In what must be an amazing day for the Heroku founders, the creator of Ruby, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto has announced that he will be joining the former Y Combinator startup as Chief Architect of Ruby.
“As a member of our platform development team, Matsumoto-san will continue his work on the Ruby language in close collaboration with the Ruby community, keeping the language open and advancing the technology in exciting new ways,” Heroku General Manager Byron Sebastian said in a release. → Read More
Everyone’s favorite under-estimator of social media, Malcolm Gladwell, might get a chuckle out of Amazon’s EC2 problems this week. First, they took out Foursquare, Reddit and Quora service, as TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher reported yesterday. The disaster in the cloud also put a stop to those who would Tweet the revolution via Act.ly, a site that gets petitions going virally, online.
The site and service was still out of order as of publication. Act.ly founder Jim Gilliam said:
“We usually get several thousand activism tweets a day. That hasn’t happened for 36 hours, because of these issues with Amazon and… → Read More
It was almost exactly two years ago that we first wrote about a company called Heroku. At the time, the Y Combinator startup was little more than a good idea: ease the development and deployment process a lot of other startups face by putting it in the cloud. Last month, Salesforce bought them for $212 million in cash. It’s no wonder that a new startup, StackMob, doesn’t mind being called a “Heroku for mobile”.
Truth be told, that is a pretty good way to describe what they’re doing. They’ve created a cloud-based system to ease the development and deployment of mobile applications. Or even more simply put, “we’re trying to solve the backend services for mobile applications,” is how co-founder Ty Amell phrases it. They want to be the single integration point for all the backend needs that an app developer may have. → Read More
You may be noticing a trend: there are a lot of startups looking to mimic the easy-to-use development platform that made Heroku a hit with Ruby developers and offer a similar solution for use with other languages. In the last few weeks alone we’ve written about PHP Fog (which, as you’d guess, focuses on PHP) and dotCloud (which aims to support a variety of languages). And today we’ve got one more: AppHarbor, a ‘Heroku for .NET’. The company is funded by Y Combinator, and it’s launching today.
AppHarbor will be going up against Microsoft Azure, a platform that developers can use to deploy their code directly from Visual Studio. But co-founder Michael Friis says that Azure has a few issues. For one, it uses Microsoft’s own database system, which can lead to developer lock-in. And it also doesn’t support Git, which many developers prefer to use for collaboration and code deployment. → Read More
Salesforce.com has just announced that it is acquiring Heroku, which provides a Ruby application platform-as-a-service, for approximately $212 million in cash.
That’s one hell of an exit for the startup, which was founded in 2007 and has raised only $13 million in funding. → Read More
Ruby Cloud Platform as a Service provider Heroku has raised $10 million in Series B funding led by Ignition Partners with existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Baseline Ventures, and Harrison Metal Capital participating. John Connors, General Partner with Ignition and former CFO/CIO of Microsoft has joined the company’s board of directors. This brings the company’s total funding to over $13 million.
Founded in 2007, the Y-Combinator-backed startup develops a Ruby on Rails development and hosting environment. Heroku aims to make software development more accessible for a wider range of people. It does so by providing a browser-based programming environment that cuts out steps traditionally needed to produce RoR applications. Heroku’s application management platform combines runtime technology for cloud scalability with tools and automation for developer productivity. → Read More
The bad news for startups keeps on coming in. This time it’s RubyOnRails application hosting provider Engine Yard that has laid off 15% of its staff, as publicly reported on the company’s blog earlier this week. We’ve contacted co-founder Lance Walley and can confirm that 12 out of 82 people have been let go, across several departments.
The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker has been updated accordingly.
Engine Yard, which essentially delivers a platform to build, manage and host Rails applications, raised raised a $15 million Series B round of funding from new investors New Enterprise Associates and Amazon last July, with investor Benchmark Capital also participating. The round brought its total amount of funding to $18.5 million. → Read More
Engine Yard, a platform to build, manage and host Rails applications, raised a $15 million Series B round of funding from new investors New Enterprise Associates and Amazon. Previous investor Benchmark Capital also participated – Engine Yard has now raised $18.5 million in capital. Engine Yard competitors Heroku and New Relic have also raised capital this year. Amazon’s investment is clearly strategic as it expands its own web services products. Engine Yard fits nicely into Amazon’s big picture plans for application tools, hosting and management. Engine Yard Aim For Java With RubyOnRails Platform – Read More On TechcrunchIT >> CrunchBase Information Engine Yard Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Heroku, the online Ruby on Rails (RoR) development and hosting environment, has raised $3 million from Redpoint Ventures and other angel investors. The Y Combinator startup aims to make software development more accessible for a wider range of people. It does so by providing a browser-based programming environment that cuts out steps traditionally needed to produce RoR applications. The founders picked RoR because it was designed for developers who want to actualize their ideas quickly. Heroku not only makes the development process easier, but it helps deploy and scale web applications, thereby making the maintenance of online software more feasible as well. The service remains in private beta but we’re told the curtain should lift pretty soon. Meanwhile, developers interested in using Heroku can put their names down on a waitlist. Co-founder James Lindenbaum says that the platform already supports over 10,000 developers and more than 12,000 applications. Almost all of them are non-critical sites, however, since the service is still working to maintain stability. Also see Engine Yard, a company with a more hands-on approach to RoR hosting. CrunchBase Information Heroku Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
New Relic is looking to capitalize on the growing number of Ruby on Rails application deployments, having recently raised $3.5M from Benchmark Capital for their Rails Performance Management (RPM) product. RPM is a combination of installed software and cloud services that helps developers understand performance problems in their RoR applications. A Rails developer first installs a standard plugin that continuously sends performance data to New Relic’s servers. He or she can then use an RPM dashboard to identify the specific points in their code that are causing bottlenecks. Several brand name Rails developers are already using a beta version of the RPM service, including Rails core developer Rick Olson. While the company is reluctant to disclose its current enterprise-size clients, they are obviously going after the several billion-dollar-plus businesses already using Rails in production. New Relic was founded by Lewis Cirne, who in 1998 started a company that offered similar monitoring software for the then-young Java application industry. Cirne successfully sold that company and has brought several of his old colleagues with him to this new Rails venture. Other startups working to make Rails deployment less painful include Heroku, which offers online development and one-click cloud deployment, and Engine Yard, which offers managed Rails service infrastructure. CrunchBase Information RPM Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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