Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
A new online service offers a simple way to let
other people know how to say your name correctly. It
lets others hear you say it yourself in your e-mail.Today,
more people from different cultures work, live and
study together. Some worry that having a difficult
name could limit them. Just ask Sheetal Dube. She
and her husband came to the United States from India
seven years ago. She says, "Sheetal is a very common
Indian name and in India people would just know how
to pronounce it. But I've been working here in the
U.S. for some time and I realize people find it hard
to pronounce. They haven't heard it before." Ms.
Dube was a user experience consultant for technology
companies. She now owns a new company called
Audioname. She came up with the idea after doing a
presentation with someone she worked with. She says,
"My colleague was Mary and it was very easy for
everyone in the room to say, you know, 'Mary's
findings showed this.' But it's very difficult to
say 'Sheetal's findings showed this.' So that's
where this idea really stuck in my head. It's like,
you know, what if I just have an audio name and, you
know, I put it in my e-mail and they have a chance
to hear it before they meet me?"Ms. Dube presented
her idea at a business development conference in
Portland, Oregon, earlier this year. It won the top
award at the event called Startup Weekend Portland.
The service is free. Ms. Dube hopes her idea will
help make introductions a little easier. People can
put a recording of their name in their e-mail
signature, their Facebook page, their LinkedIn
account or their website. The Portland Seed Fund
chose her idea as one of one hundred twenty-six
startups to receive money and mentoring support from
experts. Ms. Dube left her job to start
audioname.com. The site has been live since the
middle of September.Marketing specialist Larry
Chiagouris is the author of "The Secret to Getting a
Job After College." He advises people with really
difficult names to consider using a nickname in
their job search. Sheetal Dube says she heard advice
like that while researching her idea. She thinks a
service like Audioname offers a better choice. There
are also sites like HearNames.com where people can
learn how to say names from around the world. On our
site, voaspecialenglish.com, you can find a link to
VOA's own Pronunciation Guide to names in the news.
For VOA Special English, I'm Alex Villarreal.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
