PHP company Zend has just released the results of its annual developer survey. The exhaustive poll of 5,000 developers highlights a few interesting trends and one particularly heartening mobile web factoid.

Clearly, everyone and their dog is thinking mobile first these days. But what’s more interesting in the survey is that the majority of developers aren’t looking to iOS or Android to do so.

From a release on the report:

When asked how they intend to deliver content and services to their mobile audience, 79% of developers identified their intent to leverage web apps and open standards such as HTML5.

Of course, the devops trend marches onward with the increased need for efficiency in deployment. Zend’s results show 87 percent of developers experience delays in moving their app from development to production, and a full 90 percent have worked weekends, vacations, and holidays because of production emergencies.

Here are the results in a handy infographic form:

Image credit: Based on photo from ostill/Shutterstock

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Facebook has partnered with the women-only hacker bootcamp Hackbright Academy to create a special scholarship for moms.

Just in time for Mother’s Day, the Moms In Tech program will help women who once worked in the tech industry then left to pursue parenthood.

Hackbright will take 10 weeks to train the moms accepted into the program. During this time, old skills will get a refresh, and students will learn new skills. The women who participate will be prepared to return to the tech industry not as front-line code monkeys but as “technically hands-on leads, managers, or directors,” the program application notes.

RELATED: Tackling tech’s gender problem the right way: Teaching women to code

For the scholarship, Facebook will cover the entire $12,000 Hackbright tuition. Applications are open until May 17. The program will begin exactly one month after the deadline.

Attrition of women who become parents is a big concern for a lot of the folks we talk to at large tech companies. Taking steps like this may help give tech-minded moms a path back to work at top-tier companies.

Hackbright was founded by Christian Fernandez and David Phillips and is based in San Francisco.

Image credit: Shutterstock

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But what if you’re not one of the 6,000?

No worries, you can participate too. Google is “going live” from I/O, and pretty much anyone who wants to participate can join in. Here’s how:

1. Keynotes
   Google will stream the major presentations from 9AM to 7PM PST for both May 15 and 16.
2. Interviews with Googlers
   Google Developers Live will feature interviews with Google developers and managers throughout Google I/O.
3. News updates
   The Google Developers Google+ page will have updates (as will we — see below)
4. Full sessions
   And full sessions will be broadcast on the Google Developers YouTube channel. No word from Google on when exactly they’ll go live, but Google says they will be recorded an made “rapidly available.” Hopefully, that will be same-day.

And, of course, we’ll be at Google I/O. Our own intrepid Jolie O’Dell and Devindra Hardawar will be at the event, seeking out the best news and reporting almost-live here on VentureBeat.

Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t been to Google’s I/O home page, give it a click. Then click the “I” and the “O,” and build some binary code at the bottom of the page.

Cloud storage powerhouse Dropbox will host its first-ever developer conference — dubbed DBX — on July 9 in San Francisco, the company announced today.

Apple, Microsoft, and other big tech companies often use their developer conferences as a place to build enthusiasm and launch new products. It’s unlikely Dropbox’s first conference will have that level of fanfare, but this will at least offers developers who rely on Dropbox the chance to connect and get insight direct from the Dropbox team.

Dropbox says it will use the event to talk to devs about the capabilities of the Dropbox Platform and use it as a connection point for all Dropbox developers. The company also says attendees will become the first to learn about new products that are making their way into the platform.

The event will take place at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Developers interested in attending the conference can request an invitation here. You can also get updates from the DBX Twitter account: @dbx2013.

Image via Dropbox

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Today, Adobe’s creative software for development and design is getting 15 full-version upgrades to its apps, a total rebranding with a new versioning system, and a payment plan and future upgrade path overhaul.

The most important thing for you to know is that Creative Suite is gone. In its place is Creative Cloud. That means no matter what you use, you’ll have to pay a monthly subscription fee to use it; it also means you’ll never again have to wait two years for a bug fix or a crucial feature you need to keep up with others in your industry.

As for the new features and news apps, we’ve got a full rundown, and they’re pretty exciting.

“They’re lightweight, task-specific tools to get the job done,” Adobe marketing director Scott Morris told VentureBeat in a phone call last week. “We have a beautiful vision of where creative workflows are going.”

A lot of what you’ll see in Creative Cloud is fuller integration between desktop and cloud; for example, you will be able to sync fonts, colors, and assets between all your devices.

You’ll be able to create Behance posts directly from Photoshop to show off what you’re working on.

Also, Adobe is killing off the Adobe Application Manager. Instead, a Creative Cloud app will automatically install on the desktop along with any CC software. The Creative Cloud app will also send you notifications on software updates and Behance activities in an activity stream and will help you keep assets, fonts, and style synced.

The 15 new apps and new app versions come with hundreds of new features and revamped features, which we’re highlighting below in painstaking detail for every kind of developer and designer.

New for Photoshop

One of Adobe’s most popular pieces of software is getting a thoroughly modern overhaul. It has new features here that everyone — web designers, pro photographers, photo-happy grandmas — is going to love.

• The new Smart Sharpen feature minimizes noise and haloing while leaving your pics supercrisp.
• Intelligent upsampling makes your images larger without all that sloppy-looking noise and blurring.
• Photoshop CC includes the video and 3D editing features in Photoshop Extended, too.
• Photoshop CC supports Camera Raw edits for any Photoshop layer or file, which permits for better heal edits and vignettes.
• Adobe is giving Photoshop users editable rounded rectangles and multishape and path selection so you can select more than one path, mask, layer, or shape at a time.
• Conditional Actions use if/then statements to automatically choose between different actions based on rules you set up.
• Photoshop is also getting expanded support for Smart Objects, so you can blur and liquefy in a nondestructive way, even after you save the file.
• For 3D painting, live previews have gotten a lot faster — up to 100x faster, the company says.

New for designers

Here are all the new Adobe software features you’ll want to know about before you decide whether your CS package needs an immediate upgrade.

• Adobe Ideas is a new, free iOS app that creates freeform vector illustrations on Apple touchscreen devices.
• Kuler is a new mobile app that takes a photo and creates a color palette that can be synced across your whole system.
• Touch Type is a feature that manipulates individual letters via multitouch, stylus, or mouse. You can also instantly switch between area and point type.
• Images can be turned into brushes, and pattern brushes have auto corners.
• Font search in Illustrator and InDesign, and font preview, and font favorites in InDesign.
• Syncing for fonts, styles, preferences, you name it, across your whole system.
• Multi-file place in Illustrator.
• For InDesign, the new version is faster; has a new, dark UI; supports HiDPI and Retina displays.
• An InDesign QR code creator.
• Parallax scrolling and in-browser editing in Muse.
• InCopy comes to Creative Cloud with HiDPI/Retina support, font search, and a dark UI.

New for developers

Adobe has been placing a ton of emphasis on web design and responsive mobile design lately. Here’s what the company has planned for the more technical side of creative teams.

• Flash has been reengineered for performance with 64-bit architecture.
• Flash now has hi-def export options, better HTML publishing, and a simpler UI.
• The new Flash brings a powerful code editor and comes with Adobe Scout, which detects potential problems in your code.
• With USB connections, you can now do real-time mobile testing in FLash with iOS and Android devices.
• Edge Animate now has motion paths, templates, and support for swipe gestures, as well as an Akamai-hosted content delivery network for your runtime files.
• Edge Reflow is getting an Assets panel and Typekit integration.
• Dreamweaver has a new CSS Designer, a Typekit-powered font library, and a simpler UI.
• You can also author new Dreamweaver projects in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, and you also get a jQuery widget.
• Dreamweaver has PhoneGap integration and an upgraded Fluid Grid layout for doing responsive design.
• As with all the other new CC products, Dreamweaver supports syncing of files, preferences, and settings across your whole system.

New for video

Video pros and special effects folks will also see a lot of the syncing, collaboration features popping up elsewhere in the Creative Cloud family. But Adobe’s video apps are also getting their own special dose of refreshed magic.

• Premier is getting a redesigned Timeline to make editing more efficient.
• Link and locate in Premier will help you keep track of the thousands of clips in a big project.
• Collaborative editing in Premier and After Effects is easier with new sync options. You can also use Anywhere features to edit on the go from a shared server without running into versioning issues.
• Premier Pro now supports closed captioning.
• A few Premier features focus on more precise audio control, including a clip mixer and new plugins.
• In After Effects, you can use tools like Refine Edge, Warp Stabilizer, and Pixel Motion Blur to up your creative game and create higher-quality visual effects.
• After Effects has new tools for 3D video with Cinema 4D support.
• Audition is getting new features for sound removal, previewing tracks, and multitrack editing.
• Adobe is also announcing minor feature upgrades for Prelude, SpeedGrade, and Story Plus.

Image credit: Adobe

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For all y’all oldsters who remember the days before Adobe Creative Suite ever existed, get ready for history to play itself out all over again: Adobe is switching versioning nomenclature and will now be using CC instead of CS.

So, for example, the next version of Photoshop will be Photoshop CC, not Photoshop CS6.

The “CC” stands for Creative Cloud, Adobe’s new paradigm for delivering and upgrading software that enables for creativity, collaboration, and a sense of community among like-minded professionals across the creative industries.

The rebranding isn’t just a change in name only, however. Adobe is shifting everything about its business, from how it collects software fees and licenses its products to how often its features get updated within the various apps.

There are a lot of big changes coming, but for Adobe to continue to maintain its dominant position in the evolving world of design, those changes are necessary.

“The writing is on the wall for where Adobe is headed, but people are surprised we’re going all in as soon as we are,” Adobe marketing director Scott Morris told VentureBeat in a conversation last week.

“That’s the direction things are heading. This model lets us meet the new world way better than the old model ever would have.”

Read on for more details on how the new Creative Cloud paradigm might impact your finances (for better or for worse), and the new features you’ll be seeing rolled out ever more quickly.

Image credit: Adobe

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Learn-to-code company Treehouse has just told us it’s teaming up with CodePen to pop the hood on the Internet so all y’all can dig around and learn by hacking.

“Treehouse students can now update and play with projects from Treehouse on CodePen,” a Treehouse rep wrote via email.

“Clicking on the View Code Playground button on any Treehouse course covering HTML and CSS lets students see the source for that project and modify it however they want. We know that exploring and modifying code is one of the best ways to master markup, so this tool will be a huge help to our students as they learn.”

Here’s a bit of what it looks like:

“We’re really excited to work with CodePen to help people remix and share the work they’re doing on Treehouse,” said Treehouse founder Ryan Carson in an email exchange. ”A major part of development and design is taking existing technologies and combining them and tweaking them in new ways, and the new code playground feature on Treehouse will help students practice do exactly that.”

Treehouse students can use the CodePen sections to hack around in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files for various projects on the service.

CodePen is an independent tool that calls itself a “playground for the web’s front-end.” CodePen was built by Wufoo’s first three dev/design hires, Alex Vazquez, Tim Sabat, and Chris Coyier.

Image credit: Shutterstock

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FeedHenry is yet another company that wants to help you, the modern developer, quickly build mobile apps for iOS, Android, and mobile web.

But it’s such a profitable, popular space that even in a crowded market, this startup managed to secure a healthy $9 million round of investment capital.

FeedHenry offers enterprise-grade mobile development solutions as well. The company says its platform lets devs build HTML5 and web-native hybrid apps through a web-based “studio.” Then, the apps can be deployed to iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone devices, as well as mobile web. The company also supports tools for native iOS and Android development.

In addition to pure development tools, the startup offers backend-as-a-service features like security and storage; analytics and user management; and cloud deploy options.

Oh look! A video case study!

Today’s funding was led by Intel Capital with participation from existing investors Kernel Capital, VMware, and Enterprise Ireland, and new investor ACT Venture Capital. A previous seed round of around $1 million or less took place in mid-2011.

FeedHenry is based in Waterford, Ireland, with offices in Burlington, Mass. The startup was founded in 2010.

Myles Recny looked in the face of Twitter yesterday and said, “You should shut my company down.” Now, the social network is in talks with Recny about the app he claimed was “better than Twitter Ads.”

“Twitter reached out to me, as has the ad team at one of the other big social networks, and we’re trying to work something out,” Recny said today, in an interview with VentureBeat.

His app, Followgen, uses Twitter’s application programming interface to automate “favoriting” people’s tweets. A company signs up with Followgen and decides on a target market. The app finds relevant Twitters users and favorites some of their tweets. If all works according to plan, the person will be pleased at having a tweet favorited and then, in turn, follow the company’s Twitter profile.

Recny considers this a form of advertising. Instead of serving impressions, he’s serving favorites that convert into follows. And that’s why he wrote that Twitter should shut him down: His app may violate Twitter’s terms of service.

However, he believes that if he had legitimate access to Twitter’s special advertising API, he could make money for both companies.

“It’s been kind of an emotional roller coaster. I’ve been having uncertainty whether what I was doing was white hat or black hat in regards to Twitter’s Terms of Service,” said Recny.

Twitter has a habit of shutting companies like his down, particularly when they encroach on its business model. Instead of waiting for the inevitable, Recny explained to me that he tried to contact Twitter first by applying for the special API two months ago. He then reached out through friends who knew Twitter big wigs. Both attempts failed.

Only after he wrote the blog post yesterday did the social network get in touch with Recny.

“We both know how the dev ecosystem feels about Twitter right now, and it’s not a positive sentiment, is it?” said Recny. “People feel that their API access can be turned off for any reason. People feel like there’s no trustworthy channel in which to get in contact with Twitter.”

He says Followgen customers can expect one of three outcomes:

1. Twitter will yank Followgen’s API access and he will have to shut down the company.
2. Twitter will yank Followgen’s “favoriting” business, but give Recny its Ads API access to build something that will be mutually beneficial.
3. Twitter and Followgen will figure out a revenue sharing partnership and keep both the favoriting product and a new Ads API-supported product on the market.

That last one, even Recny admits, is highly unlikely. But Recny is not without options. Twitter and the mysterious second social network could be interested in him as an employee on their ads teams.

We asked Recny if Facebook was the second social network to get in touch with him. He replied, “Would no comment be a comment?”

He leaves the experience having learned about the struggles of not only working with Twitter, but working with yourself. He says he would not recommend the solo-founder route, and would find a co-founder next time around. Or, at least, a co-working space with people he enjoys.

Twitter image via Andreas Eldh/Flickr

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It may have been a while since you’ve heard the name _why. Or why the lucky stiff. Or Jonathan Gillette, the given name of the celebrated Ruby programmer/writer/cartoonist who completely erased his online presence in 2009.

Five years later, his site came back online with a cryptic, one-line puzzle: Public Print Queue SPOOL/DESOLEE 2012-01-06T08:21Z. Yesterday, it began posting a series of printer SPOOL commands. Today, the site is once again offline, reduced to a boilerplate GitHub 404 page.

The commands, as a handful of _why-chasers found out, printed out a series of PDFs: essays, both typed and handwritten, drawings, explanations, photo-copied book pages, manifestos, and scribbled side notes. We’ve embedded the full text below and highly recommend you read it.

It’s not an easy read, and it’s even a bit unsettling in places, but it’s worth reading.

When _why disappeared the first time around, he made it clear through friends that he was mentally and physically fine but simply wanted to be left alone. His reappearance, cryptic messages, strange publication, and disappearance again are causing some folks to wonder whether the one-time hacker still maintains the same desire.

Were the PDFs just a creative outlet? A cry for help? A diversion? A trick?

Like so many other works of literature and art, the creator isn’t able to tell us, so we have to interpret what we can the best we can — or simply enjoy these writings for what they are.

Collected PDFs of _why

hat tip: weird-future/Medium

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After a year of promises and hints, Yahoo is finally giving consumers a glimpse of its future: beautiful apps, modern design, and full participation in the future of mobile computers.

Today, the company launched two new apps, a tablet experience for the ever-popular Yahoo Mail and an iOS stunner for Weather. Both applications show a night-and-day shift in how Yahoo works. Information is pared down to the essentials. Each page is perfectly suited to the screen size and use case at hand.

And, as we learned in a call with Yahoo mobile and emerging products director Marco Wirasinghe and senior director Lee Parry this morning, both apps are a great indicator of where Yahoo is headed: into a much cooler future where it makes gorgeous apps instead of cluttered homepages.

“You’re gonna see us do a lot more things that are visual, rich, and have engagement that’s absolutely delightful,” said Wirasinghe.

‘You don’t need a weatherman …’

Visually rich is a great way to describe the new Yahoo Weather app for the iPhone. It uses Flickr community images to illustrate the weather in glorious, full-screen color rather than a boring table of temperatures with some tired pop-meteorology icons.

“It’s more than charts and numbers; it’s about places you’ve been, places where you have family. It’s connected to emotion, and visually, we can get to that connection faster than any other format,” said Wirasinghe.

“The idea [for using Flickr photos] came from internal meetings,” Wirasinghe said. “We were looking for something to do with Weather. It’s the most profound daily activity on a smartphone, but we didn’t have an experience that made it really shine. We asked what would be delightful and what do people really want.”

Also, getting the development team working on the app to work in a new way — a more collaborative way — was instrumental in making the app better.

“What you’re seeing now is the combined efforts of design and engineering and product all sitting within ten feet of each other and working in a very agile and dedicated way,” Wirasinghe said.

Leaning back into Mail

Today’s other launch was Yahoo Mail for iPad and Android tablets. One of the company’s most-used apps, Yahoo Mail has been getting facelifts for its other incarnations lately. But the tablet app took that redesign a step farther.

“We wanted to start by looking at how users use tablets,” Parry said. “Our competitors were shoehorning the same interfaces into a tablet screen. They weren’t making the most of the larger interfaces.”

Internally, the Mail team talked about their own tablet email use. They were checking in on their inboxes over the weekend; they were reading a ton of messages but not writing many. As it turned out, their users were doing pretty much the same thing, the data would show.

“We wanted to make that better for them,” Parry continued. “On the fullscreen stuff, we looked at how people read on tablets — browsers, news readers, photo apps. There’s a pattern of swiping through pages. And in fullscreen mode, we wanted to re-create that light, airy experience.”

It’s a lean-back way of reading email that works for a larger form-factor in a more casual, living-room-couch use case. But it’s also indicative of Yahoo’s future plans for its other apps.

The right design for the right device

“I’m really loving what we released today,” Parry said with more than a hint of smile in his voice. ”Mail definitely aligns to our priorities, the user experience on performance and on design. If we can focus on those to each of the daily habits Yahoo has a strong presence in, we can really improve the lives of our users.”

Mobile design, Wirasinghe said, “is an evolving exercise for us. When it comes to design, we have to look at the medium, the device. We have the content, which varies from each daily habit, and we have to think about the user experience. behind all of it. … It really comes down to taking full advantage of the really great screens [on mobile devices].”

Parry and Wirasinghe also talked about Yahoo’s tentative, hypothetical plans for newer devices and prototypes, suggesting that a Flickr or Weather app for Google Glass or Apple’s iWatch might be in the works, as well. Read the rest of our interview on VentureBeat.

Image credit: yodelanecdotal/Flickr, acme/Flickr, and Yahoo

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Facebook has just unwrapped the latest version of its mobile SDK for iOS as well as some new features for its mobile tools. Reps for the company are calling these changes “the next evolution” of the company’s mobile-first strategy.

The new tools should, the company says, make it easier for mobile developers to play around with Open Graph features on smartphones and tablets. The SDKs also bring better tools for implementing Facebook Login.

Also, the company has announced a new program to help and promote the building of Facebook-integrated mobile apps. Called the Facebook Technology Partner program, it contains a list of SDKs and other developer tools built by Facebook and its partners — companies like Kinvey, Corona Labs, Parse, Sencha, and Adobe’s PhoneGap.

The Facebook SDK for iOS 3.5 is available today. It includes a new API for handling Open Graph objects without having to host webpages with Open Graph tags, a new Sharing dialog that works more smoothly with Open Graph actions, and an improved native login UX.

Finally, stats! Facebook reps told us via email that 81 percent of the top grossing 100 iOS apps and 70 percent of the top grossing 100 Android apps use Facebook in some way. For games, those numbers are slightly higher at 82 percent for iOS and 75 percent for Android.

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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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LinkedIn has just launched the latest versions of its mobile apps, and in a stunning reversal, it’s gone from mobile web-based apps back to fully native.

Less than a year ago, the company was touting its iPad app as fully mobile-web based, with just one screen, the homescreen, running natively. Now, all that’s gone, as is some of the optimism about the current capabilities of the mobile web.

In a revealing chat with Kiran Prasad (pictured), LinkedIn’s senior director for mobile engineering, we learned exactly why — and it’s not what you think. Prasad said performance issues weren’t causing crashes or making the app run slowly. What he did say shows that HTML5 for the mobile web still has a bright future — but only if developers are willing to build the tools to support it.

Related HTML5 coverage:

PRO: 90 percent of developers plan to use HTML5 this year.

CON: 80 percent of people’s mobile time is spent in apps, not the browser.

Here’s the bulk of our chat with Prasad on engineering topics around the new apps:

VentureBeat: [interrupting interview about the app launch] Wait, let’s go back a second. Did you just say these apps are native? Isn’t that the exact opposite of where you guys were philosophically the last time we talked about mobile?

Prasad: We have definitely shifted from HTML5 to native. The primary reason for that is, we’re seeing that more and more people are spending more time in the app, and the app is running out of memory. It’s not performance issues, like speed or rendering, but it’s still a big problem.

The second reason we’ve gone native is trying to get some of the animations — the spinners and the way they work — getting that smoothness, we felt like we needed native to really do that well.

VentureBeat: Does this mean that LinkedIn is giving up on developing mobile web apps or working with mobile web technologies?

Prasad: The way we built our system, we used template JSONs. We always have to support HTML5 because so much of our traffic comes from email. When we were [serving] a smaller group [of users], we were hoping we could duplicate all that mobile web work to make our clients faster in terms of code deploys. It worked really well when mobile only made up 8 to 10 percent of traffic. … I’m not sure I could have predicted it, but we recognize now that HTML5 is not allowing us to do the best for our users.

VentureBeat: So what would it take for mobile web technologies to meet the needs of a company like LinkedIn and with apps as widely used as yours?

Prasad: There are a few things that are critically missing. One is tooling support — having a debugger that actually works, performance tools that tell you where the memory is running out.

If you look at Android and iOS, there are two very large corporations that are focused on building tools to give a lot of detailed information when things go wrong in production. On the mobile web side, getting those desktop tools to work for mobile devices is really difficult.

The second big chunk we are struggling with is operability, runtime diagnostics information. Even now, when we build HTML5, we build it as a client-side app. It’s more of a client-server architecture. … The operability of that, giving us information when we’re distributed to a large volume of users, there aren’t as many great tools to support that, as well.

[Prasad also noted that dev and ops tools for solving issues quickly "don't exist."]

Because those two things don’t exist, people are falling back to native. It’s not that HTML5 isn’t ready; it’s that the ecosystem doesn’t support it. … There are tools, but they’re at the beginning. People are just figuring out the basics.

Image credit: Kirin Prasad/Twitter

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Great news for Japanese developers: Twilio has been working with Japanese telecom giant KDDI, and today, the two entities are co-releasing a new API just for communications in Japan.

Twilio for KWC* gives developers the full Twilio bag of tricks, now with full integration with Japanese carriers and telecoms. And yes, all the documentation has been translated into Japanese, too.

*KWC is a wholly owned subsidiary of KDDI focusing on cloud technologies. Up until today, KWC had offered developers a product called boundio, a communications API that the company shut down yesterday to make room for the new Twilio partnership.

Twilio started offering multi-language support last summer; Japanese language support was part of that launch. Japan was also a major part of the company’s internationalization plans announced late last fall.

Twilio was founded in 2007 and is based in San Francisco. To date, the startup has taken around $33.5 million in venture capital over three institutional rounds.

Image credit: Twilio

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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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Developer outfit Nitrous.io has raised a small but crucial round of funding to support the further development of its IDE (integrated development environment).

Nitrous.io (previously Action.io) enables developers write (and fix) code from any web browser. It’s an idea that’s been floating around for a while, and many founders have executed it with varying degrees of success in the past.

Here’s a quick demo:

Right now, the product is free. Pricing for pro features has yet to be announced. Currently, Nitrous supports Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, Node.js, and Go. More languages and technologies are expected to be added soon.

“Founders Peter Jihoon Kim, AJ Solimine, and Arun Thampi came up with the idea for Nitrous.IO when having trouble keeping their own development environments in sync across their team and on both their home and work computers,” a company rep wrote in an emailed statement.

“They wanted a way for anyone on the team to be able to jump into the codebase immediately without having to wrestle with updating software packages or installing new libraries.”

The startup has offices in San Francisco and Singapore. Part of the new funding will be used to hire (specifically, a generalist and a dev-ops person).

Today’s cash infusion was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Draper Associates, TIBCO Software, Facebook Co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Golden Gate Ventures, and several others.

Image credit: Shutterstock/leedsn

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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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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

There seem to be a lot of assumptions flying around about AppGratis.

Last week Apple approved the company’s app-discovery app, then abruptly reversed course over the weekend and pulled it. Sources at Apple that I’ve talked to at Apple say that it violated two app store guidelines: being too similar to the app store, and using push notifications for marketing.

AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski takes Apple’s word at face value, stating “AppGratis did both of these things.” Ars Technica’s senior Apple editor Jacqui Cheng states very baldly in a tweet: “AppGratis *yet again* shows that if people get away with rulebreaking once, they assume it’s endorsed.”

Really? I’m not so sure.

These are the rules that Apple said AppGratis violated, and which Apple is using to justify its ouster:

2.25: Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected

5.6: Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind

Too similar to the app store

So let’s look at 2.25. The guideline does not say that “apps that display apps other than your own for purchase or promotion” will be rejected. It says that app that do such things AND do them in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.

Can anyone really tell me with a straight face that consumers really would get confused between AppGratis, an app that features one app a day, and the app store? As AppGratis CEO Simon Dawlat puts it, after some initial confusion in October of 2012, Apple didn’t think so either:

We were able to make a strong point on the fact that AppGratis had nothing in common with the App Store. The App Store is a 1M+ hosted app catalog. AppGratis is like a media reviewing one Apple product a day like thousands of other sites, blogs, and apps on this planet – dramatically different mechanics. We got OK-ed on this one, since our app was later approved (and has been live for months).

Note that Apple agreed with AppGratis that it was not too similar to or confuse-able with its own app store. Note that Apple ended up approving that app. And also note that this 2.25 guideline was introduced in September of 2012, before Apple ended up approving the app.

“It’s very subjective … it’s how you look at it, and you can interpret it in different ways,” Readdle co-founder Denys Zhadanov, who makes a scanner app for iPhone and iPad, told me today via Skype.

Push notifications

The second guideline that Apple is using to kick AppGratis is 5.6. And exactly the same problem applies.

Apple says that AppGratis used push notifications for marketing purposes, and the guideline states that the notifications cannot contain “advertising, promotions, or direct marketing.” That would seem to indicate something like “buy this” or “App XYZ is now available for free.”

Again, AppGratis CEO Simon Dawlat says he doesn’t advertise:

Yet another surprise for us since we only send one “system notification” a day to our users, coming in the form of a generic, opt-in only “Today’s deal is here!” message, which is precisely how Apple recommends developers to use its push notification service.

Is that advertising or direct marketing? It’s certainly a notification, but it’s not specifically promoting an app or advocating a download or asking for a sale.

Again, it’s up for grabs for interpretation, and it’s something that many developers have to wrestle with, including Readdle, which had notifications but then removed them.

“We personally don’t use push notifications, although we have 12 million users, and I’d love to,” Zhadanov told me.

He’s just decided that given the ability of different people and different organizations to interpret the same things in different ways, it’s just too risky to include them.

So what’s really going on here?

Sources close to Apple told me that apps like AppGratis challenge the app store top charts’ legitimacy, since they can be “gamed” by hundreds of thousands of downloads delivered almost literally overnight. Zhadanov agrees:

“For end-users, AppGratis is a great app, but Apple is a bit concerned how apps can influence the top charts,” he said. “AppGratis has grown too big – every app they promote zooms to the top of the free charts in the Apple app store.”

In a sense, that’s a shot for the little guy … the small developer who doesn’t have the big bucks for the big marketing campaign. In another sense, it just means that advertising and promotion need to happen entirely outside the app ecosystem, and big brands and big companies with big pockets will spend elsewhere to get the promotion and publicity they need to drive downloads.

So there’s a positive side to this story.

But there’s also a very dark side here, which is that subjective interpretations of Apple’s guidelines can determine whether your app sinks or swims, and therefore whether your company lives or dies, and whether your investment of time, money, and sweat is rewarded or wasted.

AppGratis may have violated Apple guidelines, and it may not have. It’s very much up to interpretation and opinion. And very obviously, having first approved and then within days rejecting AppGratis, even Apple doesn’t have the same opinion all the time about the same app.

And, to beat that dead horse yet a little more, the guidelines are — real shocker coming — guidelines. Not rules. Not laws. Not regulations. Which means that Apple reserves for itself the ability to judge what goes and doesn’t. And to change it’s mind whenever it wants.

“It’s not a secret that some guidelines are voluntarily too vague,” app-maker Nuage Touch co-founder Thomas Castel told me via email. “They allow Apple to remove the apps that bother them.”

It’s got that right … iOS is its own platform, and dances to the beat of Apple’s drummer.

But as a developer, how can you build a business on that?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

AppGratis CEO Simon Dawlat spoke out today about his flagship app being pulled from the iOS app store. And what he has to say should make every developer very, very nervous.

One week ago, Apple approved his app. Two days ago, Apple banished AppGratis from the iOS app store.

It’s hard to overstate or overemphasize that previous statement. It’s hard to express the confusion that such a reversal causes. It’s hard to understand how Apple can expect to treat developers who invest millions of dollars in apps that benefit Apple’s platform and not have a reaction that comes back and bites them where it hurts.

This is not some simple app with one developer in Tajikistan. This is an app with 12 million regular users, built by an international company with 45 employees, that is driving massive user engagement and additional downloads from Apple’s top competitive possession, the iOS app store.

So how did it happen, according to Dawlat?

Apple said yesterday that the app violated two app store guidelines. In addition, Dawlat said today that there was a third that Apple did not mention. Simply put, the three were: too many apps, too simple an app, and too close a similarity to the app store.

Dawlat explains how the company solved each one prior to its iPad app receiving approval last week:

1. Consolidate: Combine all of its country apps into a single major app to address iOS guideline 2.20 (too many versions of similar apps).
2. Demonstrate: AppGratis had to demonstrate its complex intelligence that matches apps to users based on multiple criteria to address iOS guideline 2.12 (too simple an app). (This is pretty funny in an app store with fart apps, by the way.)
3. Differentiate: AppGratis had to to make the case that its app is not similar to the app store and would not be confused for the app store … pretty simple to do for an app that features one app a day versus hundreds of thousands in multiple categories. This addressed iOS guideline 2.25 (too similar to the app store).

When AppGratis successfully addressed those issues, Dawlat says, Apple approved its iPhone app in November 2012. And again, Apple approved its iPad app just last week.

And then Apple completely reversed course two days ago.

As Dawlat tells it, he had extensive contact with a particular app store reviewer for months who guided AppGratis through app store approval, suggesting changes and updates and ways to meet the app store guidelines. Then, a few days after approval, a different app store reviewer seems to have gotten the file. The new reviewer tried to call Dawlat three times on Friday — he was on an airplane — and pulled the app on Sunday due to guideline 2.25 (too similar to the app store).

In addition, the reviewer said, AppGratis violated guideline 5.6, which bans developers from sending advertising, promotions, or direct marketing via push notifications. That was a shock, Dawlat says:

Yet another surprise for us since we only send one “system notification” a day to our users, coming in the form of a generic, opt-in only “Today’s deal is here!” message, which is precisely how Apple recommends developers to use its push notification service.

Dawlat finally had a conversation with the new reviewer Monday, and he says that the Apple employee “seemed very detached regarding the gravity of the situation.”

In my own conversation with people close to the situation at Apple, I have been told that AppGratis was sending too many push notifications and that it impinged on the app store functionality. But the key issue for Apple is neither of those two issues.

Instead, the key issue is AppGratis’ astonishing success.

AppGratis is an app-discovery platform. It’s so successful at helping users find new apps that in some cases it drives 500,000 installs in a single day. Recently, as it has been growing, that’s up to over a million daily installs. And even now, while it’s no longer available on the app store, AppGratis is still on 12 million iOS users’ phones, and it still drove millions of downloads over the weekend, Dawlat said.

Those massive numbers skew download counts, Apple believes, in a way that is not good for the app store top charts and therefore not for organic app discovery via the tool Apple has built for that very purpose: the app store itself. And AppGratis, of course, is getting paid for featuring those apps, which Apple seems to have a problem with.

Dawlat says he’s down but not defeated, and that this is “far from finished.”

But the source I chatted with at Apple suggested that the company won’t change its tune on this one, and that while AppGratis is welcome to resubmit, there’s not a lot of hope.

Which means, once again, that any business you build on iOS rests on the shaky foundation of an app reviewer’s decision … and sudden shifts in Apple corporate policy.

This will not be popular:

Apple, the ecosystem dictator: pulls popular AppGratis from the store, to constrain app discovery bit.ly/Y52Ws5 /via @fredmartinent

— Andreas Constantinou (@andreascon) April 7, 2013

photo credit: Joelk75 via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Whenever you install an app on your Android phone from Google Play, the app developer gets your name, email address, and neighborhood. Microsoft thinks that’s an egregious breach of consumer privacy, and it published a new video today on Scroogled that hits Google hard.

“Most app makers are trustworthy,” the ad says. “However, in the wrong hands, who knows what they’ll do with your info?”

The question is a valid one, and Microsoft is quick to mention that downloading and installing apps on Windows Phone does not result in personal information being shared. Apple’s app store handles purchases and downloads the same way, with purchasers’ names, email addresses, and detailed locations remaining private.

The difference appears to be that Google views its Play store as a marketplace rather than a store, in which you are purchasing from the developer, not specifically from Google. In other words, it’s eBay, not Amazon. I’ve asked Google for additional comment.

There’s no question that Microsoft’s attack is a little over the top, paired with a big scary question: “If you can’t trust Google’s app store, how can you trust them for anything?”

But there’s also no question that this is a privacy concern Google should address.

I’ve downloaded many apps from Google Play, and I’ve never once seen or noticed any notification that my personal information would be passed along to the app developers (which could entirely be due to my own lack of attention, or general click-through warnings behavior).

Consumer Watchdog has complained to the FTC about Google’s practice, saying:

“To no one’s surprise … Google has violated the Buzz Order yet again – and this time in a most substantive and egregious manner, by giving personal and closely held information from tens (if not hundreds) of millions of Android users to independent and unrestrained application developers, in contravention of Google’s own stated privacy policy … This represents the fifth significant misuse of confidential user data by Google in the last three years (previously, the “Wi-Spy” scandal, the Google Buzz fiasco, Google’s improper combining and use of personal data, and the Safari Hacking episode).”

I’ll update with Google’s response as I receive it.

Hey devs! If you’ve got decent coding skills and a desire to give back to the community, we’ve found an interactive flowchart that’ll show you some of the ways you can contribute your time to Mozilla projects.

Called What Can I Do For Mozilla, the site lets you choose from a few web languages — JavaScript, C, Java, PHP, and Python, to name a few — then directs you to the Mozilla projects needing contributors with those skills.

Most languages have multiple related projects for would-be contributors to consider, and each end option links to the project page.

Check ‘er out:

Basically, we all know that open-source software is a good thing, and we all know that good people give back to the communities from which they themselves take inspiration and tools. This site just makes it really easy to start following through on those values.

The site was created by University of Waterloo computer science student Josh Matthews. Matthews himself has contributed to a fair number of open-source projects, from Greasemonkey scripts and C IDEs to Firefox mods and JRuby.

Image credit: Shutterstock

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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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Developers have a reputation.

The word “developer” evokes an image that has become synonymous with someone that writes code. As someone who codes, I am well aware of the most common images and words that people think of when they learn that, yes, I am a developer.

However evolving, these reputations have followed many developers into their day job, and employers end up benefiting solely from the skills that their coders brought to new hire orientation.

In Silicon Valley and elsewhere, developer talent is scarce, particularly for companies that are not “the” social network or named after a fruit. But when companies do find, recruit, and hire the talent, most aren’t taking the right steps to empower their developer talent to learn, grow and thrive.

Few companies truly harness and empower developer talent, but there are a few ways that any company can start.

Remove roadblocks.

Maximize the time developers spend doing their job by minimizing productivity barriers. Minimizing the time it takes to onboard or spin up a new hire, find key resources, or overcome paperwork increases productivity and focus.

Also, investing in tools that make developers more productive increases loyalty and productivity.

Make existing code open and centralized.

Use a GitHub repository, and list it for the company to see and obtain access to. The web based collaboration tool allows for code reviews and team management and serves as a good way to get newbies spun up.

Let them compete!

Employees like to be rewarded for the talent, and running internal development contests that boast prizes is a fun and effective way to recognize undiscovered talent.

Contests don’t just need to be internal, employees should be encouraged to participate in hackathons and coding contests. Public competitions allow developers to learn new skills, master existing talent and interact with peers.

Break down group barriers.

Focus on internal team infrastructure to ensure that it’s not split up into groups. The collective knowledge of any group is more powerful than a single employee and developers are no different.

Encourage interaction and group projects so employees don’t feel pigeonholed into a specific area.

Coding in a vacuum isn’t productive and the quickest way to lose talent. Highly technical groups don’t need to be treated much differently than others and thrive in collaborative environments.

Developers are people too, you know.

Dave Messinger is the CTO of CloudSpokes, a crowdsourcing development community and marketplace that matches companies who need cloud development work with a worldwide community of cloud experts.

Image credit: Shutterstock

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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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Chances are you’ve read something, somewhere, about the increasing number of security breaches in web applications. Hackers are targeting these applications due to the amount of sensitive business (and personal) data they control. “Hacktivism” isn’t just a buzzword — groups of thousands of hackers are determined to take down organizations, which are targeted for reasons only the attackers themselves understand. Yet they are serious about it. And it’s time you become serious about it too.

Most organizations don’t think about application security until after the application has been designed and architected. They may layer on security testing after the application is developed. They may decide to test the application in its run time state, just before it goes to production. Some even test it after it’s in production. There are many high-profile companies that do this; you can read all about them (and the corresponding security breaches in their applications) in the latest news headlines.

To put the root cause of this issue bluntly, there’s a disconnect between security and development that can lead to serious security vulnerabilities down the road. Developers aren’t security experts, and most security experts aren’t developers. There needs to be a better mutual understanding — and earlier cooperation — between the two parties to better eradicate security issues.

Focus on software quality early and often

Usually, Quality Assurance (QA) is an “after process,” or something that happens late in the development cycle. A project that spans 180 days or more may get a 20-day cycle to perform QA testing–and security might get just three of those days.

This creates several problems, since QA and security are then testing a completely configured application that meets the functional specifications of whatever business unit ordered the application. This can pose a serious issue, since it’s the developers that need to fix the problems.

And herein lies the rub: by the time these problems are flagged, the developers have probably closed the project, been paid for meeting the deadlines and specifications of the application and moved on to another project. Re-architecting completed applications to meet new security concerns is likely not at the top of their list.

Engage devs with security issues sooner

So what exactly does “developer-first” security mean?

Developer-first security means ensuring that the people that know the most about the application, with the most amount of time and the most incentive to get the application right, actually get the application right!

They can’t be expected to think about all these things at the end of the development cycle, once they’ve moved on to another project. Their processes are all incremental and cumulative (not really an oxymoron!) — and testing has to be, as well.

Most folks have heard that developers resist security–that they don’t have the time, knowledge or understanding to do all of the requisite legwork, and create a great application at the same time. If you were developing a product and forced to tear it apart at the same time, you would likely feel the same way.

Seems logical, right?

Well, there’s more than meets the eye here. How can you expect developers to be testing or security experts, when the testing experts aren’t development experts?

It seems that most of the security companies out there have had “Year of the Developer” or Cross Site Scripting (XSS) eradication campaigns. Guess what? We’re reaching fewer developers and there are more flaws out there. Some of these flaws have been around for 15 or more years. Yet these campaigns continue to fail because organizations aren’t engaging development in an understandable manner.

Learn and speak the language

This isn’t to suggest quid pro quo here. Instead, testing experts should make a greater effort to understand how an application is developed. Give the developers requirements in a manner that they understand, using processes and technology purpose-built for development to test the quality and security of the application—and the underlying software code.

Don’t add something to a project once they’re done, and don’t expect them to be something they’re not. Test the code they write as they write it, and give them the defects in a manner they’re familiar with, either on a daily basis or as they complete their assignments (e.g. code check-in). And give them specific guidance on how to fix the issue in language they understand and in the context of their code.

That’s why more organizations need to switch over to testing that starts with developers—aka, “developer first” testing. They know more about the application than anybody else in a given organization, and can fix it in real time.

Adopt emerging best practices for dev-first security

While many organizations don’t typically think of application security as a functional business requirement, there are a number of growing companies that do.

What separates these organizations from others? They understand development. They can spare a smart developer to coach the team on QA or security. (Think embedded Security Evangelists!) And they employ a number of creative tactics to promote a developer-first approach to security, including training programs and internal incentives, from specialized titles (who doesn’t want to be a “Security Guru”?!) to contests that promote cooperation between development, QA, and security.

Organizations that adopt some or all of these methods will create better, more secure applications.

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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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Safety first, y’all!

GitHub Pages, those slick landing pages the code-hosting company lets you create for your latest and greatest projects, are moving to a new top-level domain. They will now live at GitHub.io.

“Why?!” you shriek in mock horror, realizing this isn’t that big a deal but still wanting to create a stir among your friends over brunch.

The short answer is “security.”

The long answer, from the GitHub blog, is, “This is a security measure aimed at removing potential vectors for cross domain attacks targeting the main github.com session as well as vectors for phishing attacks relying on the presence of the ‘github.com’ domain to build a false sense of trust in malicious websites. … From this point on, any website hosted under the github.com domain may be assumed to be an official GitHub product or service.”

If your GitHub Page has a custom URL, you can go back to your brunch; you have nothing to worry about and no steps to take to ensure the survival of your Page to the seventh generation.

If you do not have a custom URL, you still don’t really have anything to worry about, as GitHub will be taking care of automatic redirects from YourApp.GitHub.com to YourApp.GitHub.io for the foreseeable future.

Also not changed: The Pages IP address.

You may not resume your regularly scheduled brunching. Or whatever it is you’re doing right now. (For us, it’s Cinnabon-flavored coffee in a toasty warm bed with a small but lovable dog. Getting out of bed on the weekend is for suckers.)

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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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Facebook Home isn’t a mobile operating system. But normal users who buy or download the Home experience won’t know or care. They’ll suddenly have Facebook phones that look, feel, and behave totally different from Android phones.

And the answer to the question “What kind of phone do you have?” will be “Facebook.”

“In a lot of ways, this is a totally new type of phone,” said Facebook product designer Justin Stahl via email.

“Traditionally, phones and operating systems were designed with apps and tasks in mind. With this, we wanted to recreate the most social device you have around people.”

In a roundabout way, Facebook has gotten into the mobile OS game without actually building a mobile OS.

It’s kind of like what Google did with Chrome OS. They took a browser — a downloadable piece of software — and stuck it on top of an open-source operating system (Linux). They then distributed it on hardware, making it difficult for normal folks to see or use the core OS underneath their own software.

Now, Home doesn’t block a user from getting to the parts of Android they’re expecting to use. It just makes it a little bit more difficult. But the extra layer of software between the user and Android is significant enough to make it, in the eyes of the non-technical beholder, an entirely different animal.

In a recent interview with VentureBeat, Facebook product director Adam Mosseri said most users will think of Home as an OS, but this doesn’t matter too much (as it shouldn’t).

“It’s important that people understand it’s software, and they’ll understand because they can download it,” he said.

Here’s what Facebook home will look like on tablets.

“We didn’t think of it as being in the mobile OS game. People and content should be first, and we thought that needed to happen at a really deep level. Apps get in the way.”

So rather than a UI/UX paradigm that’s all about opening and closing apps, Facebook is serving something totally different. “If we can be a homescreen, we can get all that content and bubble up what’s most important to you,” said Mosseri. “It’s a new way to organize the information on your phone.”

And from the user side, all that new, beautiful organization, while it’s not technologically divorced from its less-organized roots, counts as a new operating system, if only from a look-and-feel perspective.

“Phones and computers have been designed for tasks and apps for decades, so we were thrilled to have the rare opportunity to shake things up, to build something personal and fun,” Stahl said.

Notifications appear in the center of the home screen on Facebook Home.

An OS for normalcy

When designing Home, Facebook’s designers, developers, and product team took the product into the real world for massive amounts of testing, making sure the interfaces and navigation controls would hold up under pressure.

“We looked at a million different use cases and tried to figure out the best way to solve each,” said Stahl. “What if you had only a few minutes while standing in line somewhere? What if you needed to quickly launch an app?”

While Stahl said that a lot of Home will be familiar enough, close enough to traditional mobile design, other elements will require users to abandon their comfort zones — row of tiny app icons, complicated widgets.

To compensate for Home’s departures from typical Android UIs, Stahl said, “We’ve tried to fill Home with moments of delight. The navigation is streamlined and intuitive, people get it right away. Immersive photos of you and your friends fill the screen. Objects move naturally and organically.”

And Stahl and Mosseri both pointed out how intentionally playful the interface and all its little details can be.

“We wanted to add an element of whimsy in there,” said Stahl. “Take Chat Heads, for instance. It allows you to keep conversations with your friends close at hand, but it’s also kind of delightful to move them around or fling them across the screen. We want this product to be as fun as it is useful.”

And for those moments when you encounter something too new, there’s Blues Clues, an internal name for coaching prompts that help new users find their way around the UI.

“They’re little tips to show you what you want to do,” said Mosseri. “This is something that grows on you, the more you use it the more you like it. We call it contextual help.” And, he said, the more features Home gets, the more clues you’ll see to guide you along.

Getting out of the way

The most interesting thing about Home is that it’s not, as others have called it, a lock screen. The phone it unlocked the minute you tap its button, and you’re immediately swimming around in your Facebook News Feed — but it’s bigger, brighter, prettier, and better than ever before.

There is no OS, there is no menu, no navigation. Just you and your friends and family, sharing jokes, pictures from the day, funny links, important moments.

“I love the moment you turn on your phone because it lights up with something amazing,” said Mosseri. “Having something meaningful show up the second I turn on my phone is by far my favorite part of the experience.”

Mosseri continued that since he started working at Facebook six years ago, minimalism has always been a guiding design philosophy: to get out of the way and let users find and enjoy their stuff.

“Now, back then, that meant small type, small icons, thin blue bars, and the content was a larger percentage of the page, but it wasn’t big,” he said. “Then our interfaces got more and more complicated. Now, we want to go back to those roots, to make content big and beautiful.

“And we want to take care of content better, to respect that content. Poeple care about people, not about Facebook. It’s an aesthetic but it’s also a design value.”

As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said over and over through the past few years, Facebook’s core goal is to connect the world, to make it more open to connections.

“That means pushing ourselves to design the best mobile experience across all platforms, to everyone on every phone,” said Stahl. “We’ll continue to innovate and create immersive products that speak to our core value of putting people first.”

Home isn’t just for phones

For our interview with Mosseri, we were sitting in a small room at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. The announcement of Home had been made some seven hours before. He was slated to do mini-chats with press and bloggers all day in a junket format and had been talking and talking, answering the same slew of questions over and over for hours on end.

But even that natural fatigue didn’t dim his obvious enthusiasm for the product he’d put so much time and effort into. In fact, he said, he is looking forward to seeing elements of Home popping up on non-mobile screens soon, as well.

“It’s a new step, a step forward, and you’ll see us move our other products forward as well.” He thinks of Facebook’s mobile side, which updates its apps every month or so, kind of like Facebook’s iTunes. “Every time Apple releases a new version of iTunes, that will influence the design of their other desktop apps,” said Mosseri. “There’s a lot of value there.”

So, what Homey touches can we expect to see in other Facebook experiences?

“Chat heads would be awesome in the Facebook app,” Mosseri said. “A lot of the design values — less chrome, better physics, bigger images, the way everything moves and feels natural — everything should feel this fast and fluid and simple, really. And so we’ll do it more and more.”

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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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We dubbed it “our Christmas,” the day when all our good engineering deeds would pay off and we’d be rewarded with a bounty of happy active users for our mobile app, Avocado.

Up until this point we’d enjoyed steady and predictable growth, but with only two weeks’ notice we realized a few big, coinciding promotions would bring us a 30x increase in traffic and a membership boom for which we weren’t yet prepared.

Scaling for a “Christmas” moment is scary; it forces you to confront all the design decisions you may have made earlier when bootstrapping your app. No matter what the hidden weaknesses are, a massive group of new users will find them.

With only two weeks, how could we scale our infrastructure to meet demand and not fall over?

Preparing for scale

This is a document of how we screwed up. And then how we fixed our screw-ups. Please learn from us.

At first, we thought we knew where our weak points were. Well, until we ran some tests and found our problems were in a completely different place.

We’ve been using Amazon’s Web Services. Here’s the initial configuration of our deployment:

1 frontend server (stored: API, web presence, socket.io, HAProxy, stunnel/SSL encryption)
1 Redis server
1 MySQL server
1 batch server (running miscellaneous daemons)

Our API server was using Node.js since it’s lightweight, fast, easy to code for, and has a large community with some solid libraries we use (and some we have written and shared).

Given the results of early tests and under limited resources and time, we understood where we needed to focus: new user signups — clearly our most complex process. We put our energies into finding the pain points and where the system would die if we had a sudden influx. This was an important business decision: You can let a few normal day-to-day activities fail, but you don’t want new user creation to fail.

Better testing

Smart scaling required us, as a wise man once said, to check ourselves before we irreparably wrecked ourselves. In other words, we tested, tested, and tested some more.

Early tests weren’t good enough so we created a replica environment: entire duplicates of our database and existing server and partitioned them off so nothing would affect our production environment. We ran through some common use cases like account creation as well as messaging and uploading images. We saw where Avocado failed and at what rates.

Pro Tip #1: We used much smaller EC2 instances in our test environment than in production. Not only does that provide limited resources all-around to more easily find problems, but it’s considerably cheaper as you pay for the amount of hardware you use on AWS.

Pro Tip #2: We built test scripts as well as used a tool called jmeter to simulate tens of thousands of user signups per minute.

Our testing process: Run the scripts, find weak points, re-run the scripts. We then experimented to see what would happen if, for instance, we added a second server or if we took advantage of all the CPUs on a given server.

We started to see things immediately. Any time we had thousands of users signing up at one time, things would grind to a halt and connections to Avocado would take ~30 seconds to complete.

What we discovered: Any time Node.js spawned off a separate process, the system would take a hit. At the time, we were spawning off a Python process to send verification emails and another for image resizes (required when a user uploads a photo to their activity stream). When that happened, we’d see a big ol’ CPU spike. We realized it was those processes that were slowing everything down.

Well, it was the processes. And the fact that we had everything on just one box.

We also noticed slow database query response times. We saw in the test environment that a handful of MySQL queries were showing up in MySQL’s slow query log (for instance, if we queried to see if a certain email address had received an invitation to join their “boo” on Avocado).

Pro Tip #3: MySQL query optimization can be something of a dark art but speeding up queries can be as easy as adding additional indexes to a couple tables.

One last thing: SSL encryption/decryption was a major load on the CPU as well, but we didn’t know to what degree it would impact the system under heavy user traffic in production.

What we changed after testing

Our first fix was to rewrite the email system, previously in Python, in Node.js so it wouldn’t need to call up another process. Moving to a node.js mailing library meant we could send 3x to 5x the number of emails in a period of time as it would take to call the external python program.

Next, we put stunnel (SSL encryption handler) and HAProxy onto their own EC2 server so we wouldn’t overload our core services.

We had a few possible solutions for the image resizing problem found in testing where spawning ImageMagick processes from node.js proved to be a huge resources hog. We explored the option of leveraging some faster libraries and third-party image resizing services.

But we ended up not rewriting any code or using any services. Either may have worked, but we didn’t want to do last minute code changes a day before our big promotion. So instead, we deployed four new EC2 instances whose sole purpose was image resizing. We took these down after the promotion.

Currently we’re back to just resizing images on our normal frontend servers (the servers that serve the API and Web page/client). For the future, we’d like to leverage a service that we can upload images to and request whatever size we want as we need them, thereby offloading the hardware intensive operation of image manipulation to someone else.

During “Christmas”

On the second day after “Christmas” began, we were woken up early in the morning by a notification that our server response times had slowed to a crawl due to traffic. The frontend server’s resources were maxed out. This, admittedly, was not our favorite way to start the weekend. #startuplife

We deployed a second frontend server and routed half the traffic to that server.

To review: At this point, we now had:

2 frontend servers
1 HAProxy/stunnel server
1 Redis server
1 MySQL server
1 batch server (running miscellaneous daemons)
4 image resizing servers

From that point onward, we kept an eye on servers and rolled out new EC2 instances as traffic increased. (We maxed out at 15 EC2 instances.)

Prior to adding all those servers, we came across another issue in testing that we waited to fix until we actually needed it: We realized that the larger EC2 instances had multiple CPUs available that would go mostly unused on our API servers due to the fact that node.js is single threaded. The HAProxy server was only pointed at one instance per box. We waited to deploy a fix because the solution was somewhat experimental — we didn’t want a “guess” to go to production. Yeah, it turns out we should’ve gambled on that guess.

All the while, whenever we would update the HAProxy configuration to handle our latest scaling solution, Avocado would go down for 1 to 2 seconds as our HAProxy restarted, thus loading the new config. Our next task was to create a redundant HAProxy server to prevent any down time.

In response, we used the Elastic Load Balancer to route traffic to the two HAProxy servers. The Elastic Load Balancer also handled the SSL encryption which took a huge load off of the proxy boxes. This allowed us to downsize the proxy boxes considerably, thus saving money in EC2 instance costs.

Everything seemed good. For, like, five minutes. Then there was socket.io.

We discovered our socket.io servers began to seriously eat up resources. Up to this point, we had a single socket.io server instance running on one of our two frontend servers. Which meant if we ever needed to update the frontend server, even if it had nothing to do with socket.io, our socket.io server would go down. It would only be a blip, but it’d still result in downtime. Downtime = sad users.

Scaling socket.io to multiple servers is tricky because if a user is connected to one socket.io server, they need to stay connected to that same one for the entire session – another socket.io server won’t have their credentials if they’re suddenly moved. So, we used something called “sticky sessions” to keep users connected to the same server for the life of their session. (When you home screen the app, we close the socket.io connection, and when you open the app again, we create another socket.io connection for the user.) Sticky sessions sets a cookie for the life of the session so it knows what socket.io server to send you to every single time. HAProxy will see that cookie and send you to the right socket.io server.

On that note, we’d like to say that while WebSockets are the new hotness (and while socket.io takes advantage of it), mobile apps should be warned, Websockets will not work on some cellular networks worldwide.

Instead, we had to use XHR-polling with socket.io, which uses HTTP requests to simulate a real-time connection. Furthermore, Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer didn’t support WebSockets, so we had to use XHR-polling regardless.

Once that issue was resolved, we scaled out to two socket.io servers. After this initial scaling, we moved the socket.io server to its own box – inside of that we could have 8 socket.io servers (one per CPU), so we had a total of 16 instances of socket.io servers.

I’m sure at this point you’re saying, “16 socket.io servers?! You’re doing something wrong.” And in thinking that, you’d be right. So, we changed something else to improve our performance: database connection pooling.

Prior to this we had one connection to the database per server instance. Any time a process wanted to talk to our database it had to get in line. The process happened so quickly that the line wasn’t very long, but since we only had a single connection per server instance we ended up using a lot more resources than necessary.

For example, our socket.io servers were eating up 60 percent of the box’s CPUs across all 8 cores because of only having one connection to the database per socket.io server instance. When we added the connection pooling, we added anywhere from 2 to 10 connections to the database per server instance.

We didn’t do this connection pooling before mostly due to lack of time and because we didn’t want to make major changes to our database code with only three days before the promotion. The connection pooling meant that usage went from 60 percent of CPU to 3 percent. Response times were dramatically improved all around.

Going international

Our “Christmas” event took us global. And we hadn’t adequately prepared for that. Users in other parts of the world were connecting to our servers all the way in NorCal. And that meant sloooow connections. We have since launched servers throughout the world, relying on Amazon to route traffic based on latency.

And that’s all part of our…

Post-Christmas planning

We’re still in the afterglow of this growth and while things are slightly less hectic, we also have quite a few other big events planned, and each of those mean more scaling.

We expect to be using auto-deployment strategies. For example, Amazon will deploy new boxes automatically based on certain metrics, letting us deploy new servers when their average CPU usage exceeds a certain percentage.

One concern we’re talking about though: if you do auto-scaling wrong you might accidentally deploy 100 boxes… and then you’re paying for 100 boxes. So we’re cautiously proceeding here.

Biggest lesson learned: It would have been great to start the scaling process much earlier. Due to time pressure we had to make compromises –like dropping four of our media resizer boxes. While throwing more hardware at some scaling problems does work, it’s less than ideal.

Generally, it’s hard to know in advance what you’re going to need unless you know exactly what growth to expect. So plan for the worst, hope for the best, and good luck out there.

TL;DR: Plan ahead. Test your servers until they fall to pieces. Eat your veggies.

P.S. We’re hosting an Android Hack Night during Google IO this year; come by and chat us up if you want to learn more about what we did.

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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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Developers who are salivating at the chance to create apps for Google Glass were thrown a (small) bone today. Google released a video presentation of its Google Mirror API, which allows you to build “experiences” for the highly anticipated eyewear.

Google Glass is a headset that projects images into your line of sight, including text messages, photos, and other information. It can also take video and photos from your perspective.

The presentation, called “Building new experiences with Glass,” was first given at the SXSW conference on March 11 by Timothy Jordan, a Google developer advocate. The Google Mirror API is an application programming interface that allows developers to create apps on Google Glass. The company says that you’ll be able to code in any language of your choosing and that if you’ve already developed for YouTube, Drive, or Google+, you should “feel right at home.”

Google Glass most recently made headlines when the company started accepting people into its “Explorer Program.” People in the program can purchase Google Glass for $1,500, to be picked up at, thus far, undisclosed events around the country.

Developers accepted into the program are undoubtedly excited to get their hands on the headset and will be looking for ways to get started on creating for this device.

hat tip The Next Web; Google Glass photo via Google

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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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The free learn-programming-online site now has 11 modules and 86 lessons in all things PHP, from the basics and the standard if/else logic flow to arrays, functions, and advanced object-oriented programming.

“The future of programming is making a tool for people to demonstrate their creativity,” Codecademy founder and CEO Zach Sims told me a few months ago. “In 2013, we want to extend Codecademy’s reach and help people move beyond beginners.”

PHP is a good start, as the language is simple enough to let beginners get their feet wet while powerful enough to build world-class websites like Facebook. And with over five million PHP developers on the planet, new programmers would be joining perhaps the largest cohort of developers around, with plenty of code help, sample, code, and forums to help them progress beyond the basics.

And with Andi Gutmans and Co. at Zend focusing on bringing the power of PHP to blended mobile applications, PHP skills are helpful not only on the server but also in cloud-connected native app development.

PHP has been one of the most-requested languages for Codecademy to add to its coursework, Sims told me. Just three months ago, Codecademy launched API training with YouTube, NPR, Bit.ly, and six other partners. Now students have one more language, besides the already existing Javascript, HTML/CSS, Python, and Ruby to use them with.

Codecademy’s introduction to its PHP courses:

PHP is the world’s most popular server-side scripting language. Interested in processing form data from your website, creating HTML on the fly, handling cookies, or talking to a database? PHP’s got you covered.

Courses are created by the community. We’re launching PHP as a work-in-progress and we want you to help create the future of PHP instruction for people all over the world.

photo credit: CyberHades via photopin cc

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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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MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook has just unveiled Home, a beautiful new skin for Android phones. It’s gorgeous and comes with tons of innovative new features, but it just might be the death knell for developers whose Android apps don’t integrate with any of Facebook’s APIs.

Granted, the dang thing just was announced today and hasn’t even launched yet to the general public. But if it gains any significant traction, it stands to hurt developers who build for Android but not for Facebook.

“The result of their action is that some app developers are going to not be a part of the equation,” said Gartner research director Brian Blau during a chat at today’s event.

“If Home becomes popular — and that’s a big if — and those developers don’t use Facebook APIs, they’re going to lose out.”

In a word, the new Home interface is a rich overlay for the Android OS that puts all the device’s applications into a tidy drawer — basically, the typical Android app drawer, alphabetically organized as usual. But without the typical homescreen(s) and the “hotseat” bar of apps along the bottom of the screen, there are just fewer paths and more clicks between users and apps. And those little roadblocks add up.

“This puts those apps at a disadvantage to any of the features of functions Facebook is going to prioritize in the Home interface,” Blau.

“Home looks like an OS and acts like an operating system, but it’s not. It will still tend to take over your device. … all of a sudden, that is the primary interface. And that can’t be good for Google or for non-Facebook Android developers.”

Google has released friendly statements about today’s news, calling Home “a win for users who want a customized Facebook experience.” We’re still waiting to hear what the Android overseers will say about Home’s implications for Android third-party devs.

Notifications for non-Facebook apps will still appear on the homescreen of a user’s Home-running device; notifications will be prioritized by Facebook by their importance and timeliness. But if the user wants to get to your app any other way, she’ll have to swipe from the homescreen to the app drawer. Facebook reps say users will be able to customize the order of apps in the app launcher.

Right now, the homescreen contains a minimal number of options: You can swipe to go to Facebook, to Facebook Messages, or to the app drawer. A Facebook rep said an option for Facebook Photos is coming soon. And in that kind of UI, Facebook-integrated apps have a distinct advantage.

“They’re going to set up a way that gives apps of any type an advantage if they integrate Facebook Connect or Open Graph,” said Blau. “They haven’t announced an API for Home yet, but you can imagine that they could extend that functionality.”

As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated directly during today’s announcements, Facebook has no plans now or in the future to build its own fork of Android. “But I don’t think they need that to accomplish their goal,” said Blau.

“If you believe that personalization is a better user experience than the canned UI you get with BlackBerry or Windows Phone, then clearly Facebook is going to win. … The social context means every time you open it, it looks very different.”

So while Facebook moves the standard for mobile UIs forward a couple notch, it pushes developers by hook or by crook into wanting and needing Facebook integration. We’ve been hearing the social company say for years that it intends to become the very best distribution platform for mobile developers; today’s move seems like it’s turning that promise into a threat for some.

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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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Gnip, the company that gives big brands firehose-level access to social APIs, is today offering a new treasure trove of data. Six troves, actually.

The company said it will now be scraping public posts from a few important new sources and using APIs to give enterprise-level clients access to those posts and data. Services to be included are Instagram, Reddit, Bit.ly, Panoramio, Plurk, and Stack Overflow.

The company already serves up similar access for top-shelf online publishing tools like WordPress, Tumblr, and Twitter.

Now, before you go gettin’ creeped out about companies gettin’ all up in your social profiles, Gnip would like to remind you that a) this information is all publicly posted; and b) the brands in question aren’t really into reading up on the details of your personal life. Rather, they’d like to find trends in aggregated data to help them make business decisions.

For example, with Instagram, “Our customers have traditionally been very interested in geotagged social data, and between 15 to 25 percent of Instagram users geotag their photographs,” a Gnip rep wrote today on the company blog.

Here are a handful of other use case scenarios for the curious among you:

* Search for keywords to find brand mentions and current events.
* Access popular posts and conduct tag searches and geosearches.
* Monitor social activity around a given location.
* Track and understand trending content.
* Get warnings of impending PR crises, including service outages or bugs in the system.
* Monitor reputation and comments to get consumer feedback and ensure customers are satisfied.

“Four-and-a-half years ago, the company was founded on the idea that data would be insanely valuable, that people would do amazing shit with it,” said Gnip COO Chris Moody in a recent VentureBeat interview, “and we wanted to fuel all those applications.”

And of course, gaining access to and collecting all this information then turning it over to those who want it most has turned out to be a pretty profitable business.

“We spend all day every day talking to people who are finding goldmines in this data,” said Moody. “They’re so excited and they’re investing so much. Maybe we’re deceiving ourselves, but if that turned out not to be the case, we’d fold up and go home, because we were founded on the idea that data is valuable.”

Image credit: Shutterstock

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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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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Only 20 percent of American consumers’ time on mobile devices is spent on the web. A massive majority, 80 percent, is spent in apps: games, news, productivity, utility, and social networking apps.

Turns out, it’s an app world, after all.

According to app analytics firm Flurry, which tracks app usage on a staggering 300,000 apps on over a billion active mobile devices, we spend an average of 158 minutes each and every day on our smartphones and tablets. Two hours and seven minutes of that is in an app, and only 31 minutes is in a browser, surfing the old-school web.

A big chunk of that 158 minutes is taken up with games — 32 percent — but it’s almost shocking to see how much time a single app and a single company eats up. Eighteen percent of all the time that Americans spend on their phones is spent in the Facebook app, a figure that by itself dwarfs all other social networking apps.

Combined, the others only take up six percent of our time.

There was a time when developers thought HTML5 would kill the mobile app, with experts like Mike Rowehl saying things like: “We’ll forget that we even passed through another era of native apps on the way to the mobile web.”

In an interesting twist, however, HTML5 is actually being used more as a tool for cross-platform native app development. In fact, it’s now the number one choice for developers building apps for multiple platforms.

Flurry also says that people are now using more apps than ever, launching 7.9 per day in the last part of 2012 versus 7.5 per day in 2011 and 7.2 per day in 2010. Consumers are continuing to try new apps as well, with long-term users adding new apps regularly to their existing stack.

“We believe that with consumers continuing to try so many new apps, the app market is still in early stages and there remains room for innovation as well as breakthrough new applications,” Flurry says.

Is the mobile web dead?

Not necessarily — we’re only five years into this ongoing mobile revolution. But today, people are talking with their taps, and they’re overwhelmingly choosing apps.

If you ever wanted proof that Google+ is, in fact, not a social network but rather an all-in bid for your identity, here’s your pudding: mere weeks after the announcement of the Google+ login button, hundreds of major media outlets are using the Google+ button for their web and mobile user logins.

Today, Google is announcing that American Idol, Universal Music Group, Fox Broadcasting company, and hundreds of other partners are doing Google+-flavored sign-ins. The service had around 10 partners at its launch; now, through middleman-like service providers including Gigya and Janrain, it’s expanding its reach by an order of magnitude and then some.

And while those red login buttons will often sit next to other login options, they bring a few unique benefits — especially for partners with Android apps.

“They can put Google+ signup next to Twitter or Facebook or their own authentication,” said Google exec Seth Sternberg in a recent chat about the rollout. “There are lots of great advantages for the developer and the user, but it’s not a one-or-the-other choice. … You could connect with both, or make it single sign-on.”

The Android piece is particularly interesting. If you’re a publisher or developer with an Android app to promote, a Google+-authenticated user who is browsing around your desktop website will be prompted to download the Android app, too. Then, the user can opt to get an over-the-air install of the app without ever touching a smartphone.

As Sternberg said, “A lot of times, [people] are using a web application that they love, and they don’t even realize it has an Android app. It’s just not obvious. So we’ve made it easy to get an app onto your phone with one tap.”

The little red button, he concluded, takes around two weeks of dev time to get up and running — a timeframe that’s consistent with the time between the Google+ login launch and today’s news of massive expansion.

Here’s a demo of the login button in action:

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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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