fbFund Gives Financial Awards To Facebook Apps

After all, competitors in the hunt for fbFund’s money are being asked to improve their creations.  In a final event that’s much funnier than it sounds, competitors in the Monty Python bit are simply asked to end their own lives.  So, however much the two groups may resemble each other in the beginning, they should be headed in different directions.

According to the Mercury News, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg stated, “We are just looking for innovative and disruptive things.  We don’t think we can build all these applications ourselves.”

That’s a reasonable attitude to take.  Zuckerberg also took a reasonable approach to forming the fbFund; grants provided by it will range in value from $25,000 to $250,000, and will come out of a $10 million pot created by Facebook, Accel Partners, and The Founders Fund.  Accel and The Founders Fund both contributed to Facebook’s success, so the fund is essentially an internal affair.

And from an outside perspective, the whole arrangement tends to create a no-lose situation.  Either we get a bunch of impressive Facebook applications, or we get a lot of apps to laugh at.

Search Exec Punches Out Of Yahoo

Andrew Braccia dropped his Yahoo VP of consumer web search business cards into the wastebasket earlier in April. He has reemerged as a principal at Accel, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

Matt Marshall at Venture Beat reported the move. Marshall also cited Yahoo’s recent search market share woes at the hands of Google; Yahoo’s losses have been Google gain.

Yahoo did gain during Braccia’s run, especially on the social media side. He helped the company bring del.icio.us and Flickr into the fold, and worked on the integration of Overture, which is now Yahoo Search Marketing.

A Yahoo spokesperson said Vish Makhijani will take Braccia’s role with the company. The former Inktomi executive was Yahoo’s VP of Yahoo! Search Marketing International and International Monetization.  Prior to that role, Makhijani was Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo!’s consumer International Search business.

Among Braccia’s big ideas includes the concept of the phone conversation as a novelty. He told Marshall people would be "connecting our brains together" instead.

It won’t be long before Accel has Braccia out with some of Accel’s investments, and talking about the future of digital media. Braccia is one of several Accel staffers who will moderate events during the Stanford Accel Symposium tomorrow.

A number of Accel’s investments, like BitTorrent, MetaCafe, and Facebook, will have speakers present for the Symposium. Facebook was one of their more difficult deals; it took Accel about three months to nail down a meeting with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2005.

Accel has also been on the scene historically with some now-legendary Internet names. They backed UUNet, which was the first Internet connection to the World Wide Web for many, and Macromedia, now part of Adobe.