Countless column centimetres have been dedicated to the meteoric rise of technology services such as Uber, Spotify, Netflix and Airbnb that are springing up and making life difficult for the established titans of their respective industries. But there's one super-power lurking behind all these start-ups, fuelling the astronomical growth of the app economy: Facebook.Through Facebook Platform, which provides developers with the creative and analytic tools to build, grow and monetise their companies, the social network claims to be one of the major forces shaking up classic business models.And at its epicentre is Julien Codorniou, Facebook's director of global platform partnerships, managing relationships with companies using Facebook's platform to reach its almost 1.5 billion users.Facebook Platform laun-ched in 2007 with the purpose of allowing developers to create external content such as games and news to be played and consumed on Facebook.com. In a year there were 30000 apps on Facebook, and later the company unlocked the platform so anyone could build an app to exist outside of the website.Today any app that connects with Facebook users - about a fifth of the global population - is considered to be part of the Facebook Platform and has allowed millions of apps to piggyback on an audience of half the world's internet users.The social network, which reached $4-billion (R50.6-billion) in quarterly revenues for the first time, has grown its monthly users by 13% over the past year and daily users by 17%. One of every five minutes spent on a smartphone in the US is spent on a Facebook app."When people think of Facebook Platform they think of a gaming platform on the web," such as Farm-ville or Candy Crush, Codorniou said. "Nobody connects the dots when they see Airbnb, Uber and Spotify that Facebook is behind each of these companies."Facebook Platform makes money by selling ads to developers who wish to target their apps to people with a certain hobby or tell users about an update to content.These apps also exist on other platforms, such as Apple's iOS and Google's Android, but Codorniou believes there is a major difference between these and Facebook's Platform."The unique asset we have is distribution - we provide the opportunity to reach more than a billion users on any device," he said.Some of Europe's most successful startups that have benefited from the Facebook Platform include King, the maker of Candy Crush Saga, that has a $4.9-billion market cap following its London flotation last year; Spotify, with an $8.5-billion valuation; and SuperCell, behind the highest-grossing mobile game, Clash of Clans, that analysts have valued as high as $11-billion. ..