Phenomenal growth rate aside, Node.js “doesn’t have a ton of great monitoring tools, and as the ecosystem matures, enterprises need these kinds of tools to look at all the layers of software,” Glen Lougheed, CEO of the Vancouver, BC-based startup told me. “We’re trying to provide devops with the visibility they need to understand what’s happening with their applications — there’s really no great user-friendly tools for that.”

Admittedly, there are some good one-off tools that Node.js devotees have open-sourced. To get to a full APM system, though, developers would need to “Frankenstein a solution together and most people don’t want to do that,” Lougheed said. Businesses are in the market for a more polished and integrated monitoring suite, he said.

NodeFly just put its APM solution — built from the ground up for Node.js specifically — into open beta so developers can try it out. Other APM suites support multiple languages but may not offer the best full-on support for Node.js itself, NodeFly said. New Relic is working on a Node.js agent that could compete with NodeFly.

In other news, NodeFly this week netted $800,000 in seed money from some pretty choice backers including Issac Roth, the man behind the Makara Platform as a Service, which has morphed into Red Hat OpenShift. Roth also spent time at Wily Technology, a leading APM provider acquired by CA — so he knows the market.

Shasta Ventures led the funding round which also netted contributions from Irfhan Rajani of Appneta, Paul Rochester of Sun Microsystems and Layer 7, and Dimitri Sirota, also of Layer 7.

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Typesafe CEO Mark Brewer

“A year ago most of the apps [using Scala] were scale-out big web applications like Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn but in that time we started seeing more traditional business applications where developers chose Scala over Java,” Brewer said. He said many developers find Scala more lightweight and streamlined than Java itself.

“Scala is extremely intuitive and … it is also extremely easy to access libraries from Java,” said Jason Pressman, a Shasta managing director who is now joining the Typesafe board.  Shasta has a history of backing open-source-oriented companies including LucidWorks, once known as Lucid Imagination, and Makara, which was acquired by Red Hat and became the basis of its OpenShift platform as a service.

Typesafe will also continue to build out the Scala-Akka stack adding more components like the recently announced Slick database connector, which makes it easier for developers to use Scala with relational and non-relational databases.

The new funding comes a year and a half after Typesafe netted a $3.5 million Series A round and includes contributions from existing backers Greylock Partners and Francois Stieger.

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For example, the public cloud giant is pitching enterprise accounts with better-than-usual discounts if customers commit to long-term-use of reserved instances for their workloads rather than the on-demand instance options, according to anecdotal reports. In some cases, it is offering unusual “true up” deals so large companies can even out their Amazon spending over the course of their fiscal year. In a “true up” model, the customer pays an agreed-upon monthly price for anticipated usage. It may end up using significantly more or less capacity in that time but this model lets it settle up at the end of each quarter.

The company is “quietly offering up yearly pricing that allows clients to smooth out the bumps of the consumption model. [This is] attractive for large corporations with yearly locked-in budgets,” said an IT executive with a large Amazon customer. “[That means] no surprise spikes either up or down,” the exec added.

An Amazon spokeswoman had no comment, but the company’s usual stance is that it offers many pricing options to give customers a lot of flexibility. Use of reserved instances can be up to 71 percent cheaper than on-demand instances.

Amazon wants cloud commitment

The push to get big accounts to commit to reserved instances for one or three year terms is not lost on Newvem, an Israeli startup that’s building its business monitoring customer use of Amazon’s cloud and making recommendations on best deployment options.

Nevvem will now offer a service to show users which of their instances should move to reserved instances, how much they will save or not save if they move, and how to move them, says Cameron Peron, the company’s VP of marketing and business development. A quarter of Newvem’s 500 customers could save from 35 percent to 50 percent of their current bill if they make the right choice, he said.

Competitive pressures add up, even for giants

Amazon has always been competitive and continually cuts prices,  but the latest push comes at a time when cloud competitors are getting feistier and more numerous. The OpenStack cloud crowd, including Rackspace and Hewlett-Packard, are coming online and Microsoft Azure is adding more directly competitive infrastructure-as-a-service capabilities. Rivals say Amazon may be feeling the pinch — with profits under pressure while its plans to build infrastructure grow unabated.

SoftLayer, a Dallas-based competitor, says it’s winning customers like Appfirst and some gaming companies from Amazon. Donn Rochette, CTO and co-founder of Appfirst, said SoftLayer offers his company the ability to pair the scale of public cloud infrastructure and the ability to get dedicated servers for its work. And, in this case, SoftLayer ended up being less expensive than Amazon because it does not charge for data traffic flowing within its own cloud, he said.

Cloudant is working with SoftLayer, Joyent and Microsoft to provide a cloud database service that distributes applications across a global network of high-performance data centers. The company still runs on Amazon but has significantly lessened that dependence over time, largely because Amazon’s DynamoDB service competes with Cloudant.

Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle’s nagging question is: If a customer is talking to Amazon, what kind of price concessions will it get to run DynamoDB and not Cloudant on Amazon infrastructure?

Stemming startup defections

Others report that Amazon is also getting more aggressive about keeping startups in the fold as they grow. Amazon EC2 is the no-brainer infrastructure pick for any startup. But once those companies start to scale up, they all do the cost-benefit analysis of staying with Amazon or bringing IT in-house. Many opt to do the latter, said Jason Pressman, managing director of Shasta Ventures, a Silicon Valley VC that works with many of these small companies.

“I think Amazon’s picking its spots to be very aggressive and simultaneously rethinking its overall pricing and all of this is concurrent with what Rackspace, Red Hat, and Microsoft Azure is doing,” he said. Every one of those vendors wants to compete for that infrastructure business. That is fundamentally a commodity service so they all have to compete on price, he added.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user Will Merydith.

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Truth be told, the Horatio Alger connection breaks down pretty quickly from there. The food Busque needed was for her dog, Kobe, and she had plenty of money to pay for it. But it was a cold and dark winter night, and she just didn’t feel like leaving the house. Irritated, Busque thought about how other people in her neighborhood were probably already planning to go to the store that night. Wouldn’t it be cool if she could just outsource the dog food run to one of them, for a small fee?

In a “flash of inspiration,” Busque started sketching plans for an online marketplace where neighbors could arrange to do simple tasks for each other. Within a few months, she had quit her full-time job as a software engineer at IBM, and the company now known as TaskRabbit was officially born.

In the three years since then, Busque’s leap of faith has paid off. TaskRabbit announced Wednesday it has raised $5 million in a Series A funding round led by Shasta Ventures. The startup, which currently brokers tasks in San Francisco and Boston, will use the money to expand its reach to other metro areas nationwide, Busque told me in an interview this week, parts of which you can watch in the video below.

TaskRabbit works essentially as a two-way marketplace: People who need help with tasks, or “senders,” negotiate prices on TaskRabbit with people who have free time to complete these tasks, or “runners.” TaskRabbit is set apart from part-time job finding services like Craigslist’s et cetera section by several layers designed to add security. TaskRabbit runners are vetted by a comprehensive background check and all TaskRabbit transactions are processed by the company’s proprietary payment system, which helps protect both senders and runners from scams.

Because users have grown to trust TaskRabbit’s platform, today the company’s purview extends well beyond dog food pickup. The price of the average TaskRabbit deal is now $45, Busque tells me, and the company currently facilitates thousands of tasks per month. TaskRabbit does not disclose its revenue, but Busque said the company collects an average commission of around 15 percent on each deal it brokers.

“We’re really empowering people to sell their free time and their special skills and services,” Busque said. “I feel like we’ve really only scratched the surface of what TaskRabbit can be used for.”

TaskRabbit has already become a household name in certain San Francisco circles. I know people who use it to outsource everything from picking up their dry cleaning to waiting in line for the latest iPhone. As it expands to more geographic locations, the company could well become an eBay-for-services, much like Etsy is an eBay-for-crafts.

Watch Leah Busque describe her vision for TaskRabbit in her own words:

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The Apptio product enables IT to manage the cost and quality of IT services by providing visibility into the costs associated with technology inside a corporation, and the value derived from those expenditures. Products in this sector seek to help IT departments map their IT spend to their business goals; competing products in the on-premise space include IBM’s Maximo product. Apptio’s current user base includes Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas, BNP Paribas, Cisco, EMD Chemical and Starbucks.

Commenting on the funding, and in particular the timing around the round, CEO Sunny Gupta said in a release:

We are operating with a very strong cash position, but still received high interest from outside investors which ultimately influenced the timing of this financing round. Customer adoption of our Technology Business Management solutions has doubled, and with this funding we can rapidly accelerate our growth, launch new products and pursue new markets to further cement our leadership in this multi-billion dollar market.

With extreme pressure on corporate IT to provide both transparency over their spend and achieve ever-increasing levels of efficiency, services that help IT leaders gain visibility over their IT resources will become more valuable. One could argue that a solution such as this is more at home as a core part of the organization’s enterprise resource planning system, but so far, Apptio’s on-demand business model and its software are winning customers and keeping the firm’s venture backers ready to give Apptio more cash.

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Ben Kepes is an independent consultant and contributing writer for GigaOM. Please see his disclosure statement in his bio.

As users, application developers and carriers bump up against the technical constraints around mobile broadband’s popularity, expect more and more hardware investments and dealmaking in the mobile sector. A venture partner involved in the $1.3 billion program to fund startups that will benefit Verizon’s LTE network has even detailed to me what types of companies he and other participants in the program are looking to invest in.

But back to today’s funding. SpiderCloud is building out hardware that allows for cell phone traffic to be kept on a proprietary local network, which the company has dubbed eRAN. So instead of all the mobile traffic that a business might generate in its building and send back to the web over the carrier’s cellular network, all the phone in the office can now communicate via a smaller in-house network that connects to the web using the business’ own web connection — it’s kind of like a femtocell in idea, but not in execution. Today’s infusion, from Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Matrix Partners, brings its total to $40 million.

Pulsus makes a mixed signal chip that converts analog signals to digital signals before it amplifies them. That allows a greater ability to modulate those signals for better sound quality but could also be used to increase the power efficiency of the handsets, possibly in  a manner similar to Quantance. It also makes a variety of other audio chips and its CEO has said it hopes to one day “be the Qualcomm of Korea.”

In a related move, today Austin chip startup Black Sand Technologies purchased an intellectual property portfolio from Silicon Labs, a mixed-signal chipmaker. Black Sand is building a power amplifier that will make some of the components inside mobile handsets cheaper to manufacture and will boost battery life on mobile phones. Black Sand raised $10 million last September.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Jurveston

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Golden previously told us that the company had been scaling up and had been working on this first round for the past few months. The team has now grown to several dozen employees, and earlier this year took seed capital from angel investors Blueshift Partners. Also unusual for a cleantech startup: Sustainable Spaces says it’s already profitable.

Home retrofits are exactly the kind of low-tech solution that get less attention but will make real differences in climate change. Golden says with houses responsible for a little under a quarter of U.S. emissions, leaky heating and cooling ducts could account for as much as 2 to 3 percent of electricity used in the U.S. Sustainable Spaces can reduce an existing home’s energy expenditure by 10 to 50 percent, Golden says; the startup has done around 400 retrofits in the Bay Area.

For now, though, there are a few hurdles to the green home retrofit market. First it can be seen as a luxury for higher-end home owners. Sure your energy bill will go down, but it could be hard to convince a family with a variety of bills to pay to invest in leaky air ducts first. Then there’s the regulatory market, which hasn’t really stepped up to encourage retrofits. Golden would like to see more incentives for energy efficiency remakes.

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I’m just as impressed as everyone else by Disney’s announcement Wednesday that it will pay as much as $700 million for the “tween” social networking site, Club Penguin. Impressed, because it’s a huge amount of money – $200 million more than what Sony and News Corp. were rumored to be bidding for the barely two-year-old Canadian company back in May.

Impressed, but not surprised. We’ve written previously about the market value of Club Penguin, and for an earlier story in Business2.0, I got to hear from a ton of kids about why they are addicted to the game. I even picked out my own waddling avatar and played the game myself for a while.

While the notion of a virtual world based on a bunch of costumed, flightless birds and their sculpting feats with snow might sound silly (‘how long will Penguins be hip, anyway?’ critics have asked), beneath Club Penguin’s hokey animation are some wildly creative and surprisingly dynamic narratives, stimulating enough even for adults despite being so juvenile (not unlike Harry Potter).

Moreover, Club Penguin’s G-rated charm has been a nice alternative to the death-and-destruction universe of other MMOs. It turns out parents were only too happy to pony up $60 a year in subscription fees to know their kids could be online and protected from smut, violence, and commercial hucksterism.

Which raises the first of two reasons why I’m worried about this acquisition, sorry, “partnership,” with Disney.

One: In the first of two conference calls with reporters Wednesday, Club Penguin co-founder Lane Merrifield (he is one of three) insisted that Club Penguin would remain ad-free, in keeping with the site’s “integrity.”

I happened to check out Disney.com during the break. Not surprisingly, Club Penguin was all over the home page – but so were ads, including one for a Disney-branded “introductory 0% interest rate” credit card from Visa.

Now, as the 28-year-old Merrifield explained, one big reason for “partnering” with Disney is to scale Club Penguin’s user base. Speaking about “new revenue streams” and “subscriber growth” Merrifield said: “We’ve not done marketing … and still won’t … so the Disney.com home page will bring awareness.”

But given that Disney.com does shill for third parties, when my turn came, I asked Lane how it is that kids who find their way to Club Penguin through Disney.com won’t be beset with ads. There was an awkward moment before the president of Disney’s Internet Group, Steve Wadsworth, (Merrifield’s new boss) jumped in to explain:

“Disney com is a place where people go to be entertained for sure, with a broad range of media, in a range of environments, as well as to be informed. So there is advertising on Disney.com — I see a Disney visa credit card ad [there]. But in virtual world environments—having watched Club Penguin carefully and learning from them—in those immersive environments that are clearly targeted at a younger kids, like Club Penguin, Disney Fairies or Toontown, those will be ad-free … so once kids get immersed, they’re pretty clean.”

Once kids get “immersed” in Club Penguin, they’ll be protected by the same quality controls that distinguished the site from the beginning. That is nice – and I don’t doubt that Club Penguin’s three founders worked hard to make this a sticking point in the deal that could likely make them each centi-millionaires. (Club Penguin took no venture capital. Cofounder Dave Krysko primarily funded it, with smaller stakes from Merrifield and a third founder, Lance Priebe, who invented the game.) But I’m not sure it matters that Club Penguin’s site will stay “clean” if, en route from Disney.com 9-yr-olds get hawked cheap credit.

Two: I think it’s admirable that Disney, the supposed “#1 site for kids and families” (despite having botched Toontown) is now “learning from Club Penguin,” but this rather confirms my suspicion that the House of Walt is no longer a house of creativity.

Having invented animation, the company had to buy Pixar to stay competitive in it for goodness sake. The single exception might be the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise – but that’s a derivative product line anyway, and we all know it will be remembered for its box office records, not its wan contribution to artistic invention.

So I’m not sure who wins here. Disney is revved by the acquisition for sure, but looks slow just the same. Club Penguin’s founders are rich, but look a bit like sell-outs. It remains to be seen if the kids benefit, at all.

Carleen Hawn is the editor of FoundRead.com. Prior to editing Found|READ, she was an Associate Editor with Forbes, and a Senior Writer and West Coast Bureau Chief for Fast Company.

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