Union Square Ventures, the VC shop that funded Del.icio.us, FeedBurner, Etsy and Twitter, has placed its latest bet in the clouds. Cloud computing service 10gen has taken $1.5 million from the high profile early investors, both the fund and the company announced today.
Most interesting perhaps is that the service is entirely open source, offering anyone a full copy of all its source code. Customers will pay for hosting, a Service Level Agreement and customer service. Today 10gen compares itself to Google App Engine and offers hosting for server side Javascript and Ruby.
Cloud computing, the use of hosted storage and processing power provided by 3rd parties specializing only in such functionality, is red hot. It’s also not without its risks, see our coverage of industry leader Amazon’s S3 downtime this weekend. We’ve also got an extensive introduction to cloud computing here.
Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson is one of the most publicly visible venture capitalists in the market and his backing is sure to lead to interesting connections. USV + open source in cloud computing may or may not work well – but it won’t be boring. 10gen was founded by Kevin Ryan, the former CEO of DoubleClick, the massive display ad company that Google is currently going through court trying to buy.
Above, versions of the 10gen SDK currently available.
Other open source cloud computing platforms include Toronto’s Enomaly and UC Santa Barbara’s Eucalyptus. There’s a good round-up of coverage on this topic over at Gigaom.
