ReadWriteMobile

"Backend as a Service" (BaaS) companies provide easily integrated cloud-based backends for mobile app developers. Though not as well known as Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS), the BaaS ecosystem has quickly evolved from a niche vertical into an important industry segment.

The industry segment took another step toward maturity this week with mobile development platform Appcelerator's announcement of its Titanium 2.0 SDK, with significant backend cloud services tied into it. Meanwhile, Boston-based mobile cloud provider Kinvey also released its platform to the public.

As an evolving standard, HTML5 will be good for lots of different things. Hybrid mobile calendar apps? Great. Social apps pulling content from the Web? Sure thing. Mobile games? Maybe ... not so much.

For all the work that developers put in to make HTML5 a more dependable standard, it is not up to the specifications of game developers. Mobile games test the limits of a device and performance is often heavily tied to the components of a smartphone or a tablet. That is not a strength of HTML5. Will HTML5 ever live up to its promise? Can it create state of the art games enjoyed by millions? It has not happened yet. We decided to run that question and several others through the outspoken Todd Hooper, CEO of Zipline games to determine whether the hype around HTML5 really does match the reality.

The "backend-as-a-service" segment of the mobile development community is evolving. Several startups got into the game early and helped define the market, such as StackMob, Parse and Kinvey. Others have followed suit and attempt to give developers similar options while integrating other value added services. Israel-based Applicasa is one of those.

Applicasa released a program this week it calls "Start-App." The program is designed to give developers all the cloud functionality and content management system services for free until an app has 100,000 downloads. Applicasa claims to be the "one stop shop" for all mobile developer needs.

Mobile development company Appcelerator announced today that it is buying "backend-as-a-service" startup Cocoafish to implement cloud services and functionality in its Titanium Platform. Acquiring Cocoafish is an astute move by Appcelerator, which focuses on tools for developers to create native and mobile Web apps. The company realized in its latest mobile developer report that 84% of developers using Titanium were utilizing some type of cloud service. With Cocoafish, Appcelerator attempts to keep all the necessary mobile development tools on its own platform.

Appcelerator admits that with the purchase of Cocoafish it is moving into direct competition with other mobile cloud services providers like Parse, Kinvey and Stackmob. With Titanium and Cocoafish, Appcelerator now has an integrated client and mobile cloud platform making it one of the most powerful mobile tools providers on the market.

Cloud-based mobile platform StackMob has released it backend-as-a-service development tools to the public. StackMob has been in beta for a year and seen 60% month-over-month adoption since its Series A funding in April. The company is one the first of the mobile cloud service providers for mobile developers to make its platform publicly available.

StackMob started specifically for iOS developers in need of cloud solutions tied to the backend of their apps. In October the company opened up its beta program to Android developers. The company's goal three-fold: help publishers build apps, deploy apps and scale apps.

Mobile backend as a service startup Parse has raised its Series A funding with an announcement today of $5.5 million coming from Ignition Partners. Parse is growing quickly and likely benefitted from being close to the prominent VCs in San Francisco along with Valley developers that have tied their cloud services to Parse for data storage, social layers, push notifications and user management.

Parse has added features recently, most prominently aligning themselves with both Heroku and Appcelerator. These are canny moves for the startup because it allows Parse to approach the environments that developers are working in. What will be next for Parse?

Why do your iOS apps crash? After all that time you spent building them, running them through emulators and testing them with your blood, sweat and tears and boom, they hit the app store and users start complaining. A startup out of Boston has an innovative approach to figuring out why your apps crash and how you can isolate the problem.

Crashlytics is a cloud-based crash reporting solution that aims to boil crash reports down to the simplest common denominator. It works by writing a simple line of code that activates its lightweight SDK (about 75KB) that taps its cloud solutions to run crash reports through Amazon Web Services and return a simple report honing in on exactly the line of code that is making your app crash. It is one of the most simple yet powerful crash report systems for mobile developers available.

Urban Airship made big news in the startup community yesterday with its acquisition of backend location services provider SimpleGeo. Last December we called SimpleGeo the most promising company of 2011 because of the way it provides location data for applications and the approach the company uses to tackle the problem. Urban Airship agrees that SimpleGeo has great potential, hence the acquisition.What does this mean for the backend-as-a-service mobile cloud realm?

Mobile development framework Sencha is releasing several new products to tie HTML5 mobile Web development to the cloud. Sencha.io is designed to give Web app developers the ability to synchronize and manage data in the cloud without having to write an excessive amount of code. For messaging, data management, login and deployment, Sencha claims that a few lines of Javascript will allow mobile Web developers to easily integrate these functions to apps built with HTML5.

Mobile backend service provider StackMob announced that it is unveilings its compelete platform for Android developers. StackMob, which is still in private beta but growing quickly, had only been targeted at iOS developers since its launch earlier this year. The StackMob Android SDK supports push notifications on all devices using Frozen Yogurt 2.2 and above.

The StackMob Android SDK will be available immediately though the first 300 that sign up will be given priority. StackMob released the news this morning. StackMob is one of the leading startups in the "backend as a service" ecosystem that is lowering the bar for developers to create dynamic apps with all the functionality a sophisticated infrastructure can provide.