Bing unveiled the Bing Fund last month, describing it as an angel investor with an incubator, “working with hot startups to innovate online.”
Bing announced today the first two startups it has been working with: Buddy and Pinion. The former, based in Kirkland, Washington, provides hosted and managed web services for application development. The latter is located in Bellevue, and aims to help gaming communities generate revenue through targeted advertising.
“The Buddy Platform considerably reduces the amount of time mobile and web application developers spend writing, testing, and managing server-side code,” The Bing Fund team says in a blog post. “Its cross-platform APIs support common scenarios such as user accounts, friends and group lists, messaging and chat, geo-location services, photo albums, metadata, gaming, push notifications and crash reporting.”
“Pinion is doing some great work with Valve and their Steam platform,” says Bing Fund GM Rahul Sood. “I have been a Steam user since, like, forever. I have been playing Counter-Strike and Half-Life since they first came out — so I spent a good amount of time studying how Pinion community servers work. Pinion is actually working on ways to improve tàe gaming experience, for example by offering up free gaming servers to communities.”
“I love these kinds of crazy ideas,” he adds.
Sood says Bing Fund is working hard to find its next startup, and apologizes to startups who have not heard back yet, saying that they have had a lot of submissions.
Image: Pinion Team