One secret about Ray Ozzie’s secretive startup is out: It will tap Amazon’s cloud

Ray Ozzie, as is his practice, has been nearly silent on the topic of his new startup, Talko. But now we know that it, like thousands of other startups, will use Amazon Web Services. How do we know this? Ray’s Talko colleague Ransom Richardson spoke at a local AWS meetup in Cambridge, Mass. Monday night, according to several attendees.

Ray Ozzie

Richardson spoke about remote management but did not offer many (or any) details about Talko’s product or its timing, according two attendees. “We did learn that they run on AWS and he said it would be a communications service for mobile — something that takes into account the pervasiveness of mobile devices and tries to provide a more engaging experience,” one attendee said. That’s pretty much all that Ozzie has said publicly about Talko, which was once called Cocomo.

Last March, Ozzie signaled that he was open to using a wide array of services including but not limited to those from Microsoft, where he was chief software architect then chief strategist and which he left in 2011. Talko has netted $ 4 million in funding that we know about.

The Talko team also includes Neil Ozzie, (Ozzie’s son), Eric Patey, and Matt Pope. Patey, Pope and Richardson were with Ray at Groove Networks, his last startup, which Microsoft acquired in 2005. A check of LinkedIn also shows other employees including Richard Speyer, another Microsoft veteran who also spent time at Endeca and Howard Nager, from Digitas and Microsoft. Some have been with him since his days at Iris Associates, the Lotus Development Corp.-affiliated company that built Lotus Notes, now a part of IBM.

There has been speculation that Talko/Cocomo is working on a Mobile backend as a Service (MBaaS). But for now we’ll be stuck in guesswork mode because Ozzie’s not talking. Reached by email, Ray Ozzie had no comment.