coghead

Coghead refugees to Intuit or Caspio? Fat chance

The Web-based app development and hosting company Coghead announced Wednesday that it was shutting down (TechCrunch: Coghead grinds to a halt). Citing general economic pressures (the excuse du jour for layoffs and shutdowns), it told its customers they'd have until April 30 of this year to use their apps. They won't be charged for the service until then, but they won't get any support, either. So the rush is now on for Coghead's users to find a new home for their apps.

At least two companies are hoping to win converts to their competing service platforms: … Read more

The battle of the cloud OSes begins in earnest

Once upon a time a cottage industry of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) vendors emerged to proclaim the next generation of application development. Bungee Labs (which I advise), Coghead, 3tera, and a range of others each stepped up to provide cloud-based platforms for developing cloud-based applications.

This week, however, each of these independent efforts was put on notice by industry heavyweights VMware, Citrix, and Virtual Iron: We're joining the fray.

James Urquhart calls out the significance of of their entries into the cloud platform market:

The long and the short of it is that we have entered into a new era, in … Read more

Bungee Labs extends its application hosting options

Bungee Labs is extending the hosting options for its Web application development environment, Bungee Connect. Today, developers using the Bungee Connect development environment can host their applications on Bungee's multitenant grid in the U.S. and Europe or on Amazon EC2. Beginning in July in public beta, organizations will be able to deploy Bungee Connect applications via the new Bungee Application Server on their own hosting infrastructure.

Bungee Labs, along with Coghead, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Joyent, Mosso, salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft and others, is paving the way to platforms-as-a-service--hosted infrastructure for developing and delivering Web applications. … Read more

Battle of developer ecosystems heads for the cloud

Right now, some may look like the online equivalent of a quaint corner store. But catalogs of online applications are the front lines of a brewing battle among platform-as-a-service providers.

Start-up Coghead on Tuesday plans to launch Coghead Gallery, an online store where people in small businesses can hunt for applications.

The applications, written with Coghead's visual-development tool, run on its hosted platform. The platform, built using Adobe Systems' Flex, runs on Amazon Web Services.

At the start, there will be about 30 partners listing their business applications. Coghead's software is aimed at small development shops or tech-savvy businesspeople. … Read more

"Java-in-the-cloud" will lead us to "Platform-as-a-Service"

There is a key missing piece for cloud computing to really go mainstream--a higher-level programming language to be able to do more advanced logic and functionality.

I wonder why Sun hasn't figured this out and why there isn't already a "Java-in-the-Cloud" distribution that has the functionality of Java with some level of restrictions or other permission management geared toward SaaS.

Maybe Sun just doesn't get it or care enough? This concept to me is the key to making the cloud a reality--and making Sun relevant again (MySQL was exciting for five minutes, but is almost … Read more

SaaS on Saas...the next wave?

Coghead CTO Greg Olsen makes some interesting points in this post " How Not to End up as an Anachronism" on the move from on-premise to SaaS to SaaS-on-SaaS applications. The move to SaaS applications built on SaaS is a much more profound shift than the move from on-premise applications to SaaS applications. The software industry is beginning to display characteristics that mimic the supply chains and service layering that are commonplace in other industries like transportation, financial services, insurance, food processing, etc. A simple set of categories like applications, middleware and infrastructure no longer represents the reality of … Read more

Coghead flips to Adobe Flash and Amazon EC2

Coghead on Monday plans to launch a second version of its hosted application development platform, which the start-up has moved to Adobe Systems' Flex/Flash technology and Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing infrastructure.

The company is one of several targeting what it calls "do-it-yourself developers" at small and midsize businesses.

Such developers are generally tech-savvy enough to write macros in Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software or work with scripting languages, but they don't have the same level of training as a professional C++ programmer, for example. The company estimates that there are between 15 … Read more

Top 5 from Web 2.0 Expo

The first Web 2.0 Expo is behind us, and it was a good show. In addition to dozens of interesting panels (including, if I do say so, mine), there were about 115 companies presenting on a crowded expo show floor, and six interesting company presentations during the "Launchpad" sessions that ran on Monday and Tuesday.

With Webware.com's Josh Lowensohn and News.com's Erica Ogg, we picked our Top 5 Web 2.0 services from the conference. They are:

Tellme, which has a new downloadable app for getting useful 411-like info on your mobile phone. ( … Read more

Databases keep getting easier: Coghead

When you go to the Coghead site you'll think I'm covering it because the home page says, "Join the Webware revolution." But Coghead is more than just a slogan I can get behind. It's a clean online application builder that takes the complex job of creating an online database and makes it almost simple.

No matter how straightforward the development tool, creating a database application is hard intellectual work. Coghead does a good job of getting out of your way so you can focus on your data structure and entry forms. It will still be … Read more