iFund, App Store Success, Future Apps

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) has started an iFund blog covering topics about its $100 million venture capital fund for iPhone developers. KPCB has currently funded five companies with about $30 million of investment capital. Those companies include:

- Pelago social discovery and location sharing through an application called Whrrl which is live on the AppStore
- iControl a home automation and monitoring solution available in Q1
- ng:moco iPhone games launching its first titles this month
- GOGII A new social interaction and marketing platform, launching in Q4
- An unannounced venture launching in Q1

The company is excited about the prospects of the App Store and note that iPhone application downloads for the first 30 days exceeded all other US carriers combined in a quarter.

According to our estimates and M:Metrics data, thats more iPhone application downloads in 30 days than all US carriers combined have in a quarter.* That means a relatively small base of handsets (~12M, mostly US) is dramatically outperforming the other 250M.

KPCB also believes that a more sophisticated set of applications will arrive as developers become more familiar with the iPhone SDK, and claim to "know some of the apps in the pipeline" that will take things to a whole new level.

Several prominent titles have recently been released to the App Store, including Star Wars The Force Unleashed and Spore. Meanwhile, SlingMedia has acknowledged that they are working on their media player for the iPhone. Despite demoing a version of their app for jailbroken iPhones, the company has made no further announcements. We've heard, however, that they are planning on launching a beta version later this year.