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“Forget being in love with the open web and all that touchy-feely stuff.”

Jay Sullivan is Mozilla’s vice president of products, and for a spokesperson of one of the open web’s dearest darlings, he’s on a tear.

“If you want to have a variety of mobile apps, it gets expensive… that’s a lot of apps to build,” he told VentureBeat in a recent interview.

Sullivan is making a strong case against building native apps and for the mobile web as the new platform to (literally) end all platforms.

Now, a number of developments make his words especially timely. Yahoo has just announced Yahoo Cocktails, a set of tools for developers to use that make web apps look and behave more like native apps. Mozilla is working on tools to help developers sell web-based apps to mobile device users, enabling them to make profits just as developers in the iTunes App Store or Android Market can now do.

Even Adobe is scrapping Flash for mobile phones and pinning its hopes on HTML 5 for the mobile web. “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively,” wrote Danny Winokur, Adobe VP and General Manager of Interactive Development.

“This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.”

It looks like mobile apps may be headed the same direction as multimedia CD-ROMs did a decade ago. Sadly for mobile apps, they don’t even have a useful second life as drink coasters.

But parties on the other side of the fence say it’s too soon to play Taps for apps. App advocates say mobile web enthusiasts are indulging in pipe dreams while the rest of the world is still working on proprietary technology stacks that do, now, what HTML5 has so far failed to deliver. Even if they admit that building for the mobile web will eventually be cheaper, faster and easier, it’s at least few years away from reality.

In the Mozilla Foundation’s new offices overlooking the San Francisco Bay Bridge, Sullivan — an unapologetic HTML5 advocate — sits in a conference room and rapidly deconstructs the assumption that to get your software onto a mobile phone you have to build a native application.

But he doesn’t resort to the familiar (and tired) ideologies about freedom from corporate technological tyranny that figure large in Mozilla’s current ad campaign. Rather, he gets downright practical.

First, he explains the obvious: Each mobile ecosystem has its own technology stack, its own operating system and programming language. That means developing apps requires a different skill set and a separate development process for each ecosystem.

At the end of the day, building a mobile web app instead of two or three or four native apps just makes more economic sense. “HTML5 is less expensive,” he says. “There’s always some stuff around the edges that won’t work perfectly, but compared to writing in seven different languages, it works.”

For developers, it’s technologically more manageable to build one mobile web app than a half-dozen or even just two native apps. And given the state of mobile web standards, we’re quickly approaching a point where end users can’t tell the difference between the two. All that’s really left is a business model for mobile web apps, Sullivan contends.

“When the web offers a more easy to access business ecosystem to developers, it will become more attractive.”

A better package

In conversations with organizations like Mozilla and Yahoo, in talks with mobile developers — basically, anyone who doesn’t have an explicit interest in promoting a single mobile operating system like Android or iOS — one trend is becoming quite apparent:

The app as you know it is dying.

It’s like the CD, an expensive package for digital information, a package that is increasingly becoming unnecessary and obsolete.

And just as with the CD, all we’re waiting for is a better delivery method to come along and kill it off.

The challenges to that shift are partly technical and partly cultural. Mobile web apps first must meet consumer demands for high quality and performance. And as previously noted, developers need to be able to market mobile web apps.

Yahoo is one company working on the first challenge. Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz is Yahoo’s platform vice president, and he is working on what he calls “a bunch of tricks to make web applications feel native.”

“We don’t want to emulate native, it has its own paradigm. What we want to do is create a new class of experiences. Something that’s the same across phones, TVs, tablets — the web is a paradigm that is cross-platform.”

But however much Mozilla or Yahoo might want to see the mobile web overtake native apps as a paradigm for ideological reasons, those who have to approach the problem practically in the here-and-now still have to deal with native issues and stacks.

“I absolutely believe that the mobile web is going to continue to grow rapidly,” says Jeff Haynie, who co-founded Appcelerator, a company specializing in getting web developers up and running on mobile OS platforms.

But, Haynie says, it’s too soon to discount the opportunity afforded by apps.

“That’s a huge opportunity for developers worldwide,” he continues, talking about mobile web apps. “But those compelling native experiences across lots of devices are where opportunity is going to be in the near-term. Consumers have come to expect a very high bar from experience, like the Flipboards and Instagrams that you just can’t acheive now with a web app.”

Referring to Mozilla et al., Haynie says, “These companies have many, many web developers — their foundation is the web. That’s what they’re yearning for, how to leverage that. That’s the promise of the web…

“The real question is, how do you let web developers build applications that span the native experience and the web?”

Web advocates, not surprisingly, have answers: New technologies and new marketplaces for making  money from web apps.

New technology for the new mobile web: JavaScript and Node

JavaScript and Node.js are two key technologies that will make the transition from native apps to web apps possible.

“JavaScript is LISP in disguise. It’s as powerful as any functional programming language can be,” says Yahoo’s Fernandez-Ruiz.

And with JavaScript-based Node.js in the equation, he says, “It’s hard to tell if this will be the next Ruby on Rails, but this could be.” (Ruby on Rails is a platform for developing web applications that has become wildly popular in the past few years, thanks to the speed with which developers can create sites and apps using it.)

JavaScript and Node are core components of Yahoo’s Cocktails, a new suite of tools to help developers make their mobile web apps look and feel indistinguishable from high-quality native apps. Fernandez-Ruiz says that in early previews, responses from mobile developers have been positive and enthusiastic; everyone wants to get their hands on it.

Getting content to run consistently across all mobile and device platforms is a daunting task, and to date, many companies are trying to tackle it by translating code from one OS’s language to another, e.g. Objective C for iPhone development to Java for Android development.

But the code that comes out on the other side of such translations is too often spaghetti, and trying to solve the compatibility problem programmatically isn’t a long-term option.

Instead, said Fernandez-Ruiz, “We decided to solve the problems of the next three years rather than the problems of today.”

Ideally, Yahoo wants to eliminate the multi-language scenarios that introduce complications for developers. That’s the goal of Cocktails. One Cocktail product, called Mojito, uses JavaScript and Node to run a single codebase both on client and server side.

“We’re not making any difference between the front end and the back end,” says Fernandez-Ruiz. “For us, it’s the exact same code.”

Manhattan, another Cocktail, is a Node.js hosted environment for Mojito. Apps can be wrapped in a native shell and shipped to the iTunes App Store or the Android Market or simply run in a browser, and Manhattan helps to speed up the user experience access across high- and low-speed networks and to run apps on platforms that don’t have full HTML5/CSS3 support.

While Node has been shown to have insane performance benefits, Fernandez-Ruiz says, “We’re not using it for event-driven, low-latency reasons, although those are there. We’re using it because it runs JavaScript on the server side.”

JavaScript is evolving, he says. “The next generation of JavaScript will make the it a compelling, high-performance programming language for the web. This is a new class of web apps that are cross-environment, continuous, fluid experiences.”

And for the end user, Fernandez-Ruiz says that jumping from one interface on a TV to another interface for the same service on a tablet or smartphone or PC is disturbing. “But with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, you can have apps that look and feel the same.”

This is something we saw in action when we reviewed LinkedIn’s latest suite of mobile apps, which are Node-powered and web-heavy. Even the native apps for iOS and Android relied heavily on the mobile web for a lot of pages and features, and the mobile web version of the app looks and functions exactly the same as the native versions.

For Yahoo’s purposes, Fernandez-Ruiz continues, “Node.js is part of the puzzle, to execute code on the server side. But the premise is the same: It’s not native; it’s the web.”

Yahoo will also be introducing other Cocktails, including Windjammer and Screwdriver, in the near future.

But Haynie says the web-app-in-a-native-wrapper model should be regarded with some caution.

“That kind of hybrid application — we’re seeing almost no one using that rig[…]

Nimbula, a company ties together public and private cloud resources in a way that companies can manage them easily, this week released the latest version of its software.

Nimbula calls itself a cloud operating system — because it helps its corporate customers manage their various cloud assets — private, public, and hybrid — from one place, with a single login. It’s new product is called the Nimbula Director 1.5.

Chief executive Chris Pinkham stopped by VentureBeat‘s office recently for an interview (see video above).

He said there’s been a lot of talk about the “hybrid cloud,” but it’s been just that. Until now, no one has really been able to do it well. While gaming company Zynga was a front-runner, and built a hybrid cloud internally — because of the huge cloud computing needs of its popular social games, Nimbula is one of the first to offer it to third parties, he said.

EMC, VMware and Citrix all offer products that require customers to rely system administrators to manage large installations, he said. But Nimbula removes that middleman, Pinkham explained, and allows companies to manage both public and private cloud computing and storage assets more simply (self-serve), and to scale them as needed. If customers want to keep existing infrastructure products, they can build upon that, say by adding public cloud infrastructure.

Competitors include Openstack and Eucalyptus.

This “infrastructure as a service” market is a $4 billion market, Pinkham said, citing Gartner research.

The company received $21 million in venture capital from Sequoia and Accel Partners last year.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive cloud trends at our inaugural CloudBeat event on Nov 30-Dec 1 at the Sofitel Hotel in Redwood Shores. We’ll be unveiling some of the most revolutionary cases of cloud adoption by the enterprise. It’s invite only. To apply to come, click on this link.

Filed under: cloud, dev, VentureBeat

Twilio announced today 500 Startup‘s Dave McClure (pictured left) and SV Angel‘s Ron Conway (pictured below, right) started a second $250,000 seed fund for startups built on top of Twilio.

“We’re giving access to some of the best angels in Silicon Valley,” Twilio chief executive Jeff Lawson told VentureBeat. “Getting a seed investment from Ron Conway and Dave McClure speaks a lot and gets entrepreneurs up and running.”

Finding funding in Silicon Valley can be difficult given the number of startups on the same search in such a small radius. Twilio wanted to call out the developers who were smart and business savvy enough to run their own companies on top of its platform.

This year’s round will be particularly enticing for startups, because any funding given by McClure will be matched equally by Conway. For example, if McClure invests $50,000, the company will receive a total of $100,000 with Conway’s involvement. The fund caps at $250,000 and will be distributed by the discretion of the investors.

“I think the Twilio platform continues to grow bigger and bigger,” McClure told VentureBeat. “We see [Twilio] being one of the more interesting platforms for developers.”

This is not the first Twilio Fund to be announced. Lawson explained the first fund came about last year when he saw a tweet from McClure saying he had invested in his fourth Twilio-based startup that day. Lawson approached McClure and suggested a dedicated fund. Thus far, the first fund has invested in 10 startups and is continuing the search as six more startups pitch for funding at the Twilio Conference this week.

“We found some great companies the first time around and I’m hoping we find some more,” said McClure.

McClure was inspired by three past Twilio fund investments to start the second fund: employment tool Proven, customer relationship manager Volta, and automated sales caller FastCall411.  McClure was also impressed with GroupMe, which wasn’t in the fund, but was recently purchased by Skype based on the strength of its group messaging capabilities.

McClure explained not all chosen companies will enter his incubator 500 Startups, but he welcomes them.

McClure also readily welcomes Ron Conway to the fund. “I’m really happy to have Ron and SV Angel on board. They’ve also been pretty aggressive and innovative in going after some early stage companies,” he said. “Ron has been around the industry for 15-20 years. I have tremendous respect for him.”

According to Lawson, McClure has led the charge on the past Twilio fund and was very elemental in decision-making.

Both McClure and Conway invested in Twilio, McClure in the company’s 2008 seed round and Conway in 2010.

[Photos courtesy of Joi/Flickr]

Filed under: deals, dev

DataStax, which sells products built on top of the open source “NoSQL” data store Apache Cassandra, just announced a $11 million investment from Crosslink Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.The company also announced a new enterprise product which will be available in Q4, 2011.

NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, CouchDB and Cassandra have a number of advantages over traditional relational databases of the type proved by Oracle and Microsoft. Instead of rigid schemas, NoSQL databases have flexible ones which can be updated easily, data access is faster and they often scale better to store very large amounts of data.

Cassandra, which is used by web giants like FaceBook and Twitter, uses a peer-to-peer architecture which has no single point of failure. It’s designed specifically for high-availability applications which cannot afford to lose data even if an entire data centre went down. You wouldn’t be happy if Facebook lost your account data or Twitter your follower list, now would you?

Cassandra can also store different types of data at the same time: structured (similar to that stored in a relational database), semi-structured (data in a format like an XML documents which contains tags or other markers to separate semantic elements) and unstructured data. Cloud or on-site servers can be used to host Cassandra.

DataStax’s CEO Bill Bosworth sees the traditional relational database vendors like Oracle and Microsoft as the main competition. It’s still a big shift, in terms of mindset as much as anything else, for a company to move from a relational database to a NoSQL database. “We want to make it easy and efficient for people to adopt this new technology.” said Bosworth. “It’s a philosophical shift that you have to make but once you make it, you start to see solutions in entirely different ways.”

I asked him about what pushes companies to make that leap.”The top reason would be scale.” said Bosworth. “The second reason would be data type.’I have semistructured and unstructured data I want to work with as well’. The third reason would be change. ‘I want that flexible schema.’” If the existing database uses lots of procedural logic, however, migration will be more complex.

There’s also the cost factor. Bosworth gave the example of a customer called Constant Contact which had been considering using a relational database for a new project and estimated that it would take 9 months and cost $2.5 million. With Cassandra, they were able to get up and running in 3 months at a cost of $250,000. DataStax currently has around 100 customers.

DataStax also announced that it will release a new enterprise product in Q4, 2011 which will include the existing OpsCentre web-based monitoring product and Hadoop and MapReduce (distributed computation of large data sets stored across a cluster) functionality on top of Cassandra. DataStax will charge a per node subscription fee for the product. The new funding will mainly go towards the development of that product and expanding sales efforts.

DataStax was founded in 2010, has 30 employees, is based in the Bay area and received $3 million in from Lightspeed Venture Partners prior to the current round.

Filed under: deals, dev, VentureBeat

Web development and basic coding skills shouldn’t be the mysterious domain of a handful of overpaid engineers, and if the Codecademy founders have anything to say about it, the boundaries of that domain will soon be rapidly expanding.

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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Filed under: dev