Facebook has just named the five winners of $225,000 cash grants from the second round of its fbFund, a joint venture between Facebook, Accel, and Founders Fund meant to cultivate and reward excellent applications on Facebook Platform. The winners: GroupCard, Kontagent, MouseHunt, Weddingbook, and Wildfire.
GroupCard – GroupCard allows users to create online cards that can be signed by an entire group of friends and then printed out. Users enter their messages, along with any photos they’d like to include, and then choose a font that mimics realistic handwriting. Once all of the messages have been compiled, users can have the card printed. The result resembles the group cards that are often passed around offices for birthdays, but can include friends and loved ones from around the globe. Printing options include large posters, photo books, and downloadable PDFs which users can print from their own computers.
Kontagent – Kontagent offers a powerful analytics platform for Facebook developers, offering far more metrics than Facebook’s own backend does. Included metrics include demographic information like user gender, user engagement times, and A/B testing. For our preview coverage of the site, check out the TechCrunchIT post here.
MouseHunt – A rich game that involves hunting mice. Though there are numerous games on Facebook, this one is much richer than most of them. Rather than using shady and irritating viral tactics to spread through the community, the game is relying on good word of mouth, and the results so far have been promising – the developers say that a whopping 40% of its users return on a daily basis.
Weddingbook – A social network within Facebook for couples looking to set their wedding plans. The site offers features meant to help each couple’s friends (who are informed of tentative plans and can help make suggestions), and also offers a section where couples who don’t necessarily know each other can offer tips and advice.
Wildfire – Allows companies to create their own branded promotions on Facebook with a minimal amount of effort (campaigns can also be simultaneously run on MySpace, Bebo, and standalone websites). Facebook’s consumer voting application used to vote on the application process was actually created by Wildfire (Facebook assures us they had no influence on the outcome).
fbFund was announced by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at last year’s TechCrunch40 conference. According to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg the company received over 600 applications within a month of opening this round to submissions. In October the company announced 25 finalists, each of which received $25,000 and was invited to showcase their applications today at Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters at an event attended by venture capitalists, Facebook executives, and members of the press.
Today’s winners were in part determined by voting that took place on Facebook, which received over 180,000 votes from 88,000 users worldwide. During the event’s keynote presentation, Sandberg emphasized the importance of Facebook Platform and its 670,000 developers to the social network, explaining that the company simply doesn’t have the resources to build enough features and applications to suit the site’s 130 million users.
Facebook also says that the third round of fbFund will be announced in early 2009.
I love the GroupCard app. Weddingbook is going to be useful – I will keep this in mind.
Facebook does not care about its users or about keeping its word. Just my opinion, to each their own.
Google is better, go to Orkut.
I so agrees with you. facebook doesn’t care about its users at all. and only reason they’re making money its because users tooo. there for they should reward
Thank you for being open minded to my opinion.
I don’t think the users need a reward, they just need to be treated like adults, not like 12 year old kids.
I don’t know how many of you have interacted with the customer service at Facebook, but they are childish and very selfish. I had an issue with something on Facebook and they sent me a deactivate my account automated response as the reply to my email about my issues, without answering any of my problems or concerns.
I predict the fall of Facebook in the coming months and the rise of more Niche like Social Networks and the continued number 1 spot for MySpace.
One love world !
I just posted the email reply I got from Facebook to deactivate my account after I had correspondence with them, on my blog.
PLEASE READ THIS and understand that Facebook does not care about ANY of us:
http://www.adri...bout-its-users/
none of these apps really jumped out at me.
It’s a branding exercise so nobody confuses them with MySpace or LinkedIn. Each one speaks to a different demographic: office managers, developer, casual gamers, brides, and BizDev (respectively). All very middle-brow, generic, communications and business administration majors. When people talk about The Long Tail, they’re referring to the collection of stuff that these people do not buy.
Huge step away from vamps and werewolves thingy… I do think the apps are bringing value and the fbFund can only spur more devs to using the platform.
Scale?
Congratulations to the winners!
…alain
What? No SuperWall?
I have a dog who’s kind of an asshole. I like things written in scary pointy letters. I think that exit lanes should not also be merging lanes. I know that card tricks are fuckin awesome. I like many remote controls as opposed to a universal remote. I would rather drink red wine than red bull. I know from experience that being in a coma is a great way to quit smoking. I saw a fly fall out of the air and die once and it was awesome.
i actually like that.
“Today’s winners were in part determined by voting that took place on Facebook, which received over 180,000 votes from 88,000 users worldwide.”
in part? . Does that mean that voting was not the only determining factor? or am I reading this wrong?
There were judges involved in the process, including DD interviews with partners at Accel and Founders Fund, who are co-managers of the fund with Facebook.
From our experience, both parties handled the process quite professionally — and we’re obviously thrilled they picked us. =)
- albert/co-founder/kontagent
Woot! Good job, guys.
Thanks for the info, Albert.
Great work.
Am I the only one who finds 180,000 votes out of 130M users to be a paltry sum? Seems to me that the broad user base doesn’t really care about these apps or there would be alot more votes.
Did you vote for any applications Scott?
Maybe the other 129M+ are bots.
LOL.
keep in mind that you could vote once each day too.
Congrats to the winners
Maybe it’s just me but all these apps seem quite weak… Weddingbook??? Are you kidding??? I mean congrats to the apps for winning but I’m just guessing the only reason they won was because all the other apps were worthless and it was a best of the worst type thing. I can’t imagine any of these apps bring any useful value to Facebook…
Peter Epstein
http://www.thew...ar.com/facebook
Facebook has really been on the ball since they partnered with Microsoft!
Congrats to the winners even if I never heard of either this contest nor the winners. I hope this helps spur more innovation, across the board, on the internet of which Facebook is but one use of.
Jon
http://DreamClue.com …get the message!
That’s what strikes me myself – I never got an invite to any of the apps and only a couple of my friends seem to use them. Too bad we are so excited about throwing sheep and selling each other that we don’t have time for something that could really be valuable.
Profy
Kotangent seems like the only one with any potential because it actually solves a need. If the application turns out to be powerful, I can potential see marketers paying for the service.
The others…quite disappointing. Who the hell would want to plan their wedding within a social network? Probably the same type of person who would want to hunt mice on Facebook. All of those people can get together and make one of those GroupCards and send out a promotion through WildFire to promote how “cooool” these apps are.
What happened to having a business model?
http://collegem...ul.com/node/258
Definitely biased but Teach the People needed to be on this list. Great idea, strong business model and presumably the exact reason that the fbFund was created not to mention one of the apps that TechCrunch endorsed.
Thanks for the kind words.
Even as (arguably) the most advanced social/viral analytics platforms as far as social networks are concerned, we’re just scratching the tip of the iceberg.
There’s a ton of work we’re doing in the background, as I’m sure many others are as well WRT analytics in this new environment.
Its a pretty exciting space to be in, and I’d argue that there’s actually more room for innovation on the meta-platform (i.e. dev and marketing platforms) front than even the application layer itself!
This is great progress for Facebook. The way they are handling fbFbund this time around is a lot more visible. Well at least the announcement part.
I asked for an invite to wildfire through their website, but it looks like I will have to wait. Does anyone have spare invites? Your help is much appreciated and will be granted with a voucher.
jens.buch@sumox.com
Great innovations and inventions just like those I really advocate for at http://www.youtechno.info
Thanks Facebook for encouraging Inventors.
cool
Kontagent looks great.
My company was a first-round winner that missed the grand prize. After talking to the winners, I was impressed. MouseHunt, Weddingbook, and GroupCard all demonstrated tremendous interest in their applications and an ability to leverage Facebook’s social very quickly after launch. The giant and growing ecosystem of Facebook apps could clearly benefit from the viral promotion and intelligence capabilities offered by Wildfire and Kontagent. Congratulations, and great job!
I got a grant from the federal government for $12,000 in financial aid, see how you can get one also at http://couponre.../federalgrants/