We’re live at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto to cover another announcement from the company and partner companies. It’s the third event that we’ve covered in the past few weeks. While there’s speculation that this will be about a Facebook fund, there are already a number of companies to demo whatever is being announced today. Partners include Cafebots, Fliboard, Lockerz, and Jive.
While we’re not sure who’s participating in this announcement, we know that at least Mark Pincus of Zynga will be here as well as a few others. As usual we’ll be posting photos and covering the news. There’s also a video stream of the announcement embedded below. We’re expecting everything to get started in about 10 minutes.
As the image below illustrates, this will be about a new Facebook fund called “sFund” which includes Facebook, amazon, and Zynga as partners.
Now the event has gotten started and John Doerr is on the stage introducing Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Pincus, and Bing Gordon.
Today they are announcing a $250 million fund to invest in social web startups. Mark Zuckerberg is the first to discuss why they’re here today. Him and John Doerr are going over what the future of social is and how Facebook is involved in this new fund. [I'm not going to cover every statement from everyone on stage and will post photos of the discussion. If you want to view what everyone is saying word for word you can see below.]
Jeff Bezos jokingly acknowledges that he hopes a large percentage of the $250 million sFund will be spent on Amazon’s web services. He also thanks Mark Pincus for using the service, Mark acknowledges how valuable it is, and suddenly this panel has turned into an advertisement for Amazon’s services! He also says that using Amazon’s web services is all his advice!
He is also suggesting being passionate about what you do, and he’s giving examples of many scientific focuses that would be interesting to study.
Bing Gordon is currently responding to a question from Doerr about how his favorite part of the social web is being able to connect with his family.
One interesting statement from Jeff Bezos is that the company will begin offering one year of an EC2 instance for free for developers who are using it for the first time and some free S3 storage as well. Pretty awesome for developers!
Source: All Facebook
Thursday, October 21, 2010