Facebook has unveiled a list of 18 applications--for the Facebook Platform, Facebook Connect, and Facebook Connect for the iPhone--that have been awarded investments from its FBFund seed funding program and invited to participate in a summer incubator workshop in its hometown of Palo Alto, Calif.
The workshop, called FBFund REV 2009, will run for ten weeks from June through August, according to a post on the Facebook developer blog by company representative Cat Lee. The post also contains a full list of winners, which range from a paintball game app to a dating service to an e-mail management program.
"Already planned are sessions with speakers from our fbFund Advisory Council, business luminaries, and our Facebook Platform team focused on everything from operating lean startups and metrics for success to marketing and monetization," Lee wrote. "The days will be packed with opportunities to get together, learn from one another, brainstorm and iterate on applications and business models. At the end of the summer, all of the startups will present to Silicon Valley angel and venture capital investors to get feedback and explore investment opportunities."
Facebook announced a chunk of finalists for this year's FBFund earlier this month.
Two nonprofits, a developer assistance program called Samasource and a student microloan project called Vittana, will also participate in the incubator program but can't receive funding due to the terms of FBFund.
Investments to the tune of $17 million are a rarity these days, but app-factory RockYou has done just that: the San Francisco-based company has announced that Japanese mobile giant SoftBank and Korean telecom investment company SK Telecom Ventures have invested $17 million to create a new joint venture to build apps for the Asia-Pacific market.
RockYou's Series C venture round, which pulled in $35 million, was in June--with the fresh $17 million, the company has raised $67 million so far.
This marks the entry of RockYou, which is best known for its Facebook and MySpace widgets, into the mobile space. "In Asia, over half the social networking occurs on mobile," CEO Lance Tokuda told CNET News. "It's both Web and mobile, and we think we'll get good penetration. The results on (Chinese social network) Xiaonei so far have been very good." RockYou says it is the first non-Chinese company to build apps on Xiaonei.
There will be a separate team handling RockYou's new Asia-Pacific operations, with operations coming from the new joint-venture investors as well. "In a lot of cases it's more cultural, where they'll take our assets and they'll port them and localize them," Tokuda said.
But there will be synergy as well, with mobile apps likely coming to the U.S. market after they're released in Asia. SoftBank is the Japanese carrier for Apple's iPhone, and iPhone apps created for it may eventually be converted to U.S. versions.
"We have no U.S. iPhone apps, and yes, we will port them back (from Asia)," Tokuda said.
So is the company giving up on Facebook's platform? No, Tokuda said, adding that they plan to keep building for it. Nor is the round specifically designed as recession padding, he added.
"There's still opportunity out there," he explained. "That said, it's good to raise a lot of money and have money in the bank, and this latest strategic round helps."
InterActiveCorp's Evite might still be the biggest name in online invitations, but Martha Stewart has made her endorsement elsewhere.
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia has partnered with and made an undisclosed investment in Pingg, a much smaller competitor.
The chief executive of New York-based Pingg, Lorien Gabel, spoke to CNET News a few months ago to make the case for his company as a more refined alternative to the clip art-friendly Evite, saying he hoped Pingg would be appropriate for "a whole segment of event types that people just (do) not want to use electronic invitations for," like graduation parties and bar mitzvahs.
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia said in a release that its investment in Pingg was designed to improve its digital presence. Through the partnership, Pingg will be promoted and have its tools worked into the Martha Stewart Web site; Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia will sell ads on Pingg, and some of its content will appear on the invitation start-up's site. Joseph Holland, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia's vice president of strategy and development, will join Pingg's board of directors.
This certainly gives Pingg an advantage, as it has plenty of other competitors attempting to eat into Evite's market share: MyPunchbowl, Socializr, and Renkoo are just a few of them.
Our request for a catfight between Stewart and IAC czar Barry Diller went unanswered.
Intel Capital, the chipmaker's venture arm, has signed a deal to acquire a $20 million stake in Telligent Systems, which specializes in social-networking software for businesses.
Intel is an existing client of Telligent.
The two companies have not disclosed a valuation for Dallas-based Telligent. Part of the $20 million stake has already been acquired, the companies said Tuesday, with the rest to follow within 12 months.
"This significant investment from Intel Capital will allow us to grow our team, our capabilities, and our reach during a time of market expansion," Telligent CEO Rob Howard said in a statement. The investment will be directed toward geographic expansion, hiring more sales professionals, and increasing Telligent's advertising and marketing budget.
Telligent manufactures a product called Community Server, which provides clients with blog, forum, wiki, and other collaborative and social software; the software is used primarily for customer relations and marketing. Those clients include the Associated Press, MySpace, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Visa, Honda, Dell, and the NFL.
Even though the iPhone has been dominating developer headlines recently, it looks as if there's still some air in the social-network gaming space.
The Social Gaming Network, a start-up that develops games for social platforms such as Facebook and OpenSocial, has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' personal investment firm, Bezos Expeditions.
This comes just months after the company closed a $15 million Series A round from Greylock Partners, the Founders Fund, and others.
Founded by the creators of Web 1.0 page creator Freewebs (which now calls itself Webs.com), the Social Gaming Network has assembled a portfolio of popular Facebook applications, such as Jetman, Super Snake, and Free Gifts, some of which it acquired from independent developers. It counts more than 54 million game installs.
SGN is one of the more prominent players in the casual-game space. It competes with Zynga, which was created by Tribe.net founder Mark Pincus.
The aim of the new funding, according to CEO Shervin Pishevar, is "to continue capturing new demographics in gaming by distributing the highest-quality games available on the social Web."
Bezos Expeditions also joined the most recent round of Twitter funding.
Universal Music Group has invested an undisclosed amount in pop-culture social network Buzznet.
Beyond the financial investment, this means that Universal artists will post promotional blogs on Buzznet, and the social site will have access to the label's music and video catalog.
Last week, Buzznet CEO Tyler Goldman told CNET News.com to expect a partnership announcement that would bring more audio content to the site.
According to a release from the two companies, this is "one of the first times that a music company will be directly involved in developing editorial programming for a social-media site, with both companies sharing in the revenue."
It's more extensive than Universal's partnerships with other social networks; the label has licensed its catalog to MySpace.com for its MySpace Music endeavor, as well as to music-focused social-media site Imeem.
With only 10 million active members--that's less than a tenth the size of News Corp.'s MySpace--Buzznet has some growth to do before it reaches its goal of being an MTV-caliber pop-culture influencer. The site has been aggressively bolstering its editorial content, acquiring music blog Stereogum and launching sister blog Videogum, with several hip blogging veterans at the helm.
Earlier this week, Buzznet announced that it had purchased another music blog, Idolator, from former owner Gawker Media.
Goldman hinted that more partnerships with big media companies were on the way for Buzznet. That's good, because having a single label behind a community and editorial site is a bit questionable.
Not only does Buzznet own music blogs like Stereogum and Idolator, but it also has deep partnerships with irreverent gossip blogs such as A Socialite's Life and Just Jared.
Let's hope that Universal's investment doesn't start tainting Buzznet's snappy editorial.
Actor Will Smith--or rather, his entertainment company, Overbrook Entertainment--is one of the investors behind a $2 million funding round for PluggedIn Media, a new site for watching high-definition and broadcast-quality music videos online, PaidContent.org reported Tuesday evening.
Who would've thought this guy would go on to become a Web 2.0 investor? Carlton Banks would be proud.
(Credit: NBC)PluggedIn (wonder how much they paid for that domain?) reportedly has about 10,000 music videos in its catalog, thanks to contracts with Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI Group, and Universal Music Group. The videos are accompanied by artist profiles and some community features.
The site is powered by Move Networks, the high-definition content delivery network that pulled in $46 million earlier this week from Benchmark Capital, Cisco Systems, Comcast, and a number of others. The company already handles video delivery for ESPN, ABC, Discovery, and Fox.
The "involvement" of Will Smith, however, is likely to be what comes to mind with PluggedIn. In addition to tearing up the box office over the past decade and a half with everything from Men In Black to I Am Legend, Smith also has an impressive number of hit rap singles under his belt, which makes him slightly more legit than rapper-turned-DanceJam-executive M.C. Hammer.
That, unfortunately, doesn't change one big problem I see with PluggedIn. Quality specifications aside, I already have a hub for watching music videos online. It's called YouTube. MySpaceTV and MTV.com are also big players in the space.
Li Ka-shing, the Hong Kong telecom mogul who invested $60 million in Facebook last year, has upped his stake to $100 million and may invest even more, MarketWatch reported Thursday.
Facebook was valued at an eyebrow-raising $15 billion when Microsoft purchased a 5 percent stake at $240 million.
According to MarketWatch, Li made the initial announcement during the earnings call for his company, Hutchison Whampoa. "Facebook is doing very well and we could have some synergy between the 3G services of Hutchison and Facebook, so the customers could use Facebook on mobile phones," Li reportedly said.
Among Li's other investments is peer-to-peer video start-up Joost.
Web-based instant messaging and chat service Meebo is planning to raise $25-30 million in venture funding, VentureBeat reported Monday.
This would likely peg Meebo's valuation at between $200 and $250 million, a whole lot more than the $60-70 million that it was reportedly worth after a funding round last year. As VentureBeat's Matt Marshall noted, investment banking flop Bear Stearns was just sold for $236 million. Never mind that reports show venture funding may be drying up and the economic forecast hasn't been getting any better recently.
Meebo, which is supported by advertising revenue, has reportedly hired the San Francisco bank Montgomery & Co. to handle the effort, and some big names in the social-networking space--possibly even Facebook or News Corp.'s MySpace.com--may be interested. MySpace operates its own instant-messaging service, and Facebook is rumored to have one in the works.
Automattic, the company best-known for blog publishing software WordPress, has raked in $29.5 million in Series B funding. Originally reported on several blogs, the funding round was confirmed by Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg in his personal blog Tuesday evening.
The most notable of the investors is the New York Times Co., which joins existing Automattic investors Polaris Ventures, True Ventures, and Radar Ventures. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Automattic turned down an acquisition offer several months ago from a "larger Internet company." Mullenweg's only apparent reference to this in his blog post was his statement that WordPress had become so successful that choosing between the "approach of serious acquisition or majority-stake investments" became an obvious next step.
Automattic has about 18 employees, according to the Journal, and also operates several lesser-known software products like forum software BBPress and spam management product Akismet. But WordPress is its centerpiece, powering around 2.2 million blogs--active and otherwise--from personal blogs to the digital properties of high-profile media publications like The New York Times, Fortune, and CNN. The Journal hinted that some of the $29.5 million will be used to allow some early employees and investors to cash out; GigaOm's Om Malik suggested that the company may also hire more engineers, anticipating continued growth.
Mullenweg's blog post seemed to confirm this speculation: "Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better Web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in antispam, identity, wikis, forums, and more -- small, open source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far."
