KPCB launches $100M iFund

The following excerpt was posted last March (2008) by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers:

KPCB's iFund^TM is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. The iFund^TM is agnostic to size and stage of investment and will invest in companies building applications, services and components. Focus areas include location based services, social networking, mCommerce (including advertising and payments), communication, and entertainment. The iFund^TM will back innovators pursuing transformative, high-impact ideas with an eye towards building independent durable companies atop the iPhone / iPod touch platform.

For more information, and to submit an application, see http://www.kpcb.com/initiatives/ifund/index.html.

Just now getting around to it, but here's my submission on behalf of Pardalis.

Please describe the market opportunity as you see it. Include information on the unmet market need, market size estimates, and unique features of the market that are relevant to your venture.

The first information bank is operating in North Dakota for the members of the CalfAID USDA PVP program. This is a member-trusted program that keeps verifiable pedigree information connected with animals as they make their way through a complex, owner-segmented food supply chain. CalfAID recognizes that there are now two products being produced along agricultural supply chains (1) the traditional farm product, and (2) a new, informational product. Build to the Cloud from trusted institutions and groups. Measure the economic impact upon family farms who will now for the first time be compensated not just for their traditional farm products but also for their informational products. Measure the impact upon the emerging Semantic Web that without an adjacent informational banking infrastructure will have virtually no opportunity to bargain for access to information that that participants to complex supply chains consider to be confidential.

Please describe your solution. Focus on how it is unique and distinctive from other similar solutions.

People are comfortable and familiar with monetary banks. Without people willingly depositing their money into banks, there would be no banking system as we know it. Without a healthy monetary banking system our economies would be comparatively dysfunctional, and our personal lives would be critically deficient in opportunities. Imagine empowering people with data ownership similar to the trustworthy, granular control they have over depositing and spending their banked money. What is technologically required is a flexible, integrated architectural framework for information object authoring and portability. One that easily adjusts to the definition of data ownership as it is variously defined by the data banks serving each information supply chain and product supply chain. The lowest common denominator will be the trusted, immutable informational objects that are authored, controllable and traceable by each data owner one-step, two-steps, three-steps, etc. after the initial port.

Please describe your technology and any proprietary intellectual property you have developed or intend to develop. Focus on how it is unique and distinctive from other similar technologies.

Pardalis holds a significant, global portfolio intellectual property (IP) uniquely designed for virtually integrating information and product supply networks that are not otherwise vertically integrable. Pardalis holds two U.S. patents that will enforceable until at least 2021, a pending U.S. continuation patent, and now four international patents issued by Australia, China, Mexico and New Zealand. Similar patents are pending in Brazil, Canada, Europe, Hong Kong, India, and Japan. Significantly, Pardalis' parent patent has been distinguished from prior art held by IBM, Microsoft, and SAP AG, all of which generally apply to the runtime efficiencies of immutable objects. Also distinguished from Pardalis' IP has been a seminal 1993 Xerox patent pertaining to collaborative data authoring and sharing. For further information begin with the blogged entry US Patent 6,671,696: Informational object authoring and distribution system (Pardalis Inc.) at http://www.pardalis.squarespace.com.

Please describe the competitive landscape. Include details how you are different from each of the competitors named.

Here's one example. Metaweb Technologies is developing technology for a semantic ‘knowledge web' marketed as Freebase Parallax^TM. Philosophically, Freebase Parallax is a substitute for a great tutor, like Aristotle was for Alexander. Using Freebase Parallax users do not modify existing web documents but instead annotate them. Freebase Parallax links the annotations so that the documents are more understandable and more findable. In the spirit of statistical reliability, annotations are also modifiable by their authors as better information becomes available to them. Metaweb characterizes its service as an open, collaboratively-edited database (like Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) of cross-linked data but it is really very much a next generation competitor to Google. As Freebase strives to become the premier ‘knowledge web', it will need access to new, reservoirs of data. Without a new Ownership Web infrastructure, such trustworthy information will forever remain missing or incomplete.

That's the substance of my submission. FYI, the submission form did not allow entry of hyperlinks or the addition of font emphasis, as I have included above in this blog entry. Also the limit was 1,000 characters (including spaces) for each of the four descriptions, above. For a more robust submission, see and compare CNN: Got an idea to help the world? Here's $10 million.