Edhat Staff
Mayor Cathy Murillo helping the Invoca team cut the ribbon on their new office (Photo: Invoca)
By edhat staff
Local tech company Invoca hosted a ribbon cutting ceremony with Mayor Cathy Murillo of their new State Street Headquarters on Monday.
Invoca, an AI-powered call tracking and analytics company, debuted their larger office space at 419 State Street. Employees were on hand collecting and assembling items to be donated to the Santa Barbara Food Bank during the ceremony.
“We’re proud to be part of the thriving tech community in Santa Barbara, and remain committed to investing in recruiting and developing top talent in the area,” said Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca. “Moving our headquarters to State Street not only gives us significantly more space, but enables our employees to walk to great restaurants, shopping, and the beach. As a result, we hope to contribute to the revival of this area.”
The local company expanded into the bigger office space by hiring 57 additional employees last year with plans to add 200 more local jobs by 2021. Invoca was recently named a Best Place to Work for 2019 by Inc. Magazine for the second consecutive year, which underscores the company’s commitment to building a workplace culture that’s inclusive, supportive, and high-performing, and also provides industry leading employee benefits and perks.
“The City welcomes Invoca to their new downtown location where their employees can enjoy the amenities of downtown restaurants and shopping. We’re excited to watch their company expand as they bring good paying jobs that benefit our local economy overall,” said Cathy Murillo, Mayor of Santa Barbara.
For more information, visit www.invoca.com.
I thought you were just being alarmist SBO, but this company really is the type of company that is building a giant surveillance state behind the scenes under the guise of “analytics”. I especially dislike phrases from their site such as “unify online and offline data into a single call profile”, so basically you call a company for some innocuous reason and they have access to every private detail of your life. Where is my option to opt out of this kind of dystopian data collecting?
Too funny SBO. I thought the same thing when I saw the picture.
Another storefront on State that offers nothing to local consumers. A surveillance state support hub.
Wow, haters gonna hate and paranoids gonna don tinfoil hats. The “surveillance state” does not need Invoca to watch you. They make and support their software just like hundreds of companies. They do make products just not physical items like shoes. Wake up old folks it is 2019.
Simple solution: unplug. Harvesting willing customers is fair game.
I know one of the founders. If i understood correctly, they basically collect data on you from your search history and then when you make a call to the type of business you wouldn’t ordinarily order from online (like insurance or directv) the company funnels your call with relevant data points about you to the seller and I believe Helps them channel you to the type of salesperson who you’re most likely to be closed by.
Yes there’s a creepy factor but if you have social media, post on edhat, use YouTube without full masking, they all know everything except your SSN and anyone can get just about anything from you. It’s almost more amazing that the majority of us aren’t opening our bank accounts every day to find they’ve been cleaned out. How do banks manage to keep the hackers out with our lame passwords?
I despise Murillo’s mayorship but I will say that at least she was pro business for this and she should be proud in promoting our always growing tech industry. And anything local from farming to tech to creative and architecture. What we truly lack is talented political minds.
566- it’s easy to take the anti-Luddite stance but I think if we heed the honest experts in AI (that would not include zuckerberg incidentally) we would hear that they are almost begging for us to panic about AI and get ready for the rise of the machines. In a few years, a machine will be able to lie to your face of its own initiative, make a deep fake video about you (no hacker needed) bankrupt a hospital, turn off a power grid, launch a missile or cause a series of data points and deep fake phone calls to perfectly persuade a vulnerable government to consider itself under attack, and so on. AI and machine learning have awesome and terrifying possibilities beyond anything I’ve even hinted at. Yes, it’s 2019- but that’s just means we’re that much closer to 2025 or 2030…
Hey lookie, there’s our esteemed mayor doing the one thing she seems to know how to do best. Stand with a giant pair of scissors and cut a large, fake ribbon for a silly PR stunt/photo-op. This company by the way, is not a tech company per se, anymore than a janitorial service is a tech company because they use a electronically controlled power washer. Sure they have software and they’ll tell you proprietary tools, but they dont actually make anything. Their business is surveillance. They make money by spying on people and selling their personal “data” to the highest bidder under the guise of “marketing intelligence”. So if you happen to enjoy telemarketers, spam, unwarranted tracking and unwanted ads, then they’re your team.
Hey SBO, at least she’s doing something, like cutting ribbons, otherwise she’d be doing nothing :)!
Sonos was in that building prior and prior to that I believe it was a clothing company. Murillo has NOTHING to do with the lease, the location or the business sector. She is 100% clueless when it comes to commerce, business and management and is by far the least capable, least effective mayor in our city’s history. Cutting fake ribbons is the only thing she is capable of doing, which is why she does it so often. Vote the wet-noodle out of office as soon as possible and before she earns any more pension. We should not have to pay for her disservice well into the future but unfortunately, we will…
This is the type of comment made by a naive, young, ignorant person… Hey kid, disliking and most certainly, distrusting a company whose business model is to spy on people is not an indictment against technology, its a celebration of knowledge and freedom. These types of “data” businesses provide no value to the community or the world at large. They are parasites that exist only to serve their own narrow interests, regardless of their costs. Keep your job, but if you want your soul, you should find another line of work that doesnt involve deception, spying and tracking people for a small monetary gain.
The key word in your post is “willing”. Only an idiot would sacrifice their privacy and freedom for some other person’s financial gain or in this case, free shipping…
It is reassuring to see so many people share my concern that a company like this one is making its money off of anti-social and creepy behavior. But it is pretty disconcerting to watch our simplistic politicians and greedy merchants praise the location of the company here as though it were a new Direct Relief International or something.
Yes, a scary surveillance company and it’s no surprise our beloved Mayor found another ribbon to cut and get her photo published without doing any research on what Invoca is all about.
You won’t necessarily see the product when YOU are the product .
I Invoca my 5th amendment rights to not be surveilled by the eye of Invoca.