Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers along with Facebook, Amazon, and Zynga, are establishing a $250 million fund (the sFund) to aid the development of a new generation of social web offerings.
"There's going to be an opportunity over the next five years or so to pick any industry and rethink it in a social way," said Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. "We think that every industry is going to be fundamentally re-thought and designed around people."
With KPCB putting up most of the money, the others are offering assistance in various ways. Amazon will provide it's web services platform for one year to selected companies and Facebook providing access to it's platform team and beta APIs.
The big focus of the fund will be social start-ups from all industries but no money will be provided to direct competitors of Facebook, Amazon, or Zynga (so there's the hook!).
"Think of it as a quarter-billion-dollar party. The third great wave of the internet is mobile and social together. It's going to be tectonic," said KPCB partner John Doerr.Source: BBC
