John Doerr of KPCB announced a $100M iFund targetted to iPhone and iPod products at today’s Apple event.
From the KPCB website,
KPCB’s iFund is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. The iFund is agnostic to size and stage of investment and will invest in companies building applications, services and components. Focus areas include location based services, social networking, mCommerce (including advertising and payments), communication, and entertainment. The iFund will back innovators pursuing transformative, high-impact ideas with an eye towards building independent durable companies atop the iPhone / iPod touch platform.
How much will KPCB invest in each business? Again, from the website:
The iFund will invest anywhere from $100K of seed capital to $15M of expansion capital in mobile application and services companies
Very interesting idea.
I wonder how this will impact the MID development market if any–which in my book is a product without an advocate. Oh, yeah, Intel is evangelizing the platform, but what about the software side? Is it going to be freewheeling open source projects? Or is Microsoft going to get behind it? Or maybe Google if Microsoft doesn’t. That sure would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Google becoming a premeir MID developer advocate. It might fit well into their mobile browsing focus. I’m not sure if Android can get them there or not. I haven’t looked at it. My 10,000 mile high guess is no. But that’s just a guess.
I look forward to seeing how all of this will play out. Do you feel the world spinning? I do.