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Kleiner Goes For The Same Old Same Old

Kleiner Perkins iFund was announced a few months ago with the goal of producing “market-changing ideas and products” funded with KPCB’s cash. Today, BusinessWeek breaks the news that the first iFunded company is yet another answer to the mystifying problem of not being able to find things to do around where you live.

For those not entrenched in the industry, creating a hyperlocal product or directory is almost as cliché as starting your own ad network. Everybody and their brother is in the space, and it’s crowded like Free Beer Night™ at Fenway.

The company working on the software is pelago and their app is called Whrrl. It’s been around for awhile and has been in use on other mobile phones, but with the new influx of cash they’re doing a native iPhone version.

First off, I’m not saying that the application is lame, I’m just saying it’s boring with regards to the all-encompassing, world-changing, hyphen-phrased launch of the iFund. iFunded companies will cure cancer. iFund money could create a dozen Googles. The iFund will save children in Africa. Instead, we get a native iPhone version of an application that’s been out for awhile. It’s not a new product, it’s not a new idea, it’s an iPhone port of an existing app. Not all that world-changing in my opinion.

The first thing that someone tied to Whrrl will probably say when they read this entry is that I have no idea how much time and effort it takes to build an iPhone app and that learning Objective-C is hard when you’ve never used it before. Well guess what, I never knew ObjC before the iPhone SDK came out and I’m doing just fine with it. Hell I never even learned C before I learned ObjC so I had to learn that as well, and I did. I produced a prototype of the iPhone project I’m working on in 3 days. One guy, no money, in my spare time.

To be fair to pelago, I think it’d be useful to produce a list of iPhone applications I think would actually be amazing and that would grab my respect. I don’t know if any of these are already out there or in development, but here we go:

• Use your iPhone’s built-in camera to scan barcodes of items, any item, and the application looks out on the web in real-time and figures out competitor’s prices and reviews.
• A golf game that used the built-in accelerometer and touchscreen to control the action. I’d pay anything this. Okay, up to $15.
• Language processor and translator. The software listens to the outside world via the microphone and figures out what language is being spoken and a rough idea of what has just been said. Speech-to-text-to-translation.

I don’t have any iFund money so I can’t come up with any more great ideas at the moment, but I’ll be sure to ideate it later once I’m swimming with cash.

And to pelago: is this the best you can do? Tracking things that you and your friends have been doing, on a map? Share your location with friends on the go? Reminds me of dodgeball but 2 years after the fact.