BlackBerry Partners Fund to set up a shop in China.

In order to craft a US$100-million affiliate fund to endorse mobile application progress in the world's biggest cell phone market, The Toronto-based venture-capital fund, yesterday, announced its partnership with China Broadband Capital Partners.

Investors and manufacturers are positioning themselves to capitalize on a mounting industry of autonomous developers crafting games and other software, that run on mobile devices, just as people trade in their traditional cell phones for multi-function Smartphone’s proficient of running downloadable applications.

For the two-year-old, $150-million BlackBerry Partners Fund -- a joint venture of BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd., Thomson Reuters, RBC Venture Partners and JLA Ventures -- the new China-based affiliate provides a foothold in the burgeoning Chinese developer community.

Success of the BlackBerry Partners Fund China experiment would result in, making it, first of many international affiliate funds in key strategic markets around the globe.

"There's a limit to how far you can go”, Mr. Talbot said. "Venture capital is a very difficult business to scale and even though you can get anywhere in the world by airplane, it's altogether a different thing to make an investment that doesn't have access to the ecosystem and that doesn't have access to our partners on an ongoing regular basis”.

Since launching in May 2008, the BlackBerry Partners Fund has added eight companies to its portfolio, including Xobni, Buzzd, Digby and Nexage. It's also broadening its focus to include software makers building tools for other mobile devices, including tablets such as Apple Inc.'s iPad.