Today, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced the formation of their new sFund, a new $250 million initiative to invest in entrepreneurs inventing social applications and services.

KPCB is flexing its muscle in Silicon Valley off the success of the $100 million iFund to finance iPhone application development, which was later increased to $200 million to focus on the iPad. iFund was a great success and generated great returns recently with the exit of ngmoco for $400 million – ngmoco was focused on being the leading creator and publisher of breakthrough games for the iPhone.

KPCB will have 10 U.S. partners working on the fund, including Chi-Hua Chien, John Doerr, Eric Feng, Bing Gordon, Lila Ibrahim, Randy Komisar, Aileen Lee, Matt Murphy, Ellen Pao, and Ted Schlein. Another four KPCB partners in Shanghai will extend the sFund’s reach in China.

Also KPCB has support from entertainment and media leaders Comcast and Liberty Media and Allen & Company to participate in the sFund and serve as strategic partners.

My Angle – Key Trends Driving This Innovation Fund

The growth of new platforms and applications will spawn new services that will create new companies never seen before. Role of the cloud, data, and mobile will drive this. Social infrastructure, social applications, and social services are all part of this new web that will create massive growth hence wealth for entrepreneurs and investors.

Mobile Innovation – Infrastructure & Applications

I wrote a post on the role of mobile and what I called the Mobile Innovation Cycle.

As we’ve been saying at SiliconAngle for over a year now, data is becoming the most important thing for developers and now for advertisers especially in mobile. Data drives a better user experience and a better user experience drive monetization. Data and data analysis is at the heart of this value proposition.

Look at the search industry in say Google. Having access to data enabled Google to build a quality search product and ad network.  With Google constantly iterating their data quality they were able to consistently build better algorithms to present users with a compelling search product.

In mobile and smartphones search doesn’t really work like on the wbe due to the screen size and real time nature of mobility. So display advertising hold the best seat at the table with respect to the search opportunity on mobile.  The display ad and applications will be the vehicle where innovation (e.g. like search in late 90s) around consumer experience will occur.

The result for consumers will look like some automated cloud service that will do most of the work and then just show up in the display of the smartphone.

With the creation of the iPhone the industry is seeing massive change.  A paradigm that I haven’t seen since the disruption of the browser.  I expect to see some major game changing user experiences over the next 10 years.  I call it the mobile innovation cycle – enabled by Apple’s iPhone a few years ago.

My analogy:  What the iPhone will do for mobile today is what the original Macintosh did for computing back in 1984- change the game in terms of user expectations around the required experience.

Below is an illustration of what is happening.  Rapid innovation around applications that is spawn new data.  This new data is the powerful new disruptor or Data Is The New Developer Kit of which I’ve written in the past many times.  How developers leverage data will determine how to make their applications more successful.

How they iterate the data feedback cycle is key.   I call it the Mobile Application Innovation Cycle.

The iPhone (now Android) kicked off a massive development boom for applications in this case millions of apps. So what we have here is a “long tail” of applications. These long tail apps are creating a data tsunami and this data is very valuable. The opportunity is to make sense of the data and move that back through to the apps and the consumer. This cycle is very rapid and will create an opportunity for platforms that can leverage the data to provide a better user experience.

This is new data never seen before so it’s a big opportunity.

Big Data – Drives Cloud, Social Infrastructure, Applications, & Services

In another post I wrote about the role of big data around a recent Cloudera announcement around the Hadoop Movement. The biggest and fastest growing trend we are monitoring here on SiliconANGLE is the new Consumer and Enterprise 2.0 around “converged infrastructure” meets “virtualization and cloud computing” – driving all that is users, applications, and data (both big data and little data).

It’s not about SaaS any more. The big problem facing growing enterprises is that they are flooded with more new types of data. Application and new user data from mobile devices and applications, are changing the mandates from CEOs and CIO of medium and large enterprises. This new world of “big data” is putting pressure on the enterprise to develop both business and technical model innovation strategies like nothing seen before. Hence the traction of the public and private cloud debate.