New Funding for Appcelerator and Jaspersoft

Despite the dire economic times, funding continues to flow toward open source. Appcelerator, which has an open platform for building web, desktop and mobile applications, has announced that it has received $4.1 million in Series A venture funding. Storm Venture managing partner Ryan Floyd will join Appcelerator's board of directors along with Larry Augustin, a noted angel investor. Meanwhile, open source Business Intelligence software maker Jaspersoft is being backed by late-stage growth fund Adams Street and Red Hat, among others, according to an Internetnews report.

Internetnews quotes Nick Halsey, vice president of marketing at Jaspersoft, as saying that Jaspersoft's news of its deal with Red Hat will be announced later this week. According to Halsey, Jaspersoft's new financing totals $12.5 million, bringing the company's total venture financing to $43.5 million. Red Hat has never invested in Jaspersoft before.

In addition to news of its new financing, Appcelerator is launching an open source competitor to Adobe's AIR, called Titanium. Titanium is an adjunct to Appcelerator's existing tools for rapidly building web applications, and adds web functionality to desktop and mobile applications.

Appcelerator's strategy with Titanium makes sense. The company has been focused on tools for deployment of cloud computing applications, but these are increasingly tied to local applications. The preview release for Titanium, and Appcelerator's existing SDK are available here.