Barlow Group

NORWALK, Connecticut– Barlow Group, a leading boutique executive search firm for early and mature growth stage technology businesses, announced today that it has invested in the series A round of vlingo alongside Charles River Ventures and Sigma Partners. This investment was made in tandem with the placement of the Chief Executive Officer, Dave Grannan.

Vlingo was founded by Mike Phillips and John Nguyen, two veterans and visionaries of the mobile and voice recognition industry, and was created to unlock access to wireless data services providing wireless carriers and wireless application providers a voice interface to their applications. With vlingo, instead of triple-tapping on a small keyboard, users can now simply speak to their mobile phones to enter search terms, addresses or other text.

“The Barlow Group team believes that the vlingo has a truly unique approach and solution to a consumer experience that has, to-date, been hampered by the complexity of the state of the mobile industry. Vlingo’s solution was designed around an easy to use and deploy solution that will become a standard in the industry. We proudly stand behind the vision of the company with our recent investment in vlingo,” said Barlow Group Founder and Managing Partner, Todd Zangrillo. “We have the utmost confidence that Dave Grannan is the right leader to partner with the founders and investors to lead the Company to enormous growth and market-leader status.”

“Having strategic partners like Barlow Group invest in the success of vlingo furthers illustrates the power of the vlingo platform and the confidence they have in us to drive vlingo forward in the mobile marketplace,” said Dave Grannan, vlingo Chief Executive Officer.

Barlow CEO placement, Dave Grannan, came from Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone maker, where he was a General Manager and responsible for leading Nokia's entry into the mobile email market. Grannan has extensive experience in the mobile and software industries and a proven track record for launching and growing new businesses. Prior to Nokia, Grannan held various executive positions in the wireless and software industries. Early in his career, Grannan was part of the communications industry group at Accenture where he advised new entrants in the PCS market on market entry strategies, and from there he joined Sprint PCS as a General Manager to help launch what became the fastest growing US wireless carrier. Later, Grannan served as President and CEO of Geoworks, a global wireless data software company. Prior to joining Nokia, he was Vice President of Partners at Openwave. Grannan started his career in the US Marine Corps where he led a unit responsible for the deployment of spread spectrum wireless position location systems in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in Kuwait and Iraq. Dave holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley.

About Barlow Group
Barlow Group is a boutique executive search firm, specializing in matching early and mature growth-stage technology businesses with breakthrough leadership and smart industry partnerships. Barlow Group’s unique Alignment methodology has helped entrepreneurs, and venture capital and private equity firms build businesses that convert company potential into maximized shareholder value. Whether placing a single transformational leader or redesigning an entire management team, Barlow Group ensures organizations are aligned to drive performance. For more information, visit www.barlowgrp.com.

About Vlingo
Vlingo Corporation (www.vlingo.com) delivers a voice-powered interface for mobile phones. Leveraging a new technology called adaptive Hierarchical Language Models (HLMs), vlingo's approach allows carriers and mobile application providers to quickly and inexpensively voice-enable any application – without custom engineering or in-house speech expertise. Unlike conventional voice recognition technologies that require individual purpose-built applications and rely on constrained grammars and scripted interactions, vlingo's open approach eliminates a costly and intensive manual effort and scales to tasks as broad as open mobile search. As a result, consumers get quick, easy and accurate access to mobile applications, which translates into new revenue streams.