Many web workers are fixed to their desks for large portions of the day. Working from home means physical inactivity and snacking can make maintaining a healthy lifestyle a struggle.

Nutrition for knowledge workers is an interesting area that I feel hasn’t been given much attention, so Graze comes along at the right time.

Graze is best described as a “snack subscription,” a little like Netflix, but with snack boxes, rather than DVDs, arriving in the mail. So how does it work?

• Sign up for a twice-weekly snack box, priced at £2.99 ($4.50) each. The service currently offers five pre-selected boxes (the choices are “eatwell,” “energy,” “wellbeing,” “preworkout” and “postworkout”) as well as the option of custom boxes.
• Each box is delivered by first-class mail on days of your choosing.
• You rate the items you receive at the Graze web site to fine-tune your taste profile. The company currently stocks 137 healthy food items, ranging from fresh fruit portions and nuts, to savory snacks, seeds and olives.
• Subsequent boxes are tailored for your taste profile, based on your ratings and preferences for suggested items you’d like to try.

The online portion of the service is well-designed, with a minimum of fuss in ordering and rating items. Of the two boxes I’ve received so far, the quality of items has been great, although the boxes are quite small. Graze is equally sublime and absurd. There’s a part of me that’s thinking that people should get off their butts and go buy some food, but equally, there’s a problem of food literacy in the UK and services like Graze could help educate people about healthier options.

I’d really like to see Graze offer “brain food” mixes for knowledge workers with erratic working patterns and generally sedentary lives, but with jobs requiring high degrees of focus and concentration.  In fact, if there was a Graze for sushi, I’d be all over it!

Graze is offering new customers a free box and 50 percent off their second box. Just use the code Z5287VX when ordering.

I’m genuinely interested in the nutritional impact of such services and more broadly how people try to stay healthy with an untethered lifestyle. Do let us know your thoughts on this (and, of course, what you think of Graze!)

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Coghead is building their business on a model similar to that of AWS: providing agile and scalable services over the web using pay-as-you-go pricing. Through their affiliate program, Coghead makes it easy for more software-as-a-service (SaaS) web businesses to launch, just like Amazon wants to use their limited beta DevPay service to encourage SaaS businesses atop AWS.

In Coghead on AWS, you can see the arrival of the SaaS ecosystem, as web-based services combined and layered on top of each other make it easier and cheaper than ever for anyone with a good web business idea to turn it into a revenue stream.

Coghead unveils v2.0 on Amazon Web Services

Today Coghead unveils version 2.0 of its do-it-yourself web application platform. Their 50 new features and enhancements look less interesting than their migration to Amazon Web Services for their computing infrastructure. (CTO Greg Olsen, who sees a SaaS-based ecosystem as the inevitable future of computing, calls AWS the most significant product of his lifetime.)

To build an application with Coghead, you drag and drop widgets to make web forms via Coghead’s Flex-based user interface. You don’t have to do any programming because Coghead has done that for you, nor do you have to buy and manage your own hardware and hosting. Coghead handles that for you, too — by delegating such responsibilities to AWS and to services built on top of AWS.

Web businesses, not just web applications

In December, Coghead launched the Coghead Affiliate Program, which provides system integrators, value-added resellers, and web tycoon wannabes an easy way to build and sell web applications using a SaaS model. Coghead affiliates build applications using Coghead’s do-it-yourself interface, then set their own per-user, per-month prices for use of those applications. Coghead takes their part of the monthly user fees, while the application developer gets the rest as revenue.

Until now, there hasn’t been an easy, low-cost way for a tech-savvy person with a good niche web application idea to turn that into a business. You’d have to find programmers, arrange web hosting, and build a payment system into your application. Coghead does all that for you.

The next web expansion?

Coghead builds on the SaaS offerings of others, including AWS (which offers both hardware and software as a service), as well on other services built on top of AWS — such as offerings from RightScale. Coghead in turn creates an environment for yet more SaaS businesses to launch. Current affiliates include Hekamedia for education, allRounds for private equity, and MCF Technology Solutions for general business applications.

Coghead is just one of many companies growing in the SaaS ecosystem. I previously covered Workplace2Go, which offers hosted business applications and uses the Jamcracker service delivery network behind the scenes. Workplace2Go, like Coghead, reduces the friction of starting a business.

It’s too early to tell which players in the SaaS ecosystem will survive and thrive — but Coghead, as both a consumer and producer of service-based offerings, looks well-positioned for success in this cost-efficient new world.

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