Coghead

I came across* this company the other day and was pretty impressed with their vision. Guy Kawasaki (an advisor of theirs) sums up the idea as follows:

Coghead provides a web-based application that allows tech-savvy businesspeople (that is, non-programmers) to create and deliver their own web-based applications…Coghead’s website is both an application authoring tool and an application delivery service. At Coghead’s website people can create an application using simple-to-learn methods (or pick a pre-built app from Coghead’s application gallery) and then invite co-workers to use the application.

This is a fantastic idea, and something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Imagine if you could take the power that Wiki has had on corporate data sharing and then put structure behind the data and add logic for processing. Very powerful.

As I’ve moved away from programming into more business-oriented functions in my company, I’ve identified many latent needs for quick-and-easy web applications to fill a variety of purposes inside a corp. Now since I’m an ex-coder I can (and sometimes have) put together a few simple systems to meet these needs, but its always kind of a hack and there’s always the ongoing issue of support through IT. What’s worse, 90+% of the other people I work with aren’t programmers at all, so we resort to using the wrong tools (Excel), crappy tools (Intuit QuickBase), or no tools at all (ack!).

The real power of Web 2.0 (or Office 2.0, or whatever 2.0) is putting creative power into the hands of everyone. We saw the first explosion of this with blogging, which lowered the barrier of entry so everyone could start posting. I think Coghead could be a material step forward in making the web (and not just computers) an incredibly productive tool for everyone.

* – OK, so I first read about them in Business 2.0, so its not like I’m the first on the block to see this, but the fact they got glossy print even before launching the Beta is a good sign that the people in charge of the company has clue about running a business outside of building technology (which, by the way, they haven’t proven yet).