I recently had the opportunity to see a demo of a product coming out in early 2008 called Blist (pronounced like “bliss” with a “t” at the end) that will take on DabbleDB and Trackvia by giving users the tools to easily create and manage databases online.

Blist’s initial target demographic will be Excel users who need more functionality and are trying to make their spreadsheets act like databases, but who don’t have the skills or tolerance to even use Access. Blist will not require users to know any SQL, the language commonly used for interacting with databases (in contrast, recently reviewed Zoho DB does require knowledge of SQL). The company behind Blist seeks to eventually replace traditional databases completely by making its product robust and appealing enough for database application developers as well. The end result: no more databases behind the firewall, since they all end up existing in the cloud.

Blist’s plans are obviously ambitious. They are not only designing a better user interface for manipulating databases, they are also building a sophisticated database architecture that will allow them to replicate data geographically, thereby preventing data loss from natural disasters. Their entirely SaaS-based database solution will also provide an API so you can link your applications up with it. If Blist ever has a chance of replacing traditional database servers, its API will need to be very capable indeed so that applications can run all of the same queries they run now. Blist’s CEO Kevin Merritt says that the API will eventually allow for a large range of operations, but the initial API will be fairly simple and will rely on XML.

Since Blist won’t be ready to convert database administrators right off the bat, the quality of its user interface will determine its initial success. Either Blist will come across as intuitive and succeed, or non-technical users will go right back to using Excel. From the brief demonstration I saw, Blist does look impressively easy to use and very functional, too. As you might be able to tell from the screenshots - which show how Blist could have been used to organize our candidate data for the TechCrunch40 conference - the program looks and feels more like a full-fledged desktop application than DabbleDB. It currently supports fourteen data types, with more coming soon. Data can be viewed in table mode (as in Excel), page view (so you can edit entries using a form), or calendar view (so you can see entries with associated dates in a calendar layout).

What really makes Blist a database application is the ability to apply various “lenses”, or views, to the data. These lenses are like queries since they allow you to view the data by particular criteria. But you won’t need to know any syntax: just change the fields in a form to construct your query. Right now, lenses can only be used to view data in different ways. Blist will become much more useful, in my mind, when users can also implement lenses to manipulate data. Once that is possible, it will closely match the functionality of GUI database tools like MySQL Query Browser.

Since Blist is an online application, the company has taken care to integrate features that distribute and share data. Databases in Blist can be easily shared with other Blist users through the standard interface. They can also be spread over the internet via widgets that pull out samples of data from particular databases. If you are a blogger who wants to publish some of the raw data you have used for analysis, you’ll be able to drop a Blist widget into your post that will highlight some of the main data points and allow users to gain access to the original data set. For example, I wouldn’t have to make unwieldy charts like this one for white label social networking solutions, because I could just drop in a Blist widget with all the data and viewing capabilities instead. These widgets, like most, can also be embedded on other webpages across the net.

While Blist is gunning for the $15 billion relational database market, they have not yet figured out pricing (although they do intend to charge both casual consumers and business users). The company will start by focusing on the North American market and will move to other regions from there. Blist has not accepted any external funding yet but will be looking to raise some soon.

• Sphere It
• 

We last wrote about LongJump back in June when their business application platform launched. Like Coghead, DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, WyaWorks, and SalesForce’s Force.com, LongJump lets programming novices design their own applications. To do so, LongJump provides a visual application creator and directory where users can share the apps they develop. Since launch, they have over 100 enterprise level customers.

Unless you already have a large audience like SalesForece, relying on users to create applications on your platform makes the service is somewhat useless until someone creates one. So, as promised earlier, LongJump has seeded their platform with a suite of applications that can be remixed by their users. The suite consists of 13 business applications that will be free to use through the end of the year. The applications include a collaboration suite and tools for customer management, sales, HR, and Finance.

Applications can be customized by anyone else. Customizations include adding or modifying new data objects such as creating a contact object or triggering new actions when information enters the system. For instance, if a contact is added, email the sales team about it. These modifications fork the application into your own private copy, which you can keep for yourself or share with others.

The collaboration suite, OfficeSpace, is the most complex of the applications and lets users share personal and group calendars, assign tasks, store documents, and collaborate through wikis. Each of the functions is organized under its own tab, with a master dashboard where each user can puts widgets of the pieces they’re interested in.

• Sphere It
• 

The amount of energy web entrepreneurs put into creating the perfect online ToDo list is surprising. In May 2006 we ran through a boatload of them in a comparison post. After all that entrepreneurial effort, you’d think the online ToDo list would have been perfected.

Apparently not. Now DabbleDB, a beautiful little database-centric application builder based in Vancouver, Canada, has created a bit of buzz around its own ToDo list application, built on the Facebook platform.

The app, called Dabble Do, uses the DabbleDB back end to create a simple ToDo list on Facebook. There are some bells and whistles. For example, for dates you simply type in “tomorrow” or “next Wednesday” and the app figures out what you mean. You can also set ToDo items for your Facebook friends and follow up by “cracking a whip.” It’s a good way to stay organized.

Will Facebook’ers use this to keep themselves organized? The email/messaging feature on Facebook is very popular (I wish I could just have it forward to my normal email, though). Perhaps adding other features of Outlook, like ToDo lists and calendars, will catch on, too. In my mind, though, social networking is very different from office-like organization applications. That’s why I wasn’t particularly excited when Zoho (an office suite) added their own Facebook application a few weeks ago. So I’m fairly tepid on Dabble Do.

The bloggers seem to like it, though, and I’ve been wrong more than once before. See Mathew Ingram, Read/Write Web, Paul Kedrosky (an investor), Donna Bogatin and others. Ah, I love the blogosphere.

• Sphere It
• 

Dabble DB, a Vancouver-based startup that has created an extremely useful and easy to use database application product, will announce a small (but undisclosed) series A round of financing on Tuesday. The round is being led by Canadian venture firm Ventures West. Paul Kedrosky, an advisor to Ventures West, has joined the Dabble DB board of directors.

Dabble DB is a wonderful application that we first wrote about in March 2006. We also linked to a seven minute demo video of the product here.

DabbleDB will also be opening its site to the public on Thursday.

• Sphere It
• 

A week ago we reviewed a very cool application, DabbleDB (review here). They are still in private beta at the moment but there have been a lot of requests from people wishing to use the service. While we weren’t able to convince the guys to let the flood of people in, but we were able to grab a screencast demo of their application. The demo video demonstrates what I saw while using the application, it is just this easy to use and this functional.

In just a few minutes, the video will show how you can start with simple, flat spreadsheet data, use Dabble DB to search and explore this data right away, then gradually evolve into a full conference-planning application (with drop-down lists, calendar views, relations, and more). While this demo shows that full app development can take place in only a few minutes, in practice it would usually happen organically over a period of time as the app editors further expand their apps.

DabbleDB Demo Video (7 minutes)

• Sphere It
• 

Every so often I get asked ‘what is the latest hot app’ and after using DabbleDB I have a new answer to that question. DabbleDB is a platform that allows you to create applications online using a web interface. The sort of applications you would create and then use are what most of us normally hack together in a spreadsheet or using some other database application that is often complex. Example applications that I created in DabbleDB are a contacts list, where I can store, share and categorise my contacts, and also an issue tracking system where I can track bugs and change requests. Other examples on the DabbleDB website are a expense report application, a conference organising app, a scheduling app and a client invoicing application.

It took me 5 minutes to create each of the apps I built, the interface is intuitive and simple to use. Once I created an app I was able to invite other users in with varying levels of permissions (read, write or build) to then enter and/or modify data, or to further customise the app themselves. When creating the application, there are a number of default field types that I can choose from such as a textbox, calendar selection, URL, drop-down selection, a link to another user and many more. At no point did I have to think twice during the building process, I visualised in my head what I needed and a few minutes later it was there on the screen and I was adding entries to it. The app building process is perfect and could not be simpler, if I realise after adding a few entries that I need another field, I just click ‘add field’ and I quickly select what I want and it is there.

When I look at all the spreadsheets that I have, I could throw all of them away except for my pure financial spreadsheets and have the rest of that information on DabbleDB within applications that I create myself. It would be a richer experience and give me more options, and I am then able to invite other people in to view this data as well as access it from anywhere. I don’t see the limit to the type of applications that can be built on DabbleDB, from complex project management applications through to the simplest contacts database.

DabbleDB has been developed over the past 12 months by Andrew Catton and Avi Bryant who run an open source and Smalltalk consulting business in Vancouver, Canada (DabbleDB has been developed in Smalltalk using a database system they developed). They expect to be able to launch within a month and currently have thousands of beta users signed up and ready to go. User will be able to try out DabbleDB with a 30-day free trial, and after the trial you will need to pick an account plan which varies based on number of users, number of applications and number of records. Andrew and Avi expect pricing to possibly start at $10 a month or lower and go up beyond $100 per month for enterprises.

Future plans include an Atom API, more rich views for data types (maps, gantt charts, and graphs) and custom forms that you can include on your own website where the information will feed back into your DabbleDB app. The upcoming plan which excited me was pre-built applications which users can install and customise themselves, giving them a start in using DabbleDB.

DabbleDB has great technology, and certainly has a market for this service with not much competition for the type of users they are targeting (ie. People who hack what should be in a database into a spreadsheet) – I am going to build my 2 apps further and add some more and use it in the future to replace the dozens of spreadsheets I have that I can’t do a lot with. These guys have solved some complex problems in building this app and I am confident there will be many personal users as well as businesses who will find that this platform for custom apps will relieve a lot of the pain they have now with spreadsheets. If you would like more information about DabbleDB, then go and sign up for the beta on their homepage or checkout their blog.

• Sphere It
•