Inside Facebook

In addition to announcing the official launch of Facebook Connect for the iPhone this weekend, Facebook has also announced a new round of the fbFund competition for developers building apps on the web, iPhone, desktop, or any platform with Facebook Connect.

Facebook’s Josh Elman announced at the Facebook Developers Garage in Austin that up to 50 developers will be selected as first round winners in May. From there, several finalists will be awarded up to $100,000 in the form of equity investments. The finalists will also be invited to spend the summer in a new incubator program being run by Dave McClure of Founders Fund, where they will also receive mentorship from Facebook engineers and executives.

Last year, there were over 600 applicants for the first year of the fbFund competition. fbFund finalist Weddingbook was acquired by TheKnot in January, and we recently profiled all finalists from last year – Wildfire, Kontagent, GroupCard, and MouseHunt – here on Inside Facebook as well.

We expect that many (if not most) of the Facebook Connect applications entered in the new fbFund competition will be built on the iPhone. For developers interested in learning more, click here for info on the SDK, or check out Facebook’s new video “How To Implement Facebook Connect on the iPhone in 5 Minutes” below.