At this time of year, we think about getting in touch. People you haven’t talked to in 30 years emerge from the woodwork to ask what you’ve been doing since you were college roommates all those years ago. And many of us will pick up the telephone to talk with faraway friends and relatives.

To do that, we’ll dial a phone number. That number might be a Skype or Yahoo ID. But it’s still something we have to keep track of. And today, when everyone has an ever-increasing number of phone numbers and IDs, that task gets harder and harder. I have four phone numbers plus three IM IDs.

I’m trying to get everyone to use my Grand Central number, but all these people out there know my other numbers. And I can’t get the people who call me most frequently — my friends and family — to use the number.

They can’t be bothered to learn it when they already knew the others. There’s no percentage in it for them. I suppose I could re-train them by not answering any other number, but, quite frankly, that’s too much work.

So I was thinking: wouldn’t it be nice if I could just pick up the phone and ask for, say, Marcelo, instead of looking up his phone number. Sure, I can program it into my phone. But that’s just one phone. And I have three.

So when I was leafing through an old magazine — a 1941 edition of Woman’s Home Companion, to be exact — one particular ad caught my interest.

It was from the American Telephone & Telegraph Company and titled “Recipe for Happiness” and showed a happy little telephone gnome waving a spoon. Leaving aside the obvious “the more things change the more they stay the same” point here, this particular recipe illustrated how technological innovations — like telephone numbers — don’t necessarily mean progress.

The “recipe” goes like this (I’m abbreviating):

Think of a friend you haven’t seen for ages.

Wish you had the opportunity to make a surprise visit.

Pick up your telephone.

Say to the friendly operator, “I wish to place a call”

Tell her who and where (telephone number or address).

Recipe Phone Call

Wow, I thought, that’s the way it used to be. Call up the operator and ask for Voxilla in San Francisco. Instead of digging through that overflowing Rolodex or worsening your case of PDA thumbs.

It’s still like that in some places. For example, in the small down east Maine town where my cousin lives, you can call the operator and ask for people by name. Not only will the operator connect you, she’ll (and it’s still a she) tell you if they’re home or not.

Now, the other — dark — side of this pretty picture is the monolithic phone company stifling competition and innovation. And, as nostalgic as this ad may make me feel — and you can see my fondness for nostalgia in my interest in old magazines — I certainly don’t want to go back to the bad old days of dollar-a-minute long distance calls.

However, there’s something here to think about. We’re not going to get the friendly operator back. If we do, he’ll probably be in the Philipines and won’t know that Mary teaches until 4:30.

But many of the VoIP innovations out there come very close to giving us the simplicity of the old days. Imagine Grand Central’s “one number for life” married to Iotum’s relevance engine with voice recognition. In fact, VoIP technology could make calling even smarter than the operator.

My wish for 2007 is that I’ll be able to pick up the phone and say, “Marcelo at Voxilla” and the phone will reply, “He’s reading the kids a story right now.” And I wouldn’t dream of interrupting.

I got a taste of how IOTUM’s Relevance Engine for personal communications works when I called IOTUM CEO Alec Saunders for an interview.

I was told by a nice ladylike voice that IOTUM had decided that Saunders wasn’t available to take my call. I was allowed to leave a voicemail and Saunders called me back from his car. Unfortunately, it was when my three phones were ringing simultaneously. If I had IOTUM that wouldn’t have happened.

The Ottawa-based company is going after the well-documented communications overload that most of us experience today.

We’re not imagining that we have so many interruptions that we can’t get any work done. Research by Gloria Marks of the University of California, Irvine reports that office workers are interrupted an average of every three minutes.

But tools like “do not disturb” aren’t much of an answer. Their operation is black and white — let all the calls through or shut everybody out. They don’t let allow you, for example, to take that call from your mother about your father’s heart attack.

Saunders thinks his company can bring some needed intelligence to that grey landscape between black and white. “We can’t help you with the guy who wants to come into your office to talk about his weekend but we can help with the phone,” he says.

IOTUM’s Relevance Engine manages communications based on your preferences and contextual information like where you are and what you’re doing — what IOTUM calls ‘context.’

The system uses things that an administrative assistant would use to make the same decision — for example, are you in a meeting or out of the office, or is it your children’s school calling. It looks at your calendar, your IM status, and the caller.

Iotum routes calls automatically to your cell phone when you’re out of the office and notes calling trends — like back-and-forth calls to the same person - to let important calls cut through the clutter. It even gives a higher priority to calls from people with whom you’re scheduled for a meeting that day, anticipating that it may indicate a change of agenda or that the meeting has to be rescheduled or postponed.

This sounds great. But too often smart systems demand a lot of configuration effort from users — relegating them to the “good idea, too much work” file. Saunders says that IOTUM has simplicity designed in from the start. “It’s a three step setup.”

First, you tell the system what numbers to reach you. The system automatically reads contacts from Microsoft Outlook. Second, you categorize your contacts — IOTUM will read the contact categories from Outlook. Third, you tell the system when you want and don’t want to be contacted. “IOTUM takes care of the rest,” says Saunders. “It’s very unobtrusive.”

The Relevance Engine resides on the network and integrates with all the places you have information about yourself like your address book, calendar, and instant messaging client.

IOTUM comes with an open XML interface and built in integration with the popular open source PBX, Asterisk. IOTUM can interface with any PBX, softswitch or media gateway, says Saunders. While the Asterisk interface is the company’s most popular, he says, “If there’s a programmatic interface it’s likely we can interface with it.”

IOTUM is also planning to integrate AIM phone and this feature will be available early next year.