Gary Culliss (born 1970) is an American entrepreneur who has founded several technology companies, including the search engine company Direct Hit Technologies [1] and the interactive voice telecommunications company, SoundBite Communications (NASDAQ: SDBT). [2]
Culliss grew up in Overland Park, Kansas [ citation needed ] and has a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of South Florida,[ citation needed ] a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School [ citation needed ] and an MBA in finance from the Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania.[ citation needed ] He currently lives with his wife and four children in Rye, New Hampshire.[ citation needed ]
Culliss holds a number of patents relating to computer and telephony systems, including US Pat. 6,006,222, [3] US Pat. 6,078,916 [4] and US Pat. 6,014,665 [5] all entitled "Method for organizing information," as well as US Pat. 6,785,363 [6] entitled "Voice message delivery method and system" and US Pat. 7,054,419 [7] entitled "Answering machine detection for voice message delivery method and system."
Short Message Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile phones exchange short text messages. Additionally, an intermediary service can facilitate a text-to-voice conversion to be sent to landlines.
Secrecy is the practice of hiding information from certain individuals or groups who do not have the "need to know", perhaps while sharing it with other individuals. That which is kept hidden is known as the secret.
Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows telephone users to interact with a computer-operated telephone system through the use of voice and DTMF tones input with a keypad. In telephony, IVR allows customers to interact with a company's host system via a telephone keypad or by speech recognition, after which services can be inquired about through the IVR dialogue. IVR systems can respond with pre-recorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct users on how to proceed. IVR systems deployed in the network are sized to handle large call volumes and also used for outbound calling as IVR systems are more intelligent than many predictive dialer systems.
Social software, also known as social apps or social platform includes communications and interactive tools that are often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle capturing, storing and presenting communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a pair or group of users. They focus on establishing and maintaining a connection among users, facilitating the mechanics of conversation and talk. Social software generally refers to software that makes collaborative behaviour, the organisation and moulding of communities, self-expression, social interaction and feedback possible for individuals. Another element of the existing definition of social software is that it allows for the structured mediation of opinion between people, in a centralized or self-regulating manner. The most improved area for social software is that Web 2.0 applications can all promote co-operation between people and the creation of online communities more than ever before. The opportunities offered by social software are instant connections and opportunities to learn. An additional defining feature of social software is that apart from interaction and collaboration, it aggregates the collective behaviour of its users, allowing not only crowds to learn from an individual but individuals to learn from the crowds as well. Hence, the interactions enabled by social software can be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many.
A pager, also known as a beeper or bleeper, is a wireless telecommunications device that receives and displays alphanumeric or voice messages. One-way pagers can only receive messages, while response pagers and two-way pagers can also acknowledge, reply to, and originate messages using an internal transmitter. In Japanese, it was commonly called a pocket bell or pokeberu (ポケベル), which is an example of wasei-eigo.
An answering machine, answerphone, or message machine, also known as telephone messaging machine in the UK and some Commonwealth countries, ansaphone or ansafone, or telephone answering device (TAD), is used for answering telephone calls and recording callers' messages.
A voicemail system is a computer-based system that allows people to leave a recorded message when the recipient is unable to answer the phone. The caller is prompted to leave a message and the recipient can retrieve said message at a later time.
Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American delivery company that provides content delivery network (CDN), cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and cloud services. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it operates a worldwide network of servers whose capacity it rents to customers running websites and other web services.
Telematics is an interdisciplinary field encompassing telecommunications, vehicular technologies, electrical engineering, and computer science. Telematics can involve any of the following:
Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives: build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant's relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.
Patrick John O'Brien is an American author and radio host, best known for his work as a sportscaster with CBS Sports from 1981 to 1997, as well as his work as the anchor and host of Access Hollywood from 1997 to 2004, and The Insider from 2004 to 2008.
Voice activity detection (VAD), also known as speech activity detection or speech detection, is the detection of the presence or absence of human speech, used in speech processing. The main uses of VAD are in speaker diarization, speech coding and speech recognition. It can facilitate speech processing, and can also be used to deactivate some processes during non-speech section of an audio session: it can avoid unnecessary coding/transmission of silence packets in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications, saving on computation and on network bandwidth.
Voice broadcasting is a mass communication technique, begun in the 1990s, that broadcasts telephone messages to hundreds or thousands of call recipients at once. This technology has both commercial and community applications. Voice broadcast users can contact targets almost immediately. When used by government authorities, it may be known as an emergency notification system.
Machine to machine (M2M) is direct communication between devices using any communications channel, including wired and wireless. Machine to machine communication can include industrial instrumentation, enabling a sensor or meter to communicate the information it records to application software that can use it. Such communication was originally accomplished by having a remote network of machines relay information back to a central hub for analysis, which would then be rerouted into a system like a personal computer.
Lie detection is an assessment of a verbal statement with the goal to reveal a possible intentional deceit. Lie detection may refer to a cognitive process of detecting deception by evaluating message content as well as non-verbal cues. It also may refer to questioning techniques used along with technology that record physiological functions to ascertain truth and falsehood in response. The latter is commonly used by law enforcement in the United States, but rarely in other countries because it is based on pseudoscience.
Voice phishing, or vishing, is the use of telephony to conduct phishing attacks.
SpinVox was a start-up company that is now a subsidiary of global speech technology company Nuance Communications, an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, United States on the outskirts of Boston, that provides speech and imaging applications. Initially, SpinVox provided voice-to-text conversion services for carrier markets, including wireless, fixed, VoIP and cable, as well as for unified communications, enterprise and Web 2.0 environments. This service was ostensibly provided through an automated computer system, with human intervention where needed. However, there were accusations that the system operated almost exclusively through the use of call-center workers in South Africa and the Philippines.
Alert messaging is machine-to-person communication that is important or time-sensitive. An alert may be a calendar reminder or a notification of a new message.
Direct Hit Technologies, Inc. was a Boston-based search engine company that provided search engine services to major web portals and operated a public search engine at directhit.com. Founded in April 1998 by Gary Culliss and Mike Cassidy, the Direct Hit search engine utilized the anonymous searching activity of millions of web searchers to rank web sites based on a number of patented algorithms, such as how long searchers spent viewing each web page and where a site was ranked in the original search results list. The Direct Hit search engine technology was invented by Gary Culliss and is the subject of the following US Patents: US Pat. 6,006,222, US Pat. 6,078,916 and US Pat. 6,014,665 all entitled "Method for organizing information." Direct Hit filed to go public through Robertson Stephens in late 1999, and was acquired by Ask Jeeves in January 2002.
An emergency communication system (ECS) is any system that is organized for the primary purpose of supporting one-way and two-way communication of emergency information between both individuals and groups of individuals. These systems are commonly designed to convey information over multiple types of devices, from signal lights to text messaging to live, streaming video, forming a unified communication system intended to optimize communications during emergencies. Contrary to emergency notification systems, which generally deliver emergency information in one direction, emergency communication systems are typically capable of both initiating and receiving information between multiple parties. These systems are often made up of both input devices, sensors, and output/communication devices. Therefore, the origination of information can occur from a variety of sources and locations, from which the system will disseminate that information to one or more target audiences.