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San Francisco startup Heroku has found a fresh approach to helping developers build and deploy applications from the popular Ruby on Rails programming framework. It’s the only company to combine automated deployment — in other words, you just upload the code onto your browser and it will go live on the web — with an exclusive focus on Rails, says co-founder James Lindenbaum. Even more exciting is a recently released feature that moves Rails development into the Internet cloud.

More and more services are leaping into the cloud, which promises to allow developers to create applications that are, in Lindenbaum’s words, accessible “on any device, any platform, anywhere”. Heroku already took a step in this direction when it launched in private testing last October. Initially, it just offered in-browser tools (see screenshot below) to simplify the development process, attracting developers who were interested in Rails but don’t have the technical chops to create an application from scratch, or who were just fed up with with the existing tools.

But if you’re an experienced developer, you’re probably not looking for a new interface. Lindenbaum says that until recently, most of those developers saw Heroku as little more than a toy. But now the company has released a feature that should tempt Rails veterans too — APIs that allow them to use whatever tools they want to edit their code once it’s been deployed on Heroku. For the first time, you can use any interface to edit a Rails application directly on the web, rather than rewriting the code offline, then uploading it to your host.

There’s plenty of competition to help Rails developers get their applications online, such as Rails hosting service Engine Yard, which announced a $3.5 million round of funding in January (our coverage). But Lindenbaum and Engine Yard chief executive Lance Walley both say there’s room for companies to fill many different niches.

Engine Yard nd Joyent offer service-oriented Rails deployment — namely, a support staff that will work with you to make sure everything goes smoothly — while Heroku is more technology oriented. Heroku’s three-person staff doesn’t have the manpower to hold the hand of every developer, but its focus on “one-click” deployment means that you can get your application online and running almost instantly. Service-oriented solutions have obvious advantages, but they also cost more and entail time-eating back-and-forth communication between developers and support staff.

Heroku doesn’t actually host its applications — that’s done on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Lindenbaum says the combination of Heroku’s technology and Amazon’s servers makes for a particularly stable solution.

It looks like there’s a demand for Heroku’s services. Sign-ups increased dramatically when Heroku announced some of its new services in February, with registration jumping from 2,500 to 7,000 users, who have created more than 5,000 applications. The company is now in talks for a possible first round of venture funding.

Heroku was one of the companies unveiled by incubator Y Combinator last year. We offered our thoughts on the most promising of a new batch of Y Combinator companies here.

VentureBeat Editor Matt Marshall and I attended the Spring 2008 Y Combinator Demo Day yesterday, where we were both pretty blown away.

Okay, so I’m easy to impress, but Matt’s a tougher nut to crack — just ask some of the start-ups who’ve been on the receiving end of his criticism. Yesterday, however, both of us found ourselves constantly saying, “Wow, that looks cool.”

Y Combinator is a Mountain View-based incubator company that funds and nurtures early-stage start-ups, then unveils them twice a year at its demo days. Of today’s 19 presenting companies, here’s our roundup of the 10 most promising, innovative or just plain cool ones (our favorites, from top down), followed by brief descriptions of everyone else.

Matt and I argued this out between ourselves, and we also tried to get some sense of the buzz among others who attended. Still, these are just first impressions. If you’re impressed by any of the companies, let us know in the comments.

The Top 10:

1. Deluux — Deluux’s goal is to bring the functionality of Facebook and other social networks to any page on the web. The company is in stealth, so all we can say is that it’s very promising. Co-founder Paul Mckellar says the company’s goal isn’t to replace Facebook, but rather to extend its “viral mechanisms” to the web at large (which is a vision that Facebook itself has, in some sense). Mckellar previously developed Socialmoth, a freestanding website that became a successful Facebook application last year.

2. 8aweek — 8aweek wants to make you (or, perhaps, your employees) more productive, and tracks your web-browsing habits to do so. There are plenty of other companies claiming to do this, including another one presenting today (see below), but what 8aweek adds is a bunch of other tools that will make greater productivity a reality. For example, you can draw up a list of sites you’ve identified as addictive, but giant time sinks (Myspace, Facebook, for example), and then set a timer that reminds you or even boots you off entirely when you’ve been on for too long (you choose when the timer goes off; see screenshot below). 8aweek does a lot more. It can also filter out a lot of the “noise” on a website by removing the items you’ve already read, and it can point you to those items and links that are the most popular. For a job like mine, where procrastination and research start to bleed into each other, I can definitely use 8aweek to make sure I don’t spend too much time on Valleywag. The service launched last month.

3. Wundrbar — Wundrbar bills itself as a next generation search bar. It looks a lot like the main Google page, but instead of just using the bar to search for results, it makes the bar a command line of sorts: For example, you can type “Amazon Harry Potter” and it’ll take you to the Amazon search results for Harry Potter. It allows you to perform basic tasks on other websites too, interpreting words in a way that is most intuitive. In some cases, you don’t even need to leave the Wundrbar home page — you can type “twitter going to san diego!” and it’ll automatically send out a Twitter message about your trip. The service is available now, and the company hopes others will use Wundrbar as a platform, adding the functionality of other websites. It wants to make money from referrals and targeted advertising.

4. FathomDB — We can’t say anything about this company, because it’s still in stealth mode, but keep an eye out. It’s definitely drawing a lot of buzz. A venture capitalist with DFJ remarked that it was his personal favorite.

5. 280 North — 280 North hopes to create a full suite of online tools that have the richness of desktop applications like Microsoft Office. So far, the company has made a PowerPoint-style presentation creator. The founders cop to the fact that they’ve aped PowerPoint’s interface, but the product benefits from being online. The great thing here is that you can build it all online, but ship presentations as PowerPoint files to people (something you can’t do with, say, a Google presentation).

Read the rest of this entry »

Behind the online service Songkick is a simple motivation: To make going to a concert as easy as going to a movie.

Some 70 percent of U.S adults did not go to a concert last year, according to Songkick chief executive and co-founder Ian Hogarth, who I met in Austin, TX last week. Does that mean they don’t like music? No, you’d probably be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t like some form of music. Instead, Hogarth surmised that the reason people do not go to concerts is that it takes too much effort. One problem is that the bands you like probably only come to your city once a year — if you’re lucky.

Songkick’s new concert recommendation system, which launches today, allows you to input up to three bands you enjoy, and the service will tell you concert dates for those bands if they happen to be touring near you soon — or if none of your three bands are coming near you soon, the service will recommend some other bands which are, and which you’re likely to enjoy.

In testing out the recommendations, the system works very well. My three bands led me to concerts of a couple other bands I already knew of and really enjoy as well, but hadn’t thought about in a while.

Another interesting feature is the ability to look at your computer’s music library (on iTunes, Winamp, or Windows Media Player) and build a recommended concert schedule from it. Hogarth noted that competitors such as the San Francisco-based SonicLiving require you to re-scan your music to update ticket listing. Songkick’s plugin auto-updates.

At its heart, Songkick is an aggregator of concert ticket information. It can be tedious to go to the various ticket sites (Ticketmaster, StubHub, etc) to try and search for bands’ shows that way. Songkick pulls all that information in and allows you to easily find which service is offering the best price for a show. The service aggregates tickets and prices from 16 different sellers across the United States and the UK. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Niche social networks grow, market leaders level off
2. Startup employees headed to big companies?
3. Stage6 had a lot of would-be investors, still has at least one
4. Sprint’s fate unclear
5. Sandvine, a company that helped Comcast block BitTorrent traffic, facing trouble
6. Chatterous: Message all of your friends at once

Niche social networks grow, market leaders level off — Web metrics service Compete reports that leading social networks MySpace and Facebook saw traffic plateau in the US between January and February, with smaller sites growing fast. One must be cautious about interpreting monthly numbers — large networks have seen seasonal dips in the past, and obviously no social network can grow forever (our coverage). Regardless, the largest, fast-growing social network is high school social network MyYearbook, which has grown 284 percent since February of last year, to more than 20 million visits this past month.

A host of Silicon Valley companies also have reason to be happy. Business network LinkedIn grew 729 percent to more than 11 million visits. White-label social network provider Ning, which we’ve previously questioned the potential of, is doing well for itself, having grown 4,803 percent to nearly four million visits. Likewise, messaging service Twitter, which generally keeps a tight lid on its internal numbers, grew 4,368 percent to more than four million visits.

But the fastest-growing site of them all is Fubar, an online bar and happy hour — and not a dating site, as its founders made clear to us last year (see comments). It grew to 3,272,217 percent to more than 6.5 million visits last month. Cheers!

Startup employees headed to big companies? — The Wall Street Journal puts together some evidence — and more speculation — that there’s “a new flight to safety [at big companies] among tech-industry workers as the economy struggles.”

Stage6 had a lot of would-be investors, still has at least one — The aftershocks of DivX’s decision to close popular online video site Stage6 are continuing. Today, Greg Sandoval reports that MySpace cofounder-turned-investor Brad Greenspan still has an offer on the table, even though Stage6’s core team has quit and the site has all but shut down. We’ve also spoken with a number of investors who said they would have been interested in funding Stage6 if it was spun out — as was DivX’s original plan. As of today, the site’s front page features a final message about the closure in a rather bizarre-looking format. The site has otherwise been wiped clean, except for a message at the bottom of the homepage (pictured) encouraging Stage6 users to go to Veoh, another online video site.

Sprint’s fate unclear — A host of rumors are circling the company. One is that T-Mobile is looking to buy it. Another is that Nextel will be spun off. More here.

Sandvine, a company that helped Comcast block BitTorrent traffic, facing trouble — Last year, Comcast tried to selectively slow down sites and services that use a lot of bandwidth, in order to prevent peer-to-peer file-sharing. It used network management software provided by Sandvine. Comcast’s actions got it in trouble with the FCC (our coverage). Now, not surprisingly, the market for Sandvine’s software is withering, TorrentFreak reports.

Chatterous: Message all of your friends at once — Chatterous lets you send a single message to friends across SMS, IM and email. Mashable has the details on this Y Combinator-backed company.

A number of well-executed personal finance management web startups have been in the spotlight in recent months, including Mint — which won the Techcrunch 40 startup competition — Wesabe and Geezeo. Buxfer, however, has been flying under the radar, and it shouldn’t be.

Beyond a clean interface for tracking your purchases, payments and trends in your spending habits (see screenshot, below), the company has been developing some impressive new features. One is a use of Google Gears that lets you store sensitive financial information on your machine, which is sure to please those concerned about online financial privacy. It also has new, useful Twitter and iPhone integration.

Also, Buxfer is a two-man team with only angel funding, facing large teams that have venture backing.

Like Mint and the others, Buxfer has introduced a way to let you easily synchronize your financial accounts from Bank of America, American Express, Citibank credit cards, Chase credit cards, and more than 300 others with your personal finance information on its site. It uses Google Gears to download your financial account information — your username and password — to an offline Buxfer component that lives on your computer, that syncs with your online Buxfer account. It’s the company’s policy to never store this sensitive user information on its servers. It accesses the data stored on your Google Gears database on your computer, and authenticates you and your information with your financial institution. You can delete the data or make it unavailable to Buxfer whenever you want.

Mint has received some heat from those concerned about letting a web startup store their personal data on its servers. Wesabe, like Buxfer, offers a set of financial information upload tools, so you can store your data on your own computer, then sync it with that site — we’ve found Buxfer’s implementation of this offline component to be easier to use.

For the more stylish geeks among us, Buxfer also offers iPhone and Twitter integration.

You can send transaction information to Buxfer and receive Buxfer alerts on Twitter (details here).

Last week, the company has released a Buxfer iPhone interface which it says has quickly become popular with its users.

When we first met the Buxfer team, almost a year ago, it was comprised of some grad student buddies who had developed a somewhat complicated interface for managing group purchases, instances like figuring out who owes who after a group dinner. While still a small site, the company has come a long way on a shoestring — considering the tiny team as well as the site’s many new features and constantly improving interface.

Buxfer first got seed funding from Y Combinator, then raised a $300,000 angel round last April, from Carnegie Mellon professor Eric Cooper and early Googler Georges Harik.

Auctomatic wants to make it easier for eBay’s most active sellers to manage sales. The San Francisco-based company launched its public beta yesterday.

So-called “powersellers” range from self-employed individuals to large firms like Dell. EBay doesn’t offer all the tools needed to manage the process of selling a lot of merchandise at once.

A range of third parties provide software tools designed to streamline the process. The largest, ChannelAdvisor, raised $30 million in May from New Enterprise Associates and other firms.

Below, Kulveer Taggar and Patrick Collison of Auctomatic tell me how they plan to compete against ChannelAdviser and other existing tool-providers.

Auctomatic has raised more than $400,000 in seed money from Y Combinator and other investors, including Paul Buchheit, creator of Google’s Gmail service.

VentureBeat: What’s wrong with the seller experience, as is? Since eBay is so big and established, why hasn’t it solved the problem already?

Kulveer Taggar: The eBay website works fine for the one-off sellers (which is what it was built for). As soon as anyone gets serious about selling, then they have to find software that helps them manage their inventory, listings, feedback, shipping, images, and so on.

To the second part of the question, there’s a big market of tools built around their platform (including eBay’s own tools — companies they purchased), but there’s lots of opportunity internationally, for seller optimization, and the ongoing efforts of Amazon and Google in e-commerce.

VB: How is this a big problem and what are you doing differently — since there are other third-party powerseller tool providers?

KT: Power-sellers bring in over $1 billion per month in gross merchandise value in the US alone. There are third parties that provide tools and make in the millions of revenue, but people tell us our user interface is a big improvement. Also, our back-end technology allows us to build new features much faster than the others.

For example, nobody builds good statistics support — the big toolmakers require that you use software provided by other third parties, and then manually cross-reference the results. We automatically generate statistics based on every view of any of your auctions, and integrate the results of that analysis into the app.

Patrick Collison: Ultimately, we want to rapidly build whatever it is that power-sellers need.

To do this, we use a lot of Smalltalk [a relatively obscure language; database startup Dabble DB is perhaps the best-known example of its use on the web]. Ultimately, it all comes down to being able to iterate and react faster, and Smalltalk puts us in a good position to do this — with our technology stack, we’re pretty confident we can out-develop our biggest competitor (which has more than 100 developers).

In Smalltalk, things that they’ve had for decades but are still absent elsewhere (like the interactive environment) really to turn out to be a big deal. A good example of this is data importing from eBay or other third party tools. It’s an inexact science. If someone encounters a problem importing their data (i.e., something we haven’t seen before in a test environment), instead of just giving up, we can log into their account and run a debug session right there and then, as they’re waiting on their browser to complete the request.

Or take international support. It has taken most of our competitors years to get anywhere with it. We implemented it in less than a week.

We definitely had to invest more in the set up — it’s not Rails [a popular programming language], where it’s most all ready for you. We had to build a lot of it ourself, and that took some time — but we’re definitely glad that we did.

VB: There’s a lot of buzz — at least in Silicon Valley — about developer platforms, at least for social networks. How’s eBay’s e-commerce platform for third parties?

KT: The last numbers I saw were that 56% of all ebay.com listings come through the API [application programming interface] and this number itself is growing at 27 percent, year-over-year. EBay’s international API markets are still open for growth, for a tools company like us.

I’d say that growth in API usage is because of the maturing of the platform (it’s been around for many years) and that the platform companies are doing better: There are now lots of people making money off the eBay platform, meaning there’s a lot of business for us to tap into. [Note: eBay as a company is doing quite well, aside from the write-down on Skype last quarter.]

In the early days, eBay couldn’t make up its mind about being a platform. They would charge for the API. That’s all changed: The API became free in 2005 and eBay made the decision that they were not really a software company, though on that last point, that’s my speculation.

Ultimately, I think they realise that having an open platform benefits them because it translates to more activity. Now, there’s a lot of internal support for the platform, with more resources being allocated towards it.

VB: Do you think any other marketplaces will be able to compete against this move? Example: what if Amazon decides to offer a competing marketplace? What about Facebook’s new API for its marketplace? How would that affect you? Would you look to integrate powerseller tools with other such marketplaces?

KT: I hear that Amazon is going to get aggressive with the “Merchants at Amazon” program, which will replace their marketplace. We’d definitely look to integrate with those marketplaces.

Facebook marketplace: It’d be interesting to experiment with different ways of making e-commerce [applications that make use of Facebook's social data.] We may apply to the FB Fund to that end [a Facebook-run grant program to finance outside developers in building interesting new applications on the site].

This talk of platforms should also include Google. We spoke to some of their people at eBay Live and they were very keen for us to integrate with Google Product Search — I’ve heard that 30 percent of all their searches are product searches. With google, it’d be interesting to let power-sellers buy their own traffic, though that’s likely a long way off for us.

VB: Tell me more about the international market, especially versus the US market. What are you seeing and how are you adapting?

KT: I think international users have been less well served by the other third-party tools companies as obviously the US companies have targeted the US market, which is about 50 percent of eBay overall.

So yes, a customised solution for UK/Ireland, Germany, India and other markets is a distinct possibility. We know of some British power-sellers who pay hundreds of pounds to have their accounts sync with eBay because all the US solutions obviously work with US accounting software. That’s a pain we’re looking to eliminate.

[Disclosure: I am personal friends with people in the company.]

iJigg is what it sounds like: A social media ranking site like Digg, but for finding great music.

The site’s front page features the most popular tracks and newest tracks from other users, that you can listen to with a click of a button without having to sign up.

If you register, you can vote on your favorite tracks, upload your own music files — currently only mp3 files — comment on what you’re listening to, edit your profile and friend other users. Those who upload tracks can choose to let others download them for free.

The site has been growing fast — despite millions of people happily using a near-infinite number of other sites that offer ways to find and share music, such as Pandora and Last.fm. A closer competitor is newly-launched Contra Stream, which also features tracks voted up by users.

iJigg has had more than 12 million pageviews so far this month, and more than 250,000 tracks are being listened to on an average day, it claims. More than 130,000 people have registered with around 1,700 more joining per day. Not bad, considering the site launched this past January and was still very small when we first talked to the company in April.

To guard against the illegal sharing of music, the site offers the usual DMCA-compliance takedown request information; the company tells us it hasn’t had any copyright-related problems.

iJigg started in Chapel Hill, North Carolina but is moving to Silicon Valley. It took funding from Y Combinator in April and is in the process of raising an angel round.

Updated

Disqus is going to launch two features to help blog readers track the most interesting comments on a blog or other web site.

Forum and blogging software has been around for many years, but there’s still no easy way to find the best comments within a web site or from across web sites.

Disqus has a two-part answer to this problem. It provides an advanced commenting system that can be added to a blog article page. Features include nested comments — tiered according to the order in which they were left — and a way for readers to vote for or against comments, and spam protection.

The other feature is a forum hosted separately by Disqus that displays comments from a blog according to how recent the post was published and how “hot” the discussion is on a particular post — in other words, how many comments that post has.

But there are many competitors.

VentureBeat — and other blogs, including Read/WriteWeb — have been testing SezWho (see below), which allows readers to rank each others’ comments, creating a reputation system that users can take with them across blogs. Techcrunch just covered Intense Debate, which provides similar reputation tracking to SezWho. We’ve also written on some of the others, such as CoComment. Public Square provides all-in-one online publishing software that includes a built-in social network for commenters.

Fred Wilson’s “A VC” blog has good examples of both the blog commenting system and the separate forum system for his blog, although the service is not yet publicly available.

Disqus is part of Big Head Labs and has received funding from Y Combinator.

Virtualmin is making it easier for web hosting companies to set up and maintain web sites, a process that can be mind-numbingly mundane and tedious.

The Mountain View, Calif. company offers open-source and commercial software designed to automate many tasks of modern web-based systems administration, like making sure the servers are running (sample below).

Less than a year old, the company now has over 500 web host providers using its software. As the number of new internet sites opening for business continues to grow, Virtualmin may be in the right place at the right time.

This latest version, released yesterday, includes automated installation tools for OpenAds’ open-source advertising platform (previous coverage here) as well as for SugarCRM, a popular open-source online customer relationship management system.

The two co-founders already know a thing or two. Jamie Cameron and Joe Cooper led development a successful open-source project called Webmin, which is now the world’s most popular web-based UNIX system administration tool. The software is downloaded more than two million times per year and is used by RackSpace.com, Lycos Europe, and thousands of other companies. They’ve both published books about it.

Virtualmin is the pair’s next-generation effort: In fact, the free, basic version of it is also open-source. The company’s core business is selling software licenses of its premium version to the hosting providers for web sites of small to mid-sized businesses. Customers include TextDrive (part of Joyent, which also hosts VentureBeat’s servers). It is competing against other system administration tools such as cPanel and Plesk.

The upgrade includes updates to some of the more than 70 other applications that it can also automatically install.

Virtualmin, a Y Combinator-backed company, is available for all major Linux distributions and Solaris: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, and 5; CentOS Linux 3, 4 and 5; Fedora Core 4, 5 and 6; Debian 3.1 and 4.0; Ubuntu 6.06 LTS; SUSE and OpenSUSE 10.0; and Solaris and OpenSolaris 10. The company also plans to announce significant Ruby on Rails upgrades in the next weeks.

Some readers took issue with VentureBeat’s recent assessment that Y Combinator had successfully “nailed” the start-up incubator model. There’s one particular critique we should address.

In return for its advice and money, Y Combinator does take its pound of flesh, in the form of six percent of a company’s stock, on average, which some people think is excessive. In our earlier, favorable assessment of Y Combinator, we were referring mainly to the vibrancy of the start-ups emerging from the group — a sure sign that something is right. But let’s look a bit closer at this six percent policy.

We asked Y Combinator partner, Jessica Livingston, more about Y Combinator’s stock policy. Turns out, Y Combinator takes ordinary common stock, she told us.

That makes Y Combinator look better than some critics have made it out to be.

“I have a real problem with Y Combinator,” said Jeff Clavier of seed capital firm SofttechVC at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday. “Y Combinator is a rip off. They give you $6k per founder for six percent of the company. I’d be happy to double that [$6k] and I’d still be getting my stock for cheaper than I usually invest.”

What Clavier failed to mention until later, when pressed by VentureBeat, is that his firm only takes preferred stock when it does its angel rounds.

VentureBeat thus believes Y Combinator’s approach offers an advantage to entrepreneurs because they’re not held hostage by the often onerous privileged rights that preferred shareholders often demand, such as minimum payouts upon acquisition or dissolution, rights to receive compensation before common, or anti-dilution rights. Common stock aligns the interests of Y Combinator with the interests of the founders and employees, who also hold common.

And while six percent is high everything equal, these companies are often very early stage companies — often little more than an idea — and so carry significant risk. They usually require more hands-on help.

(Most of the reporting for this story was done by contributing author, Mark Coker)