July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Stripe and Parse are joining forces to move the world of mobile payments forward.

Today, the two startups announced a partnership that will allow thousands of developers to quickly and easily integrate payments into their mobile applications.

Stripe and Parse are both Y Combinator alums that provide developer-centric tools to move online businesses forward. Stripe’s technology makes it easier for developers to enable online credit card payments. The company is built on the idea that “transaction on the web is a problem rooted in code, not finance” and companies can use its API to integrate a full check out system within minutes. Parse is a mobile app development company that takes care of the nitty-gritty, technical, server-side of mobile development so its clients can focus on areas like user experience and design.

With this partnership, Parse will integrate Stripe with 60,000 of its Parse-powered applications.

“We thought it’d be cool if you could instantly connect your Stripe account to start accepting payments in a Parse mobile app,” wrote Stripe developer Alex MacCaw in a blog post. “If you’re building an app on Parse and want to accept payments, you don’t need to write any server-side code. Just create a Stripe token within your mobile app, and then pass the token to a Parse Cloud Code function to create a charge.”

Both companies have an impressive roster of clients. Along with the partnership, Stripe also announced that mobile-first startups like Lyft, Exec, SideCar, OrderAhead, Sesame, and Postmates enable payments using Stripe, and Parse works with major brands including Armani, Cisco, The Food Network, Toms, and Hipmunk. Both startups provide cross-platform solutions and are dedicating to creating a vibrant, reliable, and secure mobile ecosystem.

“Parse is all about making developers’ lives easier,” Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar wrote in an email. “We think the world of application development is far behind where it should be in terms of how easy it can be to create rich, engaging applications on mobile, desktop, and web. Accepting payments is a huge piece of functionality that’s typically painful, tedious, and complicated. Stripe has turned that upside down. The partnership came about from a longstanding friendship between the two companies. We’re both leading the charge in this new “developer-first” era of companies.”

These two companies are at the intersection of a few major trends happening in the tech world. Mobile, and specifically mobile commerce, is taking off, and the payments industry is being disrupted on all sides whether it is in terms of peer-to-peer payments, Bitcoins, or dongles. It is important for businesses of all sizes not only to have a mobile presence but also to try to  monetize on that presence in a way that provides meaningful returns.

This is one in a string of moves that Stripe has taken to focus on mobile. Stripe’s third announcement of the day was the release of updated versions of its iOS and Android libraries. Stripe and Parse are both based in San Francisco.

Photo Credit: Dulup/Flickr

Firebase‘s cofounder James Tamplin wants to make the process of developing an app “10 times easier,” so he built a product that will do the hard work for you.

Launching to the public today, Tamplin’s Firebase provides a backend for developers so they won’t need to scale up hardware or servers from a provider like Amazon Web Services or Rackspace. Anyone with a basic understanding of HTML or Javascript can build an app, and Firebase will “do the rest,” said Tamplin (left), who is an alumni of elite tech accelerator program, Y Combinator.

Tamplin claims that Firebase is a step ahead of Heroku and is the first of its kind to offer a real-time solution. It’s ideal for companies who don’t have access to technical talent. Firebase can sync data in milliseconds, so you can build apps in a matter of minutes, not weeks.

Firebase came to my attention through Data Collective‘s Zachary Bogue, who said that it has been quietly building buzz and making the rounds with developers. One of Firebase’s most recent hires to the seven-person team “wrote the WebRTC spec,” according to Tamplin. (WebRTC is a project that was open sourced by Google).

In addition, hundreds of startups in the social networking and gaming space have signed on to the beta. Customers include Codecademy, Klout, and Atlassian Software.

Firebase will make its money by charging developers $4 a gigabyte for storage, and $2 for bandwidth. According to Tamplin, developers will pay for the service as the alternative is to build a real-time distributed system in Java, Node, or another language.

“The end goal of the product is to help developers build amazing experiences they wouldn’t have otherwise be able to build — and even bring novices that just started programming into the fold,” said Tamplin.

The San Francisco-based startup has already raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Bogue, Greylock Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Flybridge, among others.

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On election night, Twitter eclipsed many of its own records and even beat Facebook as the preferred medium to announce and spread news.

So how is it that the once crash-prone service saw nary a fail whale amid last night’s social media frenzy? Twitter’s engineering czar chalks it up to Ruby — rather, to the fact that Twitter has turned its back on the Ruby stack for good.

Throughout the day yesterday, Twitter users sent around 31 million election-related tweets. At the height of result-tallying activity, the service was getting 327,452 tweets per minute (TPM) about the election alone, with tweets on all topics totaling 874,560 TPM at last night’s peak, far outstripping previous records.

While Twitter used to see brief spikes during major media events, Twitter infrastructure VP Mazen Rawashdeh wrote today on the company blog that election night was a sustained, hours-long onslaught of activity — a traffic pattern the company also experienced at lower volumes during the Olympic closing ceremonies and the VMAs.

“Over time, we have been working to build an infrastructure that can withstand an ever-increasing load,” Rawashdeh said.

“For example, we’ve been steadily optimizing the Ruby runtime [see Twitter's detailed post on dealing with the Ruby garbage collector]. And, as part of our ongoing migration away from Ruby, we’ve reconfigured the service so traffic from our mobile clients hits the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) stack, avoiding the Ruby stack altogether.”

Ouch, Ruby! You need some aloe for that burn?

Conflict manufacturing aside, Twitter has for some time known that as its place in the world of media grows, it’s becoming more of a public information utility and less a mere microblogging service. As such, downtime is unacceptable. We know it, and they know it, too.

“The bottom line: No matter when, where, or how people use Twitter, we need to remain accessible 24/7, around the world,” said Rawashdeh. “We’re hard at work delivering on that vision.”

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CEO Brendan McCorkle

CloudMine started out as a business-to-business big data service, but quickly pivoted into a instant, managed backend for app developers. The goal: enable app developers to focus on the front end of their applications … the user interface features that users actually touch, rather than the infrastructure and data management that enables them.

VentureBeat spoke to chief executive Brendan McCorkle yesterday.

“Any time you build an app there’s all this scaffolding that needs to go up: infrastructure, account management, data security and other basic services just so an app can run,” says McCorkle. “We build that scaffolding so you don’t have to.”

For example, a local business-finding app might need geolocation support, user registration, some definition of public and private data, and more. CloudMine enables all the backend components of this through a single API … which has the potential to significantly simplify development and shorten build time.

“Essentially, we can abstract away the backend. We can abstract away EC2,” McCorkle said, referring to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, a common cloud computing service for developers. “That enables you as an app developer to focus on your core competency and do your thing.”

For almost all apps, he argues, the server side infrastructure is not what makes a developer’s app unique. Connection to the cloud for data and computing are essential, in fact business critical, but they are not what the user sees. They are the underlying components that support the app, and CloudMine’s goal is to provide them quickly and easily.

In addition, the company promises benefits that extend beyond simplification and cost savings.

Because CloudMine abstracts the backend, app makers are able to host their data on multiple Amazon availability zones without any additional work, significantly improving the chances of their service staying up even if a part of Amazon’s cloud goes down. In fact, McCorkle told VentureBeat, this could even extend to mirroring on multiple clouds from additional providers such as Rackspace, further increasing reliability with zero additional developer overhead.

The company is seeing some traction in two very different spaces: enterprise and startups.

CloudMine has two Fortune 500 customers who are currently using the company’s backend to expose legacy data to mobile applications. And startup clients are using the backend infrastructure to rapidly prototype and deploy sophisticated mobile apps.

CloudMine began its young life at Startup Weekend Philly just nine months ago, and is currently running more than 1500 apps on the platform. Pricing is simple: $.05 per active user per month, or custom pricing for large data consumers.

The company received $20,000 in seed investment, and a $100k investment from Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania. CloudMine is based in Philadelphia.

Image credit: ShutterStock

From Flickr user David Stanley

Tumblr has been spending several million dollars per month on web hosting, sources tell VentureBeat.

“You wouldn’t believe the amount they are spending just to keep the site up and running,” said a source familiar with Tumblr’s expenses. “It’s crazy considering they don’t have a real business model figured out yet.”

The work of scaling Tumblr’s backend architecture, which now supports 15 billion page views a month, is a massive job, according to the blog High Scalability. The post compared the blogging platform’s challenges to massive sites like Twitter and Facebook, both of which dwarf Tumblr in terms of employees and funding.

Once you dig into the size of the technical challenge Tumblr is handling on a daily basis, it’s not as surprising as our source made it seem. Tumblr is growing at 30 percent each month and, as High Scalability points out, has 500 million page views a day, a peak rate of ~40k requests per second, ~3TB of new data to store a day, all running on 1000+ servers.

The unique follower model set up by Tumblr presents a one-two punch:

• Data-rich posts full of images, music, and video, much like Facebook
• A Dashboard that lets users follow along in a manner similar to Twitter, with real-time updates coming from hundreds of blogs they follow.

This massive amount of media is all stored on Amazon web services.

“This is the fascinating thing about building a startup these days,” said Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, an investor in Tumblr who sits on the board, speaking with VentureBeat by phone. “With the elastic cloud, you can reach a fairly massive scale on a limited amount of capital.”

But when a startup goes from being a scrappy, fast growing company to a massive, top twenty property on the web, the cost of having a third party like Amazon supporting your infrastructure can begin to outweigh the benefits. “Building our own data center is something Tumblr will do at some point,” Sabet said. “We raised a significant amount of capital with these challenges in mind.”

Tumblr raised $85 million in September of 2011, back when it had just 13 billion pageviews a month, a round that valued the company at $800 million dollars. “This is not a company with a big burn rate,” Sabet insisted, pointing out that Tumblr still had money left over from the $30 million it raised in December of 2010.

Sources say that with 60 employees and mounting costs on the back end, Tumblr’s total burn rate is several million dollars a month and growing fast. That would still give it plenty of breathing room, however, at least two years based on their last funding.

“Initially the site was designed on a pretty traditional LAMP stack,” Blake Matheny, Tumblr’s director of platform engineering told VentureBeat by phone. “But we reached the end of what that technology could offer us.” The company now has 20 full time engineers on staff. “When we had half a dozen guys, all we could do was fight fires,” Matheny said. “Now we can begin to do some planning for the long term.”

Tumblr is experimenting aggressively with new revenue streams, recently rolling out highlighted posts, which let users pay $1 to attach stickers to individual blog posts. But so far founder David Karp has adamantly resisted the idea of injecting any traditional brand advertising into the site.

Kinvey has built an out-of-the-box backend that can make building and shipping mobile applications a lot simpler and faster. Basically, the startup attempts to “take everything that a developer finds to be mundane, a sheer pain or just hard to do, and make it really really easy,” as CEO and founder Sravish Sridhar told VentureBeat today.

The service allows developers to model an app’s data and file requirements and choose from auto-generated REST APIs and libraries to use in their own code.

“Backend cloud systems today provide developers with a classic platform-as-a-service offering, which is essentially a stack of tools,” Sridhar said. “They then expect the developer to code up the backend and put the stack together. But building and operating a stack sucks.

“We’ve gone many steps further and provided a completely streamlined experience to make it ridiculously easy to build and maintain mobile backends.”

Here’s a video demonstrating roughly how Kinvey works and why mobile developers might want to give it a spin:

Kinvey also claims to be bringing two firsts to the mobile services sector. First, the startup’s middleware and data layers are hosted across multiple cloud service providers, including Rackspace, Amazon and Microsoft Azure. With those kinds of redundancies in place, unless there’s some sort of horrific global power outage, Kinvey will not experience downtime.

Furthermore, Kinvey supports all mobile OSes and apps, including BlackBerry apps, Windows Phone 7 apps, and HTML5 mobile web apps.

The seed funding will be used to hire more talent and add new features, such as accessing more third-party data stores, managing app output and crash logs, and displaying analytics.

The company has been running a closed beta with more than 500 developers, mobile app shops and enterprises using the service. The company’s backend-as-a-service will launch publicly in the fall of 2011.

The mobile-development services sector has been a hot one throughout the past year at least. Cross-platform development tools like Particle, which launched to some fanfare last year at DEMO, have been getting a lot of attention as the need to bring apps to multiple OSes intensifies. Currently, other backend-as-a-service platforms for mobile do exist and include StackMob, Zipline (specifically for mobile games), and a handful of others.

Kinvey was founded in 2010 and is based in Cambridge, MA. The seed round was led by Atlas Venture, a Cambridge-based early-stage fund for tech and life sciences.

Kinvey also had early support, including $18,000 and a good deal of mentorship, from the Boston chapter of TechStars, a Boulder-headquartered startup incubator and accelerator program. Kinvey participated in the TechStars summer class of 2011, which comprised 12 hand-picked startups altogether.

“TechStars was a true accelerator for Kinvey,” said Sridhar. “We were exposed to the best entrepreneurs and investors in Boston and they have helped us shape our business in a phenomenal manner. These are relationships we will cherish for the rest of our lives.”

Image courtesy of moov4.