The great thing about Excel spreadsheets is that they’re simple, quick to create, and cheap to make and share. But they’re also hard to keep track of, hard to share, and hard to keep current. Web apps are great for sharing and keeping data up-to-date, but they’re typically expensive to create, expensive to update, and not extremely flexible.
Hungarian startup Karma Platform aims to be the solution for the problem. With a simple drag and drop, Karma turnsspreadsheets into fully-functioning applications. No code writing skills are required, use what you already know: the language of spreadsheets.
Creating an app is as simple as creating a spreadsheet. Upload the spreadsheet to Karma, and the platform automatically creates an app that mirrors the business logic inherent in the spreadsheet, including calculated fields. Check out the walk-through demonstration video of how easy it is to use Karma Platform.
Apps such as managing invoices or subscriptions, or a mini customer relationship management system, or perhaps a digital record of an organization’s digital devices for IT, are simple to create. Apps that require heavy multi-dimensional data, on the other hand, are not suitable.
Change management is also really easy. Simply update the original spreadsheet with new rows and new calculations, and re-upload it to Karma. The system instantly updates the web app and makes it available on the web, optimized for desktop, tablet, or smartphone. Karma uses the Google Web Toolkit, J2EE, and can be implemented with multiple database options: MySQL, MS SQL, or Oracle.
And even more powerfully, multiple spreadsheets can be joined to the same database, with fine-grained access rights to allow the right users access to the right data. In addition, Karma offers API access to integrate these apps to the rest of what your company might be doing — which essentially can take this solution into the realm of enterprise, as a large company could use this for simple, quick needs, while still integrating core data and apps into an overall corporate architecture.
Karma Platform is currently still in beta but is already offering cloud-based services to companies for around $1/user/day, as well as larger solutions to enterprises at variable pricing.
