Bing Fund Welcomes Buddy Platform, Inc. and Pinion Tech, LLC.

We originally announced Bing Fund on July 12, 2012. It is an angel fund with an incubator program that gives startups access to Microsoft technology assets and expertise, and funding. The team has been hard at work seeking talented entrepreneurs who are innovating online to solve big problems and create new, breakthrough experiences.

We’re off to a strong start with the enrollment of two amazing startups into the program.

Buddy, based in Kirkland, Washington, provides a fully hosted and managed toolset of web services for application development, plus rich analytics about application usage. The Buddy Platform considerably reduces the amount of time mobile and web application developers spend writing, testing, and managing server-side code. Its cross-platform APIs support common scenarios such as user accounts, friends and group lists, messaging and chat, geo-location services, photo albums, metadata, gaming, push notifications and crash reporting.

Located in Bellevue, Pinion originally hails from Australia. Pinion’s mission is to support the online gaming ecosystem, helping gaming communities worldwide generate revenue by placing gamer-targeted interactive advertising on their servers. More than 450 gaming communities are already part of the Pinion family, and major advertisers have included Sony, XBOX, McDonald’s, Chevrolet, Budweiser, Warner Brothers and Adidas.

For thoughts on Buddy and Pinion from Rahul Sood, General Manager of Bing Fund, please see his blog.