Jeff Bennett's Blog

Applications are what drive computers, smart phones and platforms.  This is not a new phenomena.  When I started my career selling for Wang…our customers wanted our computers to power their word processing and increasingly other applications that were developed on the Wang hardware platform.

The Apple iPhone is a remarkable success.  The form factor and design is classic Apple…elegant.  Apple has done a remarkable job enabling a community of developers to build apps for the iPhone that are available only through iTunes.  There are over 3 billion apps downloaded today for the iPhone.  I have about a hundred of them on my own iPhone.  Many of these apps are incredible.

Twitter is a platform that has experienced meteoric growth in adoption.  These users are consumers who have embraced the text-message like format to share tweets with many of their followers rather than a one-to-one communication via a text message.  Twitter’s massive adoption has also paralleled the smart phone expansion. Businesses have followed the consumers adopting Twitter as a way to better connect to customers.  This is a revolutionary social communication platform.

Twitter took a much more open approach to building a community of developers though…allowing access to their API with no restrictions on where the app developer would then distribute the app.  The lack of friction in this process has allowed a big community to develop quickly.  One example of this is what we have done at NameMedia to develop TwittaScope to build a community for syndication of our horoscope content.

The question is how does Twitter unite these developers into one marketplace where consumers or businesses can gain access to all of the cool apps being built on Twitter.  Laura Fitton is a social media diva in Boston that saw this opportunity and established a business plan to build the app store for Twitter in a venture she named Oneforty.  It is less than a year ago that Laura started raising capital from angels.  I joined a small group of Boston and Silicon Valley angels to provide the initial funding.  Laura also joined TechStars Boston to help accelerate the concept to a business.   Laura has built a great team and leveraged phenomenal outsourced resources to build Oneforty.

This week it was announced that Flybridge Venture Capital is leading the A round of financing for Oneforty.  Jeff Busgang, Flybridge Managing Partner, will be joining the BOD of Oneforty.  Jeff posted about the rational and his excitement for the investment this week.

Congrats to Laura, the Oneforty team, Jeff and Flybridge.