Facebook has just named 25 of the finalists for the latest round of fbFund, the social network’s joint program with Accel and Founders Fund meant to help foster quality applications on Facebook Platform. Today’s announcement represents only half of the finalists for this round, and the company says that the other 25 winners will be annouced soon. These 50 finalists will each be given $1,000 in Facebook advertising, but much more important, they will have a shot at taking part in Facebook’s incubator program this summer.
fbFund has evolved since its inception in 2007, shifting from a no-strings-attached grant to an incubator model led by Silicon Valley vet Dave McClure. Of the 50 finalists from this round, a select number of winners will be invited to the incubator program, where they can receive as much as $100,000 in equity investment along with training alongside Facebook executives and mentors. The program’s latest round has also shifted focus from solely applications built on Facebook Platform to include those using Facebook Connect both on the web and the iPhone.
Here’s a list of the winners:
Connect sites:
Frintro
GovIt
RunMyErrand
RentMineOnline
MyChurch.org
GreetBeatz
Workstir
NutshellMail
RunThere
DropPlay
Magellan (private beta),
Life360 (private beta)
Vittana (private beta)Platform apps:
Travel Brain
Networked Blogs
Gameyola
Photos I Like
Paradise Paintball 3D
Veechi Classes
BitStrips (website active, FB application in private beta)
SamaSourceiPhone apps:
FriendFreak
Near+Now (Sortuv)
Paparazzi
CrazyMenu
Not that exciting!
Agreed. Read the first paragraph and decided it was not worth my time to read any further.
Yeah Faceboook, just get to it already!
Just kidding, I’m one of the finalist w/ Govit.com!
They should have at least bothered to add a description of each winner
Dropplay… “Friends dont let friends pay for music” Great idea………………………
What does “$100k in equity investment” mean?
outsourcing R&D.
I believe it’s a convertible loan, not an equity investment.
If equity investment, they get a % of the company for their investment.
If convertible loan, the investment converts to equity at the Series A financing.
Convertible loans are preferable to startups because it doesn’t assume an early stage valuation.
@Taylor: it will be a convertible note, which altho technically is a debt instrument, functions much like an equity investment. as you note, it typically converts into equity at a future Series A financing. the primary reasoning here was that we wanted to late other investors set price.
we’ll provide more information soon once we make the final announcements about the Incubator winners.
Congrats to Leah and the rest of the team at runmyerrand.com
So Workstir has a co-founder who also works at facebook.
This isnt a conflict of interest? I guess it really doesn’t matter, because since its their investments, they can do whatever they want. But it clearly raises a good point: if you’re looking for entrance into an incubator, get someone on your team that works at the sponsoring fund.
“Congrats”.
Congrats to Mark, David, Nirav and the rest of the NutshellMail team.
its kinda funny how Facebook is incubating companies when they themselves are not exactly a model business yet. They should put this money towards outright acquisition of revenue generating companies.
put it down to facebook hype
you need your head read to invest serious resources in facebook apps, they are the leaders in screwing app developers, apple are no doubt following in their footsteps
Congratulations all!
paradise paintball is really fun!!
Yeah the whole production just seems so irrelevant. Especially now that Facebook has exhausted every avenue for ever providing it’s trigger happy investors a return.
GovIT and NutshellMail are really cool.
I’m not sure how much 1000$ on facebook ads are worth.
I’d rather like the cash then the ad space.
some interesting sites / apps. but i think most are still half baked…
i blog about the facebook ads platform over at facebookads.net
If you want to try Gameyola you should head to http://apps.fac...ok.com/gameyola