New international seed fund! KIMA Ventures

Boy, have I waited to write about this!

Today is the official launch of Kima Ventures, a venture fund that seeks to invest in startups all over the world at the seed stage, in the internet sector but also mobile, video games and telecom.

Kima is very exciting because of the two entrepreneurs who started it. The first is Israel-based Jérémie Berrebi, founder of Net2One back in Bubble 1.0, a forerunner of Google News, and now Zlio, a create-your-own-online-shop site, and angel investor in countless startups. The second is Xavier Niel, the founder of Iliad, the most innovative ISP in France, and France’s first (and only?) self-made internet billionaire, who has also done some angel investing himself. So we are talking about two major league entrepreneurs and investors creating a fund to invest globally. Kima has set a goal to invest in over 100 startups in its first two years. They are willing to invest alongside other seed funds or angels, and will use their considerable network to help companies progress, including raising additional rounds from institutional VCs if they need to.

I helped Berrebi with the launch of the fund and can tell you a little bit about the vision for Kima. Kima wants to set itself apart from other funds in a variety of ways. First of all, they promise a firm answer within 2-4 weeks, which for anyone who’s been through the maddening dance of raising money is just heaven. Second of all, they will invest all over the world. And finally, they intend to help startups within their portfolio connect with each other to share insights and best practices. The long term goal is for Kima portfolio startups to be a deep and global ecosystem of entrepreneurs and companies.

And finally, Kima’s investment philosophy is openly inspired by charge-for-stuff startup 37signals. They want their investment to help the startup get to profitability as soon as possible, ideally before their next round. No Twitter for those guys! (Even though Niel and Berrebi are both investors in Status.net, the “WordPress of microblogging”)

Given the record of the founders and their ambition, Kima is a really big deal, and I can’t wait to find out about the startups they’re going to invest in.

AppsFire wants to viralize iPhone apps

Ouriel Ohayon is famous among French entrepreneurs as the former writer of TechCrunch France, but he is an accomplished entrepreneur and VC in his own right, who is now based in Israel. He recently left his plush VC gig to start a new company called AppsFire. I sat down with Ohayon on his last trip to Paris to talk about AppsFire.

AppsFire is a simple app that helps you share iPhone app recommendations with your friends. AppsFire has all the trappings of the latest startups, including its own short URL http://getap.ps/ and an API that will come soon, Ohayon tells me. Android and BlackBerry versions are also forthcoming.

AppsFire wants to solve an important problem: there are over 100,000 iPhone apps, and the iPhone app store alone isn’t enough to help discover all the useful apps out there. Meanwhile the iPhone app store is now a billion dollar market and app stores are sprouting up all around numerous devices and platforms.

The company also recently launched PasteFire, an app that lets you share links and other items between your iPhone and your computer — copy something on your iPhone and you can paste it on your computer, and vice versa. Ohayon tells me that PasteFire is superior to other similar services because PasteFire is smart. For example, if you put a phone number into PasteFire, it will recognize it as such and prompt you to call or add to contacts; if you put an address, you’ll be able to look it up on Google Maps, etc.

For Ohayon, the grand idea behind AppsFire is to help apps in every app store become viral and, in turn, become the center of distribution of mobile apps. Ohayon told me his business model is “secret” but it’s not hard to see how such a thing could be monetized. If AppsFire pulls it off, it could be a very powerful service.

Both AppsFire and PasteFire are part of this grand masterplan. Ohayon wouldn’t tell me what the link is between them, but again, it’s not hard to tell: PasteFire suggests actions — apps — based on the links or items you share in it. This would significantly help AppsFire boost the virality of useful apps.

Ohayon was bullish about the future of app stores in general — not just on the iPhone and other mobile devices, but on cars, fridges, etc. His goal is for AppsFire to help spread apps virally within all of the app stores that exist today and will in the future. He’s also bullish about the future of his own company — when I asked him if he was afraid that Apple would copy them, he said he’d welcome it.

He’s not the only one who believes in the future of his idea: AppsFire recently raised a big angel round from first-tier French investors including Marc Simoncini (founder and CEO of Euro online dating leader Match.com), Jacques-Antoine Granjon (cofounder of vente-privee.com), Xavier Niel (cofounder of Iliad, a huge French ISP) and Jean-David Blanc (founder of allocine.com and also investor in Jack Dorsey’s Square).

If Ohayon can bring about his powerful vision of boosting mobile apps’ virality, AppsFire is clearly a company to watch.

Mobile is going to be bigger than the internet

The other day I tweeted that “AdMob selling to Google for $750 million today is like DoubleClick selling to AOL for $100 million in 1996.” I thought about that, first of all, because I admire Kevin Ryan, the CEO of DoubleClick, but most of all because I believe in the potential of the mobile internet.

I think the timing is right. Mobile right now is like the Internet in 1996: we haven’t even scratched the potential. The iPhone (and particularly the app store) was like the Netscape IPO: it was when it became obvious that mobile is huge.

I also think the valuations are right. There will be a lot more money to be made (and lost) in mobile than was made during bubble 1.0. Why? Simply because billions of people have mobile phones, and will soon have smartphones, and because the opportunities, relating to location, but also making payments and distribution easier, are bigger.

I also think the actors are right. AOL was the “blue chip” of the first wave of the internet. They played a huge part in making the internet huge, but their strategy eventually proved wrong. I actually think Google has made most of the right moves so far, but I’m convinced that the biggest companies in this new space won’t be Google, or Microsoft, or Yahoo! or whoever. They probably haven’t been created yet. (Although I think Foursquare has a ton of potential there.)

This is a short post, but I want to stake my ground here. I hope to come back to themes in the mobile space here soon.