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| (US) 1/08 - CAUCUS TABULATION SYSTEMS... |
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| Author |
Message |
    
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 7326
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, January 3, 2008 - 12:46 pm: | 
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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.
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
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
<< Page 1 Continued from page 1. Previous | Next
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.'" |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 7350
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, January 4, 2008 - 9:04 am: |
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A reply from VOXEO:
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2008 10:52:47 -0500
From: Dan York <[redacted]@voxeo.com>
To: ...blackboxvoting.org
Subject: Confirmation that Voxeo is NOT associated with a Israeli defense firm
Greetings! I would just like to thank you for being one of the few sites that actually did do some research to find out that Voxeo is NOT associated with any Israeli defense firms instead of simply re-posting the article by Christopher Bollyn:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/73/71118.html
Because of the amount of cross-posting going on without such research, we have unfortunately felt compelled to post a response:
http://blogs.voxeo.com/voxeotalks/2008/01/04/voxeo-owned-by-employees-controlled -by-your-web-applications-not-israel-elron-or-aliens-from-area-51/
Thank you again for your diligence,
Dan
--
Dan York
Office of the CTO Voxeo Corporation
Blogs: http://blogs.voxeo.com |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 7351
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 2 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, January 4, 2008 - 9:12 am: |
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A caveat - the link provided by Dan York goes to an article stating that Voxeo is "employee owned" -- but "employee owned" is usually a gradual process, whereby employees can over time acquire stock, and is sometimes used to muddy up ownership trails.
That is not to say that this is the case with VOXEO, but a quick trip through the byzantine set of hoops containing the Omaha World Herald, the various Kiewit firms, and the subsidiary firms of the Omaha World Herald companies, which have included a voting machine vendor (Election Systems & Software) parent company called McCarthy Group, and you'll see that the "employee owned" World Herald actually has two different classes of stock, and some are permanently retained by an entity containing directors from the original Kiewit entity.
Peter Kiewit was an original owner of the World Herald; his son Peter Kiewit Jr. was installed on a foundation, which at the time I researched this held a mandatory minimum big hunk of stock of more priveleged voting status. The different classes of stock for employees vs. original owners can have differences in voting rights and control. As in, the employee stockholders don't have the same rights as the other stockholders.
The original stockholders are sometimes run through another hoop like a foundation with a board of directors containing -- guess who -- the original guys. Also, some stock is sometimes retained or acquired by limited liability corporations of undisclosed participation.
In an interesting little disclosure document by Election Systems & Software, provided to the Santa Clara County Calif. board of supervisors in Feb. 2003, it was revealed that an LLC called "Normal Investments" held significant shares of ES&S. In an old news article, I found a statement that the Texas boys involved in the Cronus/BRC thing had a significant interest in ES&S. Those guys included the investment management firms for Richard Rainwater and other powerhitters.
For a trip down muddy lane, go to Chapter 3 and Chapter 8 of the Black Box Voting book, http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-3.pdf and http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf
This is not to say Voxeo is set up the same way. It is to say that sometimes "employee owned" is not what it appears to be. The ES&S ownership trail is a good tutorial in obfuscation, though, and when you start researching it you'll run into the sugary "we are an employee-owned company" statement pretty quickly.
And thanks, Dan York from Voxeo, for providing a response. |
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