Amsterdam-based Wercker, a finalist in GigaOM’s Structure Europe Launchpad Competition, targets companies where developers focus on web applications. “There are other vendors that try to do this, but they’re either open-source solutions that you have to install on-premise and [for which you have to] buy hardware or rent a VM. Our differentiation is that we’re SaaS and we support multiple languages,” co-founder and CEO Micha Hernandez van Leuffen told me.

Cloudbees, for example, offers the Jenkins continuous-integration tool on a virtual machine, but it’s a Java-only solution, he added.

Another design point is that the service will weave in a social networking element to the process — providing a sort of Facebook-like wall so team members know what their colleagues are doing or have done. That is especially important as development teams — which already rely on Github and other tools to keep work updated and track versions — are more geographically dispersed than ever.

“The social element adds value– it shows who broke what. This whole continuous development movement is about enabling trust and for that you have to be very transparent,” he said.

While the company is based in Amsterdam, its target market is thousands of miles west — in Silicon Valley because, he said “That’s where most of the developers are.”

You have to love a company that has big plans and a flair for characterizing them. Here’s how Wercker describes the current software situation on its website:

Your source control is now hosted in the cloud with Github. You run your application on a platform cloud like Heroku so you do not have to deal with infrastructure. The step that is missing in the middle is testing and deploying your code. The Universe is broken.

Werker is one of five finalists in our Structure: Europe Launchpad competition, which will take place on October 16th in Amsterdam. More information can be found here.

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Sure, many of Europe’s cloud deployments may be private, but European companies are eager to learn what their counterparts in the U.S. are doing and share their own experiences. That’s why we’re mixing our Structure stars such as Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels and Jay Parikh, VP of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, with Europeans such as Bernard Dallé, a partner with Index Ventures and Eirikur Hrafnsson, the founder of GreenQloud.

And we’re wrapping up the first day with a showcase of our five finalists. I’ve listed them below, but for more information you’ll have to come to Amsterdam on Oct. 16 and 17th and watch them present onstage. I can’t wait.

• Besol: This Spanish company has built a cloud management product that can span different clouds. The product, called Tapp, is one of those that could enable a real cloud brokerage model to develop.
• ComodIT: This company is building a software-as-a-service offering that will allow companies to create different deployment configurations for their servers and store them online for later access.
• DoxOut: This is a productivity app for the post-PC era, which in laymen’s terms means it will work on a variety of devices. The company says it does that without coding different apps for different platforms. It can work as an installed app offline or via a web browser when the user has connectivity.
• FileSpirit: Find corporate files in the cloud using the File Spirit app. The company is competing with Dropbox, SugarSync but says it offers file encryption and other services designed to appeal to corporate users.
• Wercker: In this devops focused world, companies can deploy dozens or thousands of code updates a day. Big companies write custom software to push out their updates, but Wercker has created a SaaS platform that will prep and test deployment software and integrates with GitHub.

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ThroughPuter President Mark Sandstrom, founder and CEO of ThroughPuter, explained the company’s vision to me as solving a fundamental problem in today’s IT’s world. While more applications are expected to both run faster and run in the cloud, the cloud computing infrastructure underlying those apps isn’t up to the challenge. As Moore’s Law slows down, multicore chips are replacing faster clock speeds, but, Sandstrom said, neither new chips nor the clouds running them were really designed to execute parallel processing workloads.

On the contrary, ThroughPuter has developed a hardware architecture and OS that are designed to execute parallel programs in cloud environments. That means developers can write high-performance applications that run in parallel across many cores, and can actually expect them to run optimally on a cloud platform that has been designed to support them.

However, building a cloud platform and audience to go along with it isn’t easy, and Sandstrom doesn’t think one-time hardware sales to cloud providers is a great business model. That’s why he’s looking to partner with platform-as-a-service providers to make their platforms designed for sequential processing more conducive to parallel processing, as well as with the infrastructure-as-a-service providers on whose clouds most PaaS offerings run. Sandstrom sees the possibility for a revenue-sharing model in which cloud providers deploy ThroughPuter’s hardware architecture to serve customers that want to deploy parallel applications, and ThroughPuter takes a cut of the revenue from those services.

If it can get the right relationships in place, ThroughPuter’s vision might have legs. There’s definitely a desire to move enterprise applications into the cloud, and to the extent that companies are writing their applications to compute in parallel, having in place an architecture designed to run those applications could be a big draw. And it isn’t such a crazy idea — as the emergence of solid-state drives, high-performance computing clusters and other specialized architectures in the cloud have shown us, some providers are already willing to build custom services for custom applications.

If you missed, watch ThroughPuter and our other 10 Launchpad competitors present their visions to the judges at Structure 2012:

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Kannan and Srikanth, who would become the CTO of the startup, decided to build a global, federated marketplace for cloud services which became ComputeNext. By September 2010 they had started the Seattle-based company, and by June 2011, they got busy with product development. ComputeNext launched at our Structure 2012 conference, and was one of the Launchpad finalists.

Kannan argues that while Amazon has done a great job as a leader, “in promoting cloud consumption and solving business problems, but they do not have a compelling reason to meet diverse needs of all the customers.”

“In the AWS marketplace we are able to choose a number of applications and configure and deploy them in the cloud but the IaaS provider is AWS. In ComputeNext’s marketplace, you not only have a choice of applications but also in the IaaS providers,” he said. That element of choice is one of the main reasons why Kannan feels confident about his company’s future.

The company has raised about $2 million in funding, and has attracted many partners such as ScaleXtreme, a server automation software provider, NewVEM, a cloud analytics provider, and Cloudability, which offers cloud resource management, for its cloud marketplace.

Today, it seems everyone who has been offering platforms-as-a-service (think Google App Engine), is moving into selling infrastructure-as-a-service (think AWS) and vice-versa. Kannan sees his company becoming an uber-aggregator of IaaS offerings and then selling those to platform-as-a-service providers. The company will be offering its API to PaaS providers and other companies, he said.

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During that time, the participating finalists will learn how to pitch properly and learn the basics of good interpersonal skills at Sequoia’s Sand Hill Road headquarters. Once that’s all done, they’ll hop up onstage on June 20 to present their ideas to our audience of about 900 investors, executives, media and fellow entrepreneurs and more than 20,000 online video viewers. Check out last year’s finalists here, and read about DotCloud, the eventual winner.

If you are a startup in stealth mode, with a product, or just think you are all that and bag of chips, and you want in on the stage time and Sequoia session, then get busy and apply today! The deadline to apply for the Launchpad is May 16, although we’d love to see your application sooner. We’ll disclose the finalists on May 29 and you will present on June 20 at the Mission Bay Conference center in San Francisco.

At the show you’ll have the chance to meet some of our awesome speakers such as Werner Vogels of Amazon, Steve Herrod of VMware, and executives from Microsoft, Rackspace, and more. Plus, we’ll have cookies. And who doesn’t like cookies? Entrepreneurs, you still have a week, so check out the application and get busy.

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Skip the click-and-hold

Mac App Store apps that are in your Launchpad can be moved by clicking and holding their icons, and deleted then clicking the ‘x’ that appears in the corner of each icon. It’s possible to delete and move them without waiting for that delay, though. Instead of clicking and holding an icon, simply hold the Option key on the keyboard. The icons will start to wiggle instantly, and you’ll be able to delete and move the apps.

You can also move the icons without them being in the ‘editing mode’. You can move them around simply by clicking or tapping and dragging; the icons don’t have to be wiggling to be moved.

Clear Launchpad and start again

If your Launchpad is anything like mine, it has all sorts of applications listed that you’d rather not see, such as Adobe help apps, or uninstallers. If you’d like to only have Launchpad show the apps you actually use, you can clear Launchpad completely and add the apps manually. It may be time consuming to add all the apps again, but it should stop Launchpad feeling so bloated.

1. First off, make a backup of the current Launchpad database. That way, if something goes wrong, you can restore Launchpad back to how it was. To do this, open [Your username] > Library > Application Support > Dock and make a copy of the file that’s in there. In order to get to the Library folder, you may have to use the Finder’s Go menu with the option key held down, since Lion hides it by default.
2. Now open up Terminal from Applications > Utilities. Once it’s open, paste the following command:

   sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db "DELETE from apps; \
     DELETE from groups WHERE title<>''; DELETE from items WHERE rowid>2;" \
     && killall Dock

3. Launchpad should now be empty. You can add apps back in by dragging them from the Applications folder onto the Launchpad icon.

If you’d like to restore Launchpad to how it was when you first installed Lion, simply delete the file you made a copy of from the Application Support > Dock folder. Next time you launch Launchpad, it should be back to normal.

Hide certain apps

If you’d rather not delete everything from Launchpad, or you aren’t comfortable using the Terminal, there is a preference pane you can download which allows you to select certain apps to hide from Launchpad. It’s called Launchpad-Control, and can be downloaded from this website.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the preference pane, you can find it under “Other” in System Preferences. In the Launchpad-Control pane, you’ll find a list of apps that are currently in Launchpad. You can uncheck the box next to an app’s name to hide it from Launchpad. Click apply, and you’ll briefly see the Dock disappear. Once it returns, open Launchpad and the apps you unchecked will no longer appear there.

Set up a Launchpad keyboard shortcut

Unless you bought a Mac after Lion was released, your keyboard probably doesn’t have a shortcut key for opening Launchpad. It’s very easy to set one up using System Preferences.

1. Open System Preferences and open the Keyboard preference pane. In there, select the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
2. From the source list on the left, select Launchpad & Dock. Now find Show Launchpad from the list on the right.
3. Double-click on the right hand side of the entry for Show Launchpad. A small text field should appear. Now type the shortcut you’d like to use for showing Launchpad. You can now use that shortcut to show and hide Launchpad using your keyboard.

Especially f you don’t like having Launchpad in the Dock, this makes it much easier to open it. You could even remap the Dashboard key to open Launchpad, if you wish.

Do you know of any other time-saving or organizational tips for Launchpad? Tell us below in the comments.

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1. Full-screen apps. Especially on a notebook, the ability to quickly switch to full-screen mode and navigate between apps that are using it has absolutely changed how I use Macs for the better. It definitely helps you focus on one thing at a time, and it makes great use of Macs with limited screen real estate. It just feels like something we should have been doing all along.
2. Launchpad. Despite my complaints about aspects of it in my last post, Launchpad itself is a welcome addition to the Mac. I’m using it most on my iMac, where the large icons and full-screen navigation make it much easier to find that one seldom-used app I’m looking for. I also think Launchpad is the first stage of an evolutionary tale that will only see it improve dramatically with future iterations of Mac OS, with feature additions like greater control over app arrangement, and maybe even live icons that display dynamic info at-a-glance.
3. AirDrop. Before AirDrop, copying files from my Mac to a visiting friend’s machine was sometimes so much of a chore that we wouldn’t even bother. Now I never have to have that “Hey, you still haven’t given me that file” conversation again, at least so long as everyone involved is packing the right equipment.
4. Hold key for special characters. I’ve never been able to remember the character codes for Macs, and using the special character palette from the Menu bar still requires more steps than the classic Google, copy, paste method. Holding keys down to produce special characters, as you can do on iOS devices, actually makes my life a lot easier, even though I don’t use them all that often.
5. The price. I recently had to install Windows 7 on a Boot Camp partition for my sister’s Mac. Price of the OS (even after it’s been on the market for nearly two years)? $220. The price of OS X Lion (which I was able to install on all four of my Lion-compatible Macs)? $30. Pricing may be Lion’s most appealing asset.

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1. Remove icons from Launchpad. Right now, the only icons you can remove from Launchpad are apps installed via the Mac App Store. If you remove the icon, the whole app is removed. In a way, this makes sense: they want to transfer the same ease-of-deletion from iOS to OS X. The problem is, if you have a ton of what Lion sees as apps — in my case, all the old World of Warcraft patches showed up in Launchpad — you’re going to have a mess. I can’t hide the apps completely, so instead I performed the digital equivalent of stuffing them in the closet. I created a single folder, moved any non-app programs into that, and stuck it on the last page in Launchpad.

2. Reveal your Home Library folder. I’m not sure why Apple hid this, but there are two ways you can get to it. The first is to go to the Finder, open the Go menu, and choose “Go to Folder.” Type in ~/Library/ and hit Enter. This will bring you to the folder. If you need to get there more than occasionally, or have an app where the hidden flag is causing problems, you can make it visible by typing in “chflags nohidden ~/Library” in the Terminal.

3. Make an app open in all spaces. This tip only works if you have multiple Desktop spaces. To add a space in Mission Control move your pointer to the upper-right hand corner and click on the large Plus icon. Then, right-click on the apps’s icon in the Dock, choose Options, and “Assign to: All spaces.” As a bonus tip, you can also create an empty space to quickly flip to an empty display if you need to.

4. Remove icons from the Sidebar. I’ve run into a few instances where dragging an icon off the Sidebar doesn’t actually remove it. If this happens, right-click the wayward icon and choose “Remove from Sidebar.” If, like me, you ended up with some Sidebar folders pointing to now nonexistent folders and can’t remove them at all, renaming the com.apple.sidebarlists.plist file in ~\Library\Preferences folder (it doesn’t matter what you rename it to) and rebooting will restore your Sidebar to default icons.

5. MobileMe Calendar syncing is now set in iCal. This one threw me at first. In Snow Leopard, you set MobileMe Calendar syncing within the MobileMe System Preferences pane. Now, it’s under iCal’s preferences under Accounts. I imagine this is because iCloud will render the MobileMe preferences pane obsolete.

These are five quick tips I’ve found to help me ease into Lion. What tips do you folks have?

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Structure 2011 LaunchPad winner

Now is a great time to be a software developer. Programmers can choose from a wide variety of open source languages, databases and frameworks when building applications, and there are lots of solid cloud-based hosting options available to run them on.

But that same level of choice makes it pretty difficult to be an IT manager. A system administrator’s job is to make sure all the elements of an application can run smoothly while being safe and secure. Often times, the more components an organization’s programmers want to use, the more difficult an IT manager’s job becomes. This is one major reason that programmers frequently complain of being held back by their company’s operations team.

San Francisco-based startup DotCloud aims to fix all that. Founded in 2010, DotCloud has developed a Platform-as-a-Service product that automatically configures the components for an application and deploys it to the cloud. What sets DotCloud apart is that it can configure applications stacks built using a variety of different components, from stalwarts such as PHP and MySQL to new kids on the block such as Node.js and MongoDB.

DotCloud provides IT administrators with “one place to manage and secure so that they can see what’s going on in their organization,” co-founder and CEO Solomon Hykes told me in an interview at the Structure 2011 conference held last month in San Francisco. “At the same time, developers can have fun, be productive and move fast.” The full video of our interview is embedded below.

Essentially, DotCloud has constructed an automated system that does all the work a company would typically have to get a highly paid system administrator to do manually. DotCloud also provides centralized monitoring, alerting, and control features to help the IT staff manage applications. Currently, DotCloud’s deployments run on Amazon’s EC2 cloud service, but the technology could theoretically be used as an abstract layer to run applications anywhere from Rackspace to a private cloud.

So far, DotCloud’s offering has proven quite popular. The company won both the audience and judge’s choice awards at Structure 2011; it has raised $10 million in series A funding from Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures; and currently counts Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang among its board members. But like any startup worth its salt, DotCloud is not without strong competitors. Since the company was founded, RedHat launched its own platform-as-a-service called OpenShift, and VMware debuted a similar offering called Cloud Foundry.

Hykes told me the new competition only serves to highlight the strength of DotCloud’s original concept. “When we started a year ago, there was one way to do platform as a service, and it was single-stack,” he said. “It’s really great to see validation and to see other players doing the same thing… we’re excited because we’re going in there ready. We’ve got a native multi-stack platform, we’re not bolting on top of an existing silo.”

You can watch my interview with Hykes here:

Image courtesy of DotCloud.

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The company, which was spun out of consulting and services firm Intergence Interactive in March of this year, has raised £1.2 million ($1.9 million USD) from angels and WH Ireland to develop its software. HyperGlance is a data visualization that maps out a company’s infrastructure in 3-D and tries to indicate the health of that infrastructure in a visual format easily viewed on a single monitor. The thesis behind the company is that data can be meaningless unless it’s presented correctly, so it aims to show some of the reams of IT information in a way that can promote insights and understanding in a flash and among lay people who don’t understand command lines or who think hot swappable is a new clothing line for tweens.

Real-Status is based in Cambridge, England, and its CTO Stace Hipperson was the first to consider using visualisation and navigation techniques from the computer games industry to build the visualizations it offers today.

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