Talked with Alec Saunders today…
I had a chat with Alec Saunders today about iotum. While he couldn’t demonstrate the relevance engine to me, we did talk about it in more detail.
The main question I had was: how was it going to do the work of figuring out the who, what, and when? What it basically comes down to: a series of software agents that monitor your incoming traffic flow at all the ingress points (e.g. telephones, IM). The agents will determine exactly where you are. Based on who is trying to call you and how, the communications will get redirected to the appropriate location depending on your chosen preferences and location. I’m looking forward to actually getting a demo from Alec so I can see it in action.
What would be cool is if they were able to distill that into a kind of “virtual secretary” I’ll call Becky. Becky would be a voice front-end to this whole process. If someone attempts to contact me, Becky would decide who gets through. If it’s an unknown caller (i.e. it’s someone I don’t recognize or their Caller ID is blocked), Becky would try and figure out who it is and route the call appropriately. She would be tied into my presence information and would know how to route the call based on who it is and where I’m at. And she’d have a very pleasant voice–maybe someone like Allison Smith. 
Alec tells me that this scenario may be a reality sooner than I think.
