Charterstreet and Coghead

Greg Olsen and Paul McNamara are building a company that allows biz-sumers (business consumers who might be able to write an excel macro but aren’t IT folk) to build hosted applications (a la Ning and a bit like DabbleDB), thus further commoditizing the tool making process. They’ve taken an old school business approach (e.g. no Aeron chairs and cheap office space) even though they have taken VC money.

I love this business space right now–so much of corporate IT is broken (animosity between users and IT, high costs, low innovation, poor stability, little competitive advantage, need I go on?) and there is a huge opportunity to build SaaS businesses that serve the end-users.

Their blog is called Charter Street. Read their 5-part series on “The Next Technology P-Wave“–beautiful writing, smart ideas, these guys are worth watching.

Dabble DB

Wow. I’ve just been dazzled by Dabble DB’s product demo–not only a great online app but a great presentation by one of the creators, Avi Bryant. In only a few minutes, he turned an excel spreadsheet into an online database with collaboration features, view creation, data abstraction, and more. No wonder it has received great praise. Check out this excellent review of the entire online data management space.