Heroku, the San Francisco based platform as a service startup, has just announced it has raised an additional $15 million in the second round of venture capital investment.
As one of the first cloud providers, Heroku were incubated in Y-Combinator, following an investment round of $5 million afterwards.
Heroku is currently hosting over 60.000 app on their service. Anyone can host for free an app there, as long as their database doesn’t exceed 5MB of storage.
The system provided by Heroku offers the simplest deployment and scalability solution for Ruby on Rails, by pushing the app via Git and moving up and down a couple sliders when additional concurrency or background processing is needed.
Many people see the investment actually being directed at Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and as a bet to the future that more and more startups will choose this framework and programming language and host their apps in a cloud environment as opposed to dedicated servers.
Working on a startup teaches you a lot of things. Actually it might be the most powerful experience one can get into learning how to make something from nothing and overcome difficulties and conquer challenges.
An effective approach we developed towards design at iCartApp is to challenge every single design decision we take and create ways to test those decisions. Brainstorming, random app testing, focus groups, split testing are some of the ways we challenge our own approaches to a UI or UX decision.
We think of ourselves as providers and supporters as opposed to know-all entrepreneurs. We’re working on creating something remarkable and then let our users decide how it should behave and feel. Stay tuned!
I’ve just received a very interesting email in my Inbox. Will attach it to this blog post and would like to know your oppinions on the subject in the comment section. Personally, I am very happy Google has taken this decisions.
Dear Google Apps admin,
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.
We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.
Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.
In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.
Thank you for your continued support!
Sincerely,
The Google Apps team