Hot on the heels of being named to Fast Company’s Top 50 Most Innovative Companies in the World list, Kiip announces today the second iteration of its annual Build Fund to help independent developers build and market their apps and games. Open to all independent app developers, this year ten winners will each receive $10,000 in cash and $5,000 worth of services from Kiip’s chosen partners.

This year’s fund is centered around the theme of “Creation”. “Once in a while, an app or a game comes along that defines an entirely new category. It challenges a design assumption, it attempts a risky game mechanic – it creates something completely new. Sometimes, we get lost in the shuffle of the day to day, the incremental gains, the iteration, when some of the best games and apps today came from something less scientific: a spark of genius and inspiration. We are looking for the developers that create these movements. It’s time that we focus on the true independents,” said Brian Wong, co-founder and CEO of Kiip.

On top of the winning package, chosen developers will also be connected with industry-leading mentors across many themes, including:

• Phill Ryu, creator of Clear and MacHeist
• Jon Jordan, Pocket Gamer
• Phil Black, True Ventures
• Adam D’Augelli, True Ventures
• Lee Linden, Facebook Gifts (previously Tapjoy and Karma)
• Lars Leckie, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
• Kevin Talbot, Relay Ventures
• Mario Wynands, PikPok Games
• Scott Kveton, Urban Airship
• Matt Van Horn, Path
• Matt Hunter, Jawbone
• Derek van Vliet, Get Set Games
• Markus Kassulke, HandyGames
• Robby Kwok, Crittercism

“The Kiip Build Fund is a fantastic experience for independent developers,” said Michael Leip, CEO and founder of Lab 927, a 2012 Build Fund winner. “Aside from the obvious monetary benefit, you gain access to a great group of high-level peers and exceptional mentors who are pillars of the industry. The Build Fund holds the potential to take a small indie company from good to great.”

As winners integrate Kiip’s rewards solution into their apps, they will receive valuable services from Build Fund partners, which include Amazon Web Services, Crittercism, Localytics, Parse and Urban Airship. Services cover all facets of development, from backend infrastructure and bug reporting to analytics and push notifications.

“Last year’s Build Fund taught us a lot. It kickstarted a lot of creativity. Many developers started to ask us when we would do our next one,” said Wong. “This year we also wanted to do something a little different. Kiip has grown in the last year into categories on top of games including fitness and health apps. Fitness and health has been an important fixture in our network and so this year we are announcing that Pepsi has come on board with its Propel brand as a Build Fund sponsor.”

In this year’s fund, there will be three spots open for fitness and health apps. Part of the sponsorship includes Propel rewards that will be allocated to these winners immediately when they are Kiip-enabled.

Kiip’s spot-rewards create significant retention and engagement benefits for developers while allowing them to monetize their apps. According to a recent study conducted by a University of California, Berkeley researcher, Kiip-enabled apps more than double the length of a typical user session and lead users to open the app 31 percent more times. Kiip also recently launched a brand new set of dashboards for its developers with a strong angle towards retention.

More than 800 games and apps currently employ the Kiip network to offer users premium rewards from Kiip’s more than 70 major consumer brand partners, including Mondelēz International (formerly Kraft Foods), Pepsi, McDonald’s, American Apparel, Procter & Gamble, Wrigley, 7-Eleven, Sony Music, Best Buy, Amazon, Verizon and more.

Kiip also plans to celebrate its past and future Build Fund winners at GDC 2013 in San Francisco with an event headlined by LA Riots. Details can be found at http://kiippartygdc.eventbrite.com.

To apply for the 2013 Build Fund, visit http://kiip.me/fund. To download the Kiip SDK, visit http://kiip.me/begin.

About Kiip

Kiip is the world’s first mobile rewards network that delivers rewards for achievements in apps and games. The company’s category-creating rewards platform enables brands to reach consumers in the moments when they are most engaged and receptive, while driving revenues and greater user allegiance for Kiip-enabled games and apps. Kiip was founded in 2010 by Brian Wong, Courtney Guertin and Amadeus Demarzi. In addition to its San Francisco headquarters, Kiip now has offices in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, London and Bogotá. Kiip is currently backed by Relay Ventures, Interpublic Group, Hummer Winblad, True Ventures, Digital Garage, Verizon Ventures, Crosslink Capital and others. For more information, visit www.kiip.com.

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Amazon Web Services

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. AWS offers over 30 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore, and Australia.

Crittercism

Crittercism, based in San Francisco, California, is the world’s first mobile app performance management (APM) solution that offers a real-time global view of app diagnostics and app crashes across iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, Hybrid and HTML5 mobile web on over 500 million unique devices and over 50 billion app loads. The company’s investors include Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures and Google Ventures. Learn more @crittercism and www.crittercism.com.

Localytics

Localytics is the leading provider of closed-loop app marketing and analytics solutions. The company helps organizations gain data-driven insights into their end user interactions and leverages this knowledge to create automated, personalized and behavioral-targeted actions within the app, maximizing revenue and driving customer loyalty. Localytics supports more than 500 million smart devices for customers like eBay, The Fox Group, Microsoft and The New York Times. Backed by Polaris Venture Partners and other leading investors, Localytics is headquartered in Boston, Mass. For more information visit www.localytics.com.

Parse

Parse (www.parse.com) is the mobile app development platform for iOS, Android, JavaScript, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and OS X. Parse allows your team to focus more on creating a great user experience and less on server maintenance and complex infrastructure. We offer push notifications, social integration, data storage, and Cloud Code which lets you add rich custom logic to your app's backend. With Parse, you can add a scalable and powerful backend in minutes and launch your app in record time without ever worrying about server management.

Urban Airship

Urban Airship enables brands to build relationships with their constantly connected customers through Mobile Relationship Management solutions that streamline delivering highly targeted, cross-platform mobile push messages and Apple Passbook passes. Billions of push messages and tens of thousands of passes are delivered each month, sparking exceptional consumer experiences, driving app engagement and increasing customer loyalty and lifetime value for leading brands such as CBS Interactive, Cinemagram, ESPN, Groupon, shopkick, Walgreens and Warner Bros. The company's solutions manage the end-to-end process of high-performance push messaging, location-targeted messaging and Passbook pass management. For more information, visit www.urbanairship.com and follow us on Twitter @urbanairship.