Corporate executives and Hollywood movie stars have something in common besides their gigantic salaries: They almost always have personal assistants -- someone who handles all the phone calls, e-mails and other intrusions in their lives. This person knows where their boss is at any moment, and that means they also know which calls to put through to the cellphone and which to send to voice mail, when to respond and when to ignore, and so on.
Wouldn't it be nice if the average person could get that kind of support too, without having to hire a personal assistant? An Ottawa-based startup called Iotum Corp. wants to help make it happen.
The company, founded by former Microsoft executive (and blogger) Alec Saunders and software entrepreneur Howard Thaw, has developed software it describes as a "relevance engine." It is designed to allow only certain phone calls -- and eventually other messages such as e-mail or instant messaging contacts -- to reach you, whenever, wherever and in whatever format you want them to.
Iotum has only just emerged from what it calls "stealth" mode. In addition to announcing several deals with telecom players over the past few weeks, it made a presentation to venture-capital groups and other attendees at the DEMO conference in February, an exclusive, invitation-only event organized by tech-industry maven Chris Shipley. And the presentation must have gone well, because the company won the coveted "DEMO god" award, which is given to the best presenters at the conference.
Mr. Thaw said in a recent interview that what Iotum wants to do is act as a kind of software middleman for users, filtering out certain calls and forwarding others, based on a system that the software "learns" from input by the user. In that sense, the software engine would become the single point of contact for someone who has multiple phone numbers, e-mail addresses, instant-messaging contact names, and so on.
The Iotum engine would develop patterns by using "heuristics," which is the same kind of decision-making software that powers many anti-virus programs. Mr. Thaw says that it is the "first smart platform to intelligently assess the relevance of any communication and route it to the appropriate device." Voice is the first application the partners chose, he says, because "road warriors" use their mobile phones heavily and have a need to be in contact all the time with their offices and others.
Mr. Thaw says Iotum is his sixth startup. He first met his partner for his latest venture a decade ago, when Mr. Saunders was working on the team at Microsoft that was rolling out Windows 95, and Mr. Thaw was involved with an anti-virus software maker called Thunderbyte. Both men wound up working for several different technology companies in Canada, and then a couple of years ago decided to start their own.
"Alec called me in 2003, and we started getting together every Monday to talk about ideas," Mr. Thaw says. "We came up with about 20 or 30 different businesses, and the one that seemed the most attractive was a mobile business."
Within that market, he says, it became obvious that -- thanks to voice-over-Internet or VOIP -- voice was becoming "just another application, just software … and we knew how to do that."
The Iotum software is designed to understand where you are along with who is important at any particular time in your day, and then route calls to whichever device or application makes sense at the time.
"The engine knows which calls you want to take and which to send to voice mail; it understands who they are, their relationship to you, the urgency of the call," and other crucial data, Mr. Thaw says. For example, "if my ex-girlfriend calls three times and I send her to the voice mail every time, it might say 'Do you want me to do this every time.'"
The idea was to come up with a central engine or "brain" that would do the sorting and routing of different voice calls, Mr. Thaw says, and then "plug in" different features for e-mail, instant messaging or voice commands.
"We've basically built a brain, and it's really smart, and it will get smarter and smarter," he says. "But we don't want to build all the things that it might be able to do -- we want to partner with other companies that can do that."
One possible partner, says CEO Alec Saunders, is a recently-launched company called Tello, which was formed by voice-over-Internet pioneer Jeff Pulver and former Apple CEO John Sculley, and is backed by cellular pioneer Craig McCaw. Tello is a service that is designed to make it easier for people to contact someone they know through a multitude of different applications or devices, such as an instant messaging client, a cellphone or a VOIP client such as Skype. It lets you see who among your contacts is available by which means, and lets you connect to them in any of those ways by clicking a button.
Mr. Saunders says Iotum sees its engine as being "very complementary" to the Tello service, which probably isn't surprising, considering that Mr. Pulver is on the advisory board of Iotum and is also an investor in the company. Tello's software is concerned with whether someone is available using a particular service or device, Mr. Saunders says, while Iotum's is more interested in determining whether that call or message should go through, and if so, to where and when.
Iotum has filed for several patents on its software, and in January signed a trial contract with its first customer, a regional telephone carrier called Unlimitel. The company has also partnered with Epygi, a Texas-based maker of IP-PBX phone switches for businesses, and has provided some of its underlying code to the Linux and open-source software community. Mr. Thaw says Iotum's relevance engine was also named by the App of the Year in January by Internet Telephony magazine.
