noisylime

It’s been a few months since we wrote about Startup Schwag, a service that sends users startup-branded tshirts and stickers every month.

You’ll either think this is lame (not target market) or so cool you’ve wet your pants (target market) and act accordingly. The first attempt at the model by Valleyschwag didn’t scale and folded. Startup Schwag isn’t relying on the companies to produce the stuff, though (that’s where Valleyschwag ran into trouble when they got too big), they do it themselves with the company’s permission.

The first mailing included a TechCrunch Tshirt, and one made its way to Lisa Brewster, who writes the blog Sophistechate. She posted the picture above to her blog a couple of days ago. Golf clap for Lisa, our new unofficial mascot. Another woman models the reddit tshirt here.

Founder Roddy Richards says the service is doing well and has 400 subscribers now paying $15 per month each.

Richards has also founded a startup called PriceAdvance. It was rejected by Y Combinator, but Richards used the money YC gave him to apply (travel expenses) to incorporate the company and get it going. It launched December 11 and is doing well, he says.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

[via TechCrunch]

Today, Coghead is introducing the 2.0 version of its DIY, Web-based, enterprise-application devlopment service. The site boasts a new user interface (screen shots below) based on Adobe Flex, with 50 new features and performance that is three times faster than the previous version. Basically, this amounts to a massive upgrade of its Website, but calling it Coghead 2.0 lets the company make a big deal about it. Some of the new features include a redesigned authoring environment, new drag and drop widgets, and support for Open ID.

Coghead is also now hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Web service. “Amazon knows a lot more about running data centers than we do,” CEO Paul McNamara says of the move to Amazon. The way he sees it, he is now offering an easy on-ramp for anyone who wants to create an Amazon-hosted application simply by using Coghead.

The move to Adobe Flex is what gives the site its performance boost. On Flex versus Ajax, McNamara says:

A lot of people are talking about Ajax, but we see a world that goes beyond Ajax.

What attracted him to Flex was the cross-platform, cross-browser interoperability and the prospect of creating offline apps with Adobe AIR. He expects to offer offline capabilities to Coghead users by the middle of 2008. Coghead has attracted 25,000 registered users since launching last April, but its ambition, says McNamara, is to go after the “50 million businesses that don’t have a server.” It still has a long way to go, but this upgrade should help it attract its next set of users.

Coghead

Loading information about Coghead…

cb_widget_report_widget("cb_widget_1200327808"); cb_widget_report_element("cb_widget_0_1200327808","coghead");

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

[via TechCrunch]