Monday, February 23, 2009

Coghead R.I.P - Sad but expected

Sad to read the news from InformationWeek about

SAP Buys Cloud Computing Startup Coghead

"Coghead's service continues through April, but SAP will shut customer obligations and relationships down after that. "

One of the high profile players in the dynamic business application platform is quitting soon. Even though this is a unfortunate case, but I think this is hard to avoid for Coghead base on my comments to our Strategy Committee in middle of last year below,

Coghead has very high profile, but very lousy result I would say. They spent 5 years (since May 2003) with big support to reach this stage which is still far to what the CEO is saying, "tech-savvy business people who have never before had access to an easy-to-use, do-it-yourself solution to their application needs. ", as compare to what we have achieved in less than 6 months time with such a limited resources.

I tried to create a simple checkbook application from scratch. The user experience was lousy. The tool looks good in demo, but when put my hands on it, it is not as shown.

The Form Editor tool was not easy to use, even simple task like resize the fields and reposition them as I want using mouse. You cannot use mouse to resize, but have to manually type in the width in a field hide behind the Widget tab. After changed the width, I tried to reposition 2 fields side by side, but the system rejected it and reverted the field size that I have changed to original size. After few tries, still cannot put my Account Type and Account Number fields side-by-side.

They use BPEL for the Action and process flow, which is a good thing, but the tool again is not easy to use. I can't figure out how to do a simple business rule like negative value check. When I made mistake, it just prompted me the system error and didn't suggest me what's wrong with my Action. I don't think business user can use this tool.

Finally, save the Action, and tried to create a new record to save, and I got this message.



At the end, I can't even complete a Bank account setup screen.

In short, they are not ready or even close to develop software or application development tool for business user.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

We developed and released 4 applications in 1 week time

How fast can a team of 7 develop 4 real world business applications? With Ubikwiti, the answer is one week. We developed around 17 new business components (mostly customized from existing components for different industry or usage) and configured them into 4 different applications (we call them as templates, on top of the Product & Services that we released as an alternative to QuickBooks Online Basic),



  • Accounting for Professional Consultant

  • Simple Cash Management for small business

  • Personal Cash Management

  • <name not disclosed due to marketing reason>


What development processes have we covered in this one week time? We have done,



  • Create business scenario

  • Define business processes

  • Define related new components

  • Configure new applications from the components

  • Unit testing

  • Overall User Testing

  • Publish to live server in Amazon.com

  • End user simulation testing


The declarative application development concept, Definition-based Dynamic Engine (DDE), and our business components store (U-KwikShop) is really working! By the way, the team of 7 I mentioned here were 5 business modelers and 2 application designers. No software engineer got involved.




Tuesday, February 10, 2009

QuickBooks Online on iPhone - my impression


After I have setup my Quickbooks Online, I tried to access it via my iPhone (https://accounting.quickbooks.com/m) as stated in the System Requirement from my previous post

My initial impression of the iPhone web app was good and with high expectation, but end up with disappointment as this is only a very basic read-only app. In my mind that this is a iPhone web app, not a native app, which means you must be online to access this app, and also means that you are accessing the live database at that time. I can't add or modify any of the master (bank, customer, vendor, employee), and transaction records (Who Owes Me, Who I Owe). I can understand the synchronization issues of the native app, but I cannot understand why these basic features are missing from the web app.

At least one thing meet my expectation, i.e. when tap on the customer phone number, it prompted whether I want to make a call to the number or not.

Looking forward to a more usable version of QuickBooks Online for iPhone.

Monday, February 9, 2009

QuickBooks Online - only support Windows platform with Internet Explorer


I saw that Intuit has just released a free edition of QuickBooks Online, i.e. QuickBooks Online Free. When I tried to sign up using Safari in my lovely MacBook, I got this. 

Obviously, the QuickBooks Online is tied to Microsoft technology, i.e. ActiveX. Fortunately, I have VMware Fusion with Windows XP and IE7 installed and I managed to sign up.

I can't stop to think about why Intuit decided to tied with Microsoft technology to limit their market penetration, especially the IE market share has dropped to 67% and still dropping. Will other web browsers going to support ActiveX in the future? I don't think so. 

Since this didn't make any logical sense to me, I think the technology used in QuickBooks Online is an art.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

App Store for Composite Business Application

I like to see iPhone as the application container with some basic modules/functions (the embedded apps like MobileMail, MobileSafari), and apps in the iTunes App Store are like additional modules/functions that can be added to the application container to form a composite application that is tailor-made for that particular user.

The Ubikwiti and U-KwikShop were developed based on the same principle, i.e. the 
Ubikwiti is the application container running within the Definition-based Dynamic Engine (DDE) framework, and the additional business components (modules/functions) can be added to the application from the U-KwikShop (App Store) any time to tailor make the business application for that particular user or business. 

Similar to iPhone, each of the components are independent from each other, but as Ubikwiti is a platform for business application, we have built in a set of common business objects such as Account, Party, Contact, Document, Journal, etc as the building blocks (like LEGO blocks) to 'snap' the components together. For example, a customer record created in Customer component can be used in the Invoice component as both using the same Party business object.

This gives the user the real power to build his/her own composite business application, or the real on-demand application. Anyone can start with some basic components to build a personal finance management application, and grow it to an order-to-cash financial application, or even to a fully function accounting system, just by adding more components from the U-KwikShop.

Another benefits of this approach is on the update of the components. It is similar to apps in iPhone, user can update the components individually, or even skip some updates if they are not relevant. User makes the decision.

I can see that the power of Ubikwiti application can be enormous once the U-KwikShop starts to have a lot of business components that link up with 3rd party web services such as online collaboration services, banking, payment, tracking, and so on.