Full Speed (Cog)Head

Had a great conversation on Friday with CEO Paul McNamara and Sarah Franklin from Coghead as a run-up to Web 2.0 Expo this week. (Disclosure: Coghead is a customer.) Some key bits they shared:

• Their web-based application development platform is going live this week
• They currently have about 17,000 registered developers
• Coghead recently closed an $8MM Series B financing round
• Paul really doesn’t like the term “Software as a Service” 🙂

The point that Paul kept returning to during our conversation was that of “empowerment;” that is, what they’re trying to do is to enable a new class of customer to create his or her own web-based apps, both simply and rapidly, and provide a tool to fill the gap between “management by spreadsheet” and ERP-type apps. The demo that Sarah showed me illustrated the point nicely, showing that a snazzy, data-driven web-based app could be created in short order through the Coghead interface while taking a list of ERP System features and integrating a few that could be fully customizable.

A particularly interesting bit was the illustration of “mashouts,” enabling information from Coghead apps to be embedded into arbitrary web-based apps outside of the system. Pretty nifty.

Additionally, it appears some Coghead developers are building their own apps for resale on top of the platform. The primary example that was talked through was for a company called allRounds that is building a “system that facilitates interactions among investors, companies, and exchanges in the private capital markets” using Coghead’s tools. Worth checking out, if for no other reason than it illustrates an interesting “long tail” case, where an app is created for a very specific purpose that previously would have previously been infeasible due to either the cost or effort required.

Bonus bit: The Coghead video is kinda cheesy-funny. Heh.