The ideal candidate will have built a “top 25 app” and want to build a “brand new service from the ground floor”, according to the job post.

It continued:

“In this role, you will be responsible for creating and owning world-class production tablet and web client applications across major platforms including iOS and Android . You must be willing to insist on the highest standards for quality, maintainability, and performance. You will ensure that engineering best practices are followed and that software is designed to be responsive, reliable and maintainable.”

TechCrunch first reported the news Sunday night.

Developers typically access AWS from their PCs, but smartphones and tablets are quickly supplanting laptops and PCs as devices of choice for more workers, so it would make sense for AWS to turn more attention to those form factors.  And, the company added Android and iOS support to the AWS management console so users can keep an eye on their services from their favorite gadget.

Miko Matsumura, SVP of platform marketing for Kii, a Mobile-Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS) provider, said this post talks about client app development rather than a software development kit so would not be directly competitive with what Kii does. But it is also possible that AWS will build its own MBaaS — something that GigaOM Pro analyst Janakiram MSV posited in a post (subscription required) a few weeks ago. According to MSV:

“AWS has all the required building blocks to expose mobile backend services. Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon RDS already form the backbone of many mobile applications today. The AWS SDK for Android and iOS makes it easy for developers to consume these services.”

General purpose Platforms as a Service (PaaSes) neglected this mobile segment — so startups like Kinvey, Parse, Stackmob, and Kii rushed to fill the void. Now,  the bigger PaaS players are adding more mobile capabilities — witness Microsoft’s addition of mobile services to Windows Azure last summer. MBaaS partisans claim it’s too little too late, but others predict a shakeout in this segment.

Sravish Sridhar, CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Kinvey, who looked at the ad, said the fact that AWS is looking for front-end developers is not a huge surprise but added that the GigaOM Pro report about AWS moving into mobile backend services was spot on. “If AWS is looking to launch a Backend as a Service offering, they need seasoned front-end developers because, you need to build world-class client-side libraries to abstract the backend stack.  For mobile developers, the client-side library is the new API,” he noted.

He also said that it’s a no-brainer for Amazon to add more mobile backend services this since he sees mobile “driving the adoption of cloud in the enterprise. It’s likely that AWS has seen this as well and has realized that it needs to improve its mobile cloud offering to get ‘corporate mobile payloads’ (to paraphrase VMware’s term) to run on AWS.”

I will update this story if and when Amazon responds to requests for comment.

This report was updated at 6:13 a.m. PDT Monday morning with comments from MBaaS providers Kii and Kinvey.

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As Firebase Co-Founder James Tamplin described it, the company built a JavaScript-like rules system that assigns every piece of data in Firebase with one or more rules. “Eg. ‘Only let a user use the app if they’re logged in or ‘only allow 5-digit numbers entered in a field,’” Tamplin told me via email.

Aris Samad, CEO of QuickSchools, which built a school management system that enables class scheduling with real-time updates, was thrilled to hear the news. While QuickSchools password-protected its apps, Firebase needed to address security so that more apps could go into production, Samad told me.

In a blog post announcing the API, Firebase said its security model,

“lets you build secure apps where the client talks directly to the database (Firebase). This is a shift from the normal three-tier architecture (client, server & database) and it makes running your own servers optional for many apps which, in turn, removes the application server as a scaling botttleneck.”

Firebase competes with PubNub, Pusher and Realtime.co but in many cases developers who turned to Firebase — count Quickschools’ Samad among them — would otherwise have cobbled together their own real-time backend, a chore they have little stomach for. Nathan Bashaw, who this week helped launch Scratchpad, a real-time HTML CSS editor that helps people write code in one window and see it render in another, said Firebase streamlines that whole process. “It cuts out lots of steps, cutting and pasting, sending snippets to other devs and refreshing everything all along,” he said.

Firebase, which launched its code in April, is a Y Combinator 2011 alum, and has raised $1.4 million from Greylock, NEA, Flybridge and angels including Amr Awadallah, CTO of Cloudera.

The new API will be available Tuesday and if it works as advertised, there will be a lot more Firebase mobile apps in production soon.

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If in the last four or five years the question for a promising startup has been whether to use your own servers or use Amazon Web Services, that calculus is changing. Now, startups should ask themselves, “Why architect your app for Amazon when you could forget having to architect an app at all?”

Microsoft’s Windows Azure Mobile Services

The development of these mobile infrastructure backends and the ecosystem for mobile developers is a topic that I’ll be discussing with Kevin Lacker, CTO at Parse, at our Mobilize conference on Sept. 20 and 21 in San Francisco. Parse, though, is just one of the vendors offering a mobile backend as a service.

What many of these vendors think developers really need is a way to build apps that perform flawlessly and scale rapidly up from a few to thousands (or millions) of users without requiring years worth of operations knowledge. The rise of startups like Parse is a response to the growing complexity of building out a mobile app and supporting it through spotty connections, delivering offline access to apps, and keeping an app up after a tweet or a “like” from someone famous enough to send millions of users to a service.

Microsoft’s new service envisions it as a platform as a service (hosted by Microsoft) attached to a SQL database also hosted in Microsoft’s data center. Today, Azure Mobile Services are available for Windows 8 apps, but later releases will support iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Meanwhile, over at Kinvey, CEO Sravish Sridhar sees value in letting developers host their apps on their choice of cloud, hook into their choice of database, and basically serving as the glue bringing those underlying choices together.

Sam Ramji, VP strategy at Apigee

Either way, all of these players are recognizing a fundamental shift in the type of infrastructure needed to host mobile applications. Expect more competitors to pile on.

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So … why the change? Sridhar sees two emerging trends. First, enterprise software companies (IBM, Sybase/SAP, Adobe etc.) want more mindshare among mobile developers. Second, mobile developers, who demand free tools, are forcing mobile services companies to find other ways to make money. Writing in the company’s blog, Kinvey VP Annie Bourne says these MEAPs:

offer broad software platforms to support enterprises that want to enable multiple mobile apps for multiple operating systems which access multiple sources of data. We think they belong in the Subway map of the Backend as a Service ecosystem, even though they do not offer a service, because they are a significant way enterprises address mobile infrastructure needs. Also, we see some MEAPs now working to extend their value to the large market of nimble mobile application developers.

The problem is that big enterprise software companies are, well, big enterprise software companies. They want to provide big stacks of middleware and client software and integration pieces. And they want to sell this the same way they’ve always sold software — for big dough. That doesn’t fit the mindset of mobile developers who want to build stuff fast using free or near-free tools. Enterprise software vendors are starting to get that– which is why Adobe bought PhoneGap, IBM bought Worklight etc., SAP bought Syclo etc.

Secondly, Kinvey, which offers its own platform to make it easier for developers to deploy apps on Microsoft Azure, Rackspace or Amazon clouds, says the mobile platform guys are moving down the stack, looking to become cloud service providers to make the money they can’t make on their free or near-free tools.

Writes Bourne:

Over and over again, one hears that developers don’t want to pay for development tools … Mobile SDK providers look elsewhere for revenue, including to backend cloud services. Appcelerator acquired Cocoafish and released the functionality this spring as Titanium Cloud Services. Yesterday, Flurry acquired Trestle to tack on cloud services to their mobile marketing services solutions.

So, without further ado: Check out the new map with the MEAP addition.

Feature art courtesy of Shutterstock user tovovan

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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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While the area is more famous for the tech luminaries and startups it lost to other regions — Harvard alums Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates being the most famous examples  – it still can claim a roster of impressive tech startups.

As a Silicon Valley-based partner for Boston-based North Bridge Venture Partners‘  Paul Santinelli has studied the differences between the two technology hotbeds up close and come up with a few conclusions. ”Boston is strong in infrastructure, comms [communications], and enterprise software — the kinds of technologies needed to build businesses,” he said in a recent interview.

Silicon Valley — which led the league in VC money with more than $3 billion invested in Q4 2011, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers/NVCA MoneyTree Report, is much more focused on the consumer markets, Santinelli said.

But in the post-minicomputer, post-PC world, why build a business in Boston? “That’s a question we had to answer in a very real way when we got started,” said David McFarlane, Co-Founder and CEO of Akiban Technologies, a Boston-based NewSQL database startup. Some of the company’s backers wanted it to relocate to Silicon Valley, he said, but Akiban resisted.

“There’s a tremendous amount of talent in the Boston area where there are quite a few database and data integration companies. There are a number of founding architects that came from Object Design, from Archivas, Blue Agave, and Oberon and InterSystems,” he said. Object Design was a pioneer in object-oriented databases; Blue Agave, a demand management specialist, was acquired by I2 Technologies (which was then acquired by JDA Software); Archivas was a storage startup acquired by HDS; InterSystems is the company behind the Cache database (an outgrowth of the  MUMPS database) used by many hospitals and healthcare organizations.

Ori Herrnstadt, McFarlane’s co-founder and Akiban CTO agreed. “The caliber of architects you found here in the database world was unmatched. The Vertica, the Netezza, the Object Design guys were all here,” he said.  (Vertica, Netezza and Object Design ended up at  Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Progress Software respectively.)

Other hot database or storage oriented startups in the Boston area include Kinvey, ParElastic, Ginger.io, Sonian, Hadapt, Cloudant and VoltDB, the latest brainchild of serial database entrepreneur Michael Stonebraker, who backed Informix, INGRES, Streambase and, Vertica.

It doesn’t hurt that MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Boston University, Boston College, Brandeis, Bentley, Babson, UMass/Boston and other colleges are shoehorned into a compact area around the city. Those schools provide a steady stream of young talent to power startups. Another key part of Boston’s deep bench comes from its background as the home of the minicomputer — the mid-range machines that bridged the mainframe and PC eras. Those minicomputer companies — Digital Equipment Corp., Prime Computer, Data General, Wang Labs, ComputerVision — have gone the way of the dodo bird, but left behind an impressive array of technology experience that remains relevant.

Boston’s proximity to east coast financial companies is another plus. Those companies are not only a possible source of investment but a potential customer base, Santinelli said.

Still, as evidenced by the number of local companies snapped up by outside tech giants, the Boston-Cambridge nexus can feel more like a farm team to distant big leaguers. IBM alone has bought 20 local area companies since it purchased Lotus Development Corp. in 1995. IBM’s most recent purchase was Burlington, Mass.-based Emptoris last December.  Oracle (bought Cambridge-based Endeca in October) and others have cherry picked promising startups in the area. There simply aren’t many tech giants based here any more. On the plus side, the well of expertise still runs deep in the area that witnessed the rise (and fall) of the minicomputer era.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user John Stracke

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Cocoafish, founded in 2010 in San Francisco by Michael Goff and Wei Kong, is part of an emerging class of mobile backend providers that includes Stackmob, Parse, Kinvey and others that are helping developers add cloud-based features to their apps. Cocoafish services such as push notifications, social integration, sharing, location and others will be integrated into the Titanium Platform by early in the second quarter. Appcelerator said it will also offer iOS, Android, JavaScript and REST SDKs so that these services can be accessed by all mobile app developers, regardless of what technologies they use, such as Objective-C, Java, PhoneGap, Sencha and HTML5.

Why the acquisition makes sense

Appcelerator’s acquisition of Cocoafish is logical, as it looks to become the go-to resource for developers and companies building cross-platform apps. In its latest developer survey, Appcelerator found that 84 percent of its developers connected to cloud-based services. But almost all of them were manually adding these services themselves. That can double the time it takes to launch an app.

Now Appcelerator can offer a full suite of front-end and backend solutions for developers with Cocoafish integrated into Appcelerator’s Titanium Studio. And by opening iOS, Android, JavaScript and REST SDKs, it means that Appcelerator could also appeal to developers who don’t use its Titanium Platform. That can drum up even more business, though it pits Appcelerator against a number of competitors in the mobile development services market. But it looks like there is still a lot of business to be had. Kinvey did a survey of apps on iOS and Android in September and found that 73 percent didn’t connect to a backend.

Connecting apps to cloud services can still be tough, but it usually provides more engaging features. That is increasingly important for app developers, who need to create more-dynamic apps that keep users involved. User engagement and attention is the name of the game in the mobile app world, in which users are quick to try then discard apps. The purchase of Cocoafish also raises the question of whether we will see more consolidation in this nascent market as potentially other Platform-as-a-Service offerings or other companies look to add mobile support. For Appcelerator, which raised $15 million in November, it is another sign of momentum as it capitalizes on the boom in mobile apps.

Curious about how the backend-as-a-service market fits into the larger mobile market? Take a look at this helpful chart worked up by Kinvey.

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Well, Kinvey did some digging into iOS and Android apps and found that together, 73 percent of these mobile apps are basically static and don’t connect to a backend. IOS apps fare better with 35 percent of apps connecting to cloud backends while 18 percent of Android apps connect to these services. Kinvey took a statistically representative sample of more than 2,000 apps in both the Apple App Store and Android Market and manually looked for services like data syncing, social network integration, location management and other features.

The research is self-serving, but it helps shed some light on why some apps are more engaging and appealing than others and what opportunities there are for apps to become more dynamic. That’s an increasingly important goal for developers, which are fighting to get noticed in a sea of apps and need to find ways to make money, especially as users continue to prefer free apps. That has put an emphasis on engaging users over longer periods of time, not just getting simple downloads. Localytics, an app analytics firm, reported earlier this year that one-quarter of apps are only opened one time.

I talked with Ryan Light, creative and marketing director at Kinvey, about the numbers and implications of this research. He said iOS apps are more often connected to backends because the App Store has been around longer, and developers have been working on the platform longer. He said Kinvey’s research has found that apps that connect to backends receive higher rankings and more downloads, because they’re likely dynamic with more fresh content and are more social and contextual. For example, apps that can connect to cloud data are more timely, while other apps are more useful because they include social sharing, location information or push notifications.

“The rankings of apps and how many downloads they get definitely show that developers who invest in this see some return. From the users we’ve talked to, people get bored with an app that doesn’t change. It’s more engaging to tweet something out or use an app that grabs new data and is always fresh.”

Light said developers who don’t connect to backend services are split into two camps. Some just don’t have the capabilities to build more than a simple front end for their apps. And others are capable but don’t have the time or money to do it or aren’t convinced the effort is worth it. Light said it’s understandable. He said he first got into the backend business with Kinvey when he was asked by a developer to build out some infrastructure for a mobile app, which ended up costing $7,000 and taking up two weeks’ time. That realization helped launched Kinvey, which, like its other rivals, is trying to solve the backend part of the equation for app developers.

Again, the data is a helpful selling point for backend providers. But I do think that it’s good to understand the current situation and the options that are available to developers. The name of the game in apps is engagement, something we discussed this week at our GigaOM Mobilize conference. If you can’t hold on to your users, it’s easy for them to abandon your app and then there’s no way to monetize them. We’re seeing a big spike in the number of freemium apps and in-app purchase revenue, but it’s all dependent on ongoing usage. Most big-time app developers understand this, but for the apps that still don’t have some dynamic backend connections, it’s a good reminder to look at that as an option to increase their competitiveness.

As Kinvey and a host of other providers are more than willing to tell them, developers don’t have to build this stuff themselves. It costs money, but it may be worth it, especially as apps that are more dynamic becomes the new expectation of app users.

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