The e-commerce giant is leading a $50 million investment in three-year-old Indian competitor Snapdeal.com that also includes a multiyear commercial partnership with the fast-growing online retailer.

The funding round, which also includes participation by Intel Corp.’s Intel Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and other firms, values Snapdeal at around $250 million, according to a person familiar with the deal terms.

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Other investors in the round include Kernel Capital and ACT Venture Capital (two Irish VC firms) and Enterprise Ireland, a government-backed development outfit. Cloud software company VMware is also an investor.

FeedHenry specializes in providing a cloud-based platform-as-a-service for developing and deploying mobile applications aimed at large organizations. It also runs what it describes as a “backend as a service” that helps get mobile apps working with existing enterprise applications. Its partners include Rackspace, Telefonica, Hewlett-Packard and VMware’s open source platform service, Cloud Foundry.

It’s also a would-be rival to Parse, the mobile development firm that was acquired by Facebook last month.

Zynga CIO Debra Chrapaty, who has also done high-ranking stints at other big companies such as Cisco and Microsoft, has been named CEO of enterprise cloud storage company Nirvanix.

She replaces Dru Borden, who will remain at the San Diego-based company as SVP of planning and development and who will also remain a director. Chrapaty will also remain executive chairwoman of the board of Nirvanix, which has investments from Khosla Ventures and Intel Capital.

Chrapaty has most recently been CIO of Zynga, but was also SVP of Cisco’s collaboration software unit and was a corporate VP at Microsoft. She was also president and COO of E*Trade Technologies.

In an email to me, Chrapaty wrote: “I had a great run at Zynga, wish the company and the team the best. But this is a really unique opportunity to leverage a company that is at the center of unstoppable trends (to cloud which hasn’t really affected Fortune 1000 storage yet) and a company that already has some great existing people and customers and investors you have known for decades.”

Zynga has seen a number of high-level departures and top management reorgs in recent months, as it seeks to turn around its recent rocky performance.

Zynga said that Chrapaty, who was hired from Cisco in 2011, will be replaced by Zynga exec Dorion Carroll.

“We thank Debra for her leadership and contributions to Zynga over the past years and wish her luck in her future endeavors,” said Zynga COO David Ko in a statement. “As one of our Zynga Fellows, Dorion has provided direction, leadership and management across numerous technology and products teams at Zynga over the past three years as well as being one of our most senior technology leaders.”

The venture arm of the world’s biggest chip company joins other investors — including Goldman Sachs, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Redpoint Ventures — and brings the total amount of capital raised to $45 million.

Remember, software-defined networking (SDN) aims to do to networking gear what virtualization companies like VMware have done to servers. In the same way that one server can be virtualized into many, all with different configurations, the point of SDN is to make networks as easy to spin up, configure and expand as virtual servers in the cloud, all of it done via software. VMware, for its part, is in the game via its purchase last year of Nicira, the first SDN company I ever heard of.

The idea is considered a metaphysical threat to established networking companies, specifically Cisco Systems; analysts, specifically J.P. Morgan’s Rod Hall, have worried that Cisco isn’t ready to meet the threat.

I had a quick chat with Guido Appenzeller (that’s him in the photo above, at the left of president and co-founder Kyle Forster), and he said that Intel, which does make some specialized networking chips, sees some alignment of interest with Big Switch in the future of SDN.

As I noted before, Big Switch’s approach has a lot of industry support. Its partners include Juniper Networks, Citrix, F5, Dell, Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks.

Schireson joined New York-based 10gen in 2011, and previously served as COO at MarkLogic. Before that he spent nearly a decade at Oracle where he was chief applications architect and vice president for eCommerce and Self-Service Applications.

MongoDB has certainly got a lot of momentum behind it. It has been downloaded 3.8 million times. 10gen’s commercial customers include Cisco Systems, Disney, eBay, Salesforce.com and FourSquare. It has raised more than $81 million in funding from investors including Flybridge Capital Partners, In-Q-Tel, Intel Capital, NEA, Red Hat, Sequoia Capital and Union Square Ventures.

Merriman, a former CTO at DoubleClick, the Web advertising company that Google acquired for $3.1 billion, started MongoDB in 2007 with current CTO Eliot Horowitz.

Seagate, which is the world’s biggest supplier of hard drives to PC and server manufacturers, will offer a complete line of flash-based products to its OEM and distribution partners. It will also work jointly with Virident on developing new flash-based storage products.

The investment is a strategic round, and Seagate will nominate someone to Virident’s board of directors. Virident launched in 2006 and has raised more than $63 million in four rounds of funding. Its most recent round was a $26 million series D led by Mitsui Global Investments. Other investors include Globespan Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, Intel Capital, Cisco Systems and Artiman Ventures.

Separately, Seagate reported a fiscal second-quarter profit of $492 million, or $1.30 a share, on $3.7 billion in revenue. The results were better than the $1.27 analysts had expected. The company also said it shipped 58 million disk-drive units in the quarter ended December 28. Seagate’s shares rose 2.7 percent in after-hours trading.

They include Palantir, SurveyMonkey, GitHub, Square, ZocDoc, Zulily, LegalZoom, Twitter, Warby Parker and others.

CB Insights calls the report “The Tech IPO Pipeline” — which is perhaps a bit generous given its cutoff was a $100 million valuation, and especially considering the problems some newly public Internet companies have faced in the past year.

But still, it’s an interesting slice of the industry, with some observations about who and what is creating value in tech.

For instance, it isn’t cheap to be considered a potential IPO candidate. The average company worth at least $100 million — though many on the list are valued at more than that — has raised $84.7 million, with 90 percent of them in the Series C stage or later.

The 472 companies have raised a total of $40 billion.

Only 20 percent of the companies on the list target consumers, with the remainder selling to enterprises or small and medium businesses.

By breaking down who’s investing in these 472 companies, CB Insights was able to get a real-time tally on which VCs seem to be most effective at finding and helping strong start-ups. Sequoia Capital and Intel Capital both had 35 companies on the list, and Sequoia and Accel Partners have been the best at finding these companies early in their lives, at the seed or Series A round.

The full report is here.

Serlet, who is often called the father of Mac OS X, worked at Apple for 14 years. At Parallels he will be a non-executive director. In a statement, Parallels CEO Birger Steen called him “the rare combination of a software visionary and master of execution.”

Serlet came to Apple by way of NeXT, the software company Apple so famously acquired at the end of 1996, in a move that brought Steve Jobs and several other key executives back to engineer what has been called the greatest corporate turnaround in history. Serlet worked on NeXTStep, which was an early foundation of OS X, as well as on OpenStep and WebObjects. He also spent four years as a researcher at Xerox PARC. He holds a doctorate in computer science from France’s University of Orsay.

Serlet’s departure from Apple was initially seen as a surprise, but was later determined to have been part of a planned transition, during which Serlet handed off his duties to Craig Federighi.

Parallels is best-known for the virtualization software that allows Mac users to run Windows and other operating systems on their machines. It’s a privately held company that has been around since 1999, and counts Insight Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Almaz Capital Partners as its investors. Its rise generally coincided with Apple’s migration to using chips from Intel on the Mac. But it also sells the Plesk suite of server management tools.

Porrini’s LinkedIn profile confirms the move, and shows that he has taken a job as general counsel and secretary at YuMe, a company that provides video advertising software and services. The company is backed by investments from Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Intel Capital.

HP’s legal office has seen a lot of changes recently, since former CEO Mark Hurd left, ultimately to take a job as President of Oracle. Last December, general counsel Michael Holston, who had previously been seen as a key Hurd aide, left the company. His departure came about three months after the ouster of former CEO Léo Apotheker, and Meg Whitman’s taking over as CEO last year.

In April, HP named John Schultz as general counsel, replacing David Healy, who had the job on an interim basis after Holston.

Porrini (pictured from his LinkedIn profile) had been at HP since 2001. Before that, he worked at Bluestone Software, which HP acquired in 2000. Earlier, he was a partner at the law firm of Pepper Hamilton; before that, he worked at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

For years, the applications were traditional on-premise software — you’d run it on a server or a series of desktop machines wherever the people who used them happened to be. And the biggest players were — or rather, still are — Oracle, by way of its takeover of PeopleSoft, and SAP. But when these apps started to migrate to the cloud and be available on demand, things started getting interesting. Companies that used them started to love the functionality, the ease of use, maintenance and support, and also the lower cost, and they started voting with their purchase orders in favor of the cloud.

That’s when the established on-premise suppliers got grabby. Last year, the race to roll up the cloud players started in earnest when SAP spent $3.4 billion for SuccessFactors. Not long after that, Taleo, another cloud player, went to Oracle for $1.9 billion. And Salesforce.com nabbed Rypple. Meanwhile, a bunch of former PeopleSoft execs are building Workday into a credible threat to all of them.

So this makes today’s news from SilkRoad — yet another player in the cloud-based HR application business — all the more interesting. The company announced a $35 million Series C led by Keating Capital and NTT Finance, joining existing investors Intel Capital, Crosslink Capital, Foundation Capital, Azure Capital and Tenaya Capital. Customers include McAfee and International Paper.

Another reason for all the heat being generated by this low-profile sector: The market research firm IDC reckons that, by 2015, companies will spend north of $8 billion on human-capital management tools.

The company says the funding will support its international expansion plans, especially internationally. Its products currently support 18 languages, and there are plans to add to those.

Instead, the Burlingame, Calif., company was going to focus on building games for smartphones.

Now CrowdStar, known for titles such as Top Girl, Social Girl and Modern Girl, is announcing that it has raised $11.5 million in a second round of funding to fuel its mobile ambitions.

Investors in CrowdStar’s second round are Time Warner, Intel Capital, YouWeb, The9 and NV investments. To date, the company has raised $35 million in capital.

With the new funding, the company said it plans to pursue mobile games targeting the female audience and focusing on shopping and fashion. The games will be distributed using Facebook’s social graph, the Gree social gaming network and Apple’s Game Center.

“This funding round validates our pivot to mobile social games,” Relan said in a release. “We’re going for a bigger market with lower production and acquisition costs compared to social games on the web.”

This summer, CrowdStar will launch a brand-new Girl franchise game on Gree’s emerging mobile social network. Just yesterday, Gree announced it had acquired mobile social game maker Funzio for $210 million, showing its committment to signing up new games to the network. CrowdStar is also distributing games on Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

The e-commerce giant (a term typically reserved for Amazon in these woods) is one of the larger examples companies from the Bay Area that are setting up shop here and looking to soak up some of the Northwest’s rich engineering talent.

Other companies with satellite offices in the Seattle area include Google, Facebook, Zynga and Salesforce.

“I’m surprised I ended up at eBay, but the story is compelling,” said Ken Moss, who was hired in November to be eBay’s VP of managed marketplaces technology; Moss is GM of the Redmond office.

A long-time Microsoft employee whose claim to fame includes inventing the Pivot table in Excel, Moss more recently co-founded CrowdEye, a start-up focused on search technology and later on stock market prediction.

He said eBay’s dedication to the region is one of the biggest selling points for recruitment.

Most of the 75 employees that currently work there were hired over the past few months, and a small team has been here for seven years. Among the newbies I met were a number of Microsoft veterans who had been there for 12 to 15 years.

Moss says he will report directly to eBay’s CTO Mark Carges, which is “a signal to the whole company that diversified development is for real.”

“We are first-class citizens,” Moss said, referring to sometimes strained relationship between remote workers and a company’s headquarters.

Eric Brill, VP of eBay’s research labs, is also based in the Redmond office, and has been working part-time there since joining the company in 2009.

Moss said eBay will be looking to hire a range of technologists, from college graduates to senior leaders, including developers, testers, researchers, data miners and other positions.

While I was at the office on Tuesday, the mountains were peeking out from the clouds and were easy to spot from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the fourth floor. It was easy enough for everyone to have a window seat in the open-floor plan.

Although the employees just moved in on Monday, a sign outside the building already announced eBay’s presence. Inside, workers were busy putting the final touches on the space to make it feel like eBay. Primary colors of red, blue, yellow and green highlighted the office walls; with a bit of Seattle flair, conference rooms were named after Northwest tribes such as Puyallup and Quinault (and other names that might be difficult for San Jose-based employees to pronounce).

But missing were some of the perks that some recruits expect these day — no shuttles to and from work or fancy cafeterias, for instance. 

In fact, eBay has a long way to go to compare with what Google has done here. Since entering the market seven years ago, Google has hired more than 900 employees, spread across two locations, a spokesperson confirmed.

One office is in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood; the other is on the Eastside.

The two offices are geographically divided by Lake Washington, which can be crossed by one of two floating bridges — or by boat, if you are crafty enough. The traffic bottlenecks make for a horrendously notorious commute, so having two locations that straddle both sides is a huge perk — like having offices in both San Francisco and San Jose.

Because of Google’s size here, many of its perks are similar to its Mountain View headquarters, including free meals prepared by chefs, frozen-yogurt bars and other, mostly food-based, luxuries.

In eBay’s case, the new digs are located deep on the Eastside, a couple of miles past Microsoft in Redmond, and roughly 15 miles from Jeff Bezos’s empire in downtown Seattle. Recently, Amazon relocated its headquarters to a brand-new campus in South Lake Union, a neighborhood being revitalized by former Microsoft executive Paul Allen.

Other outside companies that have also established sizable tech centers here include Facebook and Zynga. A couple others have gained offices through acquisitions. Electronic Arts, for instance, now has a large office here, after acquiring PopCap; EMC now has big expansion plans here, after purchasing Isilon.

And Geekwire, a Seattle-based technology blog, is good at keeping an ongoing tally, including recent moves into the area by Jawbone and SweetLabs, a San Diego-based start-up, based by Intel Capital and Google Ventures.

Two years ago, Facebook opened an office in the heart of downtown Seattle. It plans to move soon to a 27,000-square-foot space that will have room for about 135 employees. The 70 or so engineers in the office today have worked on projects such as video calling, the Facebook iPad app and other big issues, such as security.

Last April, social game maker Zynga opened an office in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square neighborhood, hoping to absorb some of the game talent here, spawned from Xbox and Nintendo, and cloud-computing knowledge from Amazon. It has 50 employees today, but declined to say how many it planned to hire in the near future.

As with most of these companies, eBay believes it can find a diversity of talent here that can’t always be easy to hire in the Bay Area.

As a Seattle native, and having covered tech here for the past 12 years, including an eight-year stint at the Seattle Times, I might not be the most unbiased on the subject. But I’ve seen first-hand the breadth of talent here, from Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia, T-Mobile and many others, including a strong start-up pool.

Despite that, the local tech community often suffers from an inferiority complex when it compares itself with the Bay Area, which is much larger. Still, it seems that Silicon Valley companies are finding a number of excuses to travel north to drink from the area’s plentiful tech waters.

The investment marks MasterCard’s first in the mobile payments space, and follows similar moves by both Visa and American Express.

Neither company is releasing terms of the round, but mFoundry said MasterCard was the lead investor. Intel Capital, Fidelity Information Services and Motorola Mobility also participated. Previous investors include PayPal, Bank of America and Ignition Partners.

Consumers will most likely recognize mFoundry for developing the Starbucks mobile application, which displays a bar code that can be scanned at the register to make payments from a prepaid account.

MasterCard’s SVP of Mobile James Anderson said he was more interested in mFoundry’s relationships with 600 banks and credit unions.

For the past five years, the company has been focused on the mobile banking space, by developing applications for banks that enables users to check their balances and conduct other financial services from their phone. He said millions of customers at banks, such as Citi and Bank of America, use the applications three to four times a week on average.

Going forward, MasterCard wants to work with mFoundry to enable those applications to make payments at the register using MasterCard’s near field communication (NFC) technology called PayPass.

Near field technology allows a consumer to tap their phone at the register to pay for items. By integrating with these banking applications, the purchase could be deducted straight from a person’s bank account, and without the need to carry around a wallet.

MasterCard is also working with Google Wallet and ISIS, the wireless carrier-led initiative, but it views this partnership as a third approach. “Some consumers will see value in Google; others will want to use their telco provider, and then some will trust their bank,” Anderson said. “At some level those options will be competing, but we believe the choice is up to the customer.”

MFoundry’s CEO and founder Drew Sievers said the relationship is not exclusive, so his company will be free to work with Visa or others, but MasterCard will naturally have a head start since they will be the first ones integrated into the application. Deployments will occur as soon as the middle of next year.

MasterCard is not the only payments provider making investments in the mobile payments space.

Earlier this year, Visa made a large investment in Square, and American Express has opened up an office in San Francisco and created an intimidatingly large $100 million investment fund to make sure it doesn’t miss out on any opportunities.

Sievers said for companies in the mobile banking and payments space that are gaining traction, there’s not only venture capitalists eager to invest, but a ton of companies looking for strategic investments.

In fact, he said, “there’s fewer opportunities to invest in than there are companies willing to invest.”

Here’s USV principal’s Fred Wilson’s comment, via email: “Union Square Ventures is very fortunate to be able to add Andy Weissman to our partnership and we think he is a perfect fit for the entrepreneurs we want to work with and the sectors we want to participate in.” (More below.)

That will cause a small ripple in startupland, because Weissman was the one steering Betaworks’ investment portfolio. His partner John Borthwick handled the operational parts of the business, which has founded and/or nurtured startups like Summize, TweetDeck, Chartbeat and Bitly.

With Weissman’s departure, Betaworks’s focus will change. “Though we will continue to do seed stage investments, our primary focus will be on building the core capabilities of the companies that we acquire and grow in-house,” Borthwick said told his employees via email today. Betabeat first reported the news.

What Borthwick didn’t explain in his email is that he and Weissman had previously planned on raising a “sidecar fund” that would essentially split Betaworks into two businesses: An operating company run by Borthwick and an early-stage VC shop run by Weissman.

But that plan was discarded this summer, at least in part because of opposition from Betaworks’ investors, who include RRE Ventures, Intel, AOL and the New York Times. Investors argued that they had put money into a company where investing was only a component of the plan, not a full-time occupation; by raising a new investment fund, they argued, Betaworks would essentially be competing against some of its backers.

People familiar with the company say that the plan’s collapse didn’t lead directly to Weissman’s departure. But the backstory does provide context to his move to become a full-time venture capitalist.

When Weissman lands at Union Square, he’ll have plenty of money to work with. The firm, which has made a series of lucrative bets in high-profile Web 2.0 start-ups including Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare and Tumblr, is in the midst of raising a new $150-$200 million fund.

Four-year-old Betaworks, which now has more than 80 employees, ought to have plenty of money to work with, too. In addition to the $28 million it has raised to date, the company has also been able to turn some of its investments into cash via secondary market sales.

Most notably, it has recently sold Twitter shares it acquired in 2008, when the company bought search engine Summize. That alone should provide a nice cushion for Betaworks if it needs it: Twitter’s value has shot up from $100 million to $8.4 billion over the last three years.

And speaking of ripples, here’s one I’m guessing Weissman may enjoy:

The announcement by Intel Capital late Wednesday is the latest in a series of funds that it has dedicated to spur technologies that could help broaden the market for Intel chips. In this case, Intel said it plans to invest in companies working on technologies–such as sensors and touch-related hardware and software–that could enhance Ultrabooks.

Intel is quick to acknowledge that the Ultrabook effort was in large part inspired by Apple Inc.’s iPad tablet and particularly its sleek MacBook Air. The latter was recently updated with Intel’s latest microprocessors and has been selling much more briskly than most laptop PCs running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system.

“To date if you wanted that sleek design you had to buy a Mac,” said Greg Welch, director of Intel’s Ultrabook group, in an interview last week. “There are people who want a PC in that form factor.”

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However, unlike Zynga, which is known for such titles as CityVille and FrontierVille, Kabam is building social games for the hardcore gamer looking for a little more grit and challenge.

Today, it’s driving a stake into the ground by announcing it has raised $85 million in a fourth round of venture capital. What’s more, the round closely follows a $30 million third round of funding raised in January.

To date, Kabam has raised $125 million, which still doesn’t compare to the roughly $1 billion raised by Zynga, which is now also rumored to be filing for a public offering any day.

“We are targeting a different segment,” said Kevin Chou, Kabam’s CEO. “It’s the hardcore gamers, who are spending their time on social networks, and discovering the games that Kabam makes. It’s very different from the social games that are out there today. We are seeing incredible growth and excitement in our business.”

The company has grown from 25 to 400 employees in the past 16 months and expects to release at least four more game titles this year. The funding will be used for international growth and to make more acquisitions following the purchase of a company called WonderHill in October.

The funding was co-led by Google Ventures and Pinnacle Ventures. Also participating was Performance Equity and SK Telekom Ventures, as well as previous investors Canaan Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Intel Capital.

While Kabam’s games fit the typical profile of social games on Facebook because they are free to play and are supported by virtual goods, the plots and competitive nature are more reminiscent of games on the Xbox 360–and less like Zynga.

“You aren’t buying a decorative stadium or stable,” Chou said. “You are buying things that are giving you a competitive edge against the other players in the games.”

The round of funding is large compared to other social game companies in this space that have recently announced rounds. Also this week, CrowdStar, which is arguably the largest independent social game company after Zynga, raised $23 million, and Finland-based Supercell, which also says it is making hardcore social games, raised $12 million.

Some of Kabam’s more popular titles that are available today include Dragons of Atlantis and Kingdoms of Camelot.

Chou said ultimately they might be going after a smaller audience than Zynga, which attracts 250 million players a month and a mass market, but the players are more dedicated.

He said 83 percent of their gamers are also playing console or PC games and that 55 percent are now spending less time on other platforms because of their games. In addition, social is a critical component. Up to 70 percent of their players say that the most important feature of their games is being able to form alliances with players, who are either friends on Facebook or those they can connect to anonymously.

Founded in 2008, it was one of the first gaming companies to feed off of Facebook’s social graph, which allowed companies to endlessly post messages on players’ walls to get the word out about their games.

Flash forward to 2011 and the frothy days are over.

Facebook has scaled back the amount of viral activity allowed, due to all the complaints, and now the Burlingame, Calif.-based company has decided to raise $23 million in capital to fuel its next stage of growth.

The round is a big deal for the fifth largest game company on Facebook because it represents its first ever. That’s quite the accomplishment given its position compared to others.

For instance, CrowdStar registers roughly 29 million users a month vs. Zynga, which enjoys the top position by a wide margin with 248 million users. Electronic Arts, which purchased Playfish for $275 million in 2009, has 32.7 million monthly users, according to AppData.

As a YouWeb incubated company, CrowdStar previously had raised no formal capital. Contrast that to Zynga, which has raised somewhere around $1 billion if you count a nearly $500 million injection that has not yet been officially announced.

The company’s first round was led by Intel Capital and Time Warner, along with participation from China’s The9 and NVInvestments. Vivi Nevo, the largest individual shareholder in Time Warner with lots of ties to Hollywood, also invested.

“We’ve built six to seven substantial properties that have done well and we got the audience when customer acquisition was fairly easy,” said Peter Relan, the company’s CEO and co-founder. “We were able to be profitable and fund the growth to 100 people organically.”

Relan declined to specify the company’s valuation or its revenues, which he said was in the “tens of millions.” No matter how much it is, it’s not enough to support his lofty ambitions for 2011.

By the end of the year, the company plans to double the number of employees it has to 200, hiring game developers, artists, producers and business analysts. It also wants to expand to mobile and other social networks around the world. Relan says the goal is to double the company’s revenues with only 50 percent coming from Facebook by year end.

“We are a Facebook social games company turning into a multi-platform global company,” he said. “It’s a very profitable business, but it can’t fund all that growth.”

CrowdStar said that it will launch four to five more games this year, two of which will be on mobile and the rest on Facebook. Additionally, it will launch two to three of its current game titles overseas this year in a few countries.

Relan said by pursuing both mobile and international growth, he’s confident that he’ll find audiences that are equivalent in size to Facebook. He’s targeting such social networks as Renren in China, The9, a game network in China, and OpenFeint’s social network on mobile phones.

Relan said he carefully picked the mix of investors.

Intel will be active in the tablet market, which may be a big market going forward for social gaming, and Time Warner will be able to contribute as social games increasingly integrate brands, such as GagaVille on FarmVille, and Playfish’s integration of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver in Restaurant City.

Last year, there were rumors that Microsoft was interested in purchasing CrowdStar.

Relan declined to comment on those rumors but said he’s thrilled to be an independent company. “We’ve been independent and historically we’ve never even had an investor to tell us what to do. We are a fiercely independent and motivated company that really enjoys the cultural freedom of creativity. We can do what we want, and that’s a rare luxury.”

By staying independent and by not raising money before, Relan also says he maintained lots of financial flexibility.

“With Zynga setting the trend, it’s a great thing to follow on. There will be people who think it is too inexpensive–I don’t know if it is–but it’s a great thing to be seen as inexpensive.”

Last week I talked with David Young, co-founder and CEO of Joyent, an Amazon rival with 30,000 customers around the world. His criticism of Amazon in this instance is rather harsh. The way the Amazon cloud is built, he said, virtually guaranteed that a service outage such as this would happen. While on one hand he gives Amazon high praise for “evangelizing the cloud computing model,” with the other he disparages it as “the Atari of the cloud.”

“Amazon does not represent the cloud,” Young says. “These guys are booksellers who got in the cloud business. That’s like Nordstrom’s getting into the cash register business,” he told me. “They may be the market leader, but there’s a bunch of us who are building things in such a way that we don’t see these downtimes.”

It’s hard to miss Amazon’s outsize influence. Though Amazon Web Services amounts to just a fraction of the company’s overall revenue, it is the market leader, controlling about 60 percent of the market with Rackspace, IBM, Joyent and Terremark, recently acquired by Verizon.

Joyent, which is privately held and backed by investments from Greycroft Partners and Intel Capital, would never have suffered an outage, Young claimed, because of the way it is built. Amazon, on the other hand, was never designed for what he calls persistent computing that customers need to be available all the time. The problem, he said, started in Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage, which is vulnerable to being overwhelmed by demand, something he likened to a run on a bank, where depositors panic and rush to withdraw the cash from their accounts.

Essentially, he said, Amazon became a victim of its own popularity, unable to meet the demands placed upon the EBS storage infrastructure by the network, causing in the end a cascading failure. The company has blogged about its theory in greater technical detail here.

Meanwhile, there were Amazon customers who managed to keep their services up despite the crash, and they were comparing notes today. Don MacAskill, CEO of the photo-sharing site SmugMug, blogged about how designing for failure allowed its service to remain live during the crash. Others tweeted, like Mathias Meyer of Basho Technologies, who noted that having their service running in more than one Amazon region helped avert failure.

There were others. Donnie Flood, VP of engineering of Bizo, an advertising service aimed at business executives, said that the company used all of Amazon’s regions except its most recently launched one in Japan, and combined that with a global Domain Name Service system that would direct traffic to the nearest Amazon region. When Amazon’s U.S. East region went down, all traffic in the U.S. was routed to its Amazon instances running in Amazon’s Western U.S. data center. “We were able to stay up fully the entire time,” Flood said.

Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery, a cloud-based manager of software APIs, said that his company had additional cloud infrastructure in place from Internap that took over when Amazon failed. Neither Michels nor Flood said he was likely to move the services currently hosted with Amazon to another provider.

Amazon hasn’t made any public statements about what happened, beyond those made in its status dashboard, and it hasn’t responded to any of my messages seeking a comment on any aspect of this. The company reports earnings tomorrow, so expect some questions on the conference call about Amazon’s terrible, horrible day that stretched into nearly a week.

According to sources close to the situation, Intel Capital and Advance Publications will lead a $30 million investment round in Kno, the high-profile student tablet start-up.

In addition to the funding from its venture capital arm, Intel itself will consult with Kno on its tablet design. Kno, which is getting out of the hardware business, will now focus on its software to manage the devices that are aimed at the college market.

Intel will not manufacture tablets either. Instead, its engineers will consult with Kno on power management, graphics, display, systems integration, which it does for a variety of its customers.

Along with Intel Capital and Advance, current investors will also participate in the round, said sources. But Intel Capital and Advance, the owner of the Condé Nast publishing empire, make up a big part of the funding.

Sources said Intel Capital’s investment is $20 million and Advance and others make up the rest of it.

BoomTown reported in February that the much-funded and high-profile Silicon Valley start-up–aimed at making tablet computers focused at students–was considering selling off the entire hardware part of the business.

Sources said Kno execs have recently decided that the quicker-than-expected uptake in tablet production by a multitude of powerful device makers had made its efforts to package a seamless offering less critical.

Instead, the company will now focus on its robust software and services to offer students on the Apple iPad, as well as upcoming tablets based on Google’s Android mobile operating system and others.

The move is a dramatic shift for the company, which had not shipped significant numbers of the touchscreen device as it has long touted.

In fact, Kno said in November that it would ship a $599 and $899 version of the tablet by the end of the year.

The lower price was for its single-screen device, while the clamshell double-screen version was more expensive.

And, although it has been reported no pre-orders were fulfilled, Kno did indeed ship several hundred of them, built by China’s Foxconn, before stopping doing so earlier this year.

Many have been dubious about Kno’s ambitious hardware efforts.

That’s because marketing a new and complex product like the Kno takes a lot of effort and cash, especially since it is an increasingly competitive market for mobile and portable computing products that includes Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Amazon, Dell and many others.

Before this $30 million, Kno has raised another $46 million in funding to add to an earlier $10 million round.

Sources in February said that the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company considering going back out to raise even more.

Its current backers include prominent venture players like Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital, along with angel investors Mike Maples and Ron Conway.

Sources said the shift to deliver textbook and other student-related delivery system would be a better path for all that investment money, since Kno has established a wide range of partnerships with colleges and universities.

In addition, Kno co-founder Osman Rashid has a lot of experience in digital education market. He was also the co-founder of Chegg, the textbook rental business that is reportedly aiming for an IPO soon.

BusinessWeek was first to report that Intel Capital was making the investment in Kno, but the post did not mention Advance’s involvement or that Intel itself was licensing the hardware design business from Kno.

Serguei Beloussov, the company’s founder and outgoing CEO, will continue his full-time role as executive chairman of the board and chief architect.

Steen joined Parallels from Microsoft, where he was VP of Small and Medium Business and Distribution at Microsoft. Before that, he ran Microsoft’s business in Norway and in Russia.

Parallels is a privately held company that’s been around since 1999, that counts Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Almaz Capital Partners as its investors. Its rise generally coincided with Apple’s migration to using chips from Intel on the Mac. By giving new Mac users an easy way to run Windows on their computers, it gave people accustomed to Windows, or who needed to continue to use a particular application on Windows, little excuse when the opportunity came to switch to the Mac.

But what I didn’t know is that Parallels is also a player a big player in selling software to service providers. It sells Plesk, a popular server automation tool, and it’s also a player in the server virtualization business.

I talked with Steen about all this last week.

NewEnteprise: Birger, I’m a Mac user and so of course I know about and even use Parallels once in awhile. But I had no idea Parallels was so closely involved with Web hosting and cloud providers. How big is that business?

Birger Steen: We’ve been working with service providers since 1999, and then over the last 10 years you’ll find companies like Rackspace and Media Temple and some of the biggest hosting providers are customers of ours. In most cases they run some version of our virtualization technology.

So when people think of virtualization of server, they think of VMWare. How are you different?

Partly it’s a different technology. Our technology virtualizes in a different way that’s uniquely suited to service providers that have large numbers of systems that they want to run with as much efficiency and density as possible. We have a market share of about 37 percent in that market.

And you also sell the Plesk control panel software for servers.

Control panels are very complementary to server virtualization. In the same way that control panels let you contol the computing resources on a desktop Windows machine or a Mac, you need to do the same thing on a server. If you were to rent the server from Rackspace or some other service provider, you need something to control it remotely and manage the resources. That’s the other business we’ve been in for about 10 years. As the hosting business became more complex, that product had to become more complex. A lot of our service providers sell servers to customers who then turn around and re-sell them to other end customers. So the control panel now manages resources at the reseller level, and the end-customer administrative level, and then at the end-customer user level. That’s become a very interesting business. It’s very fragmented with lots of companies reselling services from larger companies. Today we have something like 5,000 customers that are everyone from the smallest local hoster with a few servers, all the way up to some of the biggest telco companies in the world.

So what are your priorities this year?

We’re going to continue to drive hard on the Parallels desktop product, particularly on the Mac. It has a huge group of fans and we want to continue developing it. The first group of users were a lot of people who were devout Mac users where someone just had to use Windows or another OS some of the time. What we see now are a lot of users who are not switching to the Mac so much as they are adding Apple hardware. It’s a a market where people are using many different technologies and we want to continue to make that easy. We also want to continue to build out our international markets. We’re really strong in Germany, where we sell our product attached to 25 percent of the Macs sold there, whereas worldwide we’re hovering at about 5 to 6 percent. So there’s room for a lot of upside there.

So your business is profitable, and you’re growing fast. What kind of an exit do you anticipate for your investors? Will you take Parallels public?

We’re building the company to become a lot bigger, and to grow for a long period of time. We certainly aspire to have a both all the corporate processes and infrastructure that a public company would have. I’d ask our investors at Bessemer and Intel what they’re thinking. But I certainly have a long-term ambition for this.