Alex Quilici is an American engineer and businessman. He is a national source of information about robocalls for consumer protection groups, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). [1] The FCC's staff, congregational legislators and their telecom staff, and national media also look to him for information. [2] [3]
Quilici graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and received a PhD in computer science from UCLA. From 1991 to 1999, he was a freelance technical consultant and faculty member at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. [4]
Quilici was a co-founder of the Pittsburgh-based voice portal infrastructure company Quackware along with Steven Woods and Jeromy Carriere. Quilici helped bring Quack.com from being a start-up with three founders to a company which employed 125 professionals in the first 18 months. In 1999, it became Quack.com and moved to Silicon Valley; in September 2000 it was acquired by America Online, eventually becoming AOLbyPhone. Quilici joined AOL as a VP as part of the Quack.com acquisition, and founded the AOL voice services division at AOL. [5] He was a member of the board of directors of NeoEdge Networks.
Quilici's six-year tenure as a vice-president with America Online was a vital one to the company as a whole. He was integral to creating and growing America Online's voice services. He helped America Online acquire one million paying customers for their voice services yielding fifty million dollars annually in revenue. He was the vice president and chief product officer of America Online by Phone.
Quilici became a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa before joining NeoEdge Networks and becoming a director for Youmail Inc. in April 2007. He currently serves on the strategic advisory board of Jefferson Partners and is also a member of the Tech Coast Angels.
Quilici has extensive experience in the tech industry and helping the industry overall develop new products and technology. He is known for his ability to bring heightened research while keeping user practicalities. He has set a precedent by using artificial intelligence to solve software problems in products. [6]
Quilici joined YouMail as its CEO in 2007. [7] [8] In November 2015, he and the company launched the YouMail Robocall Index, to track legal and illegal robocall traffic across the United States. The YouMail Robocall Index is a unique online portal which provides a monthly estimate of the volumes and types of robocalls nationwide, and for each specific state, city and area code. The initial report indicated at the time that 1 out of every 6 calls received in the US was generated by a machine. [9]
AOL is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City, and a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc.
AIM was an instant messaging and presence computer program created by AOL, which used the proprietary OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol to allow registered users to communicate in real time.
CompuServe was an American online service, the first major commercial one in the world. It opened in 1969 as a timesharing and remote access service marketed to corporations. After a successful 1979 venture selling otherwise under-utilized after-hours time to Radio Shack customers, the system was opened to the public, roughly the same time as The Source.
Telemarketing is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson solicits prospective customers to buy products, subscriptions or services, either over the phone or through a subsequent face to face or web conferencing appointment scheduled during the call. Telemarketing can also include recorded sales pitches programmed to be played over the phone via automatic dialing.
SpeechWorks was a company founded in Boston in 1994 by speech recognition pioneer Mike Phillips and Bill O'Farrell. The Boston-based company developed and supported speech-related computer software. Originally known as Applied Language Technologies, SpeechWorks went public in 2000 and tripled its value. It was acquired by Scansoft in 2003. ScanSoft acquired Nuance in 2005, and changed its name to Nuance Communications.
Steven Jeromy Carrière is a Canadian computer software engineer.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) was passed by the United States Congress in 1991 and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush as Public Law 102-243. It amended the Communications Act of 1934. The TCPA is codified as 47 U.S.C. § 227. The TCPA restricts telephone solicitations and the use of automated telephone equipment. The TCPA limits companies or debt collectors from calling clients or prospective customers using automatic dialing systems, artificial or prerecorded voice messages, SMS text messages, and fax machines. It also specifies several technical requirements for fax machines, autodialers, and voice messaging systems—principally with provisions requiring identification and contact information of the entity using the device to be contained in the message.
Caller ID spoofing is a spoofing attack which causes the telephone network's Caller ID to indicate to the receiver of a call that the originator of the call is a station other than the true originating station. This can lead to a display showing a phone number different from that of the telephone from which the call was placed.
Steven Gregory Woods is a Canadian entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Quack.com, the first popular Voice portal platform, in 1998. Woods became the head of engineering for Google Canada where he was until 2021, when he joined Canadian Venture capital firm iNovia Capital as partner and CTO, following in the footsteps of Patrick Pichette, Google's CFO who also joined iNovia after leaving Google.
NeoEdge Networks was a Silicon Valley–based technology and in-game advertising company that enabled casual game publishers and developers to deliver television-like commercials within their products – frequently in the context of free-to-consumer casual game play. NeoEdge powered advertising for a variety of game publishers including Yahoo. NeoEdge provided both peer-to-peer game distribution and in-game advertising . It was renamed Blue Noodle in early 2011 and shut down later that year.
A robocall is a phone call that uses a computerized autodialer to deliver a pre-recorded message, as if from a robot. Robocalls are often associated with political and telemarketing phone campaigns, but can also be used for public service, emergency announcements, or scammers. Multiple businesses and telemarketing companies use auto-dialing software to deliver prerecorded messages to millions of users. Some robocalls use personalized audio messages to simulate an actual personal phone call. The service is also viewed as prone to association with scams.
Telemarketing fraud is fraudulent selling conducted over the telephone. The term is also used for telephone fraud not involving selling.
Quack.com was an early voice portal company. The domain name later was used for Quack, an iPad search application from AOL.
Verizon Communications Inc., is an American telecommunications company headquartered in New York City. It is the world's second-largest telecommunications company by revenue and its mobile network is the largest wireless carrier in the United States, with 114.8 million subscribers as of March 31, 2024.
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup company, with initial funding from seed accelerator Y Combinator.
YouMail is an Irvine, CA-based developer of a visual voicemail and Robocall blocking service for mobile phones, available in the US and the UK. Their voicemail mobile app replaces the voicemail service offered by mobile phone service providers, and offers webmail-like voicemail access and voicemail-to-text transcriptions. The company also compiles the YouMail Robocall index by monitoring automated call patterns and behaviors, and verifying that activity against numbers that its customers block, or report as spam.
Whitepages is a provider of online directory services, fraud screening, background checks and identity verification for consumers and businesses. It has the largest database available of contact information on residents of the United States.
Siri is the digital assistant that is part of Apple Inc.'s iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS, audioOS, and visionOS operating systems. It uses voice queries, gesture based control, focus-tracking and a natural-language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of Internet services. With continued use, it adapts to users' individual language usages, searches, and preferences, returning individualized results.
Hiya is a Seattle-based company that provides spam and fraud call protection and identity services to more than 400 million users around the globe.