Ray Ozzie's 'Talko' app is not the right productivity tool for the Atlanta Hawks

New team collaboration / messaging apps are seemingly everywhere, from Trello to Slack to (now Microsoft-owned) Yammer. A new entrant Talko is interesting not only for its pedigree -- the team is led by Lotus Notes co-creator and former Microsoft Chief Technical Officer / Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie -- but because it marks a return to the days when our phone was a tool for voice communication, instead of primarily text or pictures. In an introductory blog post, the Talko team describes an app that lets users talk, share and do. The idea is that communicating by voice while everyone is online is easier and others can catch up with the conversation at any time since the data is cached on Talko's servers -- Danny Ferry would probably not approve. Right now the app is iPhone only, while Talko says Android and web apps are on the way.

Dropping in photos and sorting ideas with various forms of tags is nothing new, but Talko is focusing on the first element, voice communication, whether it's through real-time live chatting or shared messages left for the team. The "social productivity" tool is free to try and the team tells TechCrunch that it plans a business model where users pay a fee to have access to older archives of their calls or data. A price isn't set yet either, but it's "likely" to cost less than $10 per month to look back further than a week or so. As-is, it's probably worth downloading and poking around a bit before that guy at the office (you know which one) brings it up on a conference call tomorrow before you go back to using Google Docs.