Announcing Express Jumpstarts

Here at AppFog we are committed to making developers’ lives easier. We want to do this not just for our customers – but for all developers. Today we’re announcing a new program that we feel has the potential to make tons of developers’ lives not just easier – but also better.

Welcome to our new Express Jumpstart Program!

Think of Express Jumpstarts as your one-click app installation to the cloud. You get all the benefits of using a popular application in seconds and because they in the cloud you get the app in the cloud, on the most powerful and easy to use cloud platform-as-a-service in existence.

Our Express Jumpstarts are one-click versions of our Jumpstarts, optimized to make launching a Jumpstart even easier. In addition, these Express Jumpstarts are part of our commitment to not only our ecosystem, but the larger developer and Open Source ecosystems.

To illustrate the new Express Jumpstarts, we’ve worked with one of our favorite Open Source projects – ThinkUp.

“We’re excited to welcome PHP Fog as our first partner for hosting ThinkUp in the cloud,” said Anil Dash, Co-Founder of ThinkUp. “The combination of powerful, scalable infrastructure and a ridiculously easy setup experience gives ThinkUp users complete control over their social networking without any complex configuration or installation.”

Visit http://phpfog.com/thinkup and signup today to register a new account on PHP Fog and get your very own installation of ThinkUp in seconds. Simply provide your email and password and click the shiny button. Done!

After that you get the full power of PHP Fog and ThinkUp – for free if you want. And if you end up deciding to upgrade to a paid PHP Fog account, the ThinkUp team will get the benefits of our referrals program and be rewarded for your satisfaction.

With this feature we are making it even easier for open source developers. Their open source projects now will have a dedicated landing page — and for you, trying out that open source project will be just one click away.

We’re really excited about this new program. We think it’s going to make a lot of folks really happy and that we’ll be able to give back to the developers who are making our cloud dreams a reality.

So… if you want to try it out, just click here.

And if you’re a developer or maintainer of an Open Source project – we want you to get involved.

One of the big challenges Open Source developers have is that it requires quite a bit of work for other developers to try their Open Source project. Another developer would have to copy the code, configure it, setup a database, connect the two, launch a local server, etc. just to try out a new project or piece of code.

In the meantime, many Open Source developers want to keep their project free (as in free beer). That is, they don’t want to turn it into a SaaS for profit. However, they are very much open to interesting revenue streams like rev sharing via a referrals program.

And our new Express Jumpstart program helps developers address both these issues. No need to create a hosted or SaaS version of your project to get folks to try it out, and the developer gets a nice little revenue stream to help cover the cost of their work. These Express Jumpstarts are basically a super awesome way for open source developers to share their projects with others all while getting some side-revenue.

If you have an Open Source project that you want to turn into an Express Jumpstart – just let us know!

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