“The Deadliest Catch captains want to hear your voice! Send them a shout out and wish them a safe, successful fishing season. Ask a question and they may just respond with an audio message of their own.” Well said by the Deadliest Catch producer who asked Evoca to power one of Discovery Channel’s most popular series — ever. Listen in to what the fans are saying as the season opens.
Here are the toll-free numbers:

Cornelia Marie - 866-503-7791
Early Dawn - 866-503-7792
North American - 866-503-7793
Northwestern - 866-503-7794
Time Bandit - 866-503-7795
Wizard - 866-503-7796
Deadliest Catch Camera Crew - 866-503-7797

Check out the Deadliest Catch mobile site while you’re at it.

We’re not making this up … an amazing new television series called Verminators premiers tonight at 10:00 PM ET/PT on Discovery Channel. You can call 866-920-9976 to tell your own “disgusting infestation stories” — inspired by the elite team of Los Angeles-based exterminators. This week’s episode: Mike and the team take on a massive rat infestation at a race track, tackle an apartment swarming with roaches, bring in K-9 reinforcement for suspected bed bugs and discover one frightened homeowner’s rat problem is much worse than she ever imagined. Listen in as the stories come creeping and crawling in during the weeks ahead.

You can probably imagine just how much fun it’s been for the Travel Channel and Evoca teams to cook up an easy way for fans of Bizarre Foods to use Evoca to share their own “bizarre foods” stories with Andrew Zimmern and hear other adventuresome gourmets around the world. It’s now as easy as picking up the phone and dialing 1-877-57-FOODS to tell your story and then listen in online. The Travel Channel team just might pick your gastronomic tale to play online! Here’s the scoop about this highly popular Travel Channel series that you can catch any night: “Unmasking an aspect of dining out that will make you think twice before ordering off the menu, and utilizing his knowledge of all things edible, Andrew Zimmern is on a quest to find the world’s most bizarre foods. Andrew knows that one man’s poison is another’s delicacy but he isn’t afraid to poke a little fun at the local fare or himself. Our energetic food-a-holic infiltrates markets and restaurants taking viewers behind the scenes to savor the local cuisine - even if that means chewing on eggs with legs, gulping down a beating frog heart or polishing off a lamb’s eyeball. Andrew is game for anything and knows the most interesting food is found closest to the source. So whether he’s chasing down large water rodents in the Louisiana bayou, fishing for piranha in the Amazon or flushing out cave bats in Malaysia, you can be sure the guy with the iron stomach will dish up the unimaginable.”

It’s very special when we can work closely with “the home team” and that’s just what happened when we helped the renowned Savannah Music Festival (SMF), Georgia’s largest musical arts festival, to connect with its audiences that travel to Savannah from around the state, country, and world. Using our Phone-to-Web technology, SMF has been inviting its audience members to record their experiences online.

We teamed up with SMF to increase audience participation and build online community by enabling anyone attending SMF events to tell the world about their experiences at the Festival simply by picking up their phone. By dialing 912-330-4254 audience members can create voice recordings that appear on the Savannah Music Festival website during the event and throughout the year. The program is part of the Festival’s interactive marketing initiatives, allowing concert-goers to voice their experiences and opinions.

“From our past experience, we find that word-of-mouth is a terrific way to build audiences,” remarked Ryan McMaken, Public Relations Manager for the Savannah Music Festival. “When word-of-mouth extends to the Internet, we are reaching thousands of potential new audience members. This program also gives us another very user-friendly way of collecting patrons’ thoughts about our productions.”

Evoca delivers its digital media services to a wide range of users including organizations that run performing and visual arts events, television programs, and radio shows that are heard around the world. Now this jewel in Savannah’s crown can benefit from the reach of the Internet.

Together with Trellon we’ve expanded the impact of Drupal’s highly popular social media software by making it easy to incorporate Evoca’s interactive Phone-to-Web content creation and hosting solution with Drupal. This kicks off a series of Evoca module introductions to speed the adoption of Evoca Media Services by users of both commercial and open source content management software solutions. The gist of the news release follows here:

Trellon, an elite web development consulting firm specializing in Drupal and third party integration web solutions and Evoca, the innovator of Phone-to-Web content creation, hosting, and media management services, announced a partnership to enable Drupal users to rapidly integrate Evoca’s innovative features into web properties developed by Trellon for customers in vertical markets including the media industry, cause marketing, education, and politics.

The Evoca-Drupal module provides seamless functionality for Drupal users who wish to deploy and manage Evoca Media Services, the flexible digital media platform offering an API (application programming interface) and integrated VoIP telephone services. Trellon has developed a solution based around webservices to rapidly deploy the Drupal services module and implement the solution.

Trellon and Evoca demonstrated the functionality of the Evoca-Drupal module at Drupalcon 2008 in Boston (March 3-6), where Trellon was a gold sponsor. This sold-out technology conference hosted over 800 attendees that develop and use Drupal, a highly popular social publishing system that blends web content management and social media capabilities supported by a thriving open source community. Drupal users include AOL, FastCompany, Warner Brothers Records, The New York Post, Amnesty International, SonyBMG, Harvard University, and the Open Architecture Network.

And the usual quotations:

“We are pleased to partner with Evoca to implement their innovative digital media solutions with Drupal as well as other popular web platforms”, remarked Samuel Wilson, Trellon’s Director of Operations. “While Trellon specializes in customizing Drupal, we have crafted the methods necessary to implement Evoca products with most of the web platforms being used online today.” Trellon is inviting both current and new clients to participate in the adoption of Evoca services to bring compelling new media features to their web properties and user engagement programs.

“Evoca welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with Trellon to integrate Evoca Media Services into the wide range of organizations that use Drupal to execute effective online communities and understand the impact of interesting new content on important site metrics – exactly where Evoca excels,” added Murem Sharpe, CEO and president of Evoca. “We look forward to on-going collaboration with Trellon as they facilitate the integration of Evoca’s services with additional web platforms to meet the strong market demand for user-generated content – the linchpin of successful social media sites.”

And here’s more about our talented new partner, Trellon:

Trellon is a web development consulting company specializing in the Internet and new media with a particular emphasis on Drupal and third party integration. Founded in 2004, the company has delivered solutions to a variety of clients in the non-profit, political, NGO and commercial sectors. Client projects have ranged in size from small niche web communities to large scale national deployments integrated with third party solutions. Trellon’s development staff includes core Drupal programmers, module contributors and CiviCRM specialists who are all open source advocates. Additionally, Trellon’s business management team provides strategic consulting services surrounding internet strategy, implementation and deployment.

We’ve just announced Evoca Media Services (EMS) Version 2.0 - bringing our customers rapid implementation of interactive campaigns that engage your customers, audiences, readers, and supporters and convert them from offline to online visitors. Why are we so excited about Version 2.0? It’s now easier than ever for you to take advantage of these two global market trends:

Trend #1 - User-generated content is the leading driver of online advertising, eCommerce, and donation revenue growth

Trend #2 - There are over 3.3 billion mobile phones worldwide - digital audio content devices, available 24×7 to put fresh, compelling content online

Media and entertainment companies and interactive marketers using Evoca Media Services 2.0 now have easy-to-deploy audio content creation and streaming features to increase online traffic and advertising revenue. EMS is Software-as-a-service, so you never have to be concerned about installation or updates. (BTW, it doesn’t involve any heavy lifting by your IT/web team, whether they’re in-house or third party.)

So … what are these new Evoca Media Services features? You now can use the Evoca Media Wizard, our integrated, “self-service” Flash player creation and customization wizard, to generate an unlimited number of branded Flash players for online play-back of digital recordings throughout your web properties. You can easily manage your “library” of players within your current interactive programs and retain them for your future programs. Innovative self-service phone configuration features enable you to upload and manage your custom voice prompts and configure your phone numbers. Did you know that Evoca offers phone numbers for thousands of U.S. cities and over 45 countries, both local and toll-free?

There’s more … Evoca’s Media Manager is a powerful online console for screening, publishing, archiving, uploading MP3s (and converting WAV to MP3), and downloading digital recordings. The Media Manager has new features that, well, you just have to use it to see (and hear) how easy it is to manage your digital audio assets. Also included in the release are expanded site help, developer forums, and open source projects (Java and PHP) that wrap the HTTP API (application programming interface).

We’ll continue to launch new self-service features that make it easier than ever for your users to create fresh, compelling audio content. Companies and organizations of any size – from large enterprises to small businesses and non-profits - can benefit from Evoca’s market-leading features by selecting license packages that fit their requirements. Want to try our developer version? Better yet, want to get started with the commercial version? Either way, it’s easy: fill out our short Online Inquiry Form and we’ll get you underway fast.

We’re also signing up partners - interactive agencies, IT integrators, and web developers, and they’re very enthused about bringing the benefits user-generated content to their clients in many creative ways that we could not have possibly thought up ourselves. Partners, we’re listening! Say the word!

This just in from Sam Margolis of Simple English News,

I just discovered something else that would not have been possible (or as easy to do) in an Evoca-less world. I am getting readers to send in New Year’s greetings in as many languages as possible.

Thanks for providing this opportunity,

Sam Margolis
Simple English News
sam(at)chortler.com
Skype: sam.margolis

And a few words about Simple English News and Sam, its founder:

Mission

Simple English News hopes to be what it says it is. Our desire is to make the news more understandable for those who are learning English.

Whose idea was it?

Simple English News was put together by Sam Margolis who thought that making the daily news more readable would be of great help to people learning English.

Sam worked for the United States Peace Corps in the small city of Papa in western Hungary where he taught English to high school students.

Afterwards Sam continued to work as a teacher and as a journalist. His writings have appeared in such places as The Independent, The International Herald Tribune, Wired Magazine, United Press International, The Globe and Mail, and several other publications

Seth wants an Xbox. Megan wants the next six lottery numbers and a bee-keeping kit. For the young and young-at-heart the Savannah Morning News teamed up with Evoca, our innovative Phone-to-Web technology company, to make it possible for anyone to express their wishes to Santa simply by phoning free of charge (912) 330-4255. Anyone can listen to a wide range of requests. Callers were asked to leave first name and list only, because Santa already knows who’s been naughty or nice.

Whether we enable phone-to-Web messages for Santa or for expressing opinions about civic issues, Evoca welcomes the opportunity to work with print media organizations like the Savannah Morning News that are pioneering the use of new technology to create compelling user-generated content. Fresh content brings print readers online and keeps online readers coming back.

The Savannah Morning News is owned by Morris Publishing Group, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Morris Communications Company, LLC. The Savannah Morning News publishes six weekly newspapers, numerous monthly publications for the Savannah area, and digitally publishes every day.

Tapping into the power of user-generated content to attract television program viewers online, Discovery Channel chose Evoca™ to make it easy for fans of Last One Standing to simply pick up a phone to create online voice comments and hear their heroes’ voices in response. The contestants record their answers by phone any time, any where. The results are rapidly posted to an attractive Discovery Channel-branded playlist player hosted by Evoca.

Airing the program on Thursday nights at 8:00 PM EST, Discovery Channel promotes the toll-free number for different contestants. Fans can participate by recording their questions for any of the six contestants: Brad: 866.920.9974; Corey: 866.920.9975; Jason: 866-920-9976; Mark: 866-920-9977; Rajko: 866-920-9978; and Richard – 866.920.9979.

When we say “Get a Phone for your Website” we really mean it. Media companies, cause marketing organizations, presidential campaigns, and other market leaders are finding that Evoca’s Phone-to-Web media services help them engage their audiences, fans, constituents, and customers with fresh online content created by people from around the globe. User-generated content is a proven asset for attracting online advertising and e-commerce revenue. Stay tuned for more Evoca Media Services success stories and get your own success story started with Evoca.

Thanks to Mashable, its huge readership now knows about Evoca Media Services, our new commercial media services platform! They applauded Evoca’s introduction of a flexible media services platform delivering audio creation and distribution online through media APIs (application programming interfaces) and integrated VoIP telephone services. We agree – our platform makes it possible for a wide range of applications to come alive – it’s really up to the user. Mashable’s audience of social networking sites are ideal users. So let’s ask Mashable to tell the rest of the story …

“Evoca, which offers services to allow users to make calls and leave voice comments via an embedded Flash player, has announced the launch of their API. The API will allow other companies to utilize Evoca’s services from their own web sites with their own branding.

When we first covered Evoca, they were primarily an add-on for social networks, allowing users to leave voice comments for their friends. These days they also offer integration with Skype, allowing companies to utilize the service as a solution for their customers to send voice messages. Evoca also provides basic call recording services for recording conference calls or other important meetings.

With its API, Evoca now enables users to customize their call recording solution for their audience. While it seems the focus is on business users, there could also be opportunities for social networks looking to add a voice comments feature (Facebook app anyone?).

The company plans to announce several big partners that will be utilizing the Evoca API in coming weeks.”

Original article posted here