Fundraising monies support ACCION USA to provide microloans and training resources to financially underserved small business owners in the US.
EVENT: Known as the ‘world's toughest bike race', the 28th annual Race Across America (RAAM) event will bring together more than 50 solo and team riders to complete a grueling 3,000 mile ride from California to Maryland. Competing in RAAM for the first time, and covering some of the harshest terrain and weather conditions known to man, Team SpinVox Adventurers - comprised of speech-to-text company SpinVox co-founder and CEO Christina Domecq and her teammate Ian Rolls - will be vying to beat the record for the fastest mixed team finishing time - eight days or less.
As part of their RAAM goal, Team SpinVox Adventurers will be riding to raise $500,000 for ACCION USA to provide microloans to small business owners looking to grow their business to the next level and create new employment opportunities in deprived local neighborhoods.
"As an entrepreneur who has created a trio of businesses in the last ten years I know the struggles that many business owners face in building a company from the ground up," says Ms. Domecq. "I believe that entrepreneurship is crucial to create new businesses, markets and wealth and for stabilizing communities as well. That's why I am riding for ACCION USA - to help give more self-starters from disadvantaged backgrounds access to resources they need early on to make their initiatives successful."
WHEN: SpinVox Adventurers will kick-off their ride with the other RAAM team riders in Oceanside, California on June 20, 2009.
SUPPORT: To learn more about supporting U.S entrepreneurs or to make a donation directly to ACCION USA visit www.accion.org/spinvox.
INTERVIEWS: Interviews with SpinVox Adventurers, ACCION USA and RAAM are available upon request.
MEDIA/PHOTOS
CONTACT: Rachael Lyon, Director North America Communications, SpinVox
Phone: +1 (917) 515-2372
Email: Rachael.Lyon@SpinVox.com
About SpinVox
SpinVox® is the world's largest privately-held speech technology company, providing the only voice to text messaging services which are used daily by millions of people and whose user base has grown over twenty-fold in the last 12 months.
Through significant innovations in voice and network technologies which are protected by over 70 patents worldwide, SpinVox has converged the two most natural forms of communication - voice and text - to create the fastest-growing form of messaging: Voice-to-ContentTM.
SpinVox services are available directly from www.spinvox.com, through leading carriers, new media (Web 2.0), Unified Communications and other service providers globally.
Implemented as a carrier-class hosted network feature, SpinVox creates significant new value from everyday natural user behaviour.
At the heart of SpinVox is its ground-breaking Voice Message Conversion SystemTM (VMCS), which has built the world's largest spoken corpus by combining state-of-the-art speech technologies with a live-learning language process, giving it unprecedented conversion accuracy, reliability, speed and scale. Developed by the Cambridge, UK- based SpinVox Advanced Speech Group, VMCS now serves users across five continents in English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Italian.
SpinVox is now live with Alltel, Cincinnati Bell, Sasktel, Rogers Wireless, Telus, Telstra, Vodacom South Africa, Vodafone Spain, Movistar Chile, Skype and Livejournal.
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