TechCrunch
Microsoft Launches BrowserSwarm To Help Web Developers Test Their JS Frameworks And Libraries
Microsoft today launched BrowserSwarm, an open-source tool for testing JavaScript frameworks and libraries across devices and browsers. The aim here, Microsoft says, is to help developers “build great, interoperable frameworks.”
Great frameworks, the company rightly notes, are the foundation of the modern web. Testing them, however, is hard and something many developers don’t always have the resources to do.
BrowserSwarm, which Microsoft developed together with appendTo and Sauce Labs, makes testing frameworks and libraries easy. All a developer has to do is point the service at the code’s GitHub repository and the system then uses the popular QUnit JavaScript Unit Testing framework on top of Sauce Labs’ web app cloud testing platform.
Even if you don’t write your own frameworks and libraries, BrowserSwarm allows you to see the test results for many popular ones like Prototype, BackBone.js and Jquery to ensure that your apps will run smoothly across a wide variety of browsers. For developers who upload their own code, BrowserSwarm creates a basic table with pass/fail scored for all the popular browsers, as well as very detailed job reports.
Given that this is an open source project, Microsoft is asking the community to help improve the results by uploading their own projects and test cases. It’s also looking for developers who are interested in connecting BrowserSwarm to other code repositories besides GitHub.
PayPal's David Marcus: Braintree Keeps Its Brand And Ops Intact; Venmo Will Be Used For Big P2P Push
Today’s news that eBay’s PayPal is buying Braintree for $800 million in cash will open the door to Braintree taking its developer-focused payments platform to more markets and with more services. PayPal, meanwhile, will use Braintree to build out its ambition to be, in the words of PayPal President David Marcus (pictured, right), “the payment OS” for all transactions, not just those directly through PayPal’s own retail services. After the deal was announced, Marcus and Braintree CEO Bill Ready (shaking Marcus’ hand in the photo) talked to us about how the two companies will coexist, and what their ambitions will be longer term.
Branding, operations separate for now to keep their eyes on the developer prize
Although Ready is reporting up to Marcus in the bigger operation, Ready will continue to run Braintree effectively as a separate operation after the sale is completed. “Braintree will report to Bill and Bill will report to me,” Marcus said today. “But it’s not our intention to integrate Braintree with PayPal. On branding, we’ll see what happens but it will remain what it is for now.” Ready says that around 200 people work for Braintree today, and all of them are coming over in the deal, but only in contract: they will remain in their current Chicago headquarters after the sale.
Part of the emphasis on separate operations is because PayPal doesn’t want to ruin a good thing: Braintree has become one of the bigger payments platform in the developer community, with some of the more interesting leaders in the newest generation of online transactions — car service Uber and Airbnb among them — using it for some $12 billion in transactions annually, $4 billion on mobile. While PayPal definitely wants to build up that part of its business, it’s all too aware of past perceptions of the company.
“To put it mildly, PayPal didn’t serve developers well for a while,” admitted Marcus today. “We want to ensure them now that the Braintree experience will only be amplified and possibly improved, but it won’t be degraded. The independence that I want to give Braintree for risk modelling and its white-glove service. If you have an issue you can pick up the phone and that is different from what we’ve done at PayPal.” By this he is referring to what Braintree calls its “white-glove” service, with a very hands-on approach to risk management and other services.
“I want to keep perpetuating that offering to customers,” Marcus continued. “The only thing that is going to change is that you will have more countries where Braintree will be available and it will be augmented, but in no way will the policies or customer service change. At the end of the day that’s what developers want and I feel really passionate about winning developers’ hearts again.”
For his part, Ready has already been seeing some backlash against the deal, even before any news was made official.
It’s all in the APIs
But to say that PayPal is simply bolting on Braintree to its existing business is not quite accurate, either.
A couple of times in our conversation today, both Marcus and Ready pointed to APIs and how these would be the initial bridge between the two operations.
Braintree’s API has been the killer component in how it has become embedded so quicky in third-party applications, and Ready today emphasized that “it was important to us that the API we built will continue onward.”
But it looks like PayPal might try to bring some of its services into that framework. “We are going to enable Braintree to run their business at a greater scale and in more countries,” said Marcus, “and with access to our APIs to incorporate Braintree with the PayPal branded experience.”
Again, specifics and timing for how this would work was not laid out today. “We can’t commit to dates right now because the acquisition needs to close first, ASAP as far as we are concerned,” said Marcus. “In the meantime we’ll think about how fast we can move… We don’t want to do anything that slows them down.”
Other offers, and going the acquisition route
We had earlier reported that Square had also approached Braintree with offers from some interested parties of around $1 billion for Braintree, before PayPal sealed the deal. No comment directly on Square or any others that may have approached Braintree today, but Ready did say that “a lot of people knocked on our door.” He added that going with PayPal wasn’t about “who offered the most dollars, but where could we go and build for the next decade of commerce.”
With Braintree clearly on a high growth trajectory at the moment and with valuations that were reaching into 10 figures, it’s noteworthy that the startup decided to move under the wings of a bigger player rather than go it alone. This speaks to the fact that despite the fast growth in e-commerce, it is still a relatively small piece of the pie — retail e-commerce as we pointed out the other day — was only 5% of all retail sales in the U.S. in the last quarter, for example. And with margins on e-commerce transactions remaining small, the route to success lies in scale.
Indeed, it’s something that Marcus notes as well in his blog post explaining the rationale for the deal, the biggest it appears that he has made at PayPal. “In the crowded payments space, most have a long way to go before they actually deliver useful solutions at the scale that’s required,” he writes. Today, he echoed the same sentiment: “It’s really hard to scale payments globally. Compliance and different payment types make it hard. But I think the key thing here is that we’re all here payments geeks and passionate about revolutionizing that.” He points out that it was the same thing that motivated him to let eBay buy his own mobile payments startup, Zong.
Ready realized at some point that becoming part of a bigger company was the way to get to where Braintree wanted to be: “We didn’t ‘decide to go the acquisition route,’ but we realised what we wanted to build was a whole new wave of commerce experiences… how do we best give developers the tools to build these?”
On PayPal’s side, picking up startups is an important way of forcing the bigger company to remain innovative. “There is a transformation at PayPal right now,” says Marcus. “We are entrepreneurs, and we like challenges.”
Venmo
We earlier reported that we’d heard that one of the key attractions for PayPal was Venmo, the mobile payments business Braintree acquired last year for $26.2 million. Today Marcus confirmed that this is the case, with Venmo part of how PayPal hopes to become more of a payment layer in apps, as well as to make a big move into peer-to-peer transactions.
“We love the Venmo Touch experience of paying in one click across different apps,” Marcus said. “And then there is the Venmo app itself. The idea for us is to enable and iterate in the world of person-to-person payments. I don’t have exact details that I can share now, but the idea is that we will make it a groundbreaking environment for P2P. We will scale globally.”
He says that what happens with that New York-based Venmo team is “TBD at this point.” That is to say, the team will remain independent and stay in New York for now.
Mesosphere Adds Docker Support To Its Mesos-Based Operating System For The Data Center
Mesos is an open source project that helps developers manage server clusters more efficiently while providing resource isolation. It’s currently being used by the likes of Twitter and Airbnb, where much of the technology was developed. Google also runs a very similar system called “Borg” – which it developed independently long before Mesos came into existence – to keep its data centers humming.
Mesosphere, an early-stage startup founded by ex-Twitter and Airbnb engineer Florian Leibert and former Airbnb engineer Tobias Knaup, is currently spearheading the development of Mesos. Just like other startups that focus on open source, Mesosphere also hopes to sell additional services in the long run, but as Leibert told me, the focus right now is on building out the Mesos ecosystem and evangelizing the concept.
Mesos, which is now hosted by the Apache Foundation, was born of a research project at Berkeley, which included then-PhD student Benjamin Hindman who later introduced it to Twitter (where he is still a technical leader).
The idea behind Mesos turns out to be pretty straightforward, though it went out of fashion some time ago: instead of setting up numerous server clusters for different parts of an application, Mesos allows you to share a pool of servers that can all run different parts of your application (say your Hadoop big-data cluster, your web server and other services) without them interfering with each other and with the ability to dynamically allocate resources across the cluster as needed. This means you could easily switch resources away from your big-data analysis and allocate them to your web server if you’re getting hit with a large amount of traffic, for example.
The high-level idea here, as Leibert explained to me, is that Mesos is essentially the kernel of an operating system that looks at the data center as a multi-core CPU. That operating system needs more than just a kernel, though, and all the components around it is what Mesosphere is now focusing on. At AirBnB, Leiber also built the Chronos scheduler, a cron replacement for automatically starting and stopping services (and handling failures) that runs on top of Mesos. The other part of the Mesos puzzle so far is Marathon, which Leibert described to me as the equivalent of init.d – the first process that’s started on a Unix system – for the Mesos ecosystem. Marathon provides the Mesos framework with an API for starting, stopping and scaling services (and Chronos could be one of those services).
Using Chronos and Marathon together, the team announced today, Mesos can now also run and manage Docker containers. Docker allows developers to automate the deployment of their applications by packaging them into lightweight, portable containers that can then be deployed on new machines. In the context of Mesos, that means it’s now much easier to deploy applications on the cluster. “Delivering applications with Docker on Mesos,” the team writes in a blog post today, “promises a truly elastic, efficient and consistent platform for delivering a range of applications on premises or in the cloud.” Docker support, Leibert told me, will also make service discovery across the cluster easier. After all, it’s not enough to just set up the cluster, but the different servers also need to be able to find each other.
Adding Docker support to Mesos, Leibert told me, is something others have tried before, but it’s actually very hard to do. Thanks to its intimate knowledge of Mesos, however, the six-person team at Mesosphere managed to integrate the system.
With these building blocks in place, Leibert said, the team now also plans to add some user-friendly interfaces to its framework to make it a bit more accessible to new users. Mostly, however, Mesosphere plans to listen to the Mesos community and then add the components its users are asking for.
Quantified Work: Meet Stir, A Former iPod Engineer's Smart, Health-Tracking And Height-Adjustable Desk
If you’re anything like me, you spend too much of your day at your desk, in front of your computer. During busy days — especially once you go deep into “the zone” — it’s easy for a few hours to fly in our usual, sedentary position. For this reason, I’m probably not the only one who could use a gentle reminder: “Hey Rip, you’ve been sitting for two hours, how about a walk?”
Well, my friends, your Fitbit can remind you that you’re behind on your steps, but what if your desk could remind you to stand up, or take a break? Thanks to Stir, a Los Angeles-born startup founded by former Apple, Disney and IDEO employees, now you can buy a smart desk that will do just that. The Stir Kinetic Desk, the startup’s first product, which launches today, combines the health-tracking software of popular wearables like FitBit and Up with connected hardware machine learning to create a new work experience that actually promotes movement — and your health.
Stir Founder and CEO JP Labrosse was one of the first 35 employees of the iPod Division at Apple, where he led the engineering development teams for two of early iPod projects, so it’s not surprising that the Kinetic Desk borrows a bit from the Apple design scheme. In particular, the desk comes with a built-in touch screen — about the size, shape, look of an iPod or iPhone — which allows users to change the configuration and height of their desk, or to go from sitting to standing (and back) just by double tapping.
Not only that, but the screen displays graphs and visual representations of a user’s movement, so they can quickly see how long they’ve been sitting and what their work habits and usage looks like. The desk contains a thermal presence sensor and computer outfitted with its health-tracking software, allowing it to track your movement and display that data through its touch screen.
While it may sound almost uncanny, not to worry, the desk isn’t yet outfitted with Siri’s voice or any sort of personal assistant. While Labrosse was willing to admit that the Stir Kinetic Desk could incorporate some Watson or HAL 9000-like features down the road, for now, the desk is meant to work in concert with the Internet of Things, not to try to commandeer it and dominate your office.
In fact, the desk tracks and adapts to your personal routine in such a way that’s meant to optimize health and productivity. The desk will display how many calories you’ve burned, time spent standing versus sitting — and your answer to “who is the most beautiful desk of them all?” of course.
Labrasse, echoing Harvard Business Review’s recent study, called sitting “the smoking of our generation,” which is probably a little overdramatic, but it’s true that in our overworked, over-connected modern work environment, we do spend more time in chairs than on our feet. While your Kinetic Desk won’t remind you to eat, shower, finish coding and go outside or be a better friend, it will help keep you upright and mindful of the healthier routine that’s right around the corner.
The desk also contains a setting called “active mode,” which you can activate by hitting a button on the front of the desk, which will put it into “Whisperbreath” mode — meaning that the desk prompts you to move after you’ve been sitting for too long with a gentle, one-inch rising and falling motion. You can then double tap to change positions.
Stir’s new smart desk also comes with built-in AC and USB ports (eight and four, respectively), connected to a single power cord you plug into the wall, and comes with Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity, which the CEO hopes will eventually allow the desk to integrate with third-party fitness and wellness devices. To think: Your desk could be come your fitness and wellness graph itself. Imagine that. The team will also eventually release a web-based dashboard to allow you to view your work and health data on the go.
The Stir Kinetic Desk has a hardwood surface, comes in white, espresso and four underside colors, and will retail at an expected $3,890. It’s not cheap, but, hey, you can’t put a price on good health, people, especially when it’s your office furniture that’s keeping you healthy.
Labrasse and the Stir team were kind enough to let us take their new health-conscious desk for a spin, and you’ll find our video below. Find the Stir Kinetic Desk at home here.
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