Alex Quilici

Last updated

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 member 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]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AOL</span> American internet portal

AOL is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AIM (software)</span> Instant messaging service

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CompuServe</span> 1969–2009 American online service provider

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. H&R Block bought the company in 1980 and began to more aggressively advertise the service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Telemarketing</span> Method of direct marketing

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991</span> U.S. federal law

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caller ID spoofing</span> Phone caller faking the phone number sent to the recipient of a phone call

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.

Neotel, previously SNO Telecommunications, is the second national operator (SNO) for fixed line telecommunication services in South Africa. It was unveiled on 31 August 2006 in Kyalami in Midrand. Neotel is South Africa's first direct telecommunications competitor to the current telecommunications parastatal, Telkom.

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 or emergency announcements. 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Voice</span> Telecommunications service by Google

Google Voice is a telephone service that provides a U.S. phone number to Google Account customers in the U.S. and Google Workspace customers in Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the contiguous United States. It is used for call forwarding and voicemail services, voice and text messaging, as well as U.S. and international calls. Calls are forwarded to the phone number that each user must configure in the account web portal. Users can answer and receive calls on any of the phones configured to ring in the web portal. While answering a call, the user can switch between the configured phones. Subscribers in the United States can make outgoing calls to domestic and international destinations. The service is configured and maintained by users in a web-based application, similar in style to Google's email service Gmail, or Android and iOS applications on smartphones or tablets.

Quack.com was an early voice portal company. The domain name later was used for Quack, an iPad search application from AOL.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Verizon Communications</span> American telecommunications company

Verizon Communications Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate. The company is incorporated in Delaware, and headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Verizon's capital stock is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Siri</span> Software-based personal assistant from Apple Inc.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hiya (company)</span> Company

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.

References

  1. "Robocall Strike Force Report" (PDF). FCC.gov. 2016-10-26. Retrieved 2020-05-14.
  2. Siegel Bernard, Tara (2019-04-26). "Phone Companies Are Testing Tech to Catch Spam Calls. Let's Hope It Works". The New York Times . Retrieved 2020-04-27.
  3. McCoy, Kevin (2018-11-20). "Enraged by endless robocalls? Help is on the way". usatoday.com. Retrieved 2020-04-27.
  4. "Alex Quilici". Mobile Messaging and Internet Applications Conference 2000 speaker bio. July 26, 2000. Archived from the original on September 16, 2000. Retrieved June 12, 2013.
  5. "VoIP and Web Phone Applications: Web 2.0 Implications for Communications, Advertising and Content". Digital Hollywood session. August 2006. Archived from the original on October 20, 2006. Retrieved June 12, 2013.
  6. Executive Profile: Alex Quilici; Bloomberg; 2014
  7. Ben Kuo (October 17, 2007). "Interview with Alex Quilici, YouMail". Socal Tech. Retrieved June 12, 2013.
  8. "YouMail team" . Retrieved June 12, 2013.
  9. Tuttle, Brad (November 12, 2015). "5 Facts About Robocalls That'll Make You Hate Them Even More". Money.com . Money.com. Archived from the original on June 7, 2022. Retrieved 2016-05-18.