Ozzie's next Start-up - Cocomo.com

Who’s Ozzie? Ray Ozzie the creator of Lotus Notes who took over as Microsoft’s chief software architect in 2006 is busy with a new startup called Cocomo. After first reading Inc’s article about Ray Ozzie’s new startup Cocomo I decided to do some research… and this is what I found.

It looks as the Inc article suggests that Ozzie is working in some sort of collaboration/communications tool targeted to mobile devices, and now that I write that I see a possible relationship to the name Cocomo with the words: Collaboration Comunication Mobile? or perhaps the name refers to this Cocomo:

Also, the former Microsoftie Matt Pope who worked at Groove Networks with Ozzie also suggested in a tweet on January 4 that this new project was a communications product and that they are in the look of an awesome designer. In this tweet, Matt added a link to a job post hosted in 37 signals job board that lists the following mobile, social and client side technologies as the preferred experience:

• iOS & Android, in both phone & pad form factors
• HTML/CSS, JS, WebGL as applied to the mobile environment
• Email & SMS, Facebook, Google+, Twitter
• Our multi-faceted identities, and issues of privacy & openness
• The social anthropology of our ever-growing use of mobile

Also, from this job post you can read that Cocomo intends to have people working remotely from different locations, as they put it in the job ad: “We seek ultimately to be a location-free startup.”

The site (or page) http://cocomo.com which is live but only shows a link to an email address was interesting enough created with Microsoft SharePoint Team Website… if you browse to http://www.cocomo.com/default.aspx you’ll see what I am talking about. This is interesting, it tells me that they are in such a rush that they just created a page using Microsoft’s SharePoint Team Website and use it as a landing page. It also tells me that ironically enough, Ozzie and his team are working in a collaboration mobile product and using Microsoft’s SharePoint Team Website to collaborate in this new venture themselves… hey, SharePoint is a great product if you know how to use it and have all the resources to manage it.

The product that they are coming up with seems could be a competitor for some of the productivity and project management tools out there such as do.com, Trello, Pivotal Tracker, Assembla, Jira, Lighthouse, etc… or perhaps these are some of the tools they are considering to use while building their own product. The assumptions above are based on a few tweets that Matt Pope sent during the month of November and December, before saying goodbye to Microsoft.

I have always been a fan of Ozzie and I wish him and his team at Cocomo the best of luck in this new startup, I am sure these guys will build something useful and I can’t wait to try it.

Cheers!

Ricardo.