Mike Vernal, Facebook’s director of engineering, said the integration of Parse technology could boost ad sales by making development of cross-platform mobile apps easier to build and run.

If a startup builds an iOS app with a way to connect into Facebook, great, but its reach is limited to the number of people with iOS devices. Then the developers have to start over to build a version of the app for Android and Windows Phone operating systems.

That’s where Parse comes in. As a provider of a Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) with software-development kits for multiple operating systems, Parse lets developers quickly build out applications without having to worry about managing servers. When a startup expands its offering from just iOS to Windows and Phone and Android apps and drops them in app stores, promotion becomes important. Facebook can help with that, by getting ads in front of users. The ads expose the applications to the startup’s app, excite users and — here’s the important part — get more ad revenue.

Getting more from mobile has been a key area for Facebook, and that’s why the Parse deal begins to make more sense. This is particularly important following the mixed reception of Facebook Home.

Aside from being an ad revenue driver, Parse makes sense from a content perspective. Not every Facebook user updates his or her lists of favorite things and other fields, so enabling fresher content from more external sources is desirable; it could boost engagement. Facebook recently rolled out to all users the ability to be selective about what content third-party applications can push back to Facebook, and now users can confidently approve of this sharing of stories into the news feed and timelines through more and more apps that developers come up with.

Down the line, Facebook also wants to make this data more accessible through its newish Graph Search tool, Vernal said. That move would scratch another item off Facebook’s long Graph Search to-do list.

As for Parse, it will keep running the way it has been, Sukhar said, whether developers want to use Facebook as a means of promotion or not.

One unanswered question is what will happen to all the apps developers run on Parse. “It’s business as usual, so we’re actually staying on Amazon Web Services,” said Ilya Sukhar, a co-founder of Parse (pictured). But Facebook has a boatload of custom-built infrastructure. Couldn’t it just move Parse-backed apps to Facebook data centers, effectively turning Facebook into a quasi-cloud service provider? Apps will keep running on AWS “right now,” said Facebook’s director of product management, Doug Purdy. But the key words are “right now.”

Purdy made it clear that Facebook wants to just enable third-party developers to build and run apps that people can enjoy regardless of the device they choose. It turns out that’s in Facebook’s best interest, too.

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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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Facebook said the addition of Parse is an acquisition, not a talent deal, and the company would not disclose financial terms. Update: The Wall Street Journal reported that the deal went for about $85 million.

From the Parse blog post:

“Parse has agreed to be acquired by Facebook. We expect the transaction to close shortly. Rest assured, Parse is not going away. It’s going to get better.

We’ve worked with Facebook for some time, and together we will continue offering our products and services. Check outFacebook’s blog post for more on this.

Combining forces with a partner like Facebook makes a lot of sense. In a short amount of time, we’ve built up a core technology and a great community of developers. Bringing that to Facebook allows us to work with their incredible talent and resources to build the ideal platform for developers.”

My colleague Barb Darrow wrote about Parse back in May 2012 when it added a new JavaScript SDK, explaining what the new technology would allow and why it would be an interesting addition to the market:

“Mobile app developers hate dealing with server-side programming, but most need to do some of it. Those server-squeamish developers are the target market for Parse’s new JavaScript SDK, downloadable as of Wednesday.

The promise of the new SDK is that these developers can now build a secure JavaScript application with a backend without having to provision or write code for servers, said James Yu, founder of San Francisco-based Parse.”

In a blog post of his own, Facebook’s Doug Purdy explained why the company wants Parse:

“By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices. Parse makes this possible by allowing developers to work with native objects that provide backend services for data storage, notifications, user management, and more. This removes the need to manage servers and a complex infrastructure, so you can simply focus on building great user experiences.”

To be sure, one of Facebook’s vulnerabilities has been a perceived lack of mobile skills. Parse could help address that.

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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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SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin

This is a big deal because most mobile app users expect to communicate via their apps. What’s the good of foursquare if you can’t alert the world that you ousted Joe Schmoe as mayor of your Dunkin Donuts? The new MbaaS integrations are all available now, according to Boulder, Colo.-based SendGrid.

One of the key advantages of SendGrid, developers say, is it lessens their overall reliance on Amazon Web Services for capabilities above and beyond basic compute and storage functionality.

That’s increasingly important for developers who don’t want to be overly reliant on a particular vendor’s cloud.  SendGrid’s biggest rival is Amazon Simple Email Service (SeS) and by using SendGrid developers can distinguish between their infrastructure provider and their mail service provider. “That’s key because it can take you six months to migrate an app off of Amazon if you need to,” said Mark Geene, CEO of Cloud Elements, a Denver area systems integrator specializing in cloud development projects.

SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin says he hears that sort of thing a lot. ”One of the strengths of SendGrid is it’s easy-on, easy-off. We make it very easy contractually and technically to sign up and to leave,” he said.

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“There’s no reason developing an app has to be something esoteric that requires a lot of knowledge,” said Kevin Lacker, the CEO of Parse, speaking at GigaOM Mobilize in San Francisco. “Someone else should be doing that boring work for you.”

Parse is that someone, and because he sees a lot of applications, Lacker also offered up a few tips for aspiring programmers to use in their apps to help with getting them picked up and keeping users involved. First, to help drive adoption of your app, or at least distribution, he recommended integrating with Facebook. He also said that to keep users coming back, implementing some sort of push notification could make sense.

If Parse or other platform plays like it are a success, then mobile development and supporting those apps could be as easy as setting up a Tumblr. Imagine what kind of world that would be.

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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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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The promise of the new SDK is that these developers can now build a secure JavaScript application with a backend without having to provision or write code for servers, said James Yu, founder of San Francisco-based Parse.

‘With Parse, we handle user authentication, data storage to a server, etc. without the developer needing to make anything but a static HTML page. We believe … this is the next inevitable step in application design for mobile web and traditional web apps,” Yu said Tuesday.

The SDK builds atop DocumentCloud’s popular Backbone.js, so those developers who know that will be able to adopt it easily to build HTML5 apps.

Parse — which already offers Android and iOS SDKs — competes with Stackmob but the real competition for the new JavaScript SDK is DIY server programming, Yu said.

“The alternative to our platform is getting your own servers running. Since technology is moving toward the fat client, we can provide a service where developers don’t need to touch a server any more but still add server-side technology.”

“We do a lot of work with game developers and they usually get to the point where they want to do things like add a high score list to their app. And they think that will be easy but it ends up being a lot more work than they thought — it balloons out so that they all of a sudden have to maintain a server,” Yu said.

“The overhead of developing mobile apps that require a shared, persistent backend that also supports communication between app users is really high and can easily add 50 percent to your development time, yet the backend is typically fairly generic in that if it’s written right it can meet the needs of a large percentage apps,” said Peter Eddy, a developer with Gazelle, a Boston-based e-commerce specialist. In an ideal world, he added, these developers would like to concentrate all their effort on the user experience and marketing and leave the generic but complicated backend plumbing to someone else.

With Parse’s new SDK, they still need to do the work, but it looks to be a lot less painful.

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Here are 10 cloud computing startups that launched in 2011 and that have a chance to make it big in 2012.

1. AppFog 

AppFog is one of a handful of Platform-as-a-Service startups to launch in 2011, but AppFog is unique because it leverages the open-source Cloud Foundry code as its core. The switch to a Cloud Foundry foundation over the summer resulted in a name change from PHP Fog, as the company was immediately able to support numerous new programming languages. Going forward, AppFog can ride Cloud Foundry’s development wave, while focusing its own efforts on building the best user experience.

2. Bromium

Little is known about Bromium other than that is plans to use virtualization technology as a tool for securing the myriad endpoints (e.g., desktops, mobile phones and tablets) that connect to enterprise networks. While securing cloud servers, as other startups such as CloudPassage attempt to do, is important, the advent of consumerization means endpoints need security. Among Bromium’s founders is Simon Crosby, who co-founded XenSource and served as virtualization CTO at Citrix Systems.

3. Cloudability

Cloudability provides a simple service with a lot of value: it monitors customers’ spending on cloud computing resources. It might uncover something as commonplace as cloud-server sprawl because so many employees are spinning up instances, or it might find something nefarious such as hackers using a company’s instances serve boatloads of network traffic. As use of cloud services proliferates, companies will need an easy tool to help them keep track of what they’re spending and where.

4. CloudSigma 

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service space is a tough racket to enter because it means competing with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, but CloudSigma has a plan. The company is all about giving customers high performance and lots of control. CloudSigma sits in the impressive SuperNAP data center and offers 10 GbE interconnects as well as solid-state drives, and developers can buy and manage resources with the granular control normally found in co-location.

Kaggle, a crowdsourcing platform for solving big data challenges, is about the hottest thing going in big data right now. The idea behind the service is simple: although not everyone has data scientists in-house, there are plenty of them floating around the world perfectly happy to put their skills to work on a problem for cash prizes and a little bit of credit. It takes a lot of computing power to host hundreds of teams on any given competition, as well as the data sets, which is why Kaggle utilizes Amazon Web Services the cloud. It used to use AWS, but has since switched to Microsoft Windows Azure.

Nebula isn’t the only company pushing a commercial version of the open-source OpenStack cloud computing software — it isn’t even the only one founded by a former NASA employee — but it does have a unique approach and an impeccable pedigree. Nebula ties OpenStack to an optimized hardware platform designed to make building public clouds a plug-and-play experience. Among its founders are former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, and investors include Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram.

7. Parse

Parse is trying to become a PaaS specialist for mobile apps, a laudable ambition given how many people now rely on their mobile devices just about everything. It will be difficult to distinguish itself from competitors such as Stackmob, as well as from web-app PaaS offerings such as Heroku and AppFog, but Parse seems to have the right ideas in mind. It has a backend focused on the needs of mobile apps, and a frontend designed for mobile developers that might not have extensive programming chops.

8. ScaleXtreme

What ScaleXtreme lacks in sexiness it makes up for in functionality. Everyone needs server-management software, but not everyone needs the big, expensive software offered from traditional software vendors, or even wants to manage software at all. ScaleXtreme gives users a cloud-based service to manage both physical and cloud-based servers, and, it says, has also garnered a lot of interest from cloud providers thinking it might be a good value-added service to their users who want more control.

9. SolidFire

SolidFire wants nothing less than to revolutionize cloud computing by making it palatable to large enterprises wanting to run mission-critical applications. The company targets cloud providers with SSD-based storage systems that make it possible to store virtual machine images in the cloud and still deliver high performance. Cloud providers utilizing SolidFire gear could find themselves hosting far more relational databases and other applications that presently remain in house.

10. Zillabyte

Zillabyte, still operating in private beta mode, wants to provide users with both data sets and the algorithms needed to process them. Data sets aren’t uncommon on the web, but they usually don’t come with algorithms and a processing backend. The service will initially focus on web data and text-based algorithms, but there’s plenty of room for growth into new types of data and algorithms as the service matures. Zillabyte was co-founded by two former Google software engineers and a former Intel engineer.

Image courtesy of Flickr user JamesWoolley5.

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