platformer

Facebook is moving to the next step of its $10 million FBFund developer grant program, the company announced Friday in a blog post by employee Catherine Lee. The first round, announced early in August, is now closed, and 25 winning proposals will be announced on September 22; 5 final winners will be chosen out of all first-round winners who apply for the second round, and winners will wind up with grant money between $25,000 and $250,000.

"Our team has been busy reviewing each submission and we're amazed and excited by what we've seen," Lee … Read more

No price has been named, but Google has made a new purchase: the Korea-based blog platform TNC, co-founder Chang Kim wrote on his blog Thursday.

TNC, founded in 2004 by Kim and Chester Roh, has created a blog software product called Textcube. An earlier TNC platform, Tistory, was sold to Korean portal Daum.

Google already owns a blogging platform, Blogger, which it purchased in 2003. From a technological standpoint, it's not immediately clear why the company would want another one--although Kim likened his company to Blogger rival WordPress (and its parent company Automattic), the favorite of the open-source community, … Read more

It looks like social music site iLike will launch its developer platform early next week.

The Seattle-based company, which announced plans to build a third-party developer platform in July, has begun notifying news outlets that it will have a "significant technology announcement" on Wednesday.

Two weeks ago, iLike's President Hadi Partovi, wrote an e-mail to third-party developers notifying them that the company was "gearing up to prepare for launch" of the platform. According to Partovi's e-mail, the iLike Developer Platform is designed to add "interactive music features to Facebook apps and Web sites.&… Read more

Atmosphir is a software-based game building tool for PC and Mac users that lets users put together their own gaming levels. Like many consumer-facing game creators you're only limited by the tools that have been given to you. In this case the tools provided are split up into packages of "blocks" that are both interchangeable and feature simple gameplay devices like moving platforms, and various themed texture elements that let you build worlds with grass, dirt, and sand.

The builder actually reminders me a lot of Cubescape, a product I looked at back in May. In Atmosphir'… Read more

It's hard to think of Apple and Facebook as obstructions to innovation and the free flow of information, but that's exactly what the companies could become one day, according to Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor and a proponent of free speech on the Web.

Apple and Facebook have generated lots of consumer satisfaction by each creating environments where third-party developers can tailor software for the iPhone or Facebook's social network. Part of their success is due to the quality control the companies maintain over the applications running on their platforms, Zittrain said. But he also worries … Read more

Salesforce.com is again expanding beyond its customer-relationship management roots with an acquisition designed to broaden its service and platform.

The company has acquired InStranet, a Chicago-based maker of call center software, for approximately $31.5 million. The buy gives Salesforce.com technology that it will use both for its internal customer service purposes, and for a new software-as-a-service offering expected to launch within 18 months, the company said.

InStranet makes so-called knowledge base management software, which can improve companies self-service support functions by making it easier for customers to find answers to common support questions.

Salesforce.com plans to … Read more

AOL's Platform-A subsidiary is now bringing affiliate marketing to widget ads. If that sounds like a lot of media speak, that's because it is.

To power widget ads, AOL acquired start-up Goowy in February, and it has already worked the acquisition into Platform-A. As part of Tuesday's announcement, Goowy's technology has been officially incorporated into Buy.at, an affiliate network that AOL also acquired earlier this year.

"Once a publisher places a widget on their Web site, consumers can grab it and distribute the widget to other locations on the Web, including social-network pages, desktops, … Read more

Facebook is announcing later on Thursday a complete revamp of the analytics system it offers to developers for measuring the performance of their applications on its platform. It's more extensive than the company's recent decision to switch from publicly reporting daily use to monthly use.

It'll be officially announced on the Facebook developer blog.

The new analytics are available only to the developer who created a given application, not to Facebook's general membership of 90 million. They'll be available under a "Features" tab in the application's page, and they will index "… Read more

Developers, start your engines: submissions are now open for the developer application contest that Facebook created for its FBFund grant program. Winning developers, who submit business plans for their prototypical Facebook Platform applications, will receive between $25,000 and $250,000 in grant money. The company plans to give away $10 million total.

The contest was originally detailed at this year's F8 conference, in which the 10 original FBFund selectees were also unveiled.

Monday saw the kickoff of the competition's Round 1, in which 25 winning proposals announced on September 22 will each be awarded $25,000. The … Read more