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Heroku was a hit with Ruby developers because it was an easy-to-use development platform. Others have tried to do the same with other languages such as PHP Fog, dotCloud. Then last year AppHarbor, a ‘Heroku for .NET’ out of Y Combinator launched.

And today AppHarbor has extended its service to European developers. EU applications will still run on Amazon’s infrastructure, but they’ll be running out of the EU-West region (Dublin) instead of US-East, where all current applications are located.

The startup raised $1.4m last year though the amount was not announced at the time. Backers include Accel, Ignition, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Quest, Start Fund and Salesforce and there are plans to raise a Series A soon.

“We have spent a lot of time making sure the AppHarbor platform is modular and scalable and this paid dividends when time came to spin up our new EU location. New applications are created in either the US or EU and existing applications cannot be moved, but we’re already thinking about how to turn this up another notch to make AppHarbor a zero-configuration, multi-region, geo-load-balanced application platform,” cofounder and CEO Rune Sørensen told us.

Add-ons in the the AppHarbor add-on catalog will work with EU-based applications. Some (such as SQL Server) will provision resources based on where your application is located. For add-ons that do not currently support the EU, a warning will be displayed when they’re provisioned to an EU application.

AppHarbor is designed to address Microsoft Azure limitations such as being locked into Microsoft’s own database, and its non-support of Git.

They now claim to be 15-20% of Azure’s size in terms of number of users – not bad for a six person startup. Offices are in Copenhagen and San Francisco.

In terms of competition Meerkatalyst claimed to be doing similar bett never appeared while and Moncai has yet to launch.

Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant leading a $100 million investment in Pinterest, valuing the company at $1.5 billion, will be making two major contributions to the image-based social network as it gears up for its next stage of growth: the funds to take the image-based social network into new international markets, and a business model.

First up, Rakuten’s home market of Japan, where “Pinterest is growing very fast,” notes Rakuten’s CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani, in an interview with TechCrunch. He wants Rakuten to grow right there with it by using Rakuten’s services to become the basis for buying things off the site.

There are already some building blocks in place for this. First of all, Rakuten already pins on Pinterest through at least a couple of official accounts: Rakuten Commerce and Rakuten Travel.

On the other hand, there is Rakuten’s existing e-commerce presence in the country. Mikitani notes that 75 percent of Japan’s internet population — equivalent to about 80 million people — already have a Rakuten ID — this is similar to an Apple ID, or an Amazon ID, in that there are payment details associated with it.

It is this ID that will pontentially become the lynchpin of a commercial service on Pinterest: “We want to enable our users to pin their own images with our ID,” he says. “Users can click and buy with it, and in the future we can create more new services.” He notes that the “rich, graphic social network” can be used for “so many interesting ideas using the Rakuten ID.” One other area, TechCrunch understands, is for users logged in with Rakuten IDs to pin images and then use those pins to buy items away from Pinterest, on Rakuten’s own Rakuten Ichiba site.

And because Pinterest is so buzzy right now, it can be used as a way of reigniting some of Rakuten’s legacy business. The company has a lot of “sleeping customers,” as Mikitani calls them. These are people who have IDs but are not regular users of Rakuten’s services. “This is a good way of getting them to start using those Rakuten IDs again.”

The other area where he would like to see more development is in the area of mobile commerce. Mikitani tells me that already, 25 percent of all Rakuten sales in Japan originate on a mobile device, and that proportion is growing. “There should be a huge synergy with Pinterest there,” he says. “We are going to promote their app using our presence here in Japan.”

International growth. The $100 million investment, which was led by Rakuten with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital, as well as a number of angel investors, will also give Pinterest the financial muscle to extend its service into new international markets. Pinterest, perhaps above all social networks, has a lot of potential as an international product — one that can work across borders– because while sites like Facebook and Twitter are text-led, Pinterest is focused around images, and therefore less limited by language barriers.

Of course, a lot of Pinterest’s growth today and in the future will be non-commercial, but the potential for commerce is very much there, too. (We wrote just the other day about another example, Curalate, which has created a social marketing service for brands to visually track how and where their images are getting used across the site.) Within that trend, Rakuten is looking at how to leverage its Pinterest investment in its international business outside of Japan, as well.

Mikitani points out that while Facebook is an “extremely powerful social network”, when it comes to shopping and e-commerce, Pinterest’s image-led service “has stronger potential.”

Facebook and Twitter, he says, are about connecting you with your friends and contacts, while Pinterest is about connecting people with the same interests via graphic images. Apart from the fact that products are put right there for you to see, you can also imagine how that social set-up can be developed into a commercial model (group buying is one that comes to mind here).

Rakuten has holdings that extend well beyond Japan, and include properties like Buy.com in the U.S., Kobo e-reader and e-books, Priceminister in France — in all, operations based in 10 countries and extending to 17 countries in total. Mikitani says that he is hopeful that the kinds of groundwork it wants to lay in Japan will also be extended to the rest of its footprint.

For example, Mikitani points out that Kobo already has a “great partnership” with Facebook to encourage people to post excerpts and read more using Kobo, which it would like to extend to Pinterest, too: “Facebook is why Kobo is growing so fast right now,” he says. “We will see more of Kobo in Pinterest, too, I think.” And buy.com — which is slowly, gradually, getting rebranded as Rakuten — is another site you could imagine could get linked up more closely with Pinterest.

But this is not to rule out other partnerships with other e-commerce players. “We are totally open to other e-commerce partnerships,” he says. “Pinterest should work with them.”

There’s been a lot of armchair valuation punditry across the Valley this week. As the Facebook IPO looms, our intricately entwined ecosystem of startups and investors seeks to benefit from the domino effect of a population feeling flush with cash. This is the picture that the WSJ painted in its Quora funding announcement yesterday, headline: “Former Facebook Hands Capitalize on Buzz.” Okay, sure, smart people will always adapt to a favorable environment — but the WSJ missed a deeper and more long-term dynamic at play.

“We intend to use some of this funding as a cushion in case of macroeconomic changes,” wrote Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo in an answer to a question about what the company would do with the financing. Sure, in laymen’s terms this could read, “We’re getting while the getting’s good,” but a startup stocking up for a potential winter does not necessarily mean overvaluation. Especially when you consider that a “large portion of this money” will go to Amazon Web Services for EC2 and other bills… at least until something less expensive and more robust gets invented.

“We wanted to extend our runway,” D’Angelo wrote, about raising as optimally as possible. “[We wanted to] focus on long-term growth and quality, and lets us avoid making short term tradeoffs like many other companies.”

Earlier today I spoke to proto-Facebook investor and Quora board observer, Peter Thiel, extensively about his personal investment in the startup. He reinforced the fact that Quora has a 20-year, 50-year, 100-year future if it manages to scale in a way that could maintain the quality of site discussion. Thiel admitted that the site had not yet reached the apex of its founders’ vision, but maintained that this kind of careful “slow growth” is a good thing in terms of keeping out irrelevant and spammy content.

“There’s a good chance that some day a majority of questions asked will be on the [Quora] platform,” Thiel said, explaining that its success fit his vision of a world where an emerging technology didn’t have to beat or destroy something else to be successful. Rather, it could just be. Imagine a layer of Quora’s intelligent discourse across all communication, where the knowledge contained on the site went beyond Q&A and attempted to solve grander problems than being a threaded platform for Silicon Valley squabbles.

In response to media criticism of the site’s valuation, Thiel referred to the technological prowess of Quora, and the breadth of talent retained by its 30-person team as its core appeal. Thiel — who told PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy that “we’d be better off if people focused on doing unique things” — implied that the startup was indeed this sort of “unique thing” — independent of, and not competitive with, Wikipedia, Facebook and Google. More importantly, he implied that it wasn’t trying to be.

Aside from the team, Thiel — who uses Quora himself to keep up on Silicon Valley news — was impressed by the complicated technology behind the site, and held the fact that it was not easily replicable as being one of its primary drivers of value.

“The Samwers are never going to clone Quora,” Thiel said, resting his case.