Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt has defined his vision for "Web 3.0″. It is exactly what we are building at Teqlo.

According to an article by Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web Schmidt was asked by an audience member to define Web 3.0.

After first joking that Web 2.0 is "a marketing term", Schmidt launched into a great definition of Web 3.0. He said that while Web 2.0 was based on Ajax, Web 3.0 will be "applications that are pieced together" - with the characteristics that the apps are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, the apps can run on any device (PC or mobile), the apps are very fast and very customizable, and are distributed virally (social networks, email, etc).

Although Schmidt probably didn't know it, what he was describing almost exactly matches what we are doing at Teqlo . Teqlo includes many of the things mentioned by Schmidt:

• Composite applications built from widgets
• Includes widgets that wrap external web services
• Highly focused small applications
• Teqlo is designed to combine everything on the server side. Teqlo is 100% SaaS.
• Everything in Teqlo is easily customizable by end users, albeit fairly sophisticated end users.

But rather than try to explain it, here's a short introductory video:

The video features our current "builder" environment. It is drag and drop easy, but we are currently working to make it even easier still.

Teqlo's Go to Market Strategy: App first, Platform later

I am afraid you will have to wait a little bit longer before you see the first real application we are delivering. Just as Peter Rip mentioned in his recent article The Teqlo Adventure, we have recently adjusted the way we are taking Teqlo to market.

At it's heart, Teqlo is a platform for building composite applications. An early beta release of that platform is currently available at the site: www.teqlo.com. However, it does not really give you much insight into what we are building. When we do release our first industrial strength application, it will be marketed as a simple elegant application designed to address the needs of a very specific and tightly defined user group. There is great precedent for starting with a small focus and then growing into a platform:

• Google started with only search. Now it is a platform in some ways ( Google Gadgets, Google Maps API ), and thinking about new ways to become even more of a platform.
• Facebook started with limited profiles, lists of friends and the ability to send basic messages. Now it is a platform.
• 37 Signals started with Basecamp. Then, Ruby on Rails was extracted by David Heinemeier Hansson.

In every case, selling and marketing the "platform" came later.

Teqlo is a Dataflow Engine: Just Like Excel

In that video, I mentioned that Teqlo is a dataflow engine. Wikipedia describes a dataflow engine this way:

Dataflow is a software architecture based on the idea that changing the value of a variable should automatically force recalculation of the values of other variables.

The most well known dataflow engine is Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet. As an end user, you define how the cells relate to each other and Excel takes care of the rest. Schmidt talked about the next generation of web tools needing to be powerful, yet easily customizable. Excel is both powerful, and almost everyone entering the business workforce knows how to edit a spreadsheet.

Contrast this ease of customization with the difficulty that most business users have procedural programming languages that are comprised of a sequence of commands for the computer to perform. Also know as imperative programming languages, they require end users to learn too much. Most business users do not know how to code VB, VBA, Perl, C, let alone any of the modern OO languages such as Java, C++, C# or Ruby.

Teqlo's Patents

Dataflow engines are notoriously difficult to build. This is especially true when you are dealing with a set of outcomes that are much more complex than the limited set of states that a cell in a spreadsheet can take on. The problem is known as graph explosion. Simply put, the cool thing about Teqlo is that our founder, Jacoby Thwaites, has figured out, and patented a mathematical solution.