Backend as a Service Blog Annie Bourne's Posts

In the last several months, we at Kinvey have talked to nearly a hundred enterprises about their mobile strategies. One common theme has emerged. A VP at one tech company, which has solved generations of business problems, summed up their clients’ condition thus: “Mobile is a mess!”

Our integration with Facebook, available today, is the first solution that enables all developers — even those without deep pockets or big teams — to connect their native mobile apps with Open Graph. If you are an individual developer or part of a dev shop, Kinvey is your ticket to Zuckerberg’s grand vision of “building an entirely new class of social apps.”

Tuesday morning, before taxiing down the runway (the first time), my United Airlines flight ran a short video promoting a glorious future where dynamic mobile applications would let passengers book and change travel plans on the run. Two hours later, this vision blurred when the 757 returned to the gate in Boston, canceled the flight, and regurgitated several hundred people into the terminal. A single desk attendant stood nervously behind the desk, as the line snaked through the hall. Former passengers were using their mobile devices to tell people their plans had changed, but did not appear to be using UA’s existing mobile app to book new ones.

We’re very excited to share that PhoneGap and Kinvey today announce an “end-to-end” technical integration between the PhoneGap environment and Kinvey’s Backend as a Service. With this new solution, developers using PhoneGap to build mobile applications can now save themselves the time and aggravation of building the backend “plumbing” that every data-driven application requires. Kinvey offers developers a full-featured, scalable cloud backend, out of the box and ready to grow through every stage of the development life cycle – from prototype to worldwide adoption or “chart-topper.”

We’re thrilled to announce that we have expanded our partnership with Urban Airship, the leading platform provider for high-performance push messaging. This expansion unveils a seamless integration that enables developers to easily build a new class of push-enabled applications for native operating systems and the mobile web. At Kinvey, we make it easy for developers to set up, operate and manage scalable cloud backends for mobile, tablet and web applications. We have integrated our API and libraries with Urban Airship’s to enable sending push notifications to devices running on iOS and Android through a single interface and SDK.  

Do you know what it is? I’ll tell you at the end of this blog. But if you went to Apple’s giant developer conference in San Fransisco last week, you might already have an idea…

If you were sitting in the seats and attending break out sessions on very cool new features for iOS 6 – like Passbook and Do Not Disturb, Apple Maps, and crowd-sourced traffic – you may have had a reaction similar to Kinvey’s iOS guru, Brian Wilson, when quizzed on key conference metrics:

Q: “What parties did you attend?”

A: “None. After sitting in those sessions, there was just so much great code to write.”

Or at least that was his cover story.

Whether you develop apps for an enterprise, or for yourself, Kinvey makes it ridiculously easy for developers to setup and maintain a cloud backend for mobile, tablet and web apps. Today, we are delighted to announce that Kinvey is partnering with HP Cloud Services to give you even more options for how and where you deploy applications, business logic and data, in the cloud. Through this partnership, Kinvey will support HP’s Cloud Services, allowing HP Cloud customers to consume Kinvey on their HP cloud instances.

Developers who use HP Cloud Services can use Kinvey’s Backend as a Service platform to get a full-featured data store, along with mobile specific features like location, social, push etc. All of these backend features are easily consumed by iOS, Android, Javascript, and Node.js libraries so that the developer doesn’t have to write any backend code. Kinvey will auto-scale and maintain your backend, so you can put your time and money into building more valuable apps.

I’ve been in Kendall Square a lot over the last several months as a Mentor to the fabulous teams at TechStars Boston 2012. But today is particularly special. Even if sheets of rain are drenching joggers along the Esplanade and diluting the uncovered cappucinos hustled out of Voltage Cafe. It’s my first day of work at Kinvey, and I am thrilled to the tips of my very wet toes. Because today I don’t just get to peek in – I get to dive in.

Why Kinvey? Why this start-up? Why now?

It’s pretty simple. I love companies that hit “the three T’s” — Technology, Timing and Team. When Sravish offered me the opportunity to join Kinvey and head up Business Development, I was thrilled. Here’s why: