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Web giants to fund $250 Million to startups
By siliconindia
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Bangalore: Kleiner Perkins to team up with Facebook, Zynga, Amazon and other media corporations to set up a $250 million fund to invest in social media startups. It will provide financing, counsel and capital for entrepreneurs working in the rapidly expanding social Internet and will be led by Amazon and Zynga board member Bing Gordon, formerly Electronic Arts CEO.
"We're at the beginning of a new era for social Internet innovators who are re-imagining and reinventing a Web of people and places, looking beyond documents and websites," Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers partner John Doerr said in a statement.
Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said that there was an unprecedented opportunity to invest in the social-media evolution of industries from online retail to music in coming years. "There's going to be an opportunity over the next five years or so to pick any industry and rethink it," he said.
The games industry was the first example of a business transformed by the social Web, with social gaming - playing among a community like Farmville or Mafia Wars and now among the most popular activities on the Internet. Others primed for a similar transformation included e-commerce, music and other sectors that will increasingly build social Web applications to take advantage of the networking phenomenon, Zuckerberg argued.
According to the world's largest social network, more than 70 percent of its users interact with specialized applications like games are popular on Facebook. Applications startups have become some of the hottest Internet properties. For instance, Walt Disney and Electronic Arts are among the media players that bought social gaming companies in the past year.
