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CogHead, a service that lets you build applications visually, officially launched this week at the web2.0 expo. CogHead wants to do for the web, what Visual Basic and MS Access did for desktop, i.e to allow developers to create business applications ranging from a simple issue tracker to a full blown CRM. CogHead comes with a lot of starter applications that could be extended or modified to fulfill your needs.

CogHead is special because it requires absolutely no technical expertise or programming knowledge, as everything is simple drag-and-drop. CogHead allows users to create, build and manage applications. The applications could also be published in the directories, where members of the community can access them or collaborate with you to refine those apps.

Users can visually create forms by dragging and dropping the pre-built widgets like text boxes, combo boxes onto the design view. Data within CogHead is represented using hierarchical xml models, so users don’t have to worry about creating complex foreign key relationships. Once forms are created you could then move onto building the application logic using the Actions. The Actions editor comes with a set of 5 basic constructs: Branch, Loop, Perform Action, Alert User and Map, which allows you to specify business logic in the form of a flow chart. CogHead has a large set of user actions and events, that will ensure that a very broad range of custom applications could be built. Once the business logic is created you could visually develop the database. However this is a bit confusing, because what we used to know as tables is referred to as Collections in CogHead. Apart from this building database tables is also a painless task.

CogHead also allows multiple users to work simultaneously on the application. Each user can be granted tailored permissions, which could be granular upto the field level. By default every table in CogHead auto-generates a WSDL, to enable other applications and web services to seamlessly communicate and access data. Versioning is also baked right into the environment. Some other exciting features include: click-to-call via Skype when you click on any phone number in the data field, and Google Maps integration with the address fields.

CogHead is building a really exciting application, and has empowered non-coders to develop business applications. Although a lot could still be done like allowing users to customize the look and feel of their applications by editing CSS, just like they could edit their MySpace profiles. However CogHead is trying to realize the promise of Web2.0, i.e user empowerment, which in its own right is a very noble pursuit. I can safely bet that their will be a lot of people who would use CogHead to build their own CRM that actually models their business workflow, rather than using Salesforce or SugarCRM and be forced to modify their workflow and methods according to the way Salesforce and SugarCRM are built.

CogHead has announced that 17,000 developers are now working on the platform, since its unofficial release in mid October last year. The company has just closed a $8 million Series B round in March. Participants in the round included two new investors, American Capital and SAP Ventures, and an existing investor, El Dorado Ventures. The round takes the total amount raised to-date to $11.2 million. They now have 21 employees in Silicon Valley and 15 more in China. See pricing information here. You may also want to see the video overview to know more. Other similar services include Dabble DB, Zoho Creator and Wya Works.