Christopher Carfi

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.

Paul Ward was one of the participants in the Social Media and CRM 2.0 workshop that Paul Greenberg and I hosted this week in DC. A snippet:

“Just finished sitting in on a morning session of BPT Partners’ CRM 2.0 Certification program, and I have to say, they’re doing a really good thing with this offering.

OK, so the topic of the day was social networks, about which I’ve done a lot of writing, speaking and — above all — thinking. Chris Carfi of Cerado gave that part of the presentation, and did a fabulous job — a great balance of describing the big sociological and technology shifts businesses should know about as well as specific examples of how social networks are expressed through current technology.”

Full review here.

Thanks, Paul! Was great to meet you in person.

(BTW, we’re doing our next session in May 2007 in Naples, FL…c’mon down!)

Nick Douglas: “Tag clouds are to Web 2.0 what lasers are to rock concerts. OLD.”

Mei Lin Fung postulates on The Seven Levels of Customer Relationships: “I was surprised about how much there is in common between personal relationships and business relationships…Basically, the story about relationships is that relationships are about stories about people. Over time, our stories might change as our perspectives and priorities change. But our relationships with people who knew us in the past mean that they know the stories of our past, and as we evolve, the people we knew, help to keep us honest, keep our stories straight even for ourselves.”

Lee Lefever: “Yes, successful communities thrive on trust. But, what comes before that? How does trust develop? It happens through consistent interactions. It happens through exchange.”

Wow. I was simultaneously howling with laughter and cringing for Sony when Paul Greenberg showed me this video last week. It is, to date, perhaps the best example of the cold, hard fact that a company no longer can have a hope of “controlling” its message. Three minutes of scathing commentary from the customer’s perspective on the mis-steps that were made in the go-to-market strategy, the design and the positioning of the PlayStation3.

Click here to view the video. (Seriously, if you haven’t seen it, watch it. It is brilliant.)

Spike has some more thoughts on it here.

Our customer Paul McNamara, CEO of Coghead, writes:

“Jeez. What’s up with the term ‘SaaS’? (‘Software as a Service’, for the uninitiated). Seems like everyone’s using it. I hate it. And it’s not just the psycho UPPERlowerlowerUPPER case – it’s the whole concept of the acronym that bothers me…the best term we can come up with is ‘SaaS’? Come on people, we can do better than that.

We don’t call radio ‘Phonograph as a Service’ (PhaaS) – although if today’s “visionaries” were alive in the ‘20s maybe we would have. It’s true that radio lets you listen to phonograph records over the air. But that’s where the similarity ends. Radio is a whole lot more.

I imagine that to the horse and buggy manufacturers, the automobile was nothing more than the ‘Horse and Buggy as a Self Propelled Vehicle’ (HaBaaSPV).

And to the manuscript producers of the middle ages, the printing press (which in the early days was operated by Scribes) was simply the ‘Scribe as an Operator of a Repeatable and Automated System for Increased Productivity and Broad-based Distribution’ (SaaOoaRaASfIPaBbD).

When technology changes the patterns of consumption in a fundamental way, then something very important is happening. A new era is dawning and new terminology is needed. Words matter.”

Paul prefers the term “webware,” by the way. Your thoughts?

Rachel Lyra Hospodar, on the coexistence between independent creation and being subsumed by corporate interests:

“A strange undercurrent of the new indie crafts movement is the sponsorship of events that many promoters are seeking and accepting. Is this a compromise of the integrity of what we do, or voluntary sponsorship of the arts, good citizenship on the part of corporations? I think each case is different, and each relationship must be examined with care. I also think that the arts have never been lucrative, and the idea of corporate citizenship acts must be considered because those big entities are not going away, and they are not going to stop having all the money. The fact of the matter is that money is the way that our society places value on time and at some point if a profession does not include any money the practitioners of it will not be able to sustainably establish a career.

Career span allows an artist or artisan to hone finer points of craft and understanding, allowing these fundamental aspects of our culture to move forward, making progress the same way technology or medicine must progress. The anarchistic bent inside of me looks forward to a time when we can all support ourselves diffusely, through person-to-person interactions. If in the meantime I can get a hand up towards this goal without being asked to compromise my goals, I am going to examine the hand stretched towards me for filth and then, detecting none, grasp it firmly and reach upwards.”

More:

“Scion spent a bunch of money sponsoring music events and throwing its swag everywhere in the hip hop community, and there’s been a recent backlash against it. They have been sponsoring arts events for a while now as well, including the [Craft Congress] itself. It’s interesting that their involvement there was much more low-key; they in fact did not want their logo on materials or branding present in any way.”

Note Scion’s change of tack from the in-your-face to the experiential; it mirrors what General Motors did so well last year.