Waging proxy wars for handset manufacturers
So Apple/KPCB has the iFund, Google has the Android Developer Challenge, and now RIM/Thompson Reuters is starting up their own BlackBerry fund. That sure feels like they’re trying to heat up the platform wars with pushing money to developers for very narrow goals. Who the heck would want to build a BlackBerry-only startup these days, except RIM?
The problem is that this doesn’t really promote solving any interesting problem. It is just the fragmented market continuing to compete with itself. A much more interesting direction would be to align investment pools perpendicular to this notion: Build a fund around location awareness, or mobile social networking, gaming, etc. That would do much more to unify the whole pie than this war over which handset gets the bigger slice.