Remember Microsoft Jane, Microsoft Tom and spending hours typing text into Windows 98’s Control Pannel settings to hear the funny voices attempting to read your sentences? Remember when AOL allowed you to customize the “Welcome, You’ve Got Mail” to the voice of Austin Powers? Since then, turning text into audio has risen in popularity but not quite reached a point where it’s completely useful. Now Wibbitz, a Tel Aviv-based startup is bringing web-based text to audio and video, giving content producers a new way to engage couch potato audiences.
Lost Remote is currently participating in a delegation of tech bloggers organized by the Consulate General of Israel in New York. We’ve been meeting and learning from the fascinating startups from Israel and Palestine who have helped defined Israel as the “Startup Nation“. Wibbitz is run by cofounders Yotam Cohen and 28-year-old Zohar Dayan, who grew up in Long Island until he was 13 until moving back to Tel Aviv. Here’s the mini web-show I made using their tool, simply by dropping LostRemote.com into the web app.
Wibbitz isn’t stopping at just letting you create fun videos of blogs or articles. Their goal is to create a new type of TV news that’s geared towards a generation that doesn’t have time to read an entire article. Their plans for the future are to launch on Smart TVs so you can drop in an RSS of your favorite blogs and tune into a news-reel type video summary, using their tech.