Update: Iowa Caucus Counted By Voxeo, not Israeli Firm
author: Bev Harris
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Is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations Counting the Iowa Democrat Caucus votes?
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 http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/73/71118.html
Subject: Live citizen research area on caucus tabulation systems, vendors, key players, routing
UNITED STATES: "Open source" research project on the automated tabulation systems used for the caucuses.
TOOLKIT MODULE: How to follow the money trail
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit-money-trail.pdf
Post information here on the following:
1) Web site ownership and IP trails
2) Financial expenditure documents
3) Corporate documents
4) Corporate ownership bio information
5) Conflict of interest issues
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 7327
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)
Posted on Thursday, January 3, 2008 - 1:15 pm:
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Have spoken with a reporter today who provided the following article. He says he called the Iowa Democratic Party and they confirmed that VOXEO will be used for the automated cell-phone tabulation system for 2008.
To be clear: VOXEO was founded by and is owned by California entrepreneurs, not, as reported, 'an Israeli firm'.
He provided the following article - Of interest: The involvement of Paul G. Stern, if this article checks out.
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quote:
bio: Paul G. Stern, 68, Chairman of Claris Capital, 2004 to date. Co-founder and General Partner of Arlington Capital Partners in 1999 and co-founder of Thayer Capital Partners in 1995. Special partner at Forstmann Little & Co. 1993-95. Northern Telecom Limited - Chairman of the Board 1990-93, Chief Executive Officer 1990-93, Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer 1989-90, Director 1988-93. President, Unisys Corporation (formerly Burroughs Corporation) 1982-87. Director of Whirlpool Corporation. Board member, Business Executives for National Security. Non-Executive Chairman, Claris Holdings LLC, and Council on Foreign Relations.
http://www.forbes.com/finance/mktguideapps/personinfo/FromPersonIdPersonTearshee t.jhtml?passedPersonId=940358
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From Litigator To Entrepreneur - Company Business and Marketing
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HWW/is_38_3/ai_66672605/pg_2
Industry Standard, The, Sept 25, 2000 by Lydia Lee
Gary Reback, Microsoft's famously irascible adversary, tries his hand at a Net startup.
GARY REBACK MADE HIS name as the nemesis of Bill Gates. As a partner at the prominent Silicon Valley law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Reback made bringing down Microsoft something of a personal crusade. He first gained notice by blocking the software giant's acquisition of Intuit, the personal-finance software company. He became really famous by helping persuade the Justice Department, with a series of hard-hitting memos, to investigate Microsoft for antitrust violations.
So what does the man who helped humble the world's most powerful technology company do for an encore? Become a Net entrepreneur, naturally.
Reback left Wilson Sonsini in May to lead an Internet infrastructure startup called Voxeo. The firm, which has been operating in stealth mode for the last four months, became a hot topic of conversation in tech circles last summer. Reback and his partner, Jonathan Taylor, would only say they were launching a "revolutionary new company at the intersection of the Net and the telephone."
This week, Reback pulled back the curtain. What's behind it is intriguing, if not revolutionary. The question, though, remains: Can the notoriously prickly attorney succeed as a CEO?
Voxeo's headquarters are not exactly located in the heart of Silicon Valley. To get there, you head west from San Jose, Calif., over the mountains to Scotts Valley, a small suburb near Santa Cruz and the coast. Here, software company Borland built an enormous complex, complete with gym and indoor swimming pool, in the early '90s. Today, the sleek glass buildings house Inprise, the new incarnation of Borland, along with a handful of tenants including Voxeo.
Voxeo is impossible to find without a guide: Reback's offices are tucked away in a maze of interconnecting buildings surrounding a giant fountain. It's a far cry from Wilson Sonsini's stately quarters in Palo Alto, Calif., where 750 well-paid lawyers ply their trade. With 55 people, Voxeo is still just a blip of a company, despite the buzz created by Reback.
Reback warms up to his CEO role by talking about how communications should be better: "If you make a reservation for a flight and the plane is late, it would be nice if you got a call from the airline -- 'Your plane is two hours late; don't go out to the airport yet.' When I was a kid, the airlines would actually do that, but they haven't done that in 40 years. Our technology lets it be done automatically, and it's virtually costless to the company, because it's just like another Web service. We've made the phone look like a Web browser."
He introduces the president of Voxeo, Jonathan Taylor, as "the brain trust." About half Reback's age (28 to Reback's 52), Taylor's one of those stereotypical geeks who started programming in elementary school and has worked at technology startups virtually ever since. With dark hair flowing to his shoulders and a red shirt untucked over his jeans, the brain trust leans back, bracing a bent leg on the table.
Voxeo, Taylor explains, is building a network to deliver e-mail, Web sites and other applications over the telephone.
When he left Wilson Sonsini, Reback planned on launching a business-to-business venture. But when he consulted Taylor, who was CTO at a messaging software company called MediaGate at the time, for technology advice, Taylor convinced Reback to go in another direction. "I said, 'Here's what I'm thinking about, isn't it great?'" recounts Reback. "He says, 'Yeah ... it's OK.' When I asked him what was on his mind, he says, 'I've got these terrible problems I've been thinking about for five years.'"
The problems had to do with the phone system. Taylor had learned first hand how complicated it was to deal with phone networks at his last company, IRdg, which created a unified messaging system that lets users retrieve e-mail over the phone and get voicemail from their Web browsers. At Voxeo, "rather than building the next cool app, we decided that we would build the first horizontal infrastructure for apps, where the telephone and the Internet come together," Taylor says. Voxeo will charge customers to run their applications, much like Web hosting companies charge for running a Web site.
Other CEOs have bet on Reback and Taylor: Eric Schmidt of Novell, Paul Stern (formerly of Nortel) and others pitched in $5 million in seed money. Since then, the Mayfield Fund and Crosspoint Venture Partners, which has backed infrastructure companies like Brocade and Juniper Networks, have put up $35 million.
Companies such as TellMe are trying to provide Web information over the phone, while phone companies and ISPs are offering premium applications like unified messaging as their core services become commodities. Voxeo is betting that more companies will want to launch phone-based Web services once there's a way to develop them that's easier than dealing with the intricacies of the phone networks and renting phone lines. "It's not that you couldn't do these applications before," says Taylor, "but it was very expensive and time-consuming."
From Litigator To Entrepreneur - Company Business and Marketing
Industry Standard, The, Sept 25, 2000 by Lydia Lee
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So far, creating phone-based applications has been the field of a small number of highly specialized computer telephony developers. Reback and Taylor hope to broaden that pool by providing a markup language, called CallXML, with the simplicity of HTML. They also plan to offer a graphical tool for creating these applications free to developers.
Other companies have already developed phone markup languages: A consortium including IBM, Lucent and Motorola have been developing Voice XML for a few years, and Microsoft released its Web Telephony Engine last year. Taylor says Voxeo will support all three languages.
The company is working with some "top-20 Web sites" on trials and expects to announce its first customers in the next couple of months.
Has Reback guessed right? Web sites mushroomed because they were easy to create and the demand was high, but the phone is new territory. "The greatest challenge Voxeo faces," says Kevin Werbach, editor of high-tech newsletter Release 1.0, "is convincing enough developers that this is a valuable platform for them to use. In my mind, it's inevitable that at some point the 2 billion people on the phone network are going to be a market for applications."
Reback, the master litigator, is counting on his deep Silicon Valley roots to help Voxeo grow. After graduating from Yale University in 1971 and getting his law degree from Stanford University, he worked for a Washington firm before joining Fenwick & West, in Palo Alto in 1981. There he defended Borland in a seminal intellectual property case when the company was sued by Lotus for allegedly copying its popular spreadsheet design. Reback pursued the case after joining Wilson Sonsini in 1991, eventually arguing successfully before the Supreme Court.
"He ran the Lotus litigation for seven years," says Philippe Kahn, who headed Borland at the time. "He never gave up and was able to focus on the long-term perspective. He didn't expect things to happen overnight."
Does Kahn think Reback has what it takes to build a company from scratch? "Sure, I'd bet on Gary."
Others are not so sure. In private, several of Reback's former associates use terms like "abrasive," "mercurial" and "difficult" to describe him. The qualities that made him a top litigator may be less effective in a small company that runs on venture capital, caffeine and esprit de corps. Says one Valley lawyer, "Gary's area of expertise, which was going out and beating up Microsoft, doesn't automatically translate into the skills for a CEO."
One sign Reback's courtroom-battle days are behind him: His collection of Civil War memorabilia, which decorated his Wilson Sonsini offices and includes a big cavalry saber, is not part of his more modest digs at Voxeo.
His new partner has already dealt with some transitional pains. "The first two weeks Gary would come in and say, 'Jon, we've got this problem -- see you later!'" Taylor laughs. "I'd remind him, 'You don't get to just identify the problem -- you've got to solve it too.'"
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Machines and voting simply do not mix. Voting is one thing that needs to be kept extremely simple, for clearly obvious reasons. There simply is no point in trying to "discredit" machine voting systems. Machines are, by definition, complicated devices. Complicated devices can always be compromised by people who have an interest in compromising them. Such interests always exist, by definition, of course.
The only reasonably simple method of counting votes consists of counting and tabulating votes cast as hand counted paper ballots. And the counting and tabulating these must be done by randomly selected election juries, on the nights after the votes are cast, in plain view of randomly chosen witnesses. Obviously, the results at each voting station should be publicly announced before being sent into larger pools of tabulation. Machines, or telephones only serve to make the voting process extremely fast and complicated, and thus effectively unobservable.
If Harris wants to rely on machines and phones, she is an enemy of true democracy. There is absolutely no need for complicated and expensive voting "systems." This is obvious to anyone who takes one minute to think about it. I have begun to question whether Bev Harris is truly a friend of real democracy.