iFund invests in iPhone gaming

 The iPhone developer iFund has taken out another investment, this time in start-up game publisher, ngmoco.

The fund is run by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and has taken an undisclosed investment in the games company. Ngmoco will use the cash to develop new titles for the iPhone, and is already advertising for developers, producers and other games development staff.

CEO Neil Young is a former Electronic Arts executive. While at that company, he oversaw development of several titles, including  Lord of the Rings, The Sims 2, and the about-to-be-released Spore. He left EA in June, and wants to both develop its own games and finance and produce games from other developers. 

Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon, a former chief creative officer for game publisher Electronic Arts will join the ngmoco board.

As we also reported here, iPhone application development is proving surprisingly lucrative for some developers, with one developer informing 9 to 5 Mac that their application has been generating near $2,000 per day in sales.

In related news, iPhone music game Tap Tap Revenge is on course to pass the million download mark this weekend, the second iPhone application to reach that benchmark, the first one was Facebook.

What this means is that approximately one-in-five iPhone owners have now downloaded the application, which has also seen 2.5 million songs downloaded to play in the game, mostly from independent and unsigned artists. Publisher Tapulous is in talks with labels about releasing a premium edition of the currently free game, featuring songs from established artists.