As part of reaching that objective, Cloudbase.io has launched a shared API to encourage data-sharing between apps. By way of example, someone coming up with a Foursquare-like idea could decide to use Cloudbase.io to build their application. Cloudbase.io would handle the backend for that app, and the developer could tell the BaaS provider to let other apps access their shared API, allowing those apps to draw on the app’s check-in data and creating opportunities for business deals down the line.

As Buliani told me:

“What I found everywhere [as I was promoting] Cloudbase.io was that everybody with a background as a backend developer instantly got it. Mobile developers were questioning the need for their application to be connected to the internet. Most mobile developers are only mobile developers; they’ve never done anything else before – never worked on websites, for example. They had this mentality of building the small game for mobile.

“The premise for the idea is that we want mobile applications to become platforms. We want them to be able to publish their own layer of APIs, even though it’s hosted on Cloudbase.io. Cloudbase.io becomes invisible in the background. We want to encourage them to be as ambitious as possible and think of themselves as a platform. It’s a chicken-and-egg game of course – what came first, the business or the API? – but we want them to be prepared for it.”

This perspective is unsurprising coming from Buliani, a developer (he was part of the early Covestor team) who became a management consultant in London’s financial heart before returning to tech. But then again, Cloudbase.io is not the only company trying to help smalltime developers think bigger.

So what about rivals such as Parse? According to Buliani, there’s a “philosophical difference” between the two outfits.

“The easiest example is, if you want to build an application on top of Parse you have to register the users of your application within that framework, so your application will have to have authentication. With Cloudbase.io you can have no authentication — it’s entirely up to you,” he said, adding that he was proud of the fact that all of Cloudbase.io’s libraries are open source and available on Github.

Of course, Cloudbase.io’s new service also crosses over somewhat with the territory of API management specialists such as Apigee and 3scale.

As with Parse, it’s free to register with Cloudbase.io and get going. Once the app’s in an app store, users need to start paying – the most basic account costs $11.99 a month, which comes with a gigabyte of data exchange. Above that are professional ($47.99 for 8GB) and enterprise ($119.99 for 20GB) tiers, with the possibility of negotiated pricing for higher volumes.

Users should take note of how data exchange volume pricing works with the shared API. If the app accessing data from the original, Cloudbase.io-using app is also using the same BaaS platform, it’s that second app that gets charged. If the second app is off-platform, it will obviously be the original app’s developers who get charged (it might be smart to publish the shared API but keep it password protected).

Incidentally, for those developers who need as much help as possible, Cloudbase.io also partnered up last month with MoSync, a provider of open-source tools for building mobile applications. The idea there is for MoSync to allow the building and compiling of the apps, with Cloudbase.io adding in the connectivity, geo-location and social pieces.

(And on another note, cloud infrastructure and data-sharing will definitely be on the agenda for discussion at our Structure:Europe conference, which will run in London on September 18-19.)

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VMware was already an investor along with Kernel Capital and Enterprise Ireland, and all three have participated in the new round as well. Intel has however taken the lead this time with ACT Venture Capital also joining in.

FeedHenry serves business customers that want to develop and deploy in-house mobile apps. In February the company partnered up with Telefonica, allowing the bundling of FeedHenry’s platform with the telco’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform, Instant Servers, for the benefit of European customers.

According to Marcos Battisti, Intel Capital’s managing director for Western Europe and Israel, the investment will help FeedHenry expand internationally:

“The mobile application market segment for enterprise is at a tipping point and those companies delivering a comprehensive solution that provide both an end to end mobile development strategy and a way to implement applications easily and securely will be at the forefront of the market segment.”

FeedHenry’s rivals include firms such as Antenna Software and SAP. The Irish firm’s particular selling point is flexibility, allowing deployment of its Mobile Application Platform to public, private and hybrid clouds. Apps developed on the platform can also be built once then rolled out to iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone devices.

The company also provides “backend-as-a-service” functionality, with server-side code based on Node.js, as well as app management tools and analytics. There’s been considerable activity in that BaaS market with Salesforce.com and Rackspace adding mobile backend capabilities there and Facebook buying Parse just last week.

It should be noted that this is far from the first investment Intel Capital has made in this space. Just this January, it also put $4.6 million into enterprise mobile app deployment firm Apperian. And, in February, parent company Intel bought the mobile app development tools division of AppMobi.

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The company is coming out of beta now and is looking to sign up more developers to its platform. Kinvey, a TechStars Boston graduate that previously raised $2 million, offers developers a simple way to add services like push notifications, social integration, location, data syncing, analytics and other features to their apps. Kinvey supports iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry and HTML5 developers on its platform.

Kinvey is going up against companies such as Stackmob and Parse, who are also trying to be the “Heroku for mobile.” Sravish Sridhar, the founder and CEO of Kinvey, told me his company is looking to differentiate itself by making it very easy for developers to connect to any data source or features on any third-party cloud platform. With Kinvey’s Service Link architecture, developers can connect to services such as Google Places, Facebook, Foursquare and Urban Airship (see disclosure below). This architecture can also be helpful for enterprises that want to unlock data that lives on legacy backends such as Oracle, WebSphere, JBoss and SAP, said Sridhar.

“We can be the glue for all data and features, end to end,” said Sridhar. “In the back end level, we are proxying information not only from our own cloud but any backend legacy infrastructure.”

Kinvey is also introducing “success pricing,” which gives customers access to all the features they want and charges them based on active users of their app. Customers will pay 3 cents per active user with caps being worked out to limit how much successful developers can expect to pay. This differs from other backend services, which often charge based on the features implemented.

As Kinvey reported last year, 3/4 of iOS and Android apps don’t connect to a backend service. But connected apps often receive higher ratings and reviews because they’re more dynamic with more fresh content and features. That suggests that there’s a lot of opportunity ahead for Kinvey, Parse, Stackmob, Appcelerator and others, who are trying to be the mobile backend of choice for developers.

Urban Airship is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in GigaOM.

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