Story by Art Rosenberg
Happy New Year!
In 2014, we were all somewhat puzzled by the name Unify came up with to replace their original Ansible announcement, i.e., “Circuit,” although its functionality for consolidating persistent multimodal business contacts makes a lot of sense. Shortly thereafter, Cisco has come up with “Project Squared” as a work-in-progress, device-independent, communications and collaboration platform to replace its aging WebEx service. It is clearly being developed around “cloud” infrastructure and targeting mobile-first business users.
Another recent innovative announcement from the legendary Ray Ozzie, who left Microsoft in 2010 as their chief software architect, introduced “persistent” voice calls and messages in a cloud-based mobile service called “Talko.” In effect, Talko records all phone conversations, as well as voice messages, as information that can be selectively retrieved just like other forms of data. This provides contextual data for further contacts and eliminates the need to remember any details of voice contacts by making written notes.
