In March of this year, venerable Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers announced it had ‘earmarked’ $100m (€64.2m) for worldwide investment in companies being created on Apple’s iPhone/iPod touch platform. The iFund is a partnership between KPCB and Apple, which will provide the firm with ‘market insight and support’.

KPCB is one among several VC firms tying up with platform providers, including the UK’s Eden Ventures and Salesforce.com with their Million Pound Challenge for companies developing on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform; and Accel Partners, The Founders Fund and Facebook with their fbFund for Facebook application developers.

Investor interest in new platforms is understandable. As KPCB Partner John Doerr writes on the fund’s website, ‘A revolutionary new platform is a rare and prized opportunity for entrepreneurs, and that’s exactly what Apple has created with the iPhone and iPod touch… we think several new significant companies will emerge as this new platform evolves’.

In introducing AppFactory, their independent initiative to fund Facebook app developers, Bay Partners – another well-established Silicon Valley VC firm – make a similar point: ‘Facebook, in essence, became the social Operating System. Historically, the creation of an operating system, or platform, has led to a new economy which includes a marketplace of applications’.

It is also clearly in the interest of platform providers themselves to encourage development on their platform. This is the reason why Microsoft, Sun, Qualcomm, Nokia, Oracle and others run extensive partner programmes. Furthermore, platform providers often put their own money down to encourage early adoption of their platforms.

For example, Google Gadget Ventures is making $5,000 (€3,200) grants to Google Gadget developers worldwide, with the chance for winners to receive further seed investment of $100k (€64k) from Google. In Autumn 2007 Amazon.com ran the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge to encourage development on top of its utility computing platform, which offers startups on-demand computing, storage and other facilities. The winner of the challenge received $50k (€32k) in cash, $50k in Amazon Web Services credits and an investment offer from Amazon.

For platform providers, spending cash on grants and seed investments to yield greater platform adoption is understandable. What is more difficult to understand is why VCs would put their own money on the line in these exercises. To generate returns VCs seek out the highest-potential startups – so why restrict prospects to just a narrow slice of the startup universe?

fbFund works much like Google Gadget Ventures, providing grants of $25k (€16k) to $250k (€160k) to Facebook application developers; however, the $10m (€6.4m) investment pool comes not from Facebook but from Accel Partners and The Founders Fund. The grants are open to companies globally so long as they have not already received VC funding; in return for the grants, Accel and Founders Fund receive right of first refusal for VC investment in the winning companies.

Eden Ventures’ challenge is set up as a competition rather than a fund; entries from UK and Irish entrepreneurs must be submitted by 7 July 2008 and the winner will have the chance to negotiate with Eden Ventures for an investment up to £1m (€1.3m) in exchange for at least a 20% equity stake.

Apple, Facebook and Salesforce.com are assisting KPCB, Accel & Founders Fund and Eden Ventures, respectively, with their investment screening processes. This suggests one reason for the creation of such vehicles on the part of VCs. The strategic insight offered by the platform provider coupled with “official endorsement” during the early stages of an emerging platform may be enough to counteract the downside of tying up funds for such a narrow purpose.

Furthermore, in the case of fbFund, Accel Partners and The Founders Fund are investors in Facebook itself - so they stand to benefit should the fbFund encourage overall adoption of Facebook’s developer platform, regardless of whether or not individual grantees succeed.

Two questions linger, though. The first is whether there are enough quality businesses being built atop these new platforms to warrant so much investment interest. fbFund, for instance, rejected all applicants from its first round of submissions in January 2008.

The second question is whether platform-specific funds are necessary or even advantageous for making investments into the most compelling startups developing on those platforms. Take the case of Camrivox, a Cambridge-based startup developing on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. The company’s products allow businesses to integrate their telephone equipment with Salesforce.com, so that when a call from a customer or sales prospect comes in their record will be automatically displayed on screen. Before Eden Ventures and Salesforce.com were taking submissions for their £1 million challenge, Camrivox had already raised £2.5m (€3.5m) in VC funding from CREATE Partners, Cambridge Capital Group, NESTA Ventures, IQ Capital Partners and others.

This week LinkedIn revamped their home page, adding a Facebook-style news feed which reports activity within your contact network in reverse chronological order. Facebook’s feed, though met with resistance when first introduced, has become a central feature of the site. Fred Wilson, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, a New York-based venture capital firm, calls the news feed “a powerful UI innovation”.

Facebook, micro-blogging services Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce, and news feed aggregators Spokeo and FriendFeed are all part of a new type of information flow that keeps people aware of the smallest aspects of their friends’ lives, regardless of physical proximity. People who use the services frequently have become adept at parsing the flow – pictures posted, new friends added, brief notes about being hungry, happy, or upset – into an overall picture, a sort of ‘social sixth sense’ as to how their friends are faring.

Keeping up-to-date with business contacts should be similarly useful, but do you really need to know that the former client you meet only four times a year at industry conferences is feeling particularly sleepy this afternoon? Facebook has been gaining acceptance amongst the digerati as a business networking tool, but its mix of personal and business turns off many users, as it assumes that users want the same depth of information about contacts of each type. LinkedIn, with its business-only focus, has the opportunity to enable a ‘business sixth sense’ to rival Facebook’s ‘social sixth sense’.

While LinkedIn still has a way to go before its news feed matches the utility of Facebook’s, Facebook could learn from one of LinkedIn’s other new features, a news aggregator (see picture). LinkedIn’s news aggregator filters news stories according to a user’s company, industry, and business network. Readers are drawn to stories they know that others are reading – witness the prominent placement that ‘most-emailed’ stories receive on the websites of major print publications. LinkedIn’s aggregator, if the algorithms work correctly (a question mark, since the service at present appears to serve up articles of questionable relevance) will be far more powerful.

Facebook hasn’t taken news aggregation in house, but there’s no reason it couldn’t follow suit. Indeed, California start-up Plum has released an application which allows Facebook users to collect articles, pages, and other media found while browsing the web and push them out to their Facebook friends. LinkedIn’s service is not so flexible, but it could be improved, perhaps with a browser plug-in (to complement LinkedIn’s Outlook toolbar) which would allow LinkedIn users to alert contacts to any article or site on the web.

LinkedIn’s service could also be improved were it to track discussions happening on news sites. Connecting up discussions happening on diverse web forums is a tricky business, though there are several start-ups tackling the problem, including coComment, Intense Debate and Disqus. The biggest issue with all three is that to work optimally they must be supported by each individual forum where discussions are taking place, whether that is a single blog or the website of a national newspaper.

Were LinkedIn to enter into the comment aggregation business, it could be in a better position to drive adoption than the aforementioned start-ups, given its approximately 17 million-strong user base. There’s precedent for LinkedIn to negotiate with relevant publications, too: BusinessWeek is a launch partner for LinkedIn's new applications platform. The business magazine will integrate LinkedIn profile information into articles on BusinessWeek’s website and to allow readers to clip BusinessWeek articles and send them to colleagues via LinkedIn.

The concept of emerging markets is so inextricably linked to Asia (and sometimes Eastern Europe) that it's sometimes easy to miss markets emerging on our very doorsteps. Ireland may just be one of these. Its economy has been booming for a decade but in terms of venture capital activity, it has been a pretty subdued environment. This is natural - the VC industry did not come about overnight in Silicon Valley, Cambridge or anywhere else. It takes time for a body of expertise and analysis to build up and even longer for investors to be convinced that it is worthy of their consideration.

However, Ireland appears to have reached, or even passed, a tipping point. Ernst & Young's quarterly venture capital report, carried out in conjunction with Dow Jones VentureOne, shows a progressive increase in the number and value of deals being done. The third quarter showed a healthy E29.7m of deals in the third quarter. Even better, Library House's database, VenturePedia, shows that so far in the fourth quarter there have been E180.9m worth of deals. Even stripping out the E126m in a single deal for Setanta, this is a big increase on the previous quarter and an even larger increase on earlier in the year.

The Irish Venture Capital Association bullishly predicts that E3bn will be available to Irish firms over the next five to seven years, half coming from locally raised funds. If that's really the case, we should all be rushing to the Emerald Isle and setting up innovative companies.

LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman, speaking last week at Library House’s Essential Mediatech conference in London, laid out his strategy for building and monetising digital communities. Few entrepreneurs have as much experience in online communities as Mr. Hoffman. Apart from attracting millions of users to LinkedIn without spending any money on advertising, Hoffman is a prolific angel investor who has backed many of Web 2.0’s biggest community successes, including Flickr, Digg, Facebook, Six Apart and Last.fm.

Mr. Hoffman’s thesis is that the strategy for building digital communities is reversed from that of building a traditional business. Rather than attempt to earn money from the outset and gradually add more customers, digital communities should first seek a large audience and then worry about their revenue model. His reasoning is that if a service fails to attract users, then no amount of revenue model revision will make it a success. Once a service has users, however, there is usually a way to make money off of it.

Focusing on audience rather than revenue model at the outset works well for digital communities which feature user-generated content, like social networks, blogs or photo-sharing sites. As more users join the service, they create more content; more content in turn attracts more users. Digital media services which trade in professionally-produced content, on the other hand, would find it difficult to follow Mr. Hoffman’s advice.

An Internet TV service, for instance, must have compelling programming lined up in order to attract an audience – content for which it can be very expensive to acquire rights. Furthermore, since this TV content is licensed rather than uploaded by users, the amount of content on the site does not automatically grow as the user base does. These are the challenging dynamics facing Internet TV start-ups such as Veoh, Hulu, Joost, and Babelgum.

For this reason, the companies most likely to succeed as the television networks of the Internet may be digital communities whose primary aim is not video at all. Social networks like Bebo and MySpace already have attracted tens of millions of users through viral growth. That audience reach puts them far ahead of the previously mentioned Internet TV services - and social networks have attracted these audiences through viral growth, without needing to spend lavishly on content acquisition.

Furthermore, now that they are in the game, social networks are showing themselves savvy purchasers of video content. Rather than acquire an extensive – and expensive – library of television content, Bebo has commissioned made-for-online shows like KateModern, a popular but low-budget interactive soap opera. KateModern and its predecessor, Lonelygirl15, suggest a new model for video production, similar to Reid Hoffman’s method for building digital communities: make content cheaply, attract an audience and then figure out the revenue model.

Social networks like Bebo pose multiple threats to Internet TV start-ups. Because their core business is building a community of users, not serving up video, the overall appeal of social networks is not limited by their video library (or lack thereof). What video they have acquired has been cheaper than normal television and yet widely appealing. Finally, as social networks add traditional TV programming to complement their Internet-only hits, their existing audience and accompanying ad revenue could provide them with the leverage and the cash to out-gun Internet TV start-ups over programme rights.

A report this week by the Wall Street Journal highlighted the contribution of cargo ships to global pollution. The tonnage of goods shipped is believed to have trebled since 1970, and shipping is used to transport a staggering 90% of the world’s goods. In fact a study by the International Council on Clean Transportation demonstrated that ships release more sulfur dioxide, the sooty pollutant associated with acid rain, than all of the world's cars, trucks and buses combined. Because of shipping’s global nature, regulation would be difficult to impose, and it is not even clear exactly what legislative tack would be most effective.

Like all supply chain and logistic issues, savings and efficiencies can be made using appropriate supply chain management, thereby minimising the actual number of shipping miles. But there are a range of other issues relating to the actual quantity and nature of the goods being shipped, which in turn relates to global economics and consumer choice.

Economics might dictate that it is cheaper to manufacture certain goods in one geography and ship them to another, but the actual shipping space taken up by each product may be subject to some control. Shipping air is neither economic, nor environmentally friendly, therefore innovative ways in which this can be reduced should be encouraged.

Simply making things smaller can have a significant impact, for instance by minimising packaging, concentrating liquid or chemical freight, or reducing moisture content where possible. However these issues are often out of the control of the actual shipping companies. They are instead influenced by educated consumers and savvy corporates.

So what can shipping companies themselves do to lessen their environmental impact? A handful of companies are currently offering cleantech solutions directly applicable for the shipping industry.

SkySails are a German company offering wind propulsion systems for modern shipping which consists of a fully automated towing kite. This may sound like a rudimentary solution, but given its claim to be able to reduce fuel consumption by up to 50% in ‘optimum conditions’ and with financial backing exceeding €14m, it may just be taken seriously.

The somewhat smaller, but equally ambitious California-based outfit, KiteShip, have cottoned onto a very similar idea, marketing their precisely named Very Large Free Flying Sails (VLFFS), which have applications on a small and large scale.

Startups are putting forth radical ideas as well, such as the entirely new and efficient combustion engine under development by Cyclone Technologies. But it is likely that such innovations will take years to scale and implement into the freight industry. In this respect, solutions that can be easily retrofitted – such as sails - and offer immediate benefits are likely to see the greatest uptake in coming years.