Steven Levy:
How can an app displace 135 years of telephony?
The first step is by being an app and not a facsimile of a desk phone. Unlike the “dialer” on your mobile, or even the call button on your contact list, Talko presents the opportunity to begin a conversation by simply touching on the image of the person or team you want to talk to, whether they are ready to join right now or sometime in the future.
Going to be very interesting to see if this takes off in any appreciable way.
Something tells me this is going to be like all the mail clients that fix email.
Ray Ozzie uses an iPhone. The jokes just write themselves.
Yup and to John, yup as well. I don’t know about the majority of people but I prefer texts and emails to a voice conversation. When I do have a voice conversation it’s usually under one minute. That being said, I don’t think the phone needs to be reinvented. For what it does and how it works I think it’s just right.
If it’s efficient and convenient, then it stands a chance of being adopted by younger people who don’t have die-hard preconceptions about how a phone call is supposed to be made.
I used to work for Groove Networks (Ray Ozzie’s last gig). Groove’s fatal flaw was that it was amazing technology but it was useless unless everyone used it – but they ended up (after waffling for years) going after an enterprise licensing model, where it effectively cost ~$150 per user, so you had no one to communicate with.
Obviously, no one is going to charge over $100 for a mobile app, but I’m curious how Talko aims to achieve the network effect that Groove fatally lacked.