DEMO: Wappwolf connects your online tools into an easy, automatic chain

Wappwolf is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Perhaps the most annoying parts of my daily tech routine are the tasks that require the use of multiple applications. For example, if I take a photo on my phone that I want to include in a VentureBeat post, I need to email it to myself, adjust the size using image editing software, then upload it into WordPress. It’s particularly annoying because I have to take the same steps every time.

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Now a startup called Wappwolf says it can help with these sorts of tasks by transforming them into automatic workflows. It will operate an “app store,” where each app will represent a step in some process, often related to the processing of a file or a document. Then each of those steps can be connected into an automatic chain. Every time you need to send, edit, and upload a photo to, say, Facebook, you can use the same workflow.

All of the apps will be based in the Web browser, with the exception of a Wappwolf iPhone app that will let users upload files to start the process. And to make sure to avoid nonsensical or useless workflows, each app will have certain built-in “grammar rules,” so that they can only be connected in other apps in a certain order.

With this launch, the Vienna, Austria company is trying to attract developers and tech-savvy consumers. But is this really something someone might use in their everyday life? Chief Financial Officer Harald Weiss said he’s definitely targeting the “early adopters.” He argued that the workflows should be so easy to create, and they should end up saving users so much time, that it will be worthwhile.

There should be about 40 applications in the store at launch, Weiss estimated. His goal is to expand the store to 1,000 apps in the first year. The company will charge per workflow, rather than per app. And it plans to make its real money by selling workflows to companies to automate business processes. Companies could, for example, combine apps to create invoices from the data in their accounting software.

Wappwolf is self-funded. You can watch a demo video here.

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