Industry Luminaries Throw Their Weight Behind Coghead

Business Wire, Oct 3, 2006

Steve Bourne, John Seely Brown, Guy Kawasaki, Ariel Poler, Rocky Roccanova, and Vishal Sikka Add Insight and Influence to Disruptive Startup

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Coghead today announced the addition of six industry luminaries to its advisory board: Steve Bourne, John Seely Brown, Guy Kawasaki, Ariel Poler, Rocky Roccanova, and Vishal Sikka. Founded in 2003, Coghead will soon announce a radically new way for tech-savvy business people to create, manage, and deliver their own web-based applications.

"Our mission is to liberate business people from the tyranny of canned software. Coghead will empower the people closest to the business need to develop their own solutions," said Paul McNamara, Coghead CEO. "With their deep understanding of trends, technologies, and markets, our distinguished advisors will play a vital role in the evolution of the company as we bring the Coghead service to market."

Coghead gives users the means to rapidly create and deliver custom applications that can easily adapt to a changing world. Coghead applications are created without coding, and are delivered instantly to anyone, anywhere over the Internet. Coghead secured $3.2 million in first-round financing from El Dorado Ventures earlier this year and plans a public beta of its service later this year.

"Coghead is at the center of a 'perfect storm' of changes in the creation and use of software," said John Seely Brown, currently a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center at USC. "Customer-directed innovation on the Internet -- that ability to do it yourself in terms of software development -- represents a key trend that is emerging as an important market force that will drive investment and development in business software for several years to come."

"VisiCalc -- the first 'killer app' -- allowed non-programmers to create customized models of tabular data using a PC, providing spreadsheet access to a host of new users, and positioning the PC as a serious business tool," said Guy Kawasaki, author and blogger. "Coghead's service allows non-programmers to create customized business applications using the Internet. This could be a 'killer app' that turns the web into a better business tool."

About Steve Bourne

Steve Bourne is currently the chief technology officer at El Dorado Ventures. Internationally known for his work on the UNIX operating system, he designed the UNIX Command Language -- commonly called the "Bourne Shell" -- that is widely used as a scripting language in the UNIX programming environment. In 1983, Bourne published The UNIX System, one of the first widely used texts on the effective use of UNIX. Bourne has also served in senior management positions at Cisco Systems, where he was director of engineering for enterprise network management; Sun Microsystems, where he was responsible for the Solaris 2.0 release; Digital Equipment Corporation, where he developed the first RISC-based workstation for DEC; and Silicon Graphics, where he was one of the company's first employees and served as director of software responsible for their first product to market. Bourne has a B.Sc. in Mathematics from King's College London, a Diploma in Computer Science from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Trinity College in Cambridge, England. He is also a past president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

About John Seely Brown

John Seely Brown is currently a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center at USC. Previously, he was the chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a position he held for nearly two decades. He was a cofounder of the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL). He is a member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and of AAAS and a Trustee of Brown University and the MacArthur Foundation. He serves on numerous public boards (Amazon, Corning, Varian Medical Systems and Polycom) and private boards of directors.

He has published over 100 papers in scientific journals and has authored and co-authored several books. His most recent book with John Hagel, The Only Sustainable Edge, is about new forms of collaborative innovation. Brown received a BA from Brown University in 1962 in mathematics and physics and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1970 in computer and communication sciences. He also has honorary degrees in Science from Brown University and the University of Michigan, in Science and Economics from London Business School, and in Humane Letters from Claremont Graduate School.

About Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, a columnist for Forbes.com, and a popular blogger. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. where he was one of the individuals responsible for the success of the Macintosh computer. Kawasaki is the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a B.A. from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.