Parse, The ‘Heroku For Mobile’, Raises $5.5 Million Series A
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
In its current form, this is inappropriate for all but the most basic use cases.
If you have a specific application in mind, I'd love to chat with you about how it maps onto our security model. Feel free to drop me a line at kevin@parse.com.
And if better security is something that's in the works, that's great. I'm not looking to give you guys a bad name. I just saw this being talked about in the startups I work around, and felt as if some of the less experienced developers were not considering what implications using a service like this might have. It's convenient, I'll give you that -- but instead of facilitating good security through its APIs, it obscures the need for it altogether. And from what I can see, it would be difficult for you guys to encourage good practice without being heavy handed.
Let's just hope your users are smart about how they use your product, because I'd hate to see what effect a few breaches might have.
- They enormously extend their offering to support development of arbitrary server-side code.
- They figure out how to do this in a way that doesn't introduce inescapable lock-in for application developers.
- They figure out how to differentiate this offering from what similar server-side deployment/platform services already provide (Heroku, EC2, AppEngine, whatever).
That's not to say UA or Parse won't ever see a big exit (in this market, who knows). Rather, I seriously doubt -- in either case -- that the economics are there for more than a profitable "lifestyle business".
(no negativity implied -- I favor lifestyle businesses, but VCs don't).
Speaking as someone who has never used node.js before, it was nice to not have to worry about setup and just start coding.
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cloudmine
CloudMine doesn't seem to have native mobile SDKs -- but that's actually the smallest piece of the puzzle.
As for lock-in we have always said from the beginning that our customers own their data and can take it with them at any time. I think you may find a recent blog post by our co-founder of interest as well: http://www.stackmob.com/2011/11/why-a-paas-for-mobile-develo...
Sometimes that's not so bad - if what you have to reimplement is stuff you'd inevitably have to build yourself if you didn't have the PaaS provider, then you're just deferring the cost of it (potentially "forever"). But often you would make different choices if you did not have the choice of the PaaS.
You may not see the potential and that's because you have no idea of what's coming up and I'm sure the founders at Parse have that piece of information and it's going to be at least a $200M exit if they execute to their vision.
You may not see the potential and that's because you have no idea of what's coming up and I'm sure the founders at Parse have that piece of information ...
Anyone with sufficient experience in developing large-scale mobile applications should have a pretty good idea of where this can go, and what to expect out of the potential customer base.
We're talking about a very familiar space of developer tooling, not rocket science.
... and it's going to be at least a $200M exit if they execute to their vision.
[Edit] In retrospect, venturing a guess here is too silly to do. $200M seems insanely high, regardless.
Seems like an awesome product, and user feedback from pretty much everyone involved has been overwhelmingly positive. That's a good combination.
Great round well deserved.
(Full disclosure, this isn't a space I've worked in before, I'm just going on what people I respect who are in the space have said)
Well if you change your mind, we are certainly hiring. Just send a resume to jobs@parse.com ;-)
This morning Adobe announced that they were shutting down Flash for mobile (vendor lock-in): Everyone praising.
This afternoon, we have Parse that raises 5.5M$ (More vendor lock-in): Most people praising.
To me, Parse sounds like an utopia. It does look very promising and the premise is very interesting. However, what happens if you need to move to some other backend (If you hit an Instagr.am's hockey puck growth for example)?
If you want analytics on your backend?
How about if you need to moderate some of your content?
Lots of black magic and while you can just switch a DNS entry on heroku, you can't do so on Parse...
https://www.parse.com/docs/rest
You can also moderate content manually through the data browser.
As far as scalability goes, our team has a lot of experience designing web-scale products. We're designing Parse from the ground up to scale. If anyone has an application that they're concerned how Parse can handle the load, we're glad to chat about it - just drop us a line at feedback@parse.com.
We have a similar product where we provide a backend for game developers, and there are quite a few of them making quite a lot of money on it. But without us, those single developers or small teams simply wouldn't be able to pull off the games that they do, because they don't have the knowledge or resources to make the backend systems we offer.
If you can afford to make your own backend systems, you're not the target for Parse, or us.
(Oh, and it's not like AWS has a 100% stellar track record either. :-) )
It provides a good bunch of interesting features and skeleton of apps for Android and iOS.
They support data store functions, push notifications with some nice options, user management, and user auth and security.