Dekoh Delivering a Web Desktop Platform for Applications

San Jose based company Pramati announced its product Dekoh this week and gave me a look around the application. Dekoh’s goal is to bring the web and the desktop together and to give developers the ability to create applications on top of that platform. Those applications can be shared and deployed anywhere in the network. It’s a lofty goal, and with more flexible desktop technologies on the horizon like Apollo and WPF and some more entrenched properties like YourMinis and Netvibes that could do the same thing, I’m not sure it will stack up.

That said, there are definitely parts of Dekoh that don’t exist in other places. Dekoh is built on Java and you can move seamlessly between online and offline mode thanks to an embedded web server. I asked about security and Vijay Puller, the CEO told me that they had configured the port so that only the local machine could browse to it. When you create an account, you’re given a Dekoh portal, something like yourname.dekoh.com and you can add buddies, install applications and share your desktop. It adds an interesting twist of social networking to the webtop space and in the example I saw, you could share photos or invite your buddies to play a game.

The most robust part of the platform is the ability to create and deploy applications. Currently there are a few applications and I believe Dekoh is planning on creating more when the product ships. The one that seemed the most fleshed out was the photo application. It ties in with the friend system of Dekoh so that you could share photos with your Dekoh contacts and manage photo sets. While I think this area has the most promise, I also wonder if developers will take to the product. You can build applications with JavaScript and HTML, so porting existing applications wouldn’t be an issue, but Dekoh needs to find a hook for users that makes developers interested in doing that. Right now this seems like a very developer-centric platform with applications that would be interesting to users, but have been done better other places. For a first mover willing to take a chance, it might be worth checking out. They’re also building out a widget platform which they plan to make available to non-Dekoh users. Their tag cloud widget struck me as pretty cool.

In the end Dekoh is trying to cover a lot of ground by incorporating Widgets, the webtop, online/offline access and home brewed applications. The ideal solution needs all of these to succeed, but I’m inclined to think the more free form solutions that exist are going to ultimately succeed. But throw some productivity applications into Dekoh and you could have a great intranet portal that works whether your at the office or on an airplane. It’s all just a matter of getting the developers to come to the platform. They’ve set up a developer portal at dekoh.org to help with that.