In an email to members today, Klout, everyone's favorite dubiously scientific social influence analyzer/punching bag announced it would be teaming up with Badgeville, a gamification platform that lets companies like eBay, Samsung, and Dell find and reward engaged customers with badges, tokens and online prizes.

By integrating Klout's "influence ranking technology," Badgeville will now, in theory, be able to help those brands figure out which loyal users have more influence and reward them accordingly. Judging by our latest Klout score, this only works for Betabeat if there's a brand out there interesting in courting someone who influences 2,000 people on topics like "Blogging, Stanford University, Reddit." That has to at least qualify us for a "Nerd" badge or something, right? What about "People who spend too much time in front of screens"?

Klout has tried to monetize its ranking system with partnerships before, reports Mashable, pointing to deals with the Palms Hotel and Casino's "Klout Klub" or the three-day loans Chevrolet offered those with Klout scores of 35 or more. But it remains to be seen if that's enough incentive for the norms to open up their Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn accounts to Klout's algorithm.

As we learned earlier today, "perks" are merely one of 18 business models the company contemplated. In an interview with TechCrunch that we told you about this morning, ff Venture Capital, a Klout investor, said that early on, other were dubious of the startup's premise. "A lot of people saw a Twitter analytics company and said, 'Hey, do I really want to invest in that?'" said ff partner John Frankel. "What we saw was a company that had potential to help people by the middle of this decade to really understand their online footprint, what they're really doing on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Normalize that data and allow people to understand and then manage their online footprint."

Perks, Mr. Frankel assured TechCrunch, were just the start, "I sat down with Joe [CEO Joe Fernandez], gosh back in April 2010 and we laid out 18 different business models and we decided perks was the first one to focus on."

Will users stick around to the mid 2010's to hear about the rest?

According to ff Venture's—the fund insists on the cummings-style "ff"—Form D filing, which sneakily offers a Roseland, New Jersey address, rather than its Midtown headquarters, the company filed an intent to raise on November, 29, 2010. Partner John Frankel says the firm was already deploying capital from the new "silver" fund even as it was raising the dough. Of the 23 investments, which includes startups like Klout, ThinkNear, Livefyre, Voxy, and Kohort, four have had up rounds. "So, it looks like performance is accelerating," he told Erick Schonfeld in a video interview.

But ff has another feather in their cap, their previous $6.3 million fund, raised in 2008 "two months after Lehman collapsed," as Mr. Frankel, a Goldman Sachs refugee, points out. According to him, Prequin ranked that fund, called "ff blue," the top-performing VC fund through the end of 2010.

David Teten, a partner with ff as well as a former entrepreneur and banker, said despite the firm's obvious concentration in social, the firm's philosophy is not to think thematically:

"I'm new to VC, I just joined this side of the table in the middle of last year and what I've seen is a a lot of VCs say, 'This sector is hot, therefore I'm going to find a company in that sector.' We think that's not a healthy approach. If the sector is defined, that means there's already some players in it, so you're probably investing in player four and someone else has defined it and is going to take the lead. Our approach is the people who know the most about the growth sectors of 2017 are the entrepreneurs. As they come to us, we filter the ones that are really promising with a promising  industries and then we'll invest in them.

It happens to be that Internet companies have great economics, so we're very happy to invest primarily in Internet companies, but our mandate is invest where there are growth opportunities which will produce great returns for our investors and of course for the entrepenrue who have most of the equity."

So invest in people, not themes and the future, not the present. Yeah, we think we got that. Earlier this week, Betabeat dropped by the ff offices for one of the firm's rousing idea dinners. The discussion was certainly future-facing covering outer space, health informatics, lucid dreaming, but, we're sorry to report, off-the-record.

Who wants t0 #FF ff Venture Capital?

Betabeat will be getting some new neighbors! Hopefully the air has cleared and we can all grab lunch.

John Frankel, who has been an angel and VC since the dot-com days, announced today that his ff Venture Capital is building out 5,000 square feet of new office space at W. 36th. It will be the home base for Frankel and his new team, partner David Teten and venture partner Mike Yavonditte, who are joining the firm.

Portfolio companies like Parsley will be using the space too, with twelve desks free for funded companies in all, but don't call it an incubator! "I hate that word. I can't tell you why, I just do," Frankel told Betabeat by phone.

ff Venture Capital is more than halfway to raising its second fund, pegged around $25 million. One of its biggest wins was Quigo, where Mike Yavonditte served as CEO, which sold to AOL for $340 million back in 2007. It's made 11 investments in 10 companies since December says Frankel.