I spent some time over the weekend playing around with Evoca, a newly-launched service that helps you record and share voice recordings. I'm fairly impressed. It goes without saying that Evoca includes tagging, groups and RSS feeds. You can also submit recordings by phone and post your clips to MySpace, Piczo, Multiply, Xanga and blogs. But the appeal of the service lies in its accessibility. Unlike more geeky services, there's little talk of podcasting - a phrase that's sure to alienate a good part of your audience. From the site:
We aim to provide the easiest way - ever - to create, organize, share, search voice recordings. Evoca intends to empower everyone, everywhere by extending and enhancing the power of voice. With Evoca, businesses can run more efficiently, journalists can capture stories more effectively, and oral historians can spread those important, personal memories that we never have the chance to hear. With Evoca, people will be able to make audio notes to self, keep personal diaries, and record family histories for generations to come. With Evoca, you can speak to your world, and your world will listen.
The business model appears to be freemium - up to 100 minutes recording time is free, beyond that there's a fee of $4.99/month. The premium account also lets you record Skype calls. They're making a little extra by charging for human transcriptions and - most importantly - allowing you to charge for your content. While I don't expect many (if any) users to pay for these clips, I think that marketplaces for user-generated content will continue to grow this year. Overall, these monetization methods show that Evoca is trying to build a real business that will be sustainable long term.