News Release
At DEMO 2008, UC San Diego Web Application Startup Opens Beta to Public
San Diego, CA, January 29, 2008 -- In just minutes, you can create a custom web application for your business, organization or club without touching a line of code, designing a database or hiring a consultant. All you need is the WYSIWYG software at app2you.com. The technology behind this UC San Diego spin out company was chosen by the DEMO 2008 conference as one of the biggest innovations coming out of the academic community. At DEMO 2008, app2you.com announced that it is opening its beta to the public – and that its web application development tools and hosting services will be free for the next few months.
At app2you.com you can whip up customized interactive Web applications that support business processes such as customer service request processing, sales tracking, internal operations, online catalogs, recruiting, ratings, fundraising drives and event planning.
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“App2you is unique in that it captures business processes in which users with different roles and rights exchange information and collaborate,” says Yannis Papakonstantinou, app2you founder and computer science professor from UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering.
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| Yannis Papakonstantinou (left), a CSE professor who is on leave to launch app2you —an application that lets users create database-driven Web sites without doing any programming, sits with app2you team members (second left to right) Gaurav Bhatia, Kian Win Ong and Keith Kowalczykowski, who are all current or former Jacobs School students. |
“To start, you specify the simple, visible aspects of your application’s pages in a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get fashion. What forms does a page of the application use to collect data? Does the page show data collected by other pages? Who should have access to the page? Then the app2you algorithms do the hard and deep part of the work – database design and programming. This allows you to focus on the high-level aspects of your business process,” says Yannis Papakonstantinou, app2you founder and professor from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering.
To further streamline the design process, app2you provides templates for popular applications as jumpstart points. Templates and real examples are available at http://app2you.com
In September 2007, app2you was selected as one of the forty hottest startups in the world by TechCrunch 40.
“I have spent many years as a professor working on database-related projects. I’m thrilled to be offering the public the chance to create customized database driven Web applications without having to do any programming. In the past, you either had to do the programming yourself or hire an expensive consultant and spend a lot of time explaining how you want your site to work. Then you had to wait for weeks or months for the project to be finished and rely on programmers to make even the smallest changes to the site. App2you is changing the rules,” says Papakonstantinou, who is on leave from UCSD to fully focus on app2you.
“The bottom line is that app2you will be the cheapest and fastest way to create, host and evolve your application as your needs change,” says Papakonstantinou.
Papakonstantinou is participating in a DEMO 2008 panel called “On Research: Turning Ideas into Innovations.”
“DEMO is again reaching deep into the academic community to identify innovators working on some very big ideas,” says DEMO’s online program.
Papakonstantinou’s DEMO 2008 panel is sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation, which this week released a report applauding the von Liebig Center at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering as a model for promoting the commercialization of discoveries made in UCSD classrooms and laboratories.
The report examines both the von Liebig Center and the Deshpande Center at MIT. According to researchers, since the two centers’ creation in 2002, they have collectively awarded nearly $10 million in seed grants and launched 26 seed-stage companies that have accumulated more than $159 million in private capital. Both centers are funded from philanthropic donations.
Media Contacts
Daniel Kane
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-534-3262
dbkane@ucsd.edu