Facebook has just announced 25 winners of cash grants from the fbFund. These grants are given to the Facebook developers that are creating some of the most promising apps on Facebook. The fbFund is a $10 million fund announced a year ago by Facebook, Accel Partners, and the Founders Fund.
Below is a list of the 25 winners, out of 600 applicants. They each received about $25,000 and will be eligible for five top prices of $225,000 (about $2 million, when all is said and done). To help determine the final five, Facebook will have a page where members can vote on their favorite apps. The cash is a free-and-clear grant, but Accel and Founders Fund get first right of refusal if they decide to invest in any of the finalists.
Some of the apps are already quite popular, like Weddingbook, a social network for brides-to-be with 336,000 active monthly users. The game Mousehunt, has 147,000 monthly active users. GroupCard, which lets dozens or thousands of people collaboratively create and send a card to one recipient, has 87,000 active monthly users. Others have not launched other than in alpha. A PDF provided by Facebook with a description of each finalist is embedded at the bottom of this post.
Which ones have you tried? Which ones will make it to the final five and why?
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Congrats to everyone! CrazyMenu.com came very close and we made it as a runner-up.
We showed 5 facebook apps, a site with 25,000 menus and 300,000 restaurants and patent pending technology all self-funded–This was a tough competition.
pick-a-place — integrates calendering and events coordinate with all IM and twitter:
http://www.facebook.com/develo.....0074519185
Foodmate. find people who share your food taste, review and add fav restaurants:
http://www.facebook.com/develo.....8955143514
Food IQ: see if you are a real food snub:
http://www.facebook.com/develo.....1303153400
wheel of luncheon — spin the wheel and eat in a new place, updates twitter feed:
http://www.facebook.com/develo.....8400268667
Scratch to eat - scratch a lotto ticket to randomly pick a restaurant:
http://www.facebook.com/develo.....7804588284
special kudos to the FBFund team at Facebook, especially Cat Lee. I got several emails from them past midnight. They were obviously burning the midnight oil through out this process. They even volunteered their cellphone numbers on Sunday night for coaching and feedback. Thanks for all the effort, you guys!
Wait isn’t this a deja-vu? I remember reading comments by people who participated in their first fund drive, most of whom felt like they were deceived into getting a fair shot at winning. The criteria for winning were not laid out clearly, and the process of selection was completely hidden from the community. It appears that the winners were not even announced until the dev community protested through their forums…
As it turned out, the winners of the first fund were mediocre in quality and the honesty and fairness of the selection came into question.
They keep beating the same lame drum the new rounds of fbfund and it sure seems like they’re after some fresh naive blood.
Overall, hugely dissapointed with the FB app market. Just the names of these applications are a sure tell sign I won’t check any of them out.
and that is tinycrunch speaking ?
yep
We’re really excited to have been selected as an fbFund recipient, and getting our product out soon. Thanks Cat, Julia, and everybody @ Facebook, Accel, and Founders Fund!
Check out the Socialfly preview app @ apps.facebook.com/socialfly
If you want to stay up to date on Socialfly developments, please check out the Socialfly Blog or follow us on twitter!
Thanks!
The Socialfly Team
Think Facebook is setting up their own version of “Facebook Idol” I wonder what app will end up being the Clay Aiken.
Also it seems like Teach The People one of the finalist was also a Techcrunch 40 finalist.
Socialfly is promising. If these guys deliver on a CRM-like system to manage all my friends/contacts, it’ll make my so much easier.
Does anyone else wonder what took them so long?
Fb should first get all the apps to change their names to something that makes sense. Branding 101.
Am I going to check any of them? Nope. Good luck, those days are gone especially with the new profile.
People are still doing apps? I thought the last FaceBook makeover killed the apps traffic down to almost nothing.
The new profile just changed the rules but man the stuff you can do now is exciting. The problem is anything good takes time. Just like the first websites generally sucked so too do the first apps. In time as people figure it out, it will get better.
Blog it for example allows you to update your blogs from your facebook profile. The problem is they haven’t bothered to expand the interface to include videos or pictures so it is still behind that firefox plugin uscribe or whatever it is called.. But if you do simple text blogs it is pretty useful. It will update your Twitter and Facebook status with that blog post automatically.
Playfish has some fun brain games which are nice to use. Fun for awhile. The crap people are thinking of when it comes to apps is generally the XML type feed apps. Where all the app is story updates about the site and then to use it you have to sign up for an account outside of Facebook which would be fine if they used friends connect or clickpass but most don’t.
The real jerks who ruin it are the idiots that send you an email saying you have an account on some website you never went to because you made the mistake of signing up for an app. That hurts the whole industry.
Give it time. Apps will get better.
I have used none of these apps. Facebook apps suck and irritate the hell out of all your friends, making you look like a damn n00b who deserves to be banned from the internets and live a life of deprivation and starvation in a cave in Siberia. Give the money to charity.
We spent a lot of man-hours to develop our application on Facebook. However, we have not done a good job in promoting it so far. I am trying to understand the issues here..
Why do they “irritate the hell out of all your friends”?
The problem was the invites and the fact apps would send you a ton of spam. Any type of email from a company that is unwanted or unasked for can really piss people off. When apps started coming out you would get 4 or 5 invites a day and you would want to say F off. App developers pay for the sins of those before them.
As for marketing focus on how your app is useful in some way. Making someone laugh is useful. Most of all treat your loyal users like gold. Never give them a reason to leave.
It’ll be interesting to see how the user voting works…
Kevin (Weddingbook)
http://www.wedsnap.com
Erick - You forgot to mention the list of the ten first round fbFund winners, including my company Podclass.com.
-Gary
I agree Erick. The first 10 winners including http://www.podclass.com should be in this list. With the millions of Facebook users and thousands of apps forming, it is nice to see the winners (those whom Facebook feels are worthy!) celebrated.
I just built a Facebook App to make holiday photocards with your Facebook photo albums.
http://apps.facebook.com/oblinqcards
The link for “Twenty20 Cricket seems” linked to vdream-racing
Thanks Ashu, fixed.
myfavz should be launching it’s pkaboo! application for facebook soon.
pKaboo! is a patent-pending new social registry / wish list concept. The best part about it is that you do not have to create a list at all. Facebook users who have the app can anonymously find out gift ideas for their facebook friends.
myfavz.com should be launching it’s pkaboo! application for facebook soon.
pKaboo! is a patent-pending new social registry / wish list concept. The best part about it is that you do not have to create a list at all. Facebook users who have the app can anonymously find out gift ideas for their facebook friends.
http://www.myfavz.com
I wonder who the near hits were, and I wonder if a certain article on a different blog was right about “politics”. hmmmMMMmm ohh well, my app still lost.
We also applied for the fbFund, our application, AutoTagger, assists you in tagging your photos. Right now it uses face detection to speed up tagging and we are in the process of adding recognition to the mix. Check it out and let us know what you think!
http://www.new.facebook.com/ap.....2782630253
Was hoping Facebook would have sent a mail informing those of us who didn’t get it instead of us getting to know from TC. Either way, kudos to the teams that won it finally.
if you want to check out our local reviews based application, targeted at the South Asian market, you can check it out here: http://locomi.com
Quick Note: Kontagent was the only FBFund recipient that was not an app, but instead an (analytics) platform that sits on top of FB =)
… and of course congrats to all the winners, we’re looking forward to working with all of you on our social analytics platform!
- albert/founder/kontagent
We applied for fbFund but didn’t get it, congrats to all the winners!
Our app called “EyeStride,” it allows anyone to create and share “GoShows” which blend maps and photos/slideshows to tell the full story of your experience. With EyeStride everything is interconnected, your friends can enjoy the photos you took on a recent vacation in sequence while following your trip on a map.
http://www.facebook.com/apps/a.....3045756091
Check it out, we would love to get some feedback. Thanks!
I know the BarTab guys and what they’re going to release. All I can say is that’s it’s going to be incredible. They’ve got my vote.
If you find the BarTab idea interesting you should check out YouGotBeer.com. The site already has a national network and you can buy someone a real drink with just their email address.
Cheers!
Pat
Hum, odd not to mention the first 10 recipients, such as PodClass (http://www.podclass.com), etc.
Of these 25 winners, I think 12 sound pretty interesting including: CheckMyCampus, GroupCard, BottleRocket, Pongr, Contagent, Wildfire, Koofers, TeachThePeople, BlackDrum, SocialFly, GameCreators and ProfessionalProfile.
Why? They put users to work generating content, use the wisdom of crowds, provide picks and shovels for further innovation, leverage Facebook scale, use networked communications, or address a Facebook shortcoming.
More here: http://snurl.com/5d8e3.