Hi, my name is Varun Parmar and I recently joined the Cocomo team as a Product Manager. From the get-go I've been amazed by the opportunities Cocomo enables for developers and my goal is to leverage my blog postings to engage in regular discussions with you on the business aspects of Cocomo.

New and exciting Cocomo-powered applications are springing up daily and as we look at these applications we can't stop but ask ourselves the parochial question - What type of applications will truly benefit from the rich set of features that Cocomo offers? It's hard to wrap our arms around this question primarily because it is a bit early - given that public beta was launched less than two months ago (whew, it feels like eternity with all the activity on the user forums!) - but there are a few key characteristics of these applications:

* Context-sensitive: It is imperative for some type of applications to ensure that the context is always maintained for the users. For example, if I'm a financial securities trader then it is critical that the live market data feed be displayed to me at all times and any other application that I may interact with be in-context to the market data feed. In other words, other applications need to be embedded into the primary application in a way that users perceive other applications as native to the primary application
* Mode of Collaboration: What is the preferred way to enable collaboration for the specific use-case that the application intends to address for users? Is it text-based chat, VoIP, Webcam video, or all of these? Augmenting the primary application with only those collaboration components that best meet the use-case needs provides a superior user experience
* Multi-user / Social: Some applications become inherently more useful when more and more people use them. Such applications benefit from the phenomena called network externalities. Example of such applications include today's popular social networks like Facebook where the social network becomes more valuable to me as more of my friends and family join the social network

We're taking the liberty to coin the term "In-context Collaborative Applications" which in our view defines the category of applications that exhibit the aforementioned characteristics. Interestingly if we look around we realize that most of today's collaboration-centric technologies and applications are out-of-context (E.g., a separate application window opens up for most text-based chat apps and popular softphones.) And herein lies the untapped and colossal business opportunity for you to develop a new well-differentiated application and/or extend your existing application by leveraging Cocomo.

So unlock your creativity and flex your imagination to come up with the next Cocomo-powered "killer app." Are you looking for ideas? Here are some high-level examples of In-Context Collaborative Application categories:

* e-Commerce Support (E.g., Shopping cart assistance, Payment and billing support)
* Interactive Dashboards (E.g., Decision support systems, Reporting systems)
* e-Learning Enablement (E.g., Multi-user whiteboard, Learner polling / quizzes)
* Social Networks (E.g., Presence, Chat - voice, video, text)
* Virtual Worlds / Casual Online Games (E.g., Enable multi-user interactions)
* Specialized Applications (E.g., Telemedicine)

Go ahead and show us the way! ...And let us know how we can further help you succeed!

Varun

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