From Elisa Camahort’s live chat coverage of Esther Dyson’s keynote interview at the Office 2.0 conference: “Work 2.0 is less about spreadsheets and word processing than it is about activity management.”
Coghead launched today, and its developers apparently agree with Esther. They embedded a BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) process engine into their offering for the do-it-yourself web app space. This should provide for more complex workflows than you could do with Excel or Access out of the box. One of their sample apps is a task management tool. While the BPEL standard itself doesn’t cover human workflow, most process engines I’ve run across include some way of tracking work assigned to people. BPEL has usually been thought of as an enterprise spec… it’s intriguing to see it appear in a service aimed at building apps for small to medium-sized organizations.
Coghead also offers web services support. Coghead advisor Guy Kawasaki says that web services interfaces are automatically generated when you build a Coghead app. This should make it really easy to mashup Coghead-built apps with other online services.
The DIY web app space is getting a bit crowded, with Dabble DB, Ning, Zoho Creator, and now Coghead, among others. I haven’t spent a lot of time with any of them, but I’m rooting for Coghead to succeed, as one of their founders, Greg Olsen, is a friend of mine from my days in Silicon Valley.
