Blue Box ETel2006 Podcast #5 - Interview with Alec Saunders of Iotum

Synopsis: Interview with Alec Saunders, CEO and "Relevance Revolutionary" of Iotum about security and privacy as they relate to Iotum's new relevance engine. The interview was recorded at O'Reilly's Emerging Telephony Conference in January 2006.

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Welcome a special edition of Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast from the floor of the Emerging Telephony Conference in San Francisco, CA. Every now and then startups emerge that are just doing things that I personally find interesting.  Iotum is one of those companies.  The main thing they are focused on is making communication more relevant to you... as they say on their home page:

iotum is the world's first smart platform that lets you control who reaches you and how. Get the calls you want, where you want, and avoid those you don't.

As I came to know more about the company, I was curious to know about how they handled securely gathering all the context information about you and how they preserved the privacy. So out at ETel 2006 I sat down with Iotum CEO Alec Saunders to talk about what Iotum is doing and issues around security and privacy.  In this interview, we covered those points and also ranged into a wide variety of other privacy-related issues such as GPS and cellphones in Japan, social issues around privacy and other points.  While it is a bit outside the realm of topics we normally cover, I hope you find it as interesting as I did.

If you would like to learn more about Iotum, Alec Saunders also maintains his own weblog where he writes on Iotum, VoIP and other topics. I'll also note that Alec's "mug shot" photo is not from any recent trip to jail but rather from a bit of fun the company had creating images for all the company members.  (Ahh, the things you can do as a startup...)

Download the show here (MP3, 18MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.  The interview runs about 20 minutes.

You may also listen to this podcast right now:

NOTE: This is the last of the interviews and shows coming out of ETel 2006.

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com. Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment line at +1-206-338-6654 to leave a comment there.