This year’s fbFund finalists span Facebook’s platform, the web and the iPhone

May 18, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

Developers may make up to $500 million on Facebook’s developer platform this year, and now Facebook’s investors are getting into that action — and then some. The fbFund, a seed-stage investment fund run by Founders Fund and Accel Partners in partnership with Facebook, has announced the first 25 of its 50 finalists for this year.

These companies aren’t just on Facebook’s platform. Some use Facebook Connect to incorporate Facebook data on other web sites or on the iPhone, but aren’t on Facebook itself.

The finalists will get $1000 in Facebook advertising credit, and so will the other 25 finalists due to be announced later this week. A smaller group will be selected to win up to $100,000 and attend fbFund’s new incubator-style summer school starting in a couple months. Perhaps due to the growing revenue coming from companies on the platform — and Connect — the fund will begin making direct capital investments this year. This means Founders Fund and Accel will get equity stakes in the winners. Previously, fbFund only gave out grants.

Here’s the first batch of finalists:

- Connect sites: Frintro, GovIt, RunMyErrand, RentMineOnline, MyChurch.org, GreetBeatz, Workstir, NutshellMail, RunThere, DropPlay, Magellan (private beta), Life360 (private beta), Vittana (private beta)
- Platform apps: Travel Brain, Networked Blogs, Gameyola, Photos I Like, Paradise Paintball 3D, Veechi Classes, BitStrips (private beta), SamaSource
- iPhone apps: FriendFreak, Near+Now (Sortuv), Paparazzi, CrazyMenu

I haven’t had the chance to review them all. So here are a few descriptions that Facebook sent over:

- Frintro: Play matchmaker to help your single friends find friends of friends to date! Think social dating via “friendly introductions.”
- RentMineOnline: Combines the success of resident referral programs with the power of social networks. Residents refer their community to friends through Facebook to earn rewards and live with friends.
- Travel Brain & GeckoGo.com: Play the Travel Brain app on Facebook to choose your favorite travel spots; then search travel reviews on GeckoGo.com
- FriendFreak: Play a fun and social iPhone app to learn more about all your Facebook friends

For a mostly quantitative look at how winners from the fbFund’s past two classes have done, check out this article.

Next Story: Best Buy’s new Napster: Five bucks, five downloads per month, won’t stream to iPhone
Previous Story: Plug and Play startup incubator eyes $20M for seed fund

Bookmark and Share

Photo of Eric Eldon

About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Eric - Thanks for including our quantitative analysis on the 2008 fbFund classes. It's engendered some great conversation and positive feedback including from Dave McClure which we're happy to see. We'll probably refresh our analysis to include these recently announced winners as well as the next 25 and the eventual $100k winners at some point in the future.

    It would be interesting to hear your or other readers perspective on platform apps and what are the key performance indicators or measures of success for such apps? In our initial analysis, we used Monthly Active Users (MAUs) as the evaluation metric which works well for customer-facing apps going after end-users.

    Of course, that metric is not as relevant/useful for platform apps which are enablers of other features/functions. We recognized this as a deficiency of the MAU metric when doing our initial analysis but it worked well given most of the apps in the '08 class were customer-facing and hence usage driven.

    Given the greater number of platform apps such as some of the ones you've highlighted above, it will make sense to look at these through a new and different lens.

    Look forward to hearing your or others ideas.

    Regards,
    Jonathan
    jsherry(at)chubbybrain.com
    http://www.chubbybrain.com
  • The site for gameyola does not contain much info about the platform
    You better head to http://apps.facebook.com/gameyola for a better taste