Bootstrap, Twitter’s homebrewed, open-source user interface framework, brings a lot of goodies to the table for busy web developers. But some folks would prefer the kit sans goodies — especially when the goodies include dated-looking gradients and drop shadows.

Today, we got wind of Flat U.I., a gorgeous, Bootstrap-based set of web templates in a very modern style. It features a fresh color palette, a gorgeous sans-serif web font, and a sweet 2D aesthetic that’s classic and fun at the same time.

Check ‘er out:

Flat UI comes from Designmodo, a developer-focused design shop that sells U.I. “packs” to help enterprising hackers outsource the pixels so they can better focus on code and creativity. Typically, these packs are composed of .PSD Photoshop files; this is Designmodo’s first HTML kit. .PSD files for the pack are also available.

The HTML version of Flat UI is based on Twitter Bootstrap and is Retina-ready. It includes custom form components, special CSS3 effects and an object-oriented CSS approach, a customizable color scheme, and the aforementioned web font as well as web font icons.

A publicly available download will launch in two days; you can also subscribe now to get early access.

hat tip: TNW

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The company sells private, managed clouds with voice and telephony, web conferencing, messaging, and video streaming capabilities to business customers.

“Our products are used by millions of people in the top Fortune 1000 and government agencies each year to collaborate and communicate virtually from around the globe,” said CEO Michael Fitzpatrick in an email interview. “These customer collaborate on new products launches, train their workforce and partners, leverage us for sales and marketing support, and even coordinate with first responders during national emergencies.”

Customers include financial organizations, large corporations, technology companies, and 12 government agencies. ConnectSolutions claims to have delivered more than 4 billion minutes of collaboration on its UC3 Managed Cloud product and has been profitable for several years. The executives decided to take this first round of funding to accelerate the company’s growth. The company will use the new funds for development and commercialization of its technology and possibly for some acquisitions.

Competitors include Cisco WebEx and IBM SameTime. Frontier Capital led this round. ConnectSolutions was founded in 2007 and currently has 50 employees, with headquarters in San Francisco. You can read the filing here.

This post was written by Jeremy Hitchcock, CEO of Dyn, an Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) provider.

Dyn has been a bootstrapped company and profitable from day one. We get a lot of questions on how we pulled this off, and while I would love to claim all the credit, there’s nothing really magical about our success. We started as an open-source, community-led project, found a need, and grew a company around it — fueled by a lot of hard work and many sleepless nights.

But when we incorporated in 2001, things weren’t pretty. We had never thought about funding, and since we were in college, we asked our customers to bankroll us. Actually, we said that the project would get shut down unless we were able to raise our $25,000 goal. When $40,000 came in, we knew we were on the hook.

We’ve grown and been profitable year over year. Now we’re eight years removed from my college graduation, have 150 people, and service some of the best Internet companies — plus 4 million customers — all over the world. We’ve learned a lot along the way, and there are a few tips that we can pass along.

1. Start with something you love.

Don’t be afraid to start small. We started with a little project that helped us access papers off our dorm room computers so we could escape walking through the cold to get to a lab printer. This is also how you understand the market/product fit and who is an ideal customer. By pursuing something personal, you understand the pain and the value that you can deliver in a product.

2. Spread the word and get others involved.

It’s easier than ever to get people to see projects and other ideas and to get public momentum behind them. Kickstarter, Twitter, Facebook, and Angel.co are great ways to do just that. You’ll want to get people using your service. We were free at the time (which was pretty unique) and enlisted a core group of volunteers who served as our initial customer support staff.

3. Get to minimum viable product (MVP) and dollar one fast.

When you start out, you are constantly thinking about dollar one — the first customer that actually pays you for your service. While we asked for donations to keep the project going, we also simultaneously launched a paid version of the service with additional features. When people are willing to part with their money because you deliver value, you’re onto something.

4. Revenue has to be greater than expenses.

John Lynch, the popular governor of New Hampshire and former head of Knoll Furniture, said this line many times: If there is a single rule in business, it’s that revenue has to be greater than expenses. This fiscally conservative approach worked well for New Hampshire, which, even during one of the worst financial crises in history, was able to maintain a balanced budget and create jobs. If it works for an entire state, it’ll work for your business.

Sometimes, this means sacrificing comfort. Since we were in college when we started Dyn, we didn’t have expensive tastes (except for the occasional trip to the Cheesecake Factory); we were perfectly happy cramming into a small office space. In fact, even as we grew, we maintained modest accommodations. All of those early sacrifices paid off, as we now have a spacious 30,000 square foot headquarters — but only because we can afford it.

5. Optimize efficiency first.

The biggest tradeoff that comes with living within your means is that you obsess over efficiency. You’re always thinking about next year’s challenges while solving this year’s problem. It takes a lot of will to break out of each plateau and make sure that you don’t get stuck.

Around 2007 we were cruising along as an e-commerce platform, selling our services to small businesses and home users. But we wanted more. After a lot of careful consideration and even more risk, we decided to move upstream and provide an enterprise service. This gamble didn’t pay off immediately. There were more sleepless nights, but today, it’s fueling our growth. We wouldn’t have been able to take this leap if we weren’t living with one foot in the future.

6. Get lots of good advice.

Because people love the bootstrapping story, it’s easy to find people willing to share their experience. Don’t just talk to people in tech. Talk to people who run restaurants, ad agencies, do metal fabrication, own car dealerships, etc. You’ll realize that once you get the market/product fit relatively right (always a work in progress), all of your problems are related to people.

Of course, listening to advice is only part of it — you also have to implement it. Sometimes that is easier said than done, especially when you’re 23 years old. If you’re an entrepreneur, there is always part of you that thinks you know everything. But to grow a company, you have to accept your shortcomings and look elsewhere for answers — while simultaneously remembering that if you’re truly innovating, there may eventually be some things people can’t help you with, simply because they’ve never been done before.

7. Have a lot of fun.

In the end, it’s important to have a good time and love the people you work with. There’s nothing secret about running a company that is profitable from day one. It involves a lot of hard work but is incredibly rewarding when it happens.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Image via yyellowbird/Flickr

Backblaze is an extremely easy-to-use, cheap storage service that keeps data safe by continuously and automatically backing it up to the cloud. Founder Gleb Budman shook up Silicon Valley by sharing the secrets behind the company’s technology in 2009 and again in 2011. The company stores nearly 40,000,000 GB of data and backs up 100,000,000 files per day. It makes money by charging users a small monthly or annual fee for the service.

The revenue is apparently not enough to quickly achieve Budman’s ultimate goals and thus he set out to fundraising. He received the $5 million from British firm TMT Investments. The money will be given in two equal distributions. Read the full story (including a trip to Panama) on the Backblaze blog.

Backblaze was founded in 2007 and is based in San Mateo, Calif.

Called Bootstrap, the toolkit is a library of relatively simple but elegant HTML and CSS conventions for building web apps. In many ways, it’s similar to the CSS framework Blueprint.

Bootstrap doesn’t run on Twitter’s platform; the company just fostered its development and is now releasing it into the world.

As Twitter designer Mark Otto wrote on the Twitter developer blog, Bootstrap “uses some of the latest browser techniques to provide you with stylish typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation and everything else you need in a super tiny (only 6k with gzip) resource.”

Bootstrap will likely be a particular boon to the not-so-design-focused developer/entrepreneur who simply needs to get a great app live on the web in a short period of time.

The Twitter team says Bootstrap should be easy for any web designer or developer to implement, and once it’s compiled, Bootstrap contains CSS and CSS alone.

The toolkit is supposed to be great for cross-browser compatibility for modern web browsers — a constant concern for latter-day web designers and developers. Although Bootstrap doesn’t currently support IE 7 and 8, the team is working to correct that right now.

Bootstrap is built with Less CSS, a CSS pre-processor that extends the language with dynamic behaviors and runs on both the client side in modern browsers (read: nothing less older than IE 6) and on the server side with Node.js.

You can check out the particulars and some examples, and you can also grab all the code on Github. The Twitter developers are also asking for the help of other interested hackers to commit to Bootstrap and help make its footprint even smaller.

Otto notes that Bootstrap was originally an internal tool developed during Twitter’s first Hackweek. Now, Bootstrap is used across the board for all Twitter’s internal apps, of which there are many.

“With the help and feedback of many engineers, Bootstrap has grown significantly to encompass not only basic styles but more elegant and durable front-end design patterns,” wrote Otto. “This release represents our first public 1.0 release and the open sourcing of many months of hard work.”

Check out DevBeat, VentureBeat’s brand new channel specifically for developers. The channel will break relevant news and provide insightful commentary aimed to assist developers. DevBeat is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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So you’ve got this idea for a product. You pull a few friends in and you start working at the local coffee shops – or, if you’re frugal, your home office. You plug in your Mac and camp out all day drinking the free refills and bumming the wifi. You’re nimble. Not tied down to a space, free to enjoy the flexibility that comes with being an entrepreneur. Cool!

You and your team check-in regularly on Skype, you use Basecamp and Pivotal Tracker and you get together a couple times a week on a video conference or in-person. You’re saving a fortune by not having an office, right? You’re doing everything right to bootstrap, right?

Wrong.

The “working from home/working from Starbucks” bootstrap is one of the great fallacies of start-up life. Here are five reasons why your start-up needs to find some proper office space right now:

Productivity – You’re functioning at about 75 percent productivity in a coffee shop or at home. The distractions are everywhere. At the coffee shop it’s the annoying person on the phone; at home it’s the cat, the dog, the neighbor, the internet is down, the TV is on…

The fact is you’re not at “the office” so your time is more malleable.  You can “meet for lunch” or “wait for the FedEx guy” or whatever excuse you prefer. No one is holding you accountable.

You may technically work long hours, but you’d need to work a 16-hour day to overcome the productivity gap. And despite the blasé use of the phrase “100-hour work week” the fact is very few entrepreneurs work those hours regularly, if ever (that’s 7 days a week, 15 hours a day – pretty tough).

Space to think – If you’re serious about building a company –a real company, not an app or a feature – than you’re going to need space.  You’re going to need whiteboards and desks and printers and stable Internet service and phone booths and meeting space.

A 30,000 ft approach tends to work at the earliest of stages (hence the well-worn “conceived on a napkin” cliché), but unpacking the intricacies of customer service or mapping out hypotheses about your product iterations are awfully hard without disposable surface area.

Yes, there are virtual tools for all of this, but the reality is that these tools are largely poor substitutes for real-life problem solving and company building.  The virtual tools are designed as supplements, not as replacements.  One of the reasons why incubators (Techstars, YC, etc.) exist is for the energy and the space.

Don’t lose that third space – Without space, your boundaries between work and play dissolve to the point that you don’t know how to work and how to play.  When you live in coffee shops or work at home you tend to go at one speed, whether you’re crushed for time or not. When you have an office with a product deadline looming, you stay there until it’s done.

When you miss deadlines at Starbucks it’s so much easier to write them off because you’re working remotely and “these things take time” and “hey, look how much money you’re saving by NOT having an office.” And if you’re the kind of person who used to have the coffee shop as a place to go and clear your head while pounding out some element of the business, that’s no longer the case.

World-class teams don’t work from home – For a little while you can get away with attracting people to your kitchen table, but very soon you’ll be competing with other start-ups for talent – and your French-Press and Brita is not going to get it done.

People want to be part of something – especially early in a company’s life – and that “something” needs to feel like an inspiring space to work. This place needs to (in some small way) say “we’re building a great company here and you should stick around.” Without even a small space with a shingle that says “here’s where we grind and make magic happen” it’s just too easy for folks to go work somewhere else.

Space is cheap – Office space is cheap and plentiful assuming you don’t need super nice digs. It’s also surprisingly cheaper than you think when you do a fully loaded cost analysis. When you’re not at the office, the chances of you bringing your lunch are probably lower and the coffee is definitely more expensive.

The price of a small, fully-functional office for three people in Cambridge right now runs about $800 all in.  For almost a year, we had 7 people in roughly 550 square feet. In our new San Francisco office, we have 2,000 feet and don’t pay too much more than we did in Cambridge. If you really think you have a company – a real company, remember – put up the $2,500 for 3 months of rent and start building.

I am a notorious stickler for keeping the burn rate low, but I realize it’s important to know where to turn the dials  Lean, bootstrapped offices help you quickly discover whether you have just another good idea or the capacity to deliver something people want.

And if your company isn’t worth a few hundred bucks a month in rent, then maybe you need to think hard about whether you’re working on the right really big opportunity.

Photo by Ben McLeod via Flickr