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Engine Yard Adds Java Support For PaaS And Availability On Oracle Public Cloud
It’s Oracle OpenWorld this week and so it’s a fitting time for Engine Yard to show its support for the Oracle Public Cloud and Java, the lingua franca of choice for the enterprise world.
Oracle is an investor in Engine Yard, one of the oldest platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers. The company took the funding last year and has spent the past several months making Java a bona fide member of the Engine Yard family.
Engine Yard is one of the most complete PaaS players in the market. Earlier this year, the company offered customers the choice of putting its platform behind the walls of a corporate data center. Now with Java support and its ability to work on the Oracle Public Cloud, Engine Yard, provides the IT giant with a service it can pop into a customer’s infrastructure. Engine Yard also works on Amazon Web Service, Windows Azure and Terremark.
In its new model, servers with a common function (such as load balancer, app server, database, etc.) are grouped together to facilitate more granular management, said Engine Yard CTO Rob Walters in an email interview today. Multiple server groups make up a complete application environment and those groups can be setup to run in different regions and can be managed, updated and scaled independently of the other groups.
The news is part of the ”app anywhere” theme that has popped up in recent weeks. Apps and infrastructure are running on multiple types of platforms, be it the cloud, a company’s data center or both. Engine Yard’s new Java support exemplifies that trend.
The PaaS market is becoming a battleground for enterprise providers. The differences broke out on Twitter today when an Engine yard programmer replied to a Red Hat community manager, regarding a question I had. The discourse cuts to the heart of the competitive differences between the two providers:
@jzb with offerings from AWS, Windows Azure, Terremark, & now Oracle, I’m not sure where the “1provider” idea comes from cc: @alexwilliams
— PJ Hagerty (@aspleenic) September 24, 2013
The positioning continues….
Lending Marketplace Prosper Locks Down $25M From Sequoia, BlackRock
Today Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending platform announced that it has raised an additional $25 million. The round was led by Sequoia, a longtime investor in the company, and was participated in by BlackRock.
The $25 million raise might feel oddly timed, as Prosper raised $20 million this January, a month that also saw it shake up its leadership team, including the installation of a new chief executive officer. Prosper, launched in 2006, had raised $94.9 million prior to today’s new cash infusion. Including the new funds, Prosper has accepted a total of $119.9 million in outside money.
According to the company, today’s funding was not raised out of duress, but was instead a component to the new direction it kicked off in earlier this year.
Taken narratively, I think that the Prosper story is simple: The $20 million and new management team that came this January were bets that its business model had legs, and was worth pursuing. If things went well, more funds would be made available. And, following a period of strong growth, Sequoia was willing to hand over more.
Loans executed on the Prosper platform totalled $9 million in the month of January this year. In August that figure had risen to $32 million. That is almost a quadrupling in under a year. On a twelve month run rate basis, Prosper is seeing loans executed of more than $360 million on its platform. Prosper’s website claims that it has lent a total of $630 million in its life. So, the company’s current yearly pace is essentially half its lifetime total.
Prosper claims that it intends to use the new $25 million in cash to “accelerate the company’s growth.” That’s generic funding verbiage, but in this case, given the company’s rapid lending rate ramp, it is probably true.
As a company, Prosper competes with Lending Club, and to an extent, Kiva. The public’s willingness to take part in services such as Prosper appears to be increasing with time. Where else can you lock in a 9% return on your funds? And with little to no tapering of the current Federal QE program in sight, other non-equity returns are not likely to move much, keeping Prosper and Lending Club attractive as potentially lucrative, if unconventional and higher-risk investments for normal folks.
A fair question is how large the total pool of potential capital is that Prosper and Lending Club are currently competing for, and if it is large enough for the pair to sustain growth over the next, say, half decade. I think that so long as the Federal Reserve keeps traditional lending rates low using its overnight rate lever, the pool is deep indeed.
Top Image Credit: Tax Credits
Petcube Opens Kickstarter Campaign To Let People Play With Their Pets Remotely
If you haven’t gotten your dose of cute cat footage for the day, watch this and then listen up. A startup called Petcube has launched a Kickstarter campaign today to manufacture a sleek box, tricked out with a laser pointer, wide angle camera lens, speakers and Wi-Fi, that allows people to play with their pets remotely.
Pet owners set up the cube in their homes and then use Petcube’s app to speak to their furry friends and drive them crazy with the laser.
The goal is to get some of the first Petcubes into animal shelters, which would have public access feeds so that anyone can play with the parentless pups. In fact, anyone can make their feed public for 15-30 minute intervals so that those whose landlords don’t allow pets (cough) can get in on the fun.
At 320 backers so far, Petcube has raised $32,679 of a $100,000 goal in less than one day.
The Petcube team — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, Andrey Klen, and Alex Neskin — has been working on the project for about a year now and is in the current cohort of HAXLR8R’s hardware accelerator program. After bootstrapping for a year, the startup raised a small round of seed funding from HAXLR8R, SOSVentures, and angel investor Semyon Dukach.
At the moment they are speaking with potential manufacturers, with the intention to ship the hardware in May of next year.
Azhnyuk said they will definitely have an Android app ready by May, as well. An iOS app is currently in the prototype stage. The apps will be free, and the cube will likely retail for $199.
The cubes are silver and quite sleek, but Petcube will also be selling skins to personalize them. Make them furry, for instance.
“For us this is just the beginning. We’re seeing it as this thing to connect all of the other pet-related devices,” Azhnyuk said. “For developers we’ll be giving access to the API, which will make it possible to connect others to Petcube.”
Petcube has been talking with Sphero, for instance, the maker of the phone-controlled robotic ball. The only potential issue I see here is when the ball gets stuck under a couch and out of reach. Then you have to watch your pet struggle with it, which is simultaneously sad, hilarious, and anxiety-producing.
The laser pointer is most appealing to cats and small- to medium-sized dogs, Azhnyuk said; large dogs don’t tend to go for it, which is a good reason to get other hardware makers in on the action. The jury is out on turtles and fish.
There’s also the possibility to gamify what one can only assume will be an already engrossing experience.
“For game developers we’ll give them the opportunity to program their interfaces on top of the Petcube gaming experience. You have a new gaming experience when you’re playing with a live being,” Azhnyuk said. “Then you can also overlay [visuals] on top of the gaming experience.”
Petcube isn’t the only startup in the long-distance pet love space: last month Petzila, a remote treat dispenser, launched an Indiegogo campaign that overshot its fundraising mark by nearly $50,000. With that kind of market validation, the odds seem to be in Petcube’s favor.
Marissa Mayer Says That She Won't Read This
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer seems to be on a bit of a press tour, and as result, a lot of her comments onstage today at the IAB MIXX conference won’t be a big surprise to folks who have been following her recent public appearances and the broader coverage of her time at Yahoo.
One thing that did surprise me: Mayer said (a couple of times, in fact) that she doesn’t read what the media writes about her. To explain why, she recalled hearing a quote from Margaret Thatcher about how press, whether it’s good or bad, influences you and “pulls you off center.” In general, Mayer said she tries not to pay attention to “external forces”: “I know who I am … I have a really clear vision of what I want us to be achieving.”
Not that she claims to be ignoring the media entirely — in the case of her much-discussed Vogue photo shoot, Mayer said that she didn’t read the profile, but “I did see the photographs.” (She said her upside-down pose was prompted by the photographer, who complained that with the profile’s theme of “leadership coming in unconventional forms,” the standard “First Lady in this chaise lounge” pose wasn’t working.)
So … do we actually believe that Mayer doesn’t read her press? Some TechCrunch writers were certainly skeptical when I brought this up, particularly since Mayer seems to be media savvy and, for the most part, doesn’t shy away from the spotlight. I’m more inclined than some of my co-workers to believe her, though I suspect it’s less a blanket “get that article away from me!” rule and more a general guideline.
On the subject of her media appearances, interviewer Charlie Rose (yep Charlie Rose) suggested that Mayer does appear to be building a bit of a brand for herself, but she replied, “I’m building the brand for Yahoo.”
Not that the entire discussion was about her relationship with the press. Mayer also touched on her transition at Google from managing search to focusing on local, which has been portrayed as a demotion, characterizing it as her own decision: “I didn’t want to be the search girl.” And she reiterated that her focus at Yahoo is on mobile — as for mobile monetization, she compared it to the early days of Google, when everyone was wondering of anyone would make money from search.
When Rose asked her what the future looks like, she said, “To me, the future is personalization.” She described herself as having “a career-long love affair with search,” and added, “The ultimate search is one where you’re the query” — i.e. it’s a search that takes into account all your history and preferences.
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