Demo Night at General Assembly: Neat Small Biz App Called Knack

One of the apps that got my attention at General Assembly’s Demo Night yesterday falls under the small business productivity tool category. It’s a genre we focus on here, so when Knack was introduced as “like Microsoft Access but on steroids for the cloud”, I winced but I knew what they were getting at.

Knack lets you create a very simple web app without committing an act of code.I have to be a little careful here by what the Knack people mean by an app. At this point, it’s a way to turn a database table into a nicely, but simply, styled list on a web page. For the rest of us–small business owners, administrators, organizers–being able to do this is a big deal.

Think of a teeny restaurant updating their site with the daily specials or a school listing those accepted into a special class: all done without having to contact the IT administrator or web programmer. This trick, though, hinges on whether you’re capable of cutting and pasting an object tag into your HTML.

It’s a modest but powerful idea, and if this company can connect with another startup in this area, say OnePager, then together they would have a pretty potent web page generator for small biz.

Knack also has a development environment so that real coders can add new code-less apps. I suspect a marketplace for these wares is in Knack’s future.

Now my grumpy side takes over. There’s already (throat clearing sounds) a pretty good and simple Google tool called Fusion Tables that does something very similar to Knack. I suppose a lot of the startups I saw last night could eventually end up as a splotch on Facebook or Google’s windshield.

The larger point here is that, especially with small businesses, branding and marketing is key, and if Knack can create a buzz as an easy tool for SMBs to use, than they’ll have a nice niche.

Knack is currently accepting beta testers, and I’m hoping to get a chance to try this one out.