Former Microsofty supremo Ray Ozzie, who was in the teams that created VisiCalc and Lotus Symphony is pushing some mobile tech which floundered at both Microsoft and Google.
Groove, which was sold to Vole, was a P2P outfit which if it was developed promised internet services where you could share files, instant message, and manage tasks with colleagues in real-time.
Neither Microsoft nor Google could get similar technology to work, so Ozzie is shot of being Bill Gate’s replacement at Microsoft, he is having a crack at it on his own.
Dubbed Talko, a new app for iPhone that’s coming soon to Android and web. It looks like a mix of WhatsApp, Google Voice, and a little bit push-to-talk app Voxer. Talko lets you text, call, send voice or photo messages, and conference call your team.
Every message and call is recorded inside one thread, and you can bookmark specific audio bits or messages so people can return to them later. Talko is designed to turn your average meeting minutes doc into a living conversation — a conference call, then a series of messages, then a photo — and each conversation has a URL only accessible to your team.
Talking to the Verge, Ozzie said that people have been able to record conference calls for quite some time, and there are various products that let you take sideband text notes, but they haven’t been wrapped in a form that has broadly gotten people’s minds away from equating voice with the phone.
He thinks that phone calls have been stuffed because people hate interrupting other people. Talko is built around the asynchronous nature of how we talk to each other today. If somebody misses the beginning of a conference call, they can hop in midway and listen to what’s happened, or send a quick text to the people on the call, or listen to the call later with the aid of bookmarks and tags to guide the way.
He wants to get to a point where Talko will transcribe all these missed calls for you.
All this is stuff which has been seen in the consumer market but not in business.
