Updated: How to Solve Information Overload

The New York Times has an interesting article today about a strange phenomena related to information overload and phone tag. People are using new anonymous telephone number services like Jangl  and PrivatePhone.com to retain privacy on their cell phones.

It’s a funny story that explores dating trends in New York, but it also demonstrates that people are using these services because they are trying to solve a growing problem of filtering out unwanted callers.  Clearly to these people, this is:

• A frequent problem
• An important problem
• A problem they can't solve adequately today with current tools, including these new services

Those are the classic identifiers of a potentially great disruptive business opportunity.

The problem these consumers are addressing is related to information overload and phone-tag.  Simply put: 'How do I receive the calls I want and filter out the calls I don't want in an easy way?'

I think this is similar to an important business problem that is growing.  Notice how some business people hand out their cell number to top clients or VIPs.

Or how voice-mail (and in some cases e-mail) have become ineffective ways to communicate because of too many low-priority messages and spam. The problem remains for business people: How do I filter out unwanted communications while retaining the important calls, emails and IMs? 

Is there a solution to this problem?

I think Iotum comes the closest to solving this important problem with their relevance engine, which hooks into customers' contact lists and calendars (such as MS Outlook) to determine the priority and handling of calls. 

Is this a big market opportunity? Typically in disruptive innovations, it is hard to be accurate. And often the opportunities look small or uncertain in the early days.

While we can't prove the size of the market, the FCC tells us that 44% of residential phone customers in California have unlisted numbers: a clear signal that people are trying to solve the problem themselves, but inadequately (no prioritization and filters out too much). And we can all attest to the rise in unwanted calls and emails.

**Update: Spam expands**

The New York Times reports on how spam has doubled recently and explores the seemingly losing battle against spam.

Freedom to Tinker reports that spam is invading other formats including blog comments, with up to 800 fake comments sent daily to that blog.

Nicholas Carr says he's given up on the battle, but he admits spam is an interesting example of the new economics of abundance.

Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration says a simple filter rule in Gmail will win back your freedom from spam.

**Other Sources **
Iotum was named one of the 'fierce 15' innovative telecom companies. Iotum's CEO, Alec Saunders also has a blog on telecom issues.

VoIP expert Jeff Pulver says this problem is well-handled by VoIP technology and that more 'disposable phone number' services should come out in 2007. At the bottom of the comments section there are some details on how VoIP technology could reduce spam calls as well.

Paul Kedrosky has staggering stats on the rise of spam emails from Russian scam artists.

 

Comments

[Del]

Would not it be cool if you can choose when people can call you by time of day?

For example:
- telemarketers, never
- my kids: always
- colleagues: 9 to 5
- e-Bay: only when I have something to sell

You know which category of people is calling you simply by checking the calling-id you see on your phone.
The calling-id is the Masque Number used to call you. Filtering made eay!

Nothing to download on your phone or on your computer, plenty of options.
Hope you'll like it:
www.MasqueNumber.com

[Matt Lambert]

I think the problem is complex, as relevance does change according to circumstance as Alec and Iotum understand. Some calls are wanted 'sometimes'.

Like Chris, I don't think that call filtering can be done purely on the basis of recognising an incoming number, this is only reliable if you have all incoming numbers in a very up to date meta directory dot dot dot.

There may be hope for that, but still better to have an additional ability to use a screening 'service' for all your calls. It will undoubtedly become more prevalent, and acceptable, as this problem grows for more people.

The ability to ask the caller their name before choosing whether now is the right time to accept the call, is already making progress. For business people, this would commonly be achieved through central telephony technology rather than a new, separate 'throwaway' number. For instance, if you decide not to take a call - the caller may wish to transfer to a colleague or another department instead of being forced to leave a voicemail. We ought to think about callers in terms of delivering a service as well as our own precious time!

Because of this, I don't see this being disruptive, but more a competitive advantage to whichever Unified Communications company delivers.

[Alec Saunders]

Hi Chris,

Let me address this one, since I have a little knowledge of how these systems work :)

The goal of the iotum Relevance Engine is to prioritize calls. It implicitly recognizes that there is no black and white solution. Life is shades of grey -- sometimes the tax collector is important to talk with right now, and sometimes not. I am not interested in talking with Revenue Canada in the middle of an important negotiation with a large client. That's reality. So, they'll go to voice mail. I can deal with them later.

[Chris Nano]

Imagine you receive a call from government agency saying they want to review your last quarter's tax return, and the caller's number is probably not already in your Outlook Contact List, you still won't think it is just a irrelevant call, will you?

Unless you can parse the voice stream the same as you parse text today, using other method to rank relevancy is just a joke, IMO.

I don't think voice spams is a big problem yet, why? because phone spams cost the spammers a lot of money and labour/hours to execute. You can send 1 million emails within the cost of a few hundred bucks, but making the same amount of phone calls will probably make you bankrupt.

The best way to deal with the unwanted phone calls remain either to unlist your home phone number, or to purchase a cheap phone number from VoIP Service Provider like Yahoo or Vbuzzer or Skype and forward the VoIP numbers to your regular phone. If you receive excessive calls/voicemails you know it's the time to stop forwarding.