Recently, there have been some really exciting news for developers everywhere. John Doerr, the famous VC from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the premier venture capital firm in Silicon Valley that financed giants like Amazon, Sun, Google, Palm, Juniper Networks, Netscape, Intuit, AOL, and many many others, announced the iFund, a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the iPhone and iPod touch platform.

A few weeks ago, Google announced the Android Developer Challenge. This is a $10 Million fund to developers who build great apps for Android, an open-source mobile platform. They encourage developers to develop in the following areas:

* Social networking
* Media consumption, management, editing, or sharing, e.g., photos
* Productivity and collaboration such as email, IM, calendar, etc.
* Gaming
* News and information
* Rethinking of traditional user interfaces
* Use of mash-up functionality
* Use of location-based services
* Humanitarian benefits
* Applications in service of global economic development
* Whatever you're excited about!

Here's the video where Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone SDK. The iFund announcement is towards the end.



Here's the video demo of Android by Sergey Brin:



I really hope that Jordanian developers take advantage of such opportunities. I would love to see several companies spring up in Jordan and the Middle East doing applications for the iPhone and Android.