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Reaching for the Clouds

A new startup hopes to compete in the crowded Web-application infrastructure market by making its platform open source.

July 25, 2008 — This week, a startup called 10gen released a preview of its infrastructure software for Web applications, entering a competitive field crowded with startups and the formidable Google, with its Google App Engine. The company received $1.5 million in an early funding round from Union Square Ventures.

Full Article on Technology Review

10gen

Union Square Ventures writes about their investment into 10gen.

July 20, 2008 — My love for computers and software started as a teenager growing up in Germany. I fondly remember my Apple II which followed my TI 59. I early on discovered that I could earn money with my programming skills and wound up doing some after school work for Siemens. While I mostly wrote code on a local machine, I got to do some mainframe stuff in Cobol. I was struck at the time by how incredibly cool and easy it was to have code running on a machine that was in a different city (Munich) over 100 miles away that reliably and rapidly provided access for thousands of Siemens endusers across the world. That was almost 25 years ago.

Full Article on Union Square Ventures

10gen, New Cloud Computing Firm, Closes $1.5m Series A

Union Square Ventures Backs Platform-as-a-Service Technology Provider

NEW YORK, NY — July 21st, 2008 — 10gen (http://www.10gen.com/), creator of a new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology that helps developers more quickly and easily build dynamic, scalable Web sites and applications, today announced $1.5 million in Series A financing from Union Square Ventures. The cloud computing company, founded earlier this year by DoubleClick veterans Kevin Ryan, Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz, and former Joost engineering VP, Geir Magnusson Jr., aims to provide significant time and cost saving advantages by allowing developers to focus on solving business problems and delivering functionality rather than expending effort on infrastructure, scaling and system management.

"At 10gen we are building a cloud stack from the ground up - including a database and application server - with the design goal of running sites and services of all sizes," noted Dwight Merriman, Founder and CEO. "Rather than porting existing tools into the cloud, Web development can only prosper by building new technologies for this environment, technologies which are available in an open way such that many companies and other entities can collaborate on their development."

10gen's team is creating a virtual Web application server and database from distributed computing resources with the goal of providing horizontal scalability and geographical redundancy that is secure, transparent and easy to manage through a high-performance grid-aware object database, automatic on-demand application scaling and site management, deployment and performance evaluation tools. The application server supports JavaScript as its first development language, with Ruby support in early testing and other languages on the product roadmap.

"The 10gen team brings together a great vision for cloud computing with amazing experience in building Internet scale systems" said Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger, who will be joining 10gen's board of directors. "We are excited to support them in their effort to provide the development community with an open source platform-as-a-service."

10gen is part of the AlleyCorp (http://www.alleycorp.com/) network of affiliated Internet companies. The 10gen platform is currently hosting Silicon Alley Insider (http://www.alleyinsider.com), the business publication of its sister company Silicon Alley Media.

About 10gen

10gen is creating a new platform to let developers quickly and easily build complex and scalable Web applications. The 10gen cloud computing architecture will enable developers to write Web applications and automatically scale as demand increases without re-architecting code. The 10gen stack includes a powerful database and application server. For more information, please visit http://www.10gen.com/ or email info@10gen.com. For career information please email resumes to jobs@10gen.com.

About Union Square Ventures

Union Square Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm based in New York City. USV invests in companies that disrupt markets by capitalizing on ubiquitous connectivity and commodity IT infrastructure. USV's current portfolio includes Etsy, Twitter and Indeed, and past investments include Tacoda (acquired by AOL), FeedBurner (acquired by Google) and del.icio.us (acquired by Yahoo!). For more information, please visit www.unionsquareventures.com.

Contact:

Michael Berkowitz
Director of Corporate Communications
AlleyCorp LLC
(646) 747-1544
mberkowitz@alleycorp.com

Ex-DoubleClick CEO heads into the clouds

Kevin Ryan's sixth Manhattan startup will ride the latest Web trend offering low-cost infrastructure services through cloud computing.

May, 8, 2008 — Former DoubleClick Inc. Chief Executive Kevin Ryan is starting his sixth Manhattan-based tech firm in the past three years, a company called 10gen that will offer Web sites low-cost infrastructure services.

Full Article on Crain's