$250 million Venture Capital Fund Established For Investment In Social Web

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 

Yet Another Facebook Privacy Issue - Oops, We Did It Again!

Another high profile security issue at Facebook has Canada's privacy commissioner again raising the possibility of a probe into the company's treatment of confidential user information. 

"If applications covered by [privacy law] are disclosing personal information without consent, that's a significant concern to our office," the office of Jennifer Stoddart said in a statement Monday to CBC News.

"We are looking at the situation and evaluating the possibility of launching an investigation."

The breach discovered by a Wall Street Journal investigation, indicates that at least 10 of the most popular Facebook apps, including FarmVille, Mafia Wars, FrontierVille, and Texas HoldEm Poker, all by game developer Zynga, were found to be sending user ID numbers to at least 25 advertising, marketing and internet tracking companies.

hmmm, the highest traffic games sending data to advertisers and nobody at Facebook knew about it? Just saying!

Source: www.cbc.ca