---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Dewayne Hendricks" <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
Date: Sep 23, 2014 11:51 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Microsoft legend Ray Ozzie wants to kill the conference call
To: "Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net" <dewayne-net@warpspeed.com>
Cc:

Microsoft legend Ray Ozzie wants to kill the conference call
Talko is a phone app that even your boss will approve of
By Ellis Hamburger
Sep 23 2014
<http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/23/6829581/ray-ozzie-talko-app-conference-calls>

We haven’t heard from Ray Ozzie in a while, which is unusual. Ozzie has been a very busy man since the early 80s — he worked on VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet app, invented Lotus Notes and sold it to IBM for billions, then founded Groove Networks, a peer-to-peer collaboration app, which he sold to Microsoft in 2005. In 2006, Ozzie took the reins from Bill Gates as Microsoft’s chief software architect.

It’s quite the resume. Five years have past since Ozzie left Microsoft, but he hasn’t retired. He’s been pursuing an old vision disguised as a new one. It turns out that Ozzie wasn’t finished with the problems Groove set out to solve. The app prophesied a new age of internet services where you could share files, instant message, and manage tasks with colleagues in real-time, but floundered under Microsoft (similarly, Wave floundered at Google). Today, Ozzie is reviving that vision with Talko, a new app for iPhone that’s coming soon to Android and web.

Talko is a little bit WhatsApp, a little bit Google Voice, and a little bit push-to-talk app Voxer. The app lets you text, call, send voice or photo messages, and conference call your team — with the ease of today’s top consumer apps. 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 (similar to SoundCloud). 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.

"The ring is evil."

"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," says Ozzie. "What’s broken about the phone call fundamentally is that people hate interrupting other people. The ring is evil." So, 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. Someday, Ozzie says, Talko will likely transcribe all these missed calls for you.

[snip]

Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>