Twilio, a cloud communication platform powering a wide array of apps, is capping off a huge year of growth with million in Series C funding from existing investors Union Square Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. The new money will be used to continue Twilio’s worldwide expansion, as it moves beyond its recent foray into the UK to the rest of Europe and beyond.

The San Francisco company has grown its customer base by about 400 percent this year to 75,000 developers, who build everything from group messaging and conferencing solutions to voice and text message notification apps and web-based distributed call centers. The Twilio platform lets developers plug in the basic communications components that used to come from traditional telecom vendors. Now, developers just pay for what they need and easily integrate a host of services without needing a strong telecom background.

Hulu, for example, was able to set up call centers on multiple continents within one month using Twilio. Twilio’s API is now the fifth most popular for developers, said Jeff Lawson, CEO and co-founder of Twilio, and half of all American households are now touched by apps using Twilio.

“We believe in opening up the black box of communication for developers,” Lawson told me. “People who wouldn’t have participated in communication because of steep technological or economic barriers are building things now.”

Twilio has been evolving the platform beyond SMS and voice services that hooked into old copper-based phone systems and this summer began offering VoIP services. It’s showing that it can grow even as old phone systems fade away and developers rely less on integrating text messaging and move to more app-to-app messages. The company got help from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, which established a dedicated 0,000 Twilio micro fund last year and has committed to a second round, this time with matching funding for developers provided by Ron Conway.

Twilio, which is up to about 85 employees, previously raised .7 million including a million round last year. Lawson said the company is looking to hire more engineers and more sales and marketing people. He declined to talk about the financial details but said Twilio has been growing revenues substantially over the last two years.

As the app boom grows, it’s back-end infrastructure providers like Twilio that continue to thrive as they help enable more and more of the mobile apps flooding the market.

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Appcelerator, which helps developers build native and HTML5 mobile apps, has been on a tear in the last year, going from 5,000 apps to 30,000 apps built off its Titanium platform. The company isn’t just getting notice from developers, investors have also taken note and have added another million in funding in Appcelerator’s Series C round.

The new money comes from Mayfield Fund, Translink Capital and Red Hat, with additional funding from existing investors eBay, Sierra Ventures and Storm Ventures, which ponied up million a year ago. All told, Mountain View, Calif.-based Appcelerator has raised .5 million to date.

The company said its growth in the last year makes it the largest third-party app publisher of mobile applications in the Apple App Store and Android Market. Its mobile apps built on Titanium are now on 30 million devices, compared to 2.5 million a year ago. And it now has 1.6 million developers, thanks to the January acquisition of Aptana, which makes an integrated development environment for web applications.

Scott Schwarzhoff, vice president of marketing for Appcelerator, said the company is evolving to provide not just cross-platform tools for native apps but also HTML5 web apps, giving customers a way to easily get into native app stores and mobile browsers. Appcelerator will use the money to continue to develop Titanium and expand in Europe and Asia. Appcelerator will also use the funds to look at more acquisitions like the pick up last week of HTML5 web app specialist Particle Code.

Appcelerator is benefiting from the explosion in mobile apps, which is projected to go from 10.7 billion apps last year to 182.7 billion in 2015, according to IDC. It’s providing a good set of tools for developers and companies to push out mobile apps. Companies like NBC, eBay, Merck, GetGlue and others have turned to Appcelerator to build out mobile apps. It’s a good place to be as companies look for a simple way to hit multiple mobile platforms and also build out mobile-optimized websites.

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Dashlane, a stealth start-up out of Paris, is still a few weeks away from unveiling its product, but the company is happily talking up its flush financial situation. The company announced Wednesday it has raised million from Rho Ventures, FirstMark Capital and Bernard Liautaud, the co-founder and former CEO of Business Objects.

Dashlane, which launched 18 months ago and is now opening a U.S. office in New York, is not explaining what it does exactly But it has provided some general details about its technology which purportedly tackles the growing problem of inputting information, passwords and payment data into websites from desktop and mobile devices.

Dashlane will offer an application that allows users to quickly and securely enter credit card details, names, addresses and login details for commerce, social and other websites. The company is focusing on the opportunity in mobile as more users struggle to repeatedly enter in information from devices that often don’t have traditional keyboards.

Emmanuel Schalit, Dashlane’s CEO, told me the application will be helpful particularly in transactions. He said 2/3 of people who begin a mobile transaction online abandon it before checkout. The startup’s new money will go toward accelerating development of the product, which will go into private beta in a few weeks. Habib Kairouz, managing partner at Rho Ventures, and Rick Heitzmann, managing director at FirstMark will join private Liautaud on the board.

I’m curious to see what Dashlane can do. As we shift to a “post-PC” world, it makes sense to focus on some of the friction people encounter as they rely more on tablets and smartphones. Particular in the case of mobile commerce and mobile payments, it’s good to streamline the process of entering in payment information while still maintaining security. Apple’s App Store and iTunes are good examples of how simplicity can spur on a lot of transactions. So we’ll have to see if Dashlane can actually deliver something that’s worth using — but I think the opportunity is big if it can.

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We had been hearing about Rovio, the company behind Angry Birds game franchise out in the market looking for cash, but never did we think that it would end up raising million in Series A funding from Accel Partners and Atomico, the venture fund started by Skype co-founders. Leading super angel fund Felicis Ventures also participated. Niklas Zennström, who also co-founded Kazaa and Rdio, will be joining the board of Rovio.

Rovio team met with me last year and had talked about being wooed by many investors including Hollywood groups. It is good they held out — their valuation has only gone up in the time that has passed. The company, which has been raking in the big dollars for a long time, thanks to its cult hit game, Angry Birds, has plans to turn the game into a multi-channel franchise, hoping to become the Sponge Bob of the iPhone generation. The game currently has 40 million active users on various mobile platforms. Rovio claims that it has sold over 2 million plush toys.

And while it still remains addictive as ever, Birds are finding that they have more competition in the market. Hopefully, the new money will help the Finland-based company find yet another hit franchise. Watch this video to see the company CEO and the Mighty Eagle tell the Angry Birds story and their grand ambitions.

Video edited and produced by Chris Albrecht.

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One thing that is needed nowadays in this economy is the need to save money.People have a lot of ideas on how to do just that.But I bet that most people do not know that they can save money if they will replace their windows.  Yes you have to spend money initially to replace it.  But in the long run you will save money and in some cases make money.  So let’s look at how replacing your windows can save you money.

Old windows are not that good in insulating your houses.And the old windows are usually single paned.So it would become hotter inside the house because these single paned windows cannot retain the cool air inside the house.And when it is cold outside the windows also do not have the ability to retain the heat inside the house.  But if you were to replace your windows they are more energy efficient. Most of my customers of my San Diego replacement windows company are surprised when they see how much energy they save.

Another mentioned benefit of new windows is make the owner some money.It can make you money by actually raising the value of your homes.Older windows would not be able to raise the value of homes.  But if you have newer windows people know it saves energy so the value increases.  In a market like today where homes are losing value this is very beneficial.This is what I’m talking about when it comes to making new money by buying new windows.  Whenever clients of my San Diego glass company tell me they are trying to sell I always suggest replacement windows.

These new windows are also great to add in your bathrooms.  You don’t want to just improve the bath and the sinks.  You want to include the windows as well. When people of my San Diego frameless glass shower service are getting work done, I tell them to do this.

So there are some of the reasons why getting your windows replaced will save you money.

Boxee, the media center software startup, has won a lot of fans with its open approach to streaming content. And as a result it has won some more money, to the tune of a $6 million second round, led by Boston’s General Catalyst Partners. The new money will be used for growth: Both expanding the team and expanding the service’s reach in the market, we’re told.

But why now? After all, Boxee raised its first round of funding just 8 months ago, a $4 million round with Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital investing. “We’ve seen a lot of momentum over the past couple of months. It seemed like it made sense to go ahead [with a new round],” Boxee’s new head of marketing Andrew Kippen tells us.