Cloud computing software and service provider Joyent has secured an $85 million round of new funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by European group Weather Investment II. It also included Telefónica Digital, the growth arm of global telecom giant Telefónica, which participated as a strategic investor.

Weather II is a strategic shareholder in telecommunications companies. Most notably, it holds a 20% stake in Vimpelcom, the world’s sixth largest mobile telecommunications group by subscribers. Joyent states that Weather II was advised in the round by investment and management group Accelero Capital. Both Weather II and Accelero focus on telecommunication and related media and technology companies in telecom and enterprise markets.

“We are delighted to make this strategic investment in a company that is providing solutions to some of the toughest problems in cloud computing, such as cloud performance, resiliency and security,” said Khaled Bichara, co-CEO of Accelero Capital.

Meanwhile, Matthew Key, Chairman & CEO of Telefónica Digital praised how Joyent’s technology would fit perfectly with technologies it has developed in-house and its own cloud services model.

Joyent’s cloud software suite SmartDataCenter is used by developers and enterprises worldwide. With JoyentCloud.com, the company provides public cloud services to a number of well-known companies, including LinkedIn, Gilt Groupe, Dell and Kabam. It’s also the steward of the open source server-side JavaScript project Node.js, a runtime for developing data-intensive, real-time apps, and a contributor to Joyent SmartOS, an open source project which powers the commercial software SmartDataCenter.

According to David Young, CEO and founder of Joyent, the new funding will enable Joyent to “build out a global compute offering to assist customers in expanding consistent software, support and services to their clients.”

Throughout 2012, Joyent plans to roll out a collection of “seamlessly connected high performance clouds” serving global corporations on every continent, the company says.

The San Francisco-based company had previously raised $5 million in September, which brought it close to $30 million total. The company’s existing investors include El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Intel Capital, and Liberty Global.

Joyent, a San Francisco-based cloud computing software and service provider, has secured $5 million in debt funding according to an SEC filing.

The company, which was founded back in 2004, offers an integrated technology suite and related services geared towards service providers, medium-sized and large enterprises, and developers.

Its offerings include cloud software suite SmartDataCenter, JoyentCloud.com, a public cloud service that aims to rival Amazon Web Services, and a Platform-as-a-Service based on Node.js, the open source server-side JavaScript development environment.

Customers include LinkedIn, Gilt Groupe, Kabam, Dell and AKQA.

We’ve contacted the company to learn who the investors are, and what they plan to do with the additional capital.

Joyent has now raised close to $30 million from investors like Intel Capital and Peter Thiel.

Joyent has revealed the winners of Node Knockout, the annual Node.js hacking competition it sponsors. This year’s hackathon, which encourages developers to build apps using the increasingly popular server-side JavaScript environment Node.js, included over 320 teams with more than 700 people competing. That’s a big jump from the 100 teams and 250 participants seen in 2010.

The resulting winners are a diverse bunch, including everything from games and YouTube battle parties (we’ll explain…) to practical tools aiding in website design and game development.

Here are this year year’s winners:

Overall Winner & Solo Winner: Observer 

Observer is tool designed to help you better understand your website visitors’ behavior by watching them navigate your site in real-time. You can see what the users are typing, what they’re clicking and even what keyboard shortcuts they’re using. You can also immediately start a chat session with a website visitor who appears to need assistance.

If you don’t have time to track all your users, you can store sessions for later playback. And all of this functionality can be implemented through a simple one-script installation.

Overall Team Winner: Eight Bit Beats

Eight Bit Beats is a collaborative, social beat and melody sequencer. Upon loading the site, you enter your name/handle, choose a sound board (DJ, Drum Kit, Special FX, etc.) and then start to add music to a collaborative track made with others.

Public Popularity Winner: Driv.in

For even more fun, check out Driv.in, the YouTube battle party. The idea is that you create rooms on the site so that you and your friends can watch videos together in real-time. Now, where have we heard about something like that before?

Yep, it’s pretty much the same thing as Chill, with the synchronous video watching, video DJ’ing, built-in chat and all. The only difference is that the “room” looks like a drive-in theater, not a movie theater as in Chill. Oh, and Drive.in has the added benefit of being able to throw tomatoes at the videos you hate. Take that, Rebecca Black!

Most Utility /Fun Winner: Doodle or Die

Doodle or Die is basically an iteration on Pictionary, where you are given things to draw and have to guess what others have drawn. The site is pretty basic, but the team is working on furthering the project as an iPad /iPhone/Android app that will be called Doodleblast.

Best Design Winner: ACROnode.com

ACROnode is a slightly more intellectually challenging game than the above, and it’s loosely based on the original Acrophobia IRC game. Players are given a random acronym and are challenged to create “backronyms.” For example, when presented with “NBAM” you might play “Narwhal Bacons At Midnight.”

Players score each other’s backronyms and receive points based on the number of votes, and for being the first to submit their backronym. It’s geeky, funny and, as indicated by the win, pretty to look at, too.

Most Innovation Winner: Blue GPU Lava 

Returning to the more practical entries, Blue Lava is a small demo showing the node-webgl library. The entry is the open source library itself, not the visualization/demo. With this, developers can create advanced video games for modern platforms using Node.js. This library specifically targets the HP TouchPad. However, it can run on other platforms. Here’s the demo in action.

 Most Complete Winner: Chess@home

Chess@home is a project whose goal is to break the current world record for the largest Chess AI. It will use JavaScript and Node to organize the largest chess ever on a future “D-Day” to pit a Chess Grand Master against thousands of computers. The question is, can a JavaScript-based AI beat a Grand Master? Or will the human beat the machines?

In the meantime, you can play against the networked machines to test your own skills.

Those are all of this year’s winners, but if you’re curious about the other projects that emerged from the hackathon, you can check out the full list of entries here.

According to a release, the acquisition will allow Joyent to offer expanded cloud infrastructure services to customers by adding new virtualization technology for Windows and Linux operating systems.

Joyent, which just raised an undisclosed round of funding from Intel Capital, counts some noteworthy companies among its customers, including social network LinkedIn, social gaming platform operator Watercooler and clothing and flash sales giant Gilt Groupe. The company used to provide hosting to Twitter.

Layerboom raised $200,000 from Canadian startup accelerator Bootup Labs.

The news comes only a few weeks after Intel helped the 5-year old company launch a cloud computing service in mainland China, reportedly the first ever to launch over there.

Joyent says it will use the extra cash to accelerate its product development and expand its sales & marketing efforts around the world.

The investment by Intel Capital in Joyent was announced today at the investment organization’s 10th Annual CEO Summit, where seven investments were made public (for approximately $25 million in total). The other six capital infusions went to Korea-based Crucialtec, Taiwan-based Gudeng Precision Industrial Co, Japan-based V-cube, China-based Phoenix New Media, United Arab Emirates-based NeuString and US-based Active Storage.

In a blog post about the reasons for accepting institutional financing for the first time since its inception in 2004, Joyent founder and CEO David Young disclosed that the company earlier raised a small seed funding round from Peter Thiel and the good old “myself, friends and family” and turned profitable quickly. So why raise extra funding?

Young explains:

Joyent has been able to grow to thousands of customers globally by force of hard work, a lot of luck, and an extraordinary time when the costs of developing and delivering software products have dropped practically to zero. While Joyent has been profitable for much of the company’s existence, we raised money because Joyent has a revenue model, and a product model and roadmap, that we believe can benefit from immensely increased scale.

Joyent counts some noteworthy companies among its customers, including social network LinkedIn, social gaming platform operator Watercooler and clothing and home good retailer Gilt Groupe. They used to handle hosting for Twitter, too, but that relationship turned sour in early 2008 after frequent downtime issues.

Curious to see what the future holds for the company.

Today, hosting provider Rackspace is offering a new cloud computing service through its subsidiary Mosso. (Disclosure: Rackspace is a TechCrunch advertiser). The service competes with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), although it doesn’t require any load balancing or other administration. It also competes with Joyent and Media Temple’s Grid Service. Pricing starts at $100 a month for:

—50 GB of storage
—500 GB of bandwidth for transferring data
—3 million HTTP requests.

From there additional capacity per month costs:

—$0.50/GB of storage
—$0.25/GB of bandwidth
—$0.03/1,000 HTTP requests

This is a bit more expensive than Amazon (which charges in a different way) but a lot cheaper than the $350 to $400 a month Rackspace charges to host a dedicated server for a Website.

Mosso bills itself as a Web app hosting service. Applications are hosted on redundant server clusters (although the data center is only in one location, so something could take the whole thing out—like, say, if a truck were to run into a nearby power transformer). Coders choose what technology stack they want their apps to run on and upload their code. Mosso supports both Windows and Linux, PHP, Ruby on Rails, .Net, Perl, Python, MySQL, and SQL Server. (Amazon, in contrast, does not support Windows). Mosso does not yet support Java applications, but it is working on that. The company actually has been testing the service for nearly two years and already runs 37,000 apps.

Update: According to an ARIN lookup, Twitter appears to be hosted by Verio now.

Update 2: Twitter has come out on their blog to say that they are now hosted by NTT America.

According to Joyent’s corporate blog, the company stopped hosting Twitter late last night:

Twitter has been officially off Joyent since 10PM last night. This may come as a surprise to some after yesterday’s posts here and here regarding the two companies working together. Those of us at Joyent appreciate the opportunity we had to work with the talented folks at Twitter. It is a great service. We wish Twitter every continued success.

As I mentioned yesterday, Joyent is standing ready with excess free infrastructure to support Twitter through this transition in the event that they need it.

The news comes amidst frequent outage problems that have plagued Twitter. Just last night, Twitter went down again, this time for a “planned maintenance project” that went “far beyond [their] planned time window”. The service has also recently suffered downtime during the State of the Union and Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld.

Despite all of these problems, just yesterday both companies were showing strong support for each other on their respective blogs. Both wrote posts (here and here) describing how they were working together to prepare for the Super Bowl this coming Sunday.

When reached over the phone, Joyent’s CEO David Young preferred not to comment on Twitter’s stability issues in particular. He did emphasize that Joyent has free infrastructure on standby should Twitter want to use it again. He also wished Twitter the best of luck, saying the team is amazed at their “great service”.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, responded to an email inquiry about the situation as such:

We’re still very much engaged in our efforts to bring solid reliability to Twitter. Achieving our goals is a sustained effort, not an overnight fix. Performance is our most important measure of success and we appreciate both the patience and frustration folks are sharing with us.

With regard to discussing technical specifics about last night’s efforts, we’ll be more keen to do that once we have a chance to come up for air and cover it with some perspective.

Given that both companies are reluctant to go into details about the break-up, we’ll just have to see whether more information comes out in time.

Strongspace and BingoDisk are amongst services that have been affected since January 12. Joyent CEO David Young said in a post to the Joyent forums that the service “got bit by a massive ZFS bug…that got onto/into the backups” preventing easy restoration.

Data Knowledge Center has more, and you can see our review of Joyent’s Slingshot product here.

The problems at Joyent follow ongoing difficulties at online storage provider Omnidrive, who saw its main website was down for over a week following suggestions that the service may be facing financial difficulties. At the time of writing Omnidrive’s web site is back up and other reports would suggest that the core storage service remained unaffected by the website issues; however, there are big questions about their long term viability.

Firefox 3 will allow sites to work offline by accessing local datastores. And at least two
other products are offering platform products that will overlap significantly with Apollo features.

Ryan Stewart wrote about one of these, Dekoh, a couple of weeks ago and generally found it lacking.

Today, Joyent announced a new product, called Slingshot. At its core, Slingshot allows developers to build (or port) Rails applications to the desktop and run offline with “simple and transparent” data synchronization.

Existing Rails applications can be ported to the Slingshot platform, and include drag and drop of files to and from the desktop. In the future, Slingshot will include filesystem access to remote data.

There’s a great product and technical overview of Slingshot here, and a screencast here.

My notes on each company are below. Many of these have been profiled here before, and we hope to get full profiles of the rest up as soon as we can schedule interviews with the teams (if you’d like to talk to me, I’m the guy with a huge TechCrunch sticker on my laptop) (Jeff Clavier also has a TechCrunch sticker on his laptop, but I’m not French, so you’ll know its not me ).

I’m breaking this down into two posts to keep it manageable. Here’s Part 1. Part 2 is here.

Social Text

Ross Mayfield spoke about wikiwyg, the first wysiwyg editor for wikis. He says its much more than a tool for wikis, however. It’s and “open source synchronous editor for the web” and his vision is that it will be used on many web applications beyond wikis. Want to try out Social Text for free? Mention web2con at socialtext and get a free five-user wiki for a year.

Rollyo

Dave Pell presented Rollyo, the roll-your-own search engine (profile).

You can create a mini-search engine from only those sites you trust or feel have relevant content, and then search against that personal search. He used a travel search example that was quite compelling – searching against just fodors, travelpost and frommers. Saved searches can be private, or public and shared with others.

Joyent

David Young talked about Joyent, a compelling network suite for small groups and companies that includes mail, calendar, contacts, files, etc., and allows developers to mash up systems on their data. Lots of tagging and “smart filters”. Open APIs to allow third party apps. Take the tour here.

bunchball

Rajat Paharia showed off his super-cool flash platform BunchBall. Rajat was also nice enough to give me a personal presentation earlier in the day. Rajat talked about how developers need both infrastructure and distribution to get applications out. BunchBall provides both – a slick flash platform (Flash 8 is required for some applications) along with open APIs, and new third party applications are automatically distributed accross the platform.

Current applications include a number of games and photo-sharing. Rajar also says that Metaliq is creating a multi user texas holdem game, to be released soon.

Check this one out. And contrary to rumors, Rajat did NOT beat me at tic-tac-toe while giving me the demo. He lies.

RealTravel

Ken Leeder talked about his new company, RealTravel. It’s centralized user content with some really sweet tagging and search/find capabilities .

The idea is to leverage user content and social networking to create a personalized experience for travel shoppers and a more effective venue for travel industry marketeres. THus, hopefully, breaking the death spiral that the online travel industry is now in: a race to the lowest price.

Zimbra

Satish Dharmara gave an absolutely stellar presentation of Zimbra (profile), although to be honest Zimbra is so damn cool and full of AJax awesomeness that he could have stood there and babbled and the audience would still have cheered.

Zimbra is an “open source enterprise-scalable collaboration server with intelligent online backup and single mailbox restore. It has hierarchical storage management”. What does this mean? You can’t run it from the Zimbra website, but you can install it on your own server. It’s Outlook as it’s supposed to be.

Read our profile. It (Zimbra, not our profile) rocks. Demo here.