Startup Has a Clever Tool to Get Non-Techies to Code: Excel

Blockspring joins the growing list of companies who are trying to make high-level, technical products more accessible.
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Paul Katsen worked at a consulting firm, and he was in charge of analytics. This meant his colleagues would ask him to write scripts that could gather data across the workforce and beyond.

In the beginning, he tried to teach his coworkers how to use the tools he had built, but he eventually realized they weren’t all that interested in learning anything close to programming skills. "All they wanted to do was say: 'This is the input I want, and I want to get something understandable out of it,'" Katsen remembers.

At one point, he discussed this code-phobia phenomenon with a college friend, Don Pinkus, who was then working at Facebook. Turns out, this was a problem at Facebook too. Even at a company known for its technological innovation, Pinkus told Katsen, there were business people who had difficulty using new technologies. "We realized they just wanted to use the tools that they’re already familiar with---like Excel and other applications," Katsen says.

The talk inspired a new company: Blockspring. Founded by Katsen, Pinkus, and a third entrepreneur named Jason Tokoph, the company has spent the last year and a half building a tool called Blockspring for Spreadsheets, with the idea of turning the world's one billion spreadsheet users into software engineers.

Essentially, the product is a series of coding tools, or APIs, that can be used from inside a spreadsheet. It plugs into popular applications like Excel and Google Spreadsheets. "Instead of building new apps and teaching people how to use them---having to do all this extra stuff just to get value---what if there was just a way to have a product that could sit between the tools that people already love to use, and tap into the technologies that developers are building already?" Katsen asks.

The tool is part of a sweeping effort to bring coding skills to a wider swath of the population. Companies like Codecademy are trying to teach coding skills via the internet. Coding "bootcamps" are popping up in various cities, offering crash courses in more advanced skills. And companies from Blockspring to Google are offering tools that seek to simplify the coding process itself.

The Power of APIs

Katsen describes Blockspring for Spreadsheets as an index of APIs, or application programming interfaces. Basically, these are tools that other companies offer over the net, tools that can be used to build new applications. Katsen calls these "building blocks"---hence the name of his startup.

Via these APIs, Blockspring lets you access a wide range of popular services, from social media analytics software SharedCount (which lets you count online "shares," "likes," and tweets) to text analysis tools from the likes Alchemy API, Aylien, indico, and Lateral.io (which let you parse emotional sentiment, identify high-level concepts within a website, and more). Katsen and his cohort have even included the API from AI startup Metamind that can help analyze data in more complex ways.

According to Katsen, some early testers have already made use of the service. Looking to hire a new developer, he says, one company tapped a Google Calendar API via Blockspring, building spreadsheet application that could show which of the company's engineers were free when a candidate was scheduled for an interview. At another company, he says, a lawyer with no technical skills tapped an algorithm provided by a company called Indico, using it to identify the political affiliation of people involved in court cases.

Does It Work?

Is the service really as easy to use as Katsen says it is? I downloaded the plug-in myself and tried it out. After I created an account on the site, Blockspring walked me through the whole process in simple step-by-step instructions.

Combining a few simple functions, I created, in a matter of minutes, a database that pulled my recent WIRED articles from Microsoft's Bing search engine and mapped them onto related tweets, shares, and pins. That gave me a picture of which of my articles did the best on social media. Blockspring would also refresh my data every time a new result came in, so I could simply go back to the spreadsheet in the future instead of typing in the functions everyday to get new results.

I also built data visualizations---word clouds of the most popular topics I covered. I dug into my news stories and saw which topics were peripherally associated with the articles I wrote. Katsen also showed me how to create nifty heat maps of the cities in the US, given public data.

Open Versus Closed

Katsen says the team is still building out the index of APIs that could be incorporated into Blockspring, and they’re working hard to get as many tools as possible onto the system. Eventually, he says, popular business tools from companies such as Slack and Tableau will be available from Blockspring.

Some companies prevent third-party apps and services from accessing their APIs, including Netflix and LinkedIn. But Katsen believes this will change. He thinks that any company that bars third part services only creates an opportunity for a new venture to fill in that gap. "Someone will sneak in and take that business," he says. "Guaranteed!”

"APIs are simply a zero-friction way to do business, and most enterprises I talk to aren’t afraid of their big competitors. They’re afraid to die of a thousand cuts from a thousand startups," Katsen says. "It's the emergence of thousands and thousands of small, focused APIs that's creating a whole new economy. And combined they get very, very powerful. That's a big reason why we exist."

CORRECTION 11:40 AM ET 07/29/15: This article originally stated that the Blockspring co-founder who worked at Facebook was Jason Tokoph. It has been corrected to show that it was Don Pinkus who worked at Facebook, not Tokoph.