Category: Tech news

Today at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins unveiled a new $250 million fund for investing in social applications, called “sFund”. Joining Kleiner Perkins in this venture are some Internet heavyweights: Facebook, Zynga, and Amazon. And CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Pincus, and Jeff Bezos took the stage today to talk a bit about the future of social.

Of them, it was Pincus who probably had the most interesting thing to say. “In five years, everybody will always be connected to each other, instead of the web,” he noted. He said that he often thinks of today’s social companies as “dial tones”. That is, they’re merely entry points for these social connections.

He noted that Facebook is the big overall dial tone for this social experience. But also singled out others as sub-dial tones, Pandora, for example, is the music dial tone, he said. He also said he hopes that his company, Zynga, will be the gaming dial tone.

He expressed excitement in the fact that while right now, many of these companies are still working on building out the infrastructure for this social experience, in five years, all this plumbing, as it were, will be in place. Then the real fun can begin.

The others on stage echoed this sentiment, suggesting that today is about laying the groundwork for something much greater to come. Zuckerberg noted the importance of Facebook’s Platform and the partnerships they have to make with companies who are doing great social things that they can’t or won’t do. Bezos talked about Amazon’s Web Services, and how vital they already are to many of these services. And he said that things are growing, quickly.

Obviously, this $250 million sFund speaks to the laying of a foundation for something greater.

More: John Doerr Talks sFund And iFund But Not fbFund Or aFund

TechCrunch50 startup Cocodot, which launched its online invitation site last year, is getting into printed invitations and greetings cards just in time for the holiday season.

Founded by former MySpace CMO Shawn Gold, Cocodot aims to be a one-stop-shop for event planning and invitations; sort of a modern, more chic Evite. You can create a high resolution, chic, stylish invitation (that can be printed as well), a vertical event pages, guest management tools, seating charts, and a directory for event planning vendors.

The new printing feature aims to give you the best of both worlds when it comes to sending tangible invitations and more eco-friendly online invites. Cocodot will allow you to print cards and also include an interactive digital version for friends and family to share comments. Brides can also coordinate matching digital and printed stationary from the engagement announcement to the wedding invitation.

Cocodot, which has raised $3 million in funding, has also recently launched design collections with a number of fashion houses, including DKNY and Lilly Pulitzer.

Cocodot faces competition from Pingg, Punchbowl, and others.

I’ve seen the future and it begins on my sofa with Google TV.

It isn’t uncommon among geeks to have your PC (or Mac) wired to your TV. A decent audio-out cable, an HDMI cable and you’re good to go. With this simple setup and a few tweaks to your TV’s input and display settings, you can watch YouTube videos (or anything else)—and that’s pretty cool.

But Logitech’s Revue with Google TV takes the integration between television and the web to a whole new level. I was able to play with one for a few hours. Here are my five favorite things about the Logitech Revue with Google TV as well as a brief review of the functionality.

1. The Web—Only Bigger, Better and On Your TV

If you’ve ever wished that you could use the web on your 47 Inch hi-def TV, you’re probably going to want Google TV. Web pages are rendered quickly, clearly and with their full functionality right on your TV. (Although Hulu might be a problem).

Not only can you browse the web, but you can interact with it just like on your Mac or PC. This means you can easily enter text—whether that’s a tweet, a search term or even a full blown blog post.

For those of you wondering how you can possibly do this using your TV remote control the answer is simple—you don’t have to. The Logitech Review comes with a fully functional wireless keyboard that includes a touchpad pointing device that even allows you to scroll with two fingers just like on a Mac.

You can also get a smaller mini-controller that features a thumb keyboard and much of the same functionality. Get both and you can finally prove to your kids that a keyboard is faster than sending texts on a phone—maybe.

In addition, you can even control Google TV using Logitech’s Harmony technology with your iPhone or Android device but more on that in a minute.

2. Seamless Video Conferencing—although I put this second on my list, it really is one of the coolest features of this new platform. Not only is the video big, bright and clear, it also allows you to place calls to and from the TV via Skype and other video calling platforms as well.

In a prior post, John Biggs of CrunchGear worried that calling on Google TV using the Logitech Revue wouldn’t be as simple as it is using Skype. Well, he can stop worrying because it is. Click, connect, talk (and see); it really is that simple.

One other great thing about Google TV using Logitech’s specifically designed camera is that when your TV is off and you receive (but miss) a call, a light comes on that tells you that this has happened. While you can’t yet leave (or receive) a video voice mail, enough people have been asking for this feature that either Google or Logitech should add it later or an enterprising application developer will build an app for it without a doubt.

3. Your Phone is Now Your Remote Control—In my distant past when I wrote for MobileCrunch, I said more than once that eventually your mobile phone will become the remote control for your life. With Google TV this reality has come one step closer, at least if you have an iPhone or an Android device.

Logitech has developed free software that you can find on either the iTunes Store or the Android App Market that allows you to totally control the Logitech Revue (and thus your interaction with Google TV) with your mobile.

Not only can you navigate with a mouse, you can also use verbal commands for things like searching Google. While I was watching, people threw some pretty rough stuff at the recognizer but it seemed to work every time from what I could see. This is a far cry from other voice to text or voice to command interfaces. My host said “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and Google TV was actually able to get this right. Beyond this, the system even seems to be able to understand people with accents—even heavy ones.

Cooler still, using the built-in share function, you can start watching a video on your mobile and if you like you can share it directly to your Google TV and the video will pick up where you left off, only now it will be bigger, brighter and better.

4. Search (– DUH – It’s Google!)—You’d expect any television platform with Google’s name on it to have great search and the Revue does not disappoint. Not only can you search what is on TV and what’s on the web, you can also search your DVR as well as on any other networked storage device on the same subnet. Family photos will never be the same.

5. Android Apps—Okay I saved the most intriguing and potentially exciting aspect of Google TV for last. Google TV is built on the Android platform and many people, myself included, believe that we’re not only going to see an explosion in app development as a result, but also a quantum leap in what Android applications can deliver. Android apps are not expected to come out until 2011, but it will be worth the wait.

With the high bandwidth of your home connection (which is going to be a lot better than any current 3G network) as well as the much larger format your TV provides (not to mention the full fledged keyboard), Android apps have the potential to get very exciting indeed.

One potential app could be a fantasy football application that can run in a picture-in-picture display and can give you realtime updates on what is happening with your fantasy football team while the game is happening—plus with the video calling capability you can call and heckle your losing friend right in the middle of his ignominious defeat. That’s just one idea off the top of my head.

The Wrap Up

Google TV has been hyped an awful lot—by bloggers, analysts, and even some mainstream media. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t deliver. In fact, if anything I was surprised by just how capable, functional, fun and intuitive the Logitech Revue is, not to mention how much better Google TV makes plain vanilla television.

My Few Complaints: As with many brand new product (the one I tested was still in beta), there are a few bugs to be dealt with. The first problem is how Google TV handles Flash. Some pages that render partially or completely in Flash don’t display properly and in one extreme case, a page I was trying to browse that renders fully in Flash crashed the unit completely. The Logitech team told me that they were aware of this issue and that it was being worked on, but as of last night it was still a problem.

Secondly, while the interface is fairly intuitive that cannot be said for every feature. Out of the box some features, and especially advanced features like contolling the camera via the control keyboard, might not be that easy for a first-time user (and especially one that isn’t really tech-savvy) to figure out.

That said, I found the whole experience to be a lot better and a lot more interesting then I had anticipated prior to actually getting my hands on the unit. I’m not much of a gambler myself but I’d be willing to bet that Google TV has a good chance of finally changing the way we interact with our televisions.

Oliver Starr was the original blogger at MobileCrunch and is currently the evangelist for Pearltrees.com. You can find him @owstarr on twitter.

We saw this one coming. Zynga has just announced the launch of FarmVille for the iPad, which is the company’s first native app for Apple’s tablet.

Similar to the iPhone app, Farmville on Facebook, but formatted for the iPad. The app will feature in app purchase support, along with push notifications for harvesting and other activities in the game. You’ll have access to your same farm, and your same friends as on Facebook as well. FarmVille on iPad takes advantage of the larger screen with custom graphics, and allows users to interact with their game on the touch screen interface.

FarmVille’s iPhone app has steadily gained traction since its launch in June. The app has spent more than 50 days in the Top 25 games on iTunes and players in 85 different countries send more than 100,000 gifts via the app each day. More than 60 million people across the world play FarmVille, roughly one percent of the global population.

Is an Android app next?

Today Kleiner Perkins is holding a special event at Facebook headquarters to announce the launch of a new $250 million social-centric sFund, which will foster a new generation of companies tapping into the social graph. And there’s plenty of other news being announced from the partners involved, which include Facebook, Zynga, and Amazon. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos just introduced a new Free Usage Tier for AWS, the extremely popular suite of cloud-based services that let developers outsource some of their infrastructure to Amazon.

Details of the new free tier are right here. The tier will allow developers to use 750 hours of Amazon EC2 per month, 5GB of Amazon S3 storage, and more (you can see the full details below). But some of the features come with a catch: you can only get access them for free if you’re a new AWS customer, and after twelve months you pay Amazon’s normal pricing. However, some of the features, including SimpleDB Machine Hours, and requests to Amazon’s Simple Queue Service and Simple Notification Service, don’t expire after a year and can be used by existing AWS customers as well.

 

This is a smart move from Amazon — it’s a great way to get developers hooked on the platform, and once they’ve been on for a year they’re probably going to stay there as opposed to switching to a competing cloud service provider. That said, it’ll be interesting to see how the many developers already on AWS react (and if Amazon will be proactive about hunting down newly created secondary accounts).

“If you don’t have a social strategy, you better go get one,” said John Doerr in a briefing about the launch of the sFund. It’s a new $250 million fund dedicated to what Doerr calls the Third Wave.

Amazon, Facebook, Zynga, Comcast and Allen & Co. are investing in the new fund, as well as others. The three “anchors” – Amazon, Facebook and Zynga – are also committing to help startups taking investments from the fund. And the CEOs of these companies, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Pincus, joined Doerr and Bing Gordon on stage today to announce it.

The fund will make investments ranging from $100,000 to $100 million, says Doerr.

The fund is organized around social startups in all industries – consumer, enterprise, health and mobile. Existing investments Jive, Flipboard and Lockerz would have been sFund investments, says Doerr. And the fund has made it’s first investment already in Cafebots, which announced a $5 million round this morning.

The rise of Facebook is “obvious but important,” Doerr told me yesterday. But the organization of the Internet around social is just getting started. Does that mean there will be lots of different social networks? Gordon says there will be, but Doerr says “Facebook is it.”

That also explains why Google and Yahoo aren’t onstage. When I asked Gordon and Doerr about it, they both said Facebook is the important platform to focus on. And Doerr noted that Facebook has many choices in how they spend resources.

Both Gordon and Doerr say they believe that major industries are just beginning to reorganize themselves around social, and that a lot of disruption is going to happen over the next several years. “We’re making a blue ocean bet that social is just beginning,” said Gordon. “Usage habits will change dramatically over the next 4 -5 years.”

Gordon also told me that he expects the fund will invest in multiple startups that will eventually be as big as Zynga, or bigger.

One thing is clear – Kleiner just made sure that social startups will drop by their offices to look for an investment, whether it’s angel size or bigger. Closing a round with them means that Facebook, Zynga and Amazon will also be indirect investors. That may give them a competitive advantage that they can’t say no to.

The press release is below

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Launches $250 Million sFund Initiative for Social Web Entrepreneurs

Amazon.com, Facebook, Zynga, Comcast and Liberty Media to Invest and Help Accelerate a New Wave of Social Web Innovations

October 21, 2010 – Palo Alto, Calif. – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced the sFund, a new $250 million initiative to invest in entrepreneurs inventing social applications and services. Amazon.com, Facebook, and Zynga, the leading companies defining today’s social and online environment; entertainment and media leaders Comcast and Liberty Media and Allen & Company, LLC, have committed to invest in the sFund and serve as strategic partners. The sFund will provide financing, counsel, and relationship capital for a new generation of entrepreneurs to deliver on the promise of the social web.

“We’re at the beginning of a new era for social Internet innovators who are re-imagining and re-inventing a Web of people and places, looking beyond documents and websites,” said KPCB partner John Doerr. “There’s never been a better time than now to start a new social venture.”

The sFund will be led by KPCB partner Bing Gordon, former chief creative officer and longtime executive at Electronic Arts and board director of Amazon.com and Zynga. Gordon said, “Social is just getting started and the opportunities are vast. As in the early days of the Internet, the race is on. Today every business, organization, and entrepreneur should have a social strategy.”

“Social apps are viral, and when they hit, it often happens suddenly, and then they grow explosively. That’s one of the reasons the scalable, elastic, no capex, variable cost nature of Amazon Web Services is ideal for social apps,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “The top three companies that develop for Facebook all use AWS.”

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said, “The Web is being rebuilt around people, and we’re at a point where any app, website, or device can be designed to be social from the ground up. We’re focused on enabling entrepreneurs to build companies that can disrupt their industries.”

Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga, noted, “Zynga’s successes – such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars – show the speed with which entrepreneurs can transform existing industries and invent entirely new ones through social platforms. Our model demonstrates consumers’ desires to connect with others in new and valuable ways.”

Brian Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast Corporation, said, “Social businesses play an increasingly important role in our entertainment and communications products. We’re very pleased to be a part of the sFund and look forward to seeing the great innovations that are generated from its investments.”

All anchor investors in the sFund initiative are prioritizing developer services for entrepreneurs, who will be part of an active ecosystem. The strategic partners launching the sFund each bring unique contributions. Amazon Web Services (AWS) will provide AWS Getting-Started Support for one year, priority access to worldwide Startup Events, and dedicated business and technical support. Facebook will contribute access to its platform teams, beta APIs, and new programs, like Facebook Credits. Zynga will host periodic sessions with sFund companies to focus on management and technical development, including open source collaboration. Comcast Interactive Capital, Comcast’s venture fund, will provide access to Comcast’s resources,
teams, and relationships.

Over the past year, there has been unprecedented innovation in social applications. KPCB’s latest social ventures show the breadth of the social opportunity, from seed stage to scale-up, and enterprise to entertainment, including:

– Cafébots — The first company dedicated to Friend Relationship Management. By building applications that are useful, fun, and scalable, consumers will be able to extract more information from and make better use of their social graphs. KPCB led a Series A funding for the company founded by a team of Stanford PhDs.

– Flipboard — The world’s first social magazine, delivering a beautiful, personalized experience of the news, images, and information being shared by your friends across social network feeds on your iPad.

– Jive — Jive’s social software leverages innovations in social to radically change the way work gets done in the enterprise. Jive has over 3,000 customers serving 15 million users. KPCB led a growth stage funding round in July.

– Lockerz — A new social commerce company aimed at ages 13-30 creates a revolutionary new way to shop, play content, and connect. In less than a year, Lockerz has grown to more than 17 million members, offering major discounts on the best fashions, electronics, music, and more.

KPCB will have 10 U.S. partners working on the fund, including Chi-Hua Chien, John Doerr, Eric Feng, Bing Gordon, Lila Ibrahim, Randy Komisar, Aileen Lee, Matt Murphy, Ellen Pao, and Ted Schlein. Another four KPCB partners in Shanghai will extend the sFund’s reach in China.

Go to www.kpcb.com/sfund and www.facebook.com/kpcbprofile, or follow us at twitter.com/kpcb to learn more about the sFund.

About Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Since its founding in 1972, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has backed entrepreneurs in over 500 ventures, including AOL, Amazon.com, Citrix, Compaq Computer, Electronic Arts, Genentech, Genomic Health, Google, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Netscape, Lotus, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Verisign, and Xilinx. KPCB portfolio companies employ more than 250,000 people. More than 150 of the firm’s portfolio companies have gone public. Many other ventures have achieved success through mergers and acquisitions.

Amazon Forward-Looking Statements
This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management’s expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com’s financial results is included in Amazon.com’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

You’ve likely heard of CRM, customer relationship management. But have you heard of FRM — friend relationship management? Probably not. But Cafebots hopes to change that shortly.

We don’t know much about the still-in-stealth startup which was co-founded by three folks out of Stanford, but we do know that the company has just secured $5 million in funding. And the funding is perhaps even more significant because they are the first company funded as a part of Kleiner Perkins’ new sFund, the social fund announced today at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA.

“We live in a world where social is the new search,” Cafebots co-founder Yoav Shoham told us when we had the chance to speak to him earlier. “The manual curation of the web was important, but now we’re emerging into this social layer,” he continued. He noted that while there have been some attempts, no one has nailed this FRM idea yet. “People are touching parts of the elephant, but no one has gotten it,” is the way Shoham put it.

He wouldn’t give us anything beyond that aside from saying that their products will play nicely will all the social platforms out there. They won’t be just tied to Facebook, for example.

The company currently has six employees, but they hope to double that by the end of the year. It’s around that time that they hope to have their first product ready, we’re told.

Alongside the sFund investment, Kleiner partner Bing Gordon will be joining Cafebots’ Board. “We love working with Kleiner, and we love working with Bing. The sFund is a bullseye for us,” Shoham said.

More on the sFund:

• Live: Kleiner Perkins Unveils The $250 Million sFund With Facebook, Zynga, and Amazon
• The Kleiner Perkins sFund: A $250 Million Bet That Social Is Just Getting Started

Welcome to your daily Angry Birds fix! Obviously we’re thisclose to release or we wouldn’t have received these things in our inbox this morning. No word yet on actual debut date or pricing.

So all we’ve got are these hi-res, full color shots of the brightly colored plush birds, spun off from the wildly popular (at 6.5 million iPhone downloads and counting) mobile game.

‘Ah, Techcrunch has a shiny new red ball. I’ll miss the “Facebook changes font size on footer” posts but welcome a few dozen more in the “Angry Birds plush doll _________” category.’ — Andy

GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT.

Sidenote: Rovio’s Angry Birds was most recently in the news for NOT selling to Electronic Arts.

Is there really any doubt the Mac App Store will be anything other than a huge hit when it debuts in 90 days? Seven billion downloads on the current App Store would suggest that Apple knows what it’s doing (and that people really love to slingshot cartoon birds into buildings). And the benefits of the App Store are clear: it’s an easy-to-use, one-stop source of safe, tested software. Usually. Maybe not all of that software is worth your time—how many fart Apps do you really need?—but the platform itself is sound, and Apple is keen to make sure it stays that way. But the platform is closed. Only with Apple’s approval (not to mention its 30 percent cut of the action) can your App find a home on the App Store.

But is that scenario ideal when it comes to desktop operating systems?

Read more…

We’re here today at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. But it’s not a Facebook event. Well, it’s not totally a Facebook event. Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has summoned the press here for an announcement. What will it be? Judging by the signs posted around here, it’s called the “sFund”. And Facebook, Amazon, Zynga, are major partners with Comcast, Liberty Media, and Allen & Co. are on board to help out as well.

You may recall that in 2008, Kleiner Perkins announced a $100 million iFund, to spur iPhone app development. In March of this year, they doubled that down with another $200 million. They haven’t announced the size of this fund just yet, but we’d guess it’s closer to the latter amount. And judging from the name, I think it’s a good bet that this fund will be all about social applications.

Update: Sure enough, it’s a $250 million fund being led by Kleiner partner Bing Gordon and built around social applications.

More:

• Stealth Social Startup Cafebots Scores The First Money From Kleiner Perkins’ New sFund
• The Kleiner Perkins sFund: A $250 Million Bet That Social Is Just Getting Started
• John Doerr Talks sFund And iFund But Not fbFund Or aFund

Below, find my live notes (paraphrased):

John Doerr: We’re here for the future of the social web. The social web as defined by entreprenuers. And we have some great ones here today. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Mark Pincus. We’re on the third wave now. This is about the social web.

One company is just company out of stealth today Cafebots. Another is Flipboard, the first social magazine. Jive Software — it has 15 million users already. Relying on Facebook relationships. And the fourth is Lockerz. It aims to be the homepage for teens and young men and women.

These companies are re-imagining a social web. It’s about relationships. Alan Kay said the best way to predict the future is to invent it. At Kleiner we think that extends to funding it too.

Today we’re announcing a $250 million fund called the sFund. It’s like a quarter billion dollar party. A social one.

Mark Zuckerberg: Our view for the next few years is that every industry is going to get fundamentally rethought and built around people. If you look at our photos product, it wasn’t great to start. But it was social. That made it. Events and Groups are the same.

Look at what Zynga has done. It’s not just games you’re playing with your friends, they’re designed to be social. This is going to keep happening. And this fund is going to help that. Having a firm like Kleiner behind this is powerful.

I think there is going to be an opportunity in the next few years to pick any industry and re-do it.

We decided to invest in a platform. It’s about helping people build out these great applications. We want to continue that with this fund.

Marc Pincus: We are at this point in time where there are so many platform changes and disruptions happening all at once. Things are changing in front of our eyes with apps and social. You can log in to something and it will know you. This is new for the web.

It’s one of the few times in history where venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are behind the curve. I think on the consumer side, I’m bugged that there isn’t a great travel service. Why don’t I have an app that knows I’m at the airport and knows my flight is cancelled? It could recommend things, other options to me. Or games (laughs).

On the infrastructure side, memBase is a great example. And we hope you’ll fund a company that reinvents customer support for all of us. We’re entering this new world of free services but customer expectations are still based on the paying services. We were outsourcing, we brought it in house and it’s better. But we don’t want to be in this business.

For me, the big thing to learn has been knowing how to run a company at scale. Seeking out coaches and mentors has helped a huge amount. I’ve looked to Jeff Bezos here the most.

Jeff Bezos: The most important advice is to use Amazon Web Services (laughs). Most of that $250 million should be spent on that — a lot of reasons to be excited.

But seriously, these social applications tend to be viral. They can grow violently. The cloud helps that. All three of the top Facebook companies are using AWS, so thanks for the business.

MP: We couldn’t have scaled Farmville without AWS.

JB: This guys are a great example of huge growth. It’s an interesting phenomenon. It’s this rich solution of people who are connected already. You don’t need a lot of marketing to get these things to grow.

For investors, I’d say to get a damn good ROI (laughs).

If I were coming out of school today, I would be passionate about genetic life. It’s about solving green and social issues. There have been golden ages — like TV in the 50s, aviation, so on. This probably is the golden age of social apps. But I’d be in the future. We’re right on the edge of being able to do things with synthetic life.

Bing Gordon: I think social is just beginning. We have a billion and a quarter people worldwide — in four years it’s going to be 5 billion, I think. I think average friend counts are going to go to 500. Social connections are going to skyrocket. The social graph is going to explode. 30 minutes to an hour per day per person connected to social in the future. We’re just getting started.

JD: What about 5 years from now?

BG: The most exciting part of the social graph is when members of your family post something. Marc Pincus in five years your kids are going to be on Facebook. It changes everything.

MP: What excites me most is that so much of our time right now is spent on getting the network wired. In five years, everybody will always be connected to each other, instead of the web. It will be so frictionless. I think of these services as dialtones. Facebook is the dialtone on top of it. Pandora is the music dialtone. We hope to be the gaming dialtone.

MZ: A lot of people building social apps now will be at scale by then. A lot of companies require DNA for special areas. I don’t think Facebook could ever make games, for example. That’s why we partner with Zynga. I’m most excited about what we’re going to be able to do with partners to build out our entire graph.

There are a lot of companies that add social on. But the things that make the apps work is that things are built in to the product, that they are social. There are going to be two kinds: ones that layer the social on top, and the ones built from the ground up. The ones that slap it on on top and check the box are going to lose, I think.

JB: We’re launching a bunch of new things that will help all of this growth for the future.

BG: You have to learn from your peers. We bring CEOs together to talk to one another. Like the people on this stage.

————————– Q&A —————————–

Q: You started the iFund early, there was a Java fund. Facebook is in its 7th year now — what took you so long?

JD: Zynga exploded about a year and a half ago. We realized the application opportunity was going to be enormous. That’s when we set out to make the fund.

Q: Where are you going to draw the line between social and not social? What is social to you guys?

BG: 5 years from now, if you don’t have a lot of friends, you’re not going to have any. You either build social from the ground up or you slap it on. Those slap on people will get shorter meetings.

Q: Do you intend to add other partners?

BG: We love partners. I suspect people will come in for more discussions. There are finance laws for how to add new partners, but it’s a party.

Q: Social responsibility — how do we stop apps from leaking data or being friendly with children?

JD: We don’t control how people run their businesses. But we agree that users ought to own their own data.

Q: Are all of these companies putting cash into this fund?

JD: Yes.

Q: Why not called it the fFund? What about aFund for Android?

JD: This is not the fbFund, this is more than that. But Facebook is the big social network.

Q: Are you folding these guys into the sFund — are these new investments?

JD: We have invested in Cafebox already. The rest would be in the sFund, but instead they’re in our regular portfolio.

Q: Is this media investments or tech investments?

BG: Yes. I think content without technology is boring.

Q: What monetization models do you favor?

MP: I believe we are underinvested in the user-pay economy. I think there’s a wrong assumption that we’ve built stuff on that things have to be free with ads. We believe in a model that is supported by users. I think my wife’s company, One Kings Lane, is a great example of what’s going to be the next big online economy.

Q: Can you talk more about customer service?

JB: I’m in favor of it. It’s a good feature. It’s going to be different for every business.

Q: Reports of Amazon launching an App Store. Comment?

JB: You’ll just have to stay-tuned. Nothing to announce today.

Q: Are these going to be advertising-based companies?

MZ: Our view is that there are going to be a lot of different models. I think companies will match what their customers want. We’re pretty sure there will be new social versions of things across all industries.

MP: I think that before this new chapter there was an oddly inverse relationship between tech and monetization. It’s about going to a new depth of engagement now.

And now it’s time for a Bing Gordon poem.

As soon as we heard that the SkyFire browser was coming to the iPhone, we just knew it was going to sit in the approval queue for a while. With Apple/Adobe’s infamous squabbling, anything that claimed to support Flash — even through some server-side conversions, as with SkyFire — was going to be subject to some major scrutiny.

1 month, 20 days, and 2 hours later, our buddies at SkyFire Labs say that they think they’re getting pretty close to approval. With that in mind, they’ve sent over the latest pre-release build of the browser, and I’ve been dabbling with it for the past 12 hours or so. So, what’s it like to use the first Flash-video friendly browser on iOS? Find out after the jump.
Read the rest at MobileCrunch

Google’s and Facebook’s lobbying efforts have continued to grow this quarter. For the third quarter of 2010, Google spent $1.2 million on lobbying efforts compared to $1.08 million in the same quarter last year. The seach giant is already close to spending more in the first three quarters ($3.92 million so far this year) than in all of 2009 ($4.03 million). Google is on track to spend $5 million on lobbying this year Facebook doubled its lobbying spending this year from $60,000 in the second quarter to $120,000 in the third quarter. But the social network spent slightly less than the same quarter last year ($121,000). You can find the reports from the U.S. Senate’s lobbying database here.

For Google, this quarter’s lobbying efforts were slightly lower than previous quarters this year. Q2 came in at $1.34 million, with Google spending $1.38 million in the first quarter of 2010. According to a release from organization Consumer Watchdog, Google outspent a number of other technology companies this quarter including Apple ($340,000) and Facebook. Microsoft, however, spent $1.63 million in the third quarter.

Google’s lobbying strategy for this quarter included immigration, online advertising regulation including privacy and competition issues, patent reform, online consumer protection, cloud computing, renewable energy, smart grid, Congressional Internet service usage rules and broadband access.

Another area where Google put its lobbying resources was “openness and competition in the online services market,” specifically related to the $700 million acquisition of travel software company ITA. The deal is reportedly being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department.

Facebook spent its lobbying money on global regulation of software companies and restrictions on internet access by foreign governments; cyber security policy, internet privacy regulations, and FCC regulations on net neutrality. None of these topics are that surprising, especially considering Facebook’s recent issues with online privacy. In July, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said ninety percent of the D.C. staff’s day is focused on privacy.

Photo Credit/Flickr/VinothChandar

This week, a new biogas facility opened in San Antonio, Texas, and began turning greenhouse gases into a power source. Companies that partnered to develop and run the new facility are the San Antonio Water System (SAWS) which treats sewage and provides potable water and wastewater to about 1.3 million people in Texas, and Ameresco, a publicly traded energy services company.

The project captures methane gas that’s generated during sewage treatment, and directs this gas into a commercial, natural gas pipeline nearby so it can be sold, delivered and used as energy for heat and electricity generation. Typically, waste water facilities burn methane off in flares.

According to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency research methane is about 21 times more powerful at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, and has a chemical lifetime in the atmosphere of approximately 12 years. Methane’s relatively short life, coupled with its problematic potency as a greenhouse gas, makes it a candidate for mitigating global warming within 25 years, the EPA suggests.

In a press statement, Robert R. Puento, the chief executive and president of SAWS said “This project is a sound investment for our environment and our community. By reusing biogas instead of burning it off, we are helping protect the city’s air quality and developing a renewable energy resource.”

Ameresco will treat and transfer at least 900,000 cubic feet of methane gas from SAWS wastewater plant to a nearby commercial gas pipeline, where they will sell it on the open market. The gas will be used and sold as energy, and some royalties on the sale of the biogas will be returned to the water company and its customers, reducing its cost of operations, overall. SAWS expects to generate at least $200,000 a year from biogas sales.

Biogas has remained somewhat scarce in the U.S. consumer energy market. Once biogas has been captured, it remains a challenge to transport it for use in fuel cells like the ClearEdge5 or the Bloom Box or other systems.

BioEnergy Solutions in Bakersfield, California has taken greenhouse gases from dairy manure, and directed it into Pacific Gas & Electric’s pipeline, and Cargill has embarked on a number of biogas projects worldwide, mostly involving agriculture industry projects, but Ameresco and SAWS claim theirs is the first biogas project of its kind in the country.

Environmentalists are eager to see more collaboration between large, public wastewater utilities and private sector or other companies that can help them curb methane emissions, while generating renewable, and low emissions energy.

The Europas, the TechCrunch Europe Awards 2010 for European tech companies, will be held on November 19 in London (tickets are available here). Entrants have been informed by Crunchbase, our database of startups, and will be voted on by the industry. These results will influence a subsequent voting round from The Europas Advisory Board of experts, chaired by TechCrunch Europe. You can vote in all the categories below.

If you want to suggest a company that you think should be voted on by the industry, then please suggest it in the comments on each award category – but it does not guarantee entry. The judges’ decision is final. If you want more information on any of the entries, look on CrunchBase. To sponsor any category please contact TechCrunch Europe Events and Sponsorship Director Aléna Dundas on alena [@] techcrunch.com (@alenadundas on Twitter)

Don’t forget to Tweet or share the voting pages to your social networks, and you can of course vote for yourself. Use the logo above on your site to encourage voting. For the latest updates on the awards simply subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed). Happy voting!

Here come the Groupon partnerships. In what may be the first of several big distribution deals aimed at cementing its lead in social commerce, Groupon and Ning are launching an affiliate beta program today. Anyone who runs a Ning social network can now add a Groupon widget with geo-targeted daily deals. They will get a cut of any Groupon deals purchased through their Ning sites, and Groupon will extend its reach potentially to tens of thousands of new sites with strong communities who perhaps would like to start buying things together. The program is in limited beta now, and will be rolled out as an option for all Ning sites by early next year.

Besides Ning, Groupon may soon strike similar deals with Yahoo, eBay and Citysearch. The goal is to become the de facto brand for daily deals.

As we’ve noted before, there is a lot of competition in the daily deal space and there is a real danger that margins could one day collapse. Although, it’s hard to say what the saturation point is for these types of offers. One of the best things Groupon has going for it is its first-mover advantage, amazing economics, and its growing brand. These types of partnerships are all about blowing out distribution even bigger than Groupon can do on its own. The margins will be smaller, just as with all affiliate networks, but it is the same strategy Amazon pursued successfully with its affiliate program, or even Google with AdSense.