A Startup A Day

Aight, hope y’all enjoyed the video series - now back to your regularly scheduled blathering.

Given the recent explosion of web-based social apps and widgets, there are a handful of companies who are making it easier to build and host your apps.  Sites like Sprout and KickApps have Flash-based IDE’s to let you easily build lightweight apps, and the big guys like Google are building out full stacks to support larger-scale efforts.  However, one big piece of the puzzle that I haven’t seen is the ability to create a very simple hosted web service that allows developers to create a basic CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) interface to a data store. 

Here are a few key features that a service like this would need to succeed:

• It must be ridiculously easy to set up. Users could just paste a SQL “create” statement, or could use a simple interface to define the columns.
• It must be scalable.  S3 on the back-end for the basic package, with maybe some faster local storage options available for premium packages.
• Pricing must be competitive.  Again, S3.
• It must be easy to load existing data into the store.  Several options like CSV files or even Excel exports.

Other interesting features?  A set of open source or shared read web services that could be created or used by anyone.  This could be as simple as basic options to fill a drop down list (i.e. standard set of countries, states, cities) or something more complex like IP-to-location mappings.

What do you guys think?  Is there something like this already out there?  Any other features you’d like to see?