting entrepreneurs called in, including:

• Matt Spradley from Vignature
• Sean Tierney from Scratch Audio
• Seth Samuels from Converati
• Carrie Requist from uGrokIt
• Vadim Kleyzit from StresStimulus
• Sergey from usabiliTEST

Host Jason Cohen was joined by co-hosts Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley of the Startup Success Podcast.

Burning Man Balloonatics – Making your ‘flying away with a bunch of balloons’ dream a reality.

"All the pretty colors"

If you were one of the 50,000 humans at the Burning Man Festival this past August, perhaps you looked into the skies toward the center of the playa and noticed close to 20 giant, primary colored balloons flying fellow burners up, up, up and away! That is if you were conscious at sunrise and the early afternoon hours.

"Up up and away we go"

The Balloonatics were cautious and strategic about how and when they were to fly people away on a few strands of balloons.  Once the wind picked up, game over! The balloons are heavy and difficult to manage, wind is not their friend. Therefore most of the balloon rides occurred at sunrise and in the early afternoon, with frequent wind and dust-storm breaks.

"Lift off"

Who is behind the Balloonatics at Burning Man?
Well, it would take a couple of adventure junky engineers, Konstantin Othmer founder of the audio to text transcription service www.speechpad.com and Bruce Leak co-founder of WebTV.
Along with the help of Joshua Rosen of www.freshr.com and many other happy volunteers who are balloon passionate.

"How much helium does it take to fly you away?"

Courtney Hatt of Speechpad/Fellow Burner comments,  “It was as if my childhood dream of being a carnie had come true and even better, I wasn’t getting paid! I was honored to keep the Balloonatic’s line organized and chaos free, as people signed their lives away with waivers. It was beautiful to see so many happy faces conquering either a fear, or living a dream, which in my opinion is the best way to connect with another human.”

"The early morning crowd is pleased"

This year they were able to fly close to 200 people. The Balloonatics will also be featured in an upcoming Burning Man documentary, hoping to hit film festivals worldwide in 2012.

Let’s hope for the opportunity to fly away with the Balloonatics next year!

Here’s a short video of Speechpad CEO, Konstantin Othmer, talking to Kym McNicholas about transcription services crowd sourcing and the amazing high quality of our transcribers!

We are working to support more and more audio formats. One of the most popular is mp3, so we are now optimizing our keywords and landing pages for those of you searching for mp3 to text transcription.

Speechpad now has a landing page just for podcast transcription.

We’ve been hard at work to make sure customers have a great experience using our site. On the transcription front, we continue to receive very high marks with customers who have switched from another transcription provider universally saying that our quality is higher! On the website front, we just hired a fantastic UI designer and are overhauling the usability and some of the key flows. Some of these changes will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

Our business has been growing organically and we really appreciate all the inbound links! We have three new landing pages to help our new customers who are searching for us to help find us. They are:
Voice To Text
Speech To Text
Audio To Text

Very creative, right?

Please feel free to link directly to those pages!

We’ve had a number of customer success stories with our Video SEO transcription services. SEOMoz and FounderBuzz are just two of the leading companies using our transcription services.

SEOMoz is a leader in helping companies optimize their websites for search engines, and we are delighted that they have chosen Speechpad to help optimize their own site!

Founder Buzz interviews business founders and recently interviewed our CEO, Konstantin Othmer, as part of a campaign to talk to companies that provide services to Founder Buzz.