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April 16, 2007

Coghead Announces 17,000 Developers Building Applications Visually

Michael Arrington

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cogheadlogo.jpgSilicon Valley based Coghead is making a bit of a splash today at the Web 2.0 Expo. They’re officially launching, although it’s largely ceremonial: they’ve been open to the public since October 2006.

I wrote in detail about Coghead last year. The company competes in the “online access” space (a reference to Microsoft Access). We’ve written about Coghead competitors in the past, including Dabble DB, Zoho Creator and WyaWorks. The primary use of these products is to create business applications that deal with everything from task tracking through to purchase orders.

What is special about CogHead is that users building applications with the product require less technical skills because the process is (mostly) all drag-and-drop and visual. CogHead is unique because of just how easy it is to create forms, views and apps - the design view allows users to create fields by dragging and dropping them onto a form. The user can lay the fields out and place them on the page, making the application they build more user friendly and easier on the eyes. Building the logic behind the forms is also a graphical process, the user takes objects and actions and drags them into a flow chart that is similar to a data-flow or logic diagram. There are a number of starter applications to help users get comfortable with the platform.

Coghead is also announcing today that 17,000 developers are now working on the platform.

The company has raised $11.2 million in two rounds of venture capital from American Capital Strategies Ltd., SAP Ventures and El Dorado Ventures. They have 21 employees in their Silicon Valley headquarters and another 15 in China.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 8:00 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. whoopee

    April 16th, 2007 at 9:03 am

    people have been trying to sell software-by-picture through various CASE tools for twenty five years. twenty five years of failure.

    yes you can build software by drawing pictures. totally useless, brittle, slow, unscalable software. nothing changes when you put this in a browser other than six months of bonus novelty.

  2. Jim

    April 16th, 2007 at 9:05 am

    Oh another venture capital news.

    Sounds exciting for investors & company… :)
    Sounds depressing for web 2.0 people… :(

    Maybe mike find it :| or Maybe mike is looking to chase new web 2.0 muhammand ali “I’m greatest Web 2.0. I’m king of fighter. I never use Venture capital. I will accept your web 2.0 innovation challenge.” oh yeah, he would contact and write about it.

  3. Direct Textbooks

    April 16th, 2007 at 9:18 am

    Make that 17,001, looks good. Don’t know if it’ll be truly useful, but worth a look.

  4. tommyboy

    April 16th, 2007 at 9:22 am

    Hey Jim…Learn how to write in english.

    This sounds like a quality application. Small online businesses really need a a simple, customizable database solution for things like CRM and Inventory Management. Quicken and Access are two software solutions that can be used, but I think there has to be better. Can zoho, coghead, or someother online database solution serve this need?

  5. Jamie

    April 16th, 2007 at 10:04 am

    I think it’s a good idea, especially if it can ease the burden for small businesses to create workflows that really work. I can see some immediate applications for some of my cilents.

    I wonder, however, if that is 17,000 active developers or 17,000 people who read about it on this blog (or another blog) and just signed up. 17,000 people equals about 5% of the RSS subscribers on this site. Probably not too far-fetched that such a number might just be checking it out.

    I’m not picking on Coghead. Seriously, I think they look terrific. Just seems that the numbers aren’t really all that meaninful. Of course it will be the same problem when I release numbers for my site as well. :)

  6. Sprezzatura

    April 16th, 2007 at 10:07 am

    I signed up for a Coghead account some months ago. Got a string of bugs the first time I tried to use it and never went back. They’re probably counting my account as one of the 17,000 though.

  7. KR

    April 16th, 2007 at 11:52 am

    Although many of the 17k developers may not be active, let’s say for the sake of argument that 5k are active in using the tool. If 1000 or 20% of those developers provide a simplified application solution for their companies or vertical markets they support, that is not bad.

    Microsoft is known to take 3 versions before getting things right. I think that Coghead or any company trying to address a complex solution deserve a little time to get the kinks out of the system. The fact that SAP has invested in this company has to be worth something. Last I heard the guys and gals at SAP can write a little bit of code, and know something about using software to automate business tasks.

  8. Jason Nelms

    April 16th, 2007 at 12:22 pm

    I am one of the folks using CogHead. It isn’t as simple or straightforward as the TC articles make it sound. I personally have found dabbleDB to be easier in terms of developing. Does anyone else have any comments on the ease of use of Coghead? Just wondering if I am missing something that will make it easier than it seems after a few tinkerings.

  9. Who would use Coghead?

    April 16th, 2007 at 12:30 pm

    Question? Can you make money buy using coghead tools?

    if not… it’s waste of time…

  10. RaJesh Anandakrishnan

    April 16th, 2007 at 1:41 pm

    After seeing article in TC, I immediately registered and started using CogHead. Its not a simple application to play around. It needs some time to understand what is what.(even after seeing the video demo). Design is not so intutive. Learning curve is high. It is not so easy to use.

    ~ http://www.suggestusability.com

  11. Ramón

    April 16th, 2007 at 1:46 pm

    I am the CEO of a small group of companies with 100+ employees. We have been using Quickbase (similar to Coghead) from Intuit for the last 3+ years for easily building up to 10 custom applications from CRM, knowledgement management, expense-holiday-traing tracking, project management, task lists, and other very specific applications for our business on one single enviroment…… and I can assure you this is part of the future of entrerprise apps.

    Building an application on Quickbase is easy and a sraightforward exercise and with some experience you can achieve 95% of what is needed without programming a sinle line of code, not involving IT departments and leaving the power of information management on the business line.

    Initially, it is not cheap but when you realized the potential, it really becomes cost effective.

    I wander why Intuit is not promoting it as it should. If this guys a Coghead do similar to Quickbase and promote it, I assure they are going to be successfull.

    By the way, in Quickbase there is not drag&drop technology, but the way it works, it is not needed.

  12. edbong

    April 16th, 2007 at 1:47 pm

    Jajajaja… I really enjoy the “software-by-picture” (whoopee) metaphor… great! I dont quite share the opinion but it is a valid argument. We have been working on something similar for years now and a pattern has evolved. The the “software-as-picture” concepts works great for 90% of the implementation…. but then - on the last mile - the customizations drive you crazy. A button here, change of color there… it starts adding up. For this same reason we decided to not stay on-demand but to release the Applicationexchange.com under an open source license. It helps you to get the best of both worlds.

  13. pallet jack

    April 16th, 2007 at 2:09 pm

    Sounds like a decent - web program - to make other web programs ..

    - and I bet it could really get viral - If someone could create a program and then sell it to over 5-10k people on a ”trial” basis -

    People would hate that person but they would make alot of money

    -RB

  14. Paul McNamara

    April 16th, 2007 at 3:30 pm

    Hi, someone above asked about the ability to build apps to sell to your customers. We will absolutely support this model. We call it the Affiliate model. You’ll be able to build an app and then get a subscription based revenue stream from that app.

  15. pwb

    April 16th, 2007 at 10:14 pm

    Looks like a bunch of mediocre and lightly customizable apps. I don’t understand who would be satisfied with this.

  16. Pavel

    April 17th, 2007 at 3:04 pm

    Well, the structured data on the web is a part of a future (see http://lifeboat.com/ex/minding.the.planet). That’s right. I’m thinking in the same direction. I just sure microformats like RDF, OWL will be used to create such structured semantic networks. In this case you can write your software by picture or by XML or just RDF triples.
    Now I think some triple store services will appear on the web. This is a first step to get real value from structured data. Other services like coghead or like my http://www.semanticlinks.net will use them or realize own storage. Such services are two-steps-ahead.

  17. guanxi

    April 17th, 2007 at 5:47 pm

    A similar product we use is TeamDesk (teamdesk.net). It’s highly customizable rdbms (though we haven’t needed anything complex yet), the responsiveness of the interface is great (a concern of ours with any web app), service and support have been highly responsive (including implementing many requested features), and it’s much more cost-effective than Quickbase, at least.

  18. drew

    April 20th, 2007 at 12:00 am

    I like the idea of coghead but im not sure if they hit the mark.

    Their UI isn’t a flexible or user friendly as I thought it would be.

    What do you guys think WOULD work…following along the same lines of online software.

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