A sort of next generation voicemail services, based out of Aliso Viejo.  They went live with their public beta last month, and earlier this month announced that they received their first major round of VC funding (totaling 4.5 million from VantagePoint Venture Partners).

Youmail is all about customizing your voicemail experience.  You can give each caller a customized voicemail message, so if you want to leave your family and friends various fun messages while leaving a more serious message for work colleagues and unknown callers, you can.   Basically its very similar to customized ringtones for callers.  Another interesting feature is the ability to "Ditch" a call, by answering with a voice message but immediately hanging up after the message is played (fun for pranks or maybe that annoying stalker of yours).  Finally, Youmail also allows you to access your voicemail over the web, which could come in handy if your cell phone is dead or if you want to share a funny message you received with your friends.

In our tests with YouMail we were impressed with how easy and well it worked.  Really the big issues facing Youmail are less about technical merit and more about business and marketing.  Will the added functionality in YouMail be enough to convince people to use it?  I'm not necessarily sure, as I personally don't have enough interest in customizing messages for people.  I'm busy enough as it is, and I have little time or interest in making custom ringtones for people, let alone custom messages.   Of course I'm sure that I'm not the primary market demographic; I suspect Youmails biggest uptake will be highschool kids who incessantly use their phones (the ones who somehow send a 1000 text messages a month).  Ultimately YouMail success will hinge on whether it can convince enough people to use their service, and manage to make it without the carriers adding these features on their own. 

On one hand, the concept almost feels gimmicky and I'm not sure actual consumers really will latch onto the service (I for one, am more interested in reading other peoples reviews of the merchant, which merchant answers the phone the fastest isn't really a relevant factor).  Also despite their public beta release, you really can only demo their system, its not really all that usable yet (It's only available in Los Angeles and they don't have much in their system besides a few select merchants).  Fastcall411, needs to get lots and lots of merchants in their system, sooner than later, if they want to have any impact.

On the otherhand, FastCall411 is working on a relatively hard problem of trying to identify local businesses that are no longer available.  I have it on very good word that the big Local Search guys such as Google are having a hard time validating their huge local business databases, to certify whether or not a local listing is correct (basically is the business still there and if so, is the phone number they have on file accurate).  While I think it is unlikely FastCall411 will succeed in the consumer space, if their technology really does deliver, they have a decent shot at doing well by shifting their focus to selling or licensing the software for something like GOOG411.