Trackvia is latest entrant in Database 2.0 market

Computerworld - It's the rare Web 2.0 start-up that has the guts to brag that it's resisting a jump onto the Facebook application bandwagon.

But that's what Matt McAdams, founder and chief technology officer of online database firm Trackvia Inc. proudly says he told his venture-capital investors last week.

"Not being in the Valley helps us be more intellectually humble and forces us to talk to our customers," McAdams said via phone last week from his office in Lakewood, Colo., referring to Silicon Valley.

And what do those customers -- what McAdams likes to call "ordinary people keeping track of stuff" -- want? Features such as easy-to-set-up feeding of data from Web forms into Trackvia, McAdams said, as well as permission and change control, "wicked fast" data search and deduplication capabilities, Google mapping of data and easy export from Trackvia's MySQL-based back-end to customers' Excel spreadsheets.

The feature that McAdams may be proudest of is Trackvia's ability to easily mail merge and print labels. That won't win any points with the "TechCrunch crowd," he notes, but it is proving popular with the many small businesses keeping their customer lists in Trackvia.

They do not include an Asynchronous JavaScript and XML Web interface, which McAdams says would slow down Trackvia, nor the ability to handle "concurrent" changes to data records, something he said only database geeks really care about.

"Eighty percent of our users come from Excel, and 20% come from writing on whiteboards," he said.

Trackvia already has about 1,000 paying subscribers even though it is making its official debut today. It is the 14th entrant in the growing Database 2.0 market.

Bettering a dot-com past

Not being a first mover doesn't worry McAdams, who is more concerned in righting past sins. McAdams, who obtained his Ph.D. in physics from California Institute of Technology to run two start-ups during and after the dot-com boom, says that while rushing past products to market has pleased investors, for customers they "were never better than mediocre."

"We don't want to do it that way again," he said. "I'll be happy signing up just one new customer a day."

McAdams said he senses a bit of his former dot-com cockiness in some of Trackvia's competitors, whose products, he claimed, look like they "were built by some college kid in his dorm."

Dismissing public data repositories such as Google Base and FreeBase, McAdams said that Trackvia's main competition includes DabbleDB, Intuit Inc.'s QuickBase and WebOffice from Cisco Systems Inc.'s WebEx Communications Inc. subsidiary.

McAdams had something to say about each one, though. The oldest service, QuickBase, is "very slow" and has had "high-profile performance problems," he said. "We are wicked fast, and will always be."