Nearly 600 applications from developers vying for a slice of Kleiner Perkins’s $100 million iFund to help fuel their iPhone startup efforts have accidently spilled onto the web.
Developers looking for financial support to launch an iPhone company or employ a small team dedicated to authoring a cutting-edge iPhone application can
apply through the financial firm's website.
As part of the application process, individuals are asked to list their contact information, bios, demonstrative material, financial earnings, competitors, and to provide a detailed explanation of their iPhone application concept along with any proprietary technology they've developed.
Much of this data, which is collected into a database, found its way into the public domain recently when an employee of Kleiner Perkins’ former hosting provider, Meteora Technologies Group, accidently published it to the web.
In total,
588 applications were compromised, according to
TechCrunch, which notes that although the data was leaked in the form of a MySQL database dump, it's still easily readable in any text editor or a browser.
A quick peek at the time stamps on the applications reveals many of the submissions were made on March 6th, the same day Apple unveiled its iPhone SDK and announced Kleiner Perkins's $100 million iFund. The firm revealed a couple of months later that
1,700 startups had submitted apps seeking funding.
Update: Google has removed the cache of the leaked SQL file.
Topics: iPhone SDK, iFund, iPhone
