Trackvia provides software as a service for transforming ordinary spreadsheets into versatile databases. The Colorado-based startup has raised its first major round of institutional funding, the amount of which (while not disclosed) is being described as a “typical Series A”.

The round’s investors include two VCs out of the Rockies - Flywheel Ventures and Access Venture Partners - plus some notable angels, including Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Prior to this Series A, Trackvia had raised less than $1 million since launching in February 2006.

Trackvia appeals to SMBs that need to organize, access, and analyze business critical data that might typically be placed into Excel or Access files. By importing these files into Trackvia, the data can be searched and queried as with traditional relational databases. It can also be used to generate statistics, print out mailing labels, run email campaigns, create custom views, and generate web forms (think Wufoo). Images and other files can be loaded and associated with entries, and the system retains a comprehensive change history for all entries. Permissions can also be set on a per-entry basis.

Trackvia competes with Blist (review) and DabbleDB (review), although its customers don’t tend to bring these companies up; they’re more likely to mention Intuit’s QuickBase and Act. Trackvia’s executives suggest that its customers are not so much interested in sharing their data broadly but are rather looking for better ways to handle information internally.

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I recently had the opportunity to see a demo of a product coming out in early 2008 called Blist (pronounced like “bliss” with a “t” at the end) that will take on DabbleDB and Trackvia by giving users the tools to easily create and manage databases online.

Blist’s initial target demographic will be Excel users who need more functionality and are trying to make their spreadsheets act like databases, but who don’t have the skills or tolerance to even use Access. Blist will not require users to know any SQL, the language commonly used for interacting with databases (in contrast, recently reviewed Zoho DB does require knowledge of SQL). The company behind Blist seeks to eventually replace traditional databases completely by making its product robust and appealing enough for database application developers as well. The end result: no more databases behind the firewall, since they all end up existing in the cloud.

Blist’s plans are obviously ambitious. They are not only designing a better user interface for manipulating databases, they are also building a sophisticated database architecture that will allow them to replicate data geographically, thereby preventing data loss from natural disasters. Their entirely SaaS-based database solution will also provide an API so you can link your applications up with it. If Blist ever has a chance of replacing traditional database servers, its API will need to be very capable indeed so that applications can run all of the same queries they run now. Blist’s CEO Kevin Merritt says that the API will eventually allow for a large range of operations, but the initial API will be fairly simple and will rely on XML.

Since Blist won’t be ready to convert database administrators right off the bat, the quality of its user interface will determine its initial success. Either Blist will come across as intuitive and succeed, or non-technical users will go right back to using Excel. From the brief demonstration I saw, Blist does look impressively easy to use and very functional, too. As you might be able to tell from the screenshots - which show how Blist could have been used to organize our candidate data for the TechCrunch40 conference - the program looks and feels more like a full-fledged desktop application than DabbleDB. It currently supports fourteen data types, with more coming soon. Data can be viewed in table mode (as in Excel), page view (so you can edit entries using a form), or calendar view (so you can see entries with associated dates in a calendar layout).

What really makes Blist a database application is the ability to apply various “lenses”, or views, to the data. These lenses are like queries since they allow you to view the data by particular criteria. But you won’t need to know any syntax: just change the fields in a form to construct your query. Right now, lenses can only be used to view data in different ways. Blist will become much more useful, in my mind, when users can also implement lenses to manipulate data. Once that is possible, it will closely match the functionality of GUI database tools like MySQL Query Browser.

Since Blist is an online application, the company has taken care to integrate features that distribute and share data. Databases in Blist can be easily shared with other Blist users through the standard interface. They can also be spread over the internet via widgets that pull out samples of data from particular databases. If you are a blogger who wants to publish some of the raw data you have used for analysis, you’ll be able to drop a Blist widget into your post that will highlight some of the main data points and allow users to gain access to the original data set. For example, I wouldn’t have to make unwieldy charts like this one for white label social networking solutions, because I could just drop in a Blist widget with all the data and viewing capabilities instead. These widgets, like most, can also be embedded on other webpages across the net.

While Blist is gunning for the $15 billion relational database market, they have not yet figured out pricing (although they do intend to charge both casual consumers and business users). The company will start by focusing on the North American market and will move to other regions from there. Blist has not accepted any external funding yet but will be looking to raise some soon.

Blist

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Trackvia

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Dabble DB

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Zoho

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Can't see the video? Click here

The amount of energy web entrepreneurs put into creating the perfect online ToDo list is surprising. In May 2006 we ran through a boatload of them in a comparison post. After all that entrepreneurial effort, you’d think the online ToDo list would have been perfected.

Apparently not. Now DabbleDB, a beautiful little database-centric application builder based in Vancouver, Canada, has created a bit of buzz around its own ToDo list application, built on the Facebook platform.

The app, called Dabble Do, uses the DabbleDB back end to create a simple ToDo list on Facebook. There are some bells and whistles. For example, for dates you simply type in “tomorrow” or “next Wednesday” and the app figures out what you mean. You can also set ToDo items for your Facebook friends and follow up by “cracking a whip.” It’s a good way to stay organized.

Will Facebook’ers use this to keep themselves organized? The email/messaging feature on Facebook is very popular (I wish I could just have it forward to my normal email, though). Perhaps adding other features of Outlook, like ToDo lists and calendars, will catch on, too. In my mind, though, social networking is very different from office-like organization applications. That’s why I wasn’t particularly excited when Zoho (an office suite) added their own Facebook application a few weeks ago. So I’m fairly tepid on Dabble Do.

The bloggers seem to like it, though, and I’ve been wrong more than once before. See Mathew Ingram, Read/Write Web, Paul Kedrosky (an investor), Donna Bogatin and others. Ah, I love the blogosphere.

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Dabble DB, a Vancouver-based startup that has created an extremely useful and easy to use database application product, will announce a small (but undisclosed) series A round of financing on Tuesday. The round is being led by Canadian venture firm Ventures West. Paul Kedrosky, an advisor to Ventures West, has joined the Dabble DB board of directors.

Dabble DB is a wonderful application that we first wrote about in March 2006. We also linked to a seven minute demo video of the product here.

DabbleDB will also be opening its site to the public on Thursday.

Tags: techcrunch, paulkedrosky, ventureswest, canada, vancouver, web2.0, web_2.0