Cloud computing has fundamentally changed the world of IT. Business operations from tracking sales leads to finance management are increasingly going airborne due to the cloud’s flexibility, 24-hour access, and lower cost. However, many developers still work on their desktops, which can limit their productivity.

“The Integrated Development Environemnt (IDE) model for application development hasn’t changed in four decades,” said CEO Tyler Jewell in a statement. “It’s so pervasive, the IT industry has become complacent to its severe limitations.”

Codenvy’s solution requires no downloading to access the full stack browser environment, with multiple language and framework options. The company claims developers can gain up to two additional hours of coding time each day through features like “always-on workspaces, parallel multicore compilation, continuous iterative deponent, and multicursor pair programming.” Teams can also share their workspaces to facilitate collaboration.

Programming teams can use Codenvy to run and test their applications, go through the complete “build lifecycle” (validate, compile, test, package, and deploy), and edit code in the browser. Integration partners include GitHub, ReHat Openshift, Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services, VMWare, Heroku, and AppFog. The company has 50,000 registered developers. The service is free for public projects and otherwise involves a monthly subscription free ranging from a $9 a month “secure” option for five private projects to Codenvy Enterprise, which carries a variable, case-by-case pricing basis.

Toba Capital led this $9 million round, with participation from Auriga Partners and a number of angel investors. Codenvy was formerly known as Exo IDE and is based in San Francisco.

Photo Credit: Mike Saechang

Drawbridge grabs cash for better social ads

Drawbridge announced a $6.5 million investment today. The company wants to make mobile ads as sophisticated and targeted as their desktop counterparts. Prominent firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital led the round.

Mixpanel’s unique analytics attract a new investment

Y Combinator startup Mixpanel just raised its first institutional round of funding. The company dives deep into pageview and visitor engagement analytics, offering real-time “micro” stats. Andreessen Horowitz led the round and additional angel investors, including PayPal Co-founder Max Levchin, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, and Yammer chief executive David Sacks, participated.

Coupa gets money for its expense reports

Mere months after closing a $12 million investment, Coupa has closed its fifth round of funding for $22 million. The company did not disclose its valuation. The company’s software can track any payroll-related spending and procurement. It handles invoicing, inventory, budgets, and expense reporting. New investor Crosslink Capital led the round. Existing investors Battery Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, El Dorado Ventures, and Mohr Davidow Ventures participated.

Moviepilot.com gets funding for fanboys

Movie site for fanboys, Moviepilot.com raised $7 million in second-round funding. The company scours the Internet for movie news and helps movie studios promote their latest flicks. DFJ Esprit led the round.

Google Apps security company BetterCloud raises its seed round

BetterCloud announced it has closed a $2.2 million investment. It offers cloud management services aimed at Google Apps, such as security and group management. The seed funding comes from angel investors and chief executive David Politis.

This CRM raised $6.8M

Future Simple, the company behind Base, has raised $6.8 million. Base operates similarly to Salesforce by storing business contacts and leads. Index Ventures led the round, with Social+Capital Partnership, OCA Ventures and the I2A fund participating.

Drumbi grabs funding for a customer service automated system (exclusive)

Hate those machines you get when you call a customer service line? Drumbi is creating one of those, but it claims it will do a much better job. It also promises to cut down on those excruciating wait times. The company raised $2 million at a $8.5 million pre-money valuation from Quest Software.

Turning webcams into credit card scanners, Jumio nabs funding

Online payment and ID company Jumio has raised funding. The company did not officially disclose the funding amount, but it’s said to be $3.3 million from Citigroup, according to VentureWire. Jumio turns web and smartphone cameras into credit card and ID card processing machines.

Another credit card processing startup, Flint Mobile

Like Square, Intuit, and Pay Pal before it, Flint Mobile raised $3 million to process credit cards with your phone. Flint Mobile is shunning a square, triangle, or moon-shaped dongle in favor of using a smartphone camera to process payments. It will make money by way of transaction fees; 1.95 percent plus $0.20 per transaction for debit cards and 2.95 percent plus $0.20 per transaction for credit cards. Storm Ventures led the round.

Bloc is going to make a web developer out of you

Web coding online school Bloc has raised $250,000 in seed money to transform you into a web developer in eight weeks. For three grand, you’ll be able to write Ruby on Rails code with the best of ‘em. In time the company will also offer iOS develop classes and HTML/CSS design programs. Robert Hutter at Learn Capital led the seed round, in the form of a convertible note.

One million dollars goes towards 3-D fashion games for women

Frenzoo raised $1 million today to create 3-D fashion iOS and Android games for women. It’s first game, Me Girl, features 3-D-like avatars that girls can dress up and play with as supermodels. Efficient Corporate, Siemer Ventures, K5 Ventures, and Metaverse Services participated in the round.

Hey, you’ve got a loyalty program in my point of sale system

Mobile loyalty program startup RewardLoop has raised $1 million in funding. The company’s system connects to point of sale devices to offer loyalty programs and printed receipt offers. Madrona Ventures led the first round of funding for RewardLoop.

Money exploding from computer image via Shutterstock 

Seeing Framework’s magic in action is, well, a bit magical. As the screen resolution (or browser window size) changes, links become buttons. Images automatically resize. Layouts morph.

Try it out yourself; go to one of the many sites built on Foundation, then manipulate the size of the browser window. Take it down to a tablet size, then a smartphone size, and watch the site change fluidly along with you.

The benefit of Foundation is that you, the designer, don’t have to customize each layout on a device-by-device basis.

“The framework does all the work,” said Dmitry Dragilev, lead marketer at design shop Zurb, which created Foundation. “People don’t need to worry about this stuff anymore.”

User experience these days lives on mobile as much as on the web. That’s why Foundation, a new building and prototyping framework for front ends, works across all platforms. Better still, it’s open source software; you can check it out on Github.

In some ways, the framework is a lot like Twitter’s open-source front-end framework, Bootstrap.

But Zurb representative Dmitry Dragilev says Zurb’s framework is superior because of its emphasis on multi-device scaling. “Bootstrap just works for desktop apps. The one we’re releasing is designed to work on any kind of device, mobile or not, and that’s crucial now that mobile web use has started to overtake desktop use.”

The basis of Foundation is the Grid, a layout framework that seamlessly scales your content across all form factors, including mobile devices, small screens, large desktops and even huge screens, such as Internet-connected TVs. The Grid is a twelve-column, semi-liquid “grid of awesomeness that you’re gonna love,” Zurb claims.

In addition to the Grid, Foundation includes a slew of tools for rapid web and mobile prototyping, including typography, tabs, buttons, image grids, pagination, forms and more. “We also included some of our most popular JavaScript plugins, Orbit and Reveal, so you can handle image and content sliders and modals,” stated Zurb in a company blog post.

Finally, Foundation prototypes can be built into full sites for maximum developer/designer efficiency.

Dragilev said Dictionary.com already uses Foundation (check it out on their Word Dynamo app), as do a number of other sites and apps. Also, Zurb is presenting today at Mozilla’s WebFWD initiative for open web solutions.

Next, Zurb will be further refining the framework (squashing bugs and fixing edge cases), as well as adding templates, site generation, more common elements and even better mobile support.

Image courtesy of Juri Pozzi.

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The tool is free to use, though it requires registration once you start designing a site and want to save it. Upon launch, you have a choice of website templates based on categories, such as restaurant, photographer, hotel or bio. You can also skip the templates and start from scratch, which is what I did.

While I started testing IM Creator just for this article, I ended up designing and developing a website for an idea I’ve had for a while now — a place where you can complain about your ultimate pet peeve. The whole process took me about an hour and I was very impressed with the simplicity and flexibility of the experience. (The ads were my own addition.)

IM Creator is a WYSIWYG editor, meaning what you see is what you get. Designing with IM Creator feels a bit like using Photoshop. You start with a blank white canvas and have a myriad of elements such as widgets, text, video, slideshows, basic HTML boxes and more. Each element can be re-sized and positioned anywhere on the canvas. The big difference from Photoshop, besides that application’s more advanced editing tools, is that once you’re done designing in IM Creator, you just hit publish and then you have a live website. There are some nice extra touches as well, such as being able to easily add search engine optimization (SEO) tags and Google Analytics.

Before you fire your web designer or developer, IM Creator has some restrictions you should keep in mind. You are limited to the design elements provided, and while there is an HTML box, you have to know HTML to understand what goes in there. Also, any graphics still have to be created and uploaded, so a designer would be needed to make your site visually appealing. This tool may actually be most useful and desirable to designers who lack any front-end web development skills.

IM Creator is one of the easiest and more flexible website creators I’ve used to date. The only issue I see is with the company’s business model. To publish your site to a unique URL, you have to subscribe to a monthly hosting option provided by IM Creator. While comparable to other hosting options in price, not having a choice might be enough to make potential customers jump ship.

The Israel-based company, founded in 2011, claims to have 2,000 paying customers as well as just becoming profitable. IM Creator has raised $300k from friends and family.

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This small group of young hackers entered the most recent class of Y Combinator startups and built a company that aims to teach anyone how to code.

Their interface is simple and even fun to use. Their traction is through the roof; Codecademy.com has seen more than 250,000 visitors in the first four days since launching. Those visitors spend around an hour each on the site, and together, they’ve completed more than 2.75 million coding exercises. The young startup could change the world by changing the way ordinary people think about coding.

The site is free to use. It’s social — you can learn along with your friends — and incentivized with badges and friendly competition. Learners can also track their progress through the various lessons on the site. Best of all, the site is completely interactive. If you’ve ever had to sit through college lectures, screencasts or coding tutorials, you know what a boon interactivity is to learning web development.

“Codecademy leverages the best of the web and brings it to online learning,” said co-founder Zach Sims to VentureBeat.

“This is the first time programming has been truly democratized. It’s available to anyone with a computer and it’s easy to follow. We think creating a new generation of programmers will help to raise employment and the standard of living for those individuals. It’s preparing the world for the future.”

Sims said he struggled with learning how to code. Taking classes, reading books and watching videos weren’t sufficient learning tools — a fact many would-be developers can relate to. Oftentimes, a student of programming needs to learn by doing, but the most basic building blocks of coding just aren’t accessible enough to pick up and play with from the start.

“Web development is definitely hard,” said Sims, “and I think that’s why tons of people end up looking for a ‘code monkey’ in lieu of learning themselves.”

Also, Sims noted, “While the entrepreneurial community has exploded within the past year or two, there’s a constant shortage of developers and a tremendous number of businesspeople trying to learn to code … Programming literacy is going to be an incredibly important skill in the next few years, and we hope we can bring that to new groups of people.”

Part of those new demographics is an expanded age range. Sims and his colleagues estimate the site could easily be used by anyone between the ages of 12 and 50, and right now, he said, “Most of our users are probably 15 to 30.”

So far, the site includes just eight Javascript lessons. “Adding more content will be key to retaining those people and attracting other, more advanced developers,” said Sims. Around 200 developers have been in touch with Codecademy about adding their own content and lessons to the site.

Sims said learners can expect more Javascript lessons first. The courses will then expand to cover other languages based on popularity within the community. “We hope to have hundreds of lessons online within a few months,” Sims said.

Also, the founders plan to add support for 10 spoken languages by the beginning of September. “We’re internationalizing the site to ensure the entire world can get access to our content,” said Sims.

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Java will join Ruby, Node.js and Clojure on Heroku’s Celadon Cedar runtime stack.

While Ruby in particular is popular in the world of web startups and Node.js is wildly buzzy at the moment, Java is without doubt the most widely used programming language now supported by Heroku and may do a lot to increase Heroku’s adoption within the greater developer community.

As Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins writes on the company blog, “Java boasts an estimated population of six million developers, with a vast ecosystem of tools, libraries, frameworks and literature. It is the most mature and established programming language for building server-side applications in existence today.”

Wiggins also enthuses about the Java Virtual Machine, which he calls “one of the best runtime VMs in the world.”

Other JVM-based languages, such as JRuby, Scala and Jython, will also be bootstrappable on the Heroku platform with pom.xml.

In the post, Wiggins explains why the Cedar stack supports the Jetty webserver with Java rather than J2EE application containers, which he said are a relic of older software distribution methods.

“Heroku is built for the new era of software-as-a-service,” he writes. “Java teams are often still stuck with the classic process because it’s built into the toolchain. Heroku for Java is optimized for compact applications that require robust yet agile deployment and rapid iterations. You can deploy any Java application to Heroku, including J2EE applications, but you aren’t constrained by the J2EE deployment process.”

Check out the Heroku blog for a sample hello world app to get you started.

Image of Duke the Java mascot courtesy of Wikipedia.

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

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

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It looks like Digg founder Kevin Rose has found his rebound start-up after breaking up with Digg just about two weeks ago — a web application development lab called Milk.

Milk doesn’t seem like a traditional incubator (they usually offer guidance, mentorship and a little bit of seed funding to get started). Instead it will be a place where developers can bring in an interesting idea and quickly turn it into some kind of operational mobile application. Most of them will probably fail, but Milk’s goal is to find the few applications that end up turning into big hits on the scale of Angry Birds and Foursquare.

Rose unveiled the details about his new venture to TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy. The new venture will re-unite Rose with former Digg designer, Daniel Burka. Burka will join Rose as a co-founder of the development lab. Rose plans to keep the team pretty small — employing less than 10 coders.

It looks like Rose isn’t actually interested in creating social photo sharing application number 471, though, according to the TechCrunch interview. The development lab wants to focus on ideas that are so far out there that most investors would end up turning up their noses at the idea of giving them money.

Rose launched Digg in 2004, but he always shied away from being a direct leader of Digg, instead hiring Jay Adelson (who later got the boot) and most recently Amazon.com’s Matt Williams to run the company. He resigned from the news aggregation site halfway through March.