At some point over the weekend, a post at Techcrunch UK buy Milo Yiannopolous was pushed out detailing the departure of “social media guy James Whatley” from SpinVox.  I’d provide you a link to the post, but it has since been unpublished.  Here’s the post in it’s entirety and unedited:

[HOLD – DO NOT PUBLISH] Exclusive: James Whatley quits SpinVox

James Whatley, social media guy for SpinVox, just quit his job, citing “[REASON]“. His departure comes after several weeks of serious allegations against the company from the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones and others. SpinVox has been accused of exaggerating the capabilities of its speech-to-text technology and not paying its bills. It has also been under pressure to explain messages apparently originating from foreign call centre employees who are disgruntled with working conditions and who claim to have gone unpaid for some time.

We understand that Whatley’s split from the company was amicable. “[QUOTE],” he told me earlier today.

Whatley’s departure shouldn’t come as a surprise: it’s been increasingly obvious from recent tweets and blog posts that his heart isn’t in it any more. (Whatley himself doesn’t say anything of the kind explicitly, of course.)

Part corporate PR guy, part social media darling, Whatley always occupied a difficult space. The back-and-forth between Cellan-Jones’s articles and blog posts and Whatley’s SpinVox blog has left Whatley’s name synonymous with the row.

But it was never a fair fight, and, wisely, Whatley has removed himself from the fray. He’s gone at the right time: so closely was he linked with SpinVox in media reports, had he left it any longer he may have risked damage to his professional reputation.

What’s next for SpinVox? Those who’ve heard the revelations that neither the BBC’s nor The Register’s lawyers have allowed out of the gate know that the worst is yet to come. But there’s a feeling in the wider industry anyway that whatever the truth behind these accusations, SpinVox could be a sinking ship. The events – and media reports – of the next few weeks will likely decide its fate.

I’ve been bearish on SpinVox since their inception.  In posts on my personal blog and at Mashable, I’ve lambasted the poor quality of their voice to text translation, while bloggers elsewhere have questioned their business model, level of funding, and levels of honesty about how their tech works.

Just last week, The UK Register drummed up a recurring rumor (that I’ve heard alleged outside the blogosphere many times) that SpinVox was a Mechanical Turk operation, which is to say that most of the translations were done by folks who were paid pennies to listen to portions of audio files and transcribe them.

As to what this has to do exactly with their “social media guy” quitting is uncertain – I assume if Milo ever gets the quote from Whatley, we’ll find out.