VenChar

Outsourced prayer

This is funny (via Marginal Revolution, I think):

With Roman Catholic clergy in short supply in the United States, Indian priests are picking up some of their work, saying Mass for special intentions, in a sacred if unusual version of outsourcing. American, as well as Canadian and European churches, are sending Mass intentions, or requests for services like those to remember deceased relatives and thanksgiving prayers, to clergy in India.

About 2 percent of India's more than one billion people are Christians, most of them Catholics. In Kerala, a state on the southwestern coast with one of the largest concentrations of Christians in India, churches often receive intentions from overseas. The Masses are conducted in Malayalam, the native language. The intention - often a prayer for the repose of the soul of a deceased relative, or for a sick family member, thanksgiving for a favor received, or a prayer offering for a newborn - is announced at Mass.

While most requests are made via mail or personally through traveling clergymen, a significant number arrive via e-mail, a sign that technology is expediting this practice.

Predictably, this has all sorts of people in a tizzy:

But critics of the phenomenon said they were shocked that religious services were being sent offshore, or outsourced, a word normally used for clerical and other office jobs that migrate to countries with lower wages.

In a news release, David Fleming, national secretary for finance of Amicus said the assignment of prayers "shows that no aspect of life in the West is sacred.''

TvEyes

TVEyes is a business intelligence service that can be used to get real-time notifications when specified keywords appear on TV or radio. It scans the closed captions that accompany TV broadcasts and sends you an alert when a keyword is detected. Apparently it also searches radio broadcasts by using a speech-to-text conversion engine. Apparently the biggest users currently are the two presidential campaigns. From the company website:

TVEyes makes radio and TV searchable by keyword. Just as you would use an Internet search engine to research a topic, TVEyes offers keyword search capability for both radio and TV broadcasts. With a growing network of monitored stations both in the US and internationally, TVEyes is the first company to introduce language-independent, real-time audio and video monitoring.

From the NYT article:

This Web-based service bills itself as a search engine for TV and radio. It scans the closed captions that accompany most television programming for keywords selected by users. For radio broadcasts, it employs a special speech-to-text program that quickly produces searchable text.

Soon after your keyword has been mentioned, TVEyes sends you an e-mail message containing the reference and a link to a partial transcript. A free version of the service allows you to track up to three keywords or phrases; subscription versions (starting at $500 a month) offer features like unlimited keywords and direct access to a video or audio clip containing your keywords.

The primary subscribers are marketers, investors, government agencies and consumers.

Transforming clicks to rings

NYT profiles a couple of startups - Ingenio and eStara - that are trying to bridge Internet search and old-fashioned telephone calling by extending the pay-per-click advertising model to include pay-per-call. The idea is to allow small businesses that have no web presence to advertise on the web and direct the customers offline for fulfillment.

The Ingenio service, which is to begin this summer, relies on old technology: toll-free numbers. When a user types in a search for, say, plumbers in Tucson, FindWhat's advertisers will display a dedicated toll-free phone number that Ingenio has secured on the advertiser's behalf. (Advertisers will eschew Web addresses in their ads.)

When the customer calls the number, Ingenio registers the event and charges the advertiser whatever fee the advertiser had bid for the right to appear near the top of the search listings. Ingenio and FindWhat then share that fee according to a revenue split that neither company would disclose.