While in San Francisco earlier this month, I met up with Laszlo’s Founder and CTO, David Temkin, along with CMO Kent Libbey. Laszlo has an open source Ajax application development platform called OpenLaszlo - which has been used for external apps like Pandora (online radio and music sharing) and ishares.com (Barclays sharemarket app). OpenLaszlo was released at the end of 2004 and claims to have over a quarter of a million downloads to date. Meanwhile Laszlo received an $8 million Series C round of funding in September and in October they made a deal with Sun Microsystems, to enable OpenLaszlo applications to run on the Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME).

When I spoke to David, my ears pricked up when he mentioned that Laszlo is building a WebOS. While he wasn't able to give me many details, he did say the WebOS will be a framework as well as a set of apps. Hmmm, the WebOS space is getting crowded! More on this as it develops.