Christina Domecq is the CEO and co-founder of U.K.-based mobile tech success story SpinVox, which converts voicemails into text and email. These days, Ms. Domecq is hard to reach—she has only a moment to talk on her cell while driving to her next meeting.

Before SpinVox took off and she was recognized as the United Kingdom’s young entrepreneur-of-the-year by Ernst and Young, Domecq was spending up to an hour a day listening to voicemails. Wouldn’t it be great, she wondered, if she could read her voicemails as texts during meetings?

Two years and £65 million ($128.4 million) in venture funding later, she and co-founder Daniel Moulton are expanding their original concept to include spoken SMS and blog technology. SpinVox already boasts more than 120,000 users in the U.K., and plans to announce deals with carriers in Spain, France, Germany, and the United States in early 2007.

The oldest of six children, Ms. Domecq is no stranger to leadership. She moved with her family to the New York City area from Spain when she was 13, and at age 16, she looked after her siblings when her mother died. “Everybody says, ‘Where do you get your leadership skills from?’ It really just comes from family,” she says.

Ms. Domecq founded her first IT services company at 20 while studying at Notre DameUniversity in South Bend, Indiana—then sold it and started an IT training business in New York City. After only 19 months of operations, SpinVox has grown from a staff of seven to 150. All this, and Ms. Domecq has just celebrated her 30th birthday.

Charles Golvin, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, is not so sure the U.S. response to SpinVox will be as enthusiastic as it was in Britain. “Converting speech to text is not any great shakes,” he says.

But Ms. Domecq argues that SpinVox’ technology is a cut above the competition from companies like Comverse and Skype. Much like Google in the realm of search engines, Ms. Domecq believes SpinVox will rise to the top because of its simplicity. “There’s just this moment where you go, ‘Wow, that works,’” she says. <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><!--[endif]-->—Marisa Taylor