Microsoft Buys Talko, Another Ray Ozzie Company

alphadogg writes: Every decade or so Microsoft seems to feel the need to buy a Ray Ozzie company. This time it's Talko, a Boston-based startup dedicated to helping workgroups (or families or other sets of associates) collaborate using their smartphones. Terms were not disclosed, but in a blog post the company said Talko technology, at least part of it, will live on in Skype. If this rings a bell to long-timers it's because ten years ago Microsoft bought Groove Networks, Ozzie's then Boston-area startup geared for, yes, computer-assisted collaboration.

There's something about

[Anonymous Coward]

Being able to talk on stage while wearing black clothing, that makes people in Silicon Valley and Seattle want to throw serious money at you.

Re:

[turkeydance]

a turtleneck gets more money and a religion.

Traveler to go

[PopeRatzo]

So, it's like Lotus Notes for your smart phone?

Re:

[stooo]

Lotus Notes? eeeekkk.....

Re:

[Notorious G]

I worked with Lotus Notes for years and, while there are some flaws, it's clearly superior when it comes to business collaboration. The latest release, R9, is about the best email client for business there is with incredible security (there's a reason secret governments TLA's use Notes) and mature deployment mechanisms that make enterprise support easy.

People used to ridicule the UI and now the UI is essentially duplicated in the most popular software (tabs, tiling, etc). There was a time where the applicat

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[RyoShin]

The Lotus Notes comparison is apt: Ray Ozzie was heavily involved in the development of Lotus Notes, and it's where he got a lot of attention in the computing world (also how he first met up with Bill Gates, IIRC.) I actually read an article about him the other day in an issue of Wired... from 2008 (I hate throwing away magazines until I read them). According to that, a large motivating goal of his was to recreate a network he worked with in college; collaboration stuff we take for granted now, but that was

RIP Groove

[JBMcB]

Groove was sweet. Basically a private dropbox/cloud sync app, but you could tweak it to do other stuff as well. Microsoft bought it, killed off most of the cool stuff, then bolted the rest onto SharePoint.

They could have made it a totally kickass, lightweight private cloud sync platform. Instead, we have SharePoint. Ugh.

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[FatdogHaiku]

that allows people to collaborate when taking a piss. can I has buy out ?

Careful!
You know how the*IAA feels about unauthorized streaming...

Microsoft desperate to get into mobile business

[nickweller]

Microsoft is desperate to get into the mobile phone business ..