News

Hello,

ChipIn’s hosting provider will be performing network maintenance on Sunday April  13th between the hours of 3:00AM and 5:00AM CDT. During this time, engineers will be upgrading networking equipment.

The upgrade is expected to take 15 minutes and will happen sometime during the 2 hour window. For the duration the upgrade period ChipIn widgets will not be available and the chipin.com site will be inaccessible.

We appreciate your patience during this upgrade.

Regards,

Dustin

ChipIn was phase I of our master plan to change the online world of fundraising and organizing. Now we are ready to unleash Sprout on you all. We have all the power of ChipIn fundraising with the flexibility of a web based authoring environment to create sophisticated Flash content. Introducing Sprout Builder

Please take a visit to our new site. I am extending a private beta invite to all ChipIn users. Just visit this link: Here are a couple reviews and videos about Sprout Builder. Techcrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and more. Also visit the Sprout Builder blog

DEMO 2008 Presentation:

Sprout Builder Overview:

User generated Video:

The waiting is finally over! It is two weeks (check out the countdown widget below) until we launch our newest product and future direction of the company. It has been tough to not talk about Sprout and how we believe it will change the way people build flash files and distribute widgets. Our tagline is that anyone can quickly and easily build living content^SM. Come check out our new Website at sproutbuilder.com and Blog

I want to thank everyone who has helped us along this past year. Our ChipIn users who continue to amaze us with how our little fundraising widget has changed lives. The entire ChipIn team who have worked hard to make Sprout a reality. Don’t worry, we have not forgotten our roots… ChipIn users will be invited to soon build sophisticated fundraising widgets in Sprout! Come check us out at DEMO on Jan 28th at 3 pm PST for our stage presentation or visit our booth. Wish us luck!

A friend of mine one night in a sake stupor at our favorite sushi restaurant in Honolulu (Yanagi) jumped up and screamed… “we’re going to Maui” in an effort to get us to bail on work and go with him the next morning.  Needless to say, I didn’t make the journy, so it is now with great pleasure that I can announce that we are going to “DEMO!” with the expectation that I’ll be there on Jan 28th.  I promised more blogging, so here we go.  We sold the versus apps, have been secretly working on a new product for the past year as the ChipIn.com site chugs along.  So to entice you to keep reading I’ll just dribble the news out a bit at a time.

We’ve reached a remarkable milestone! Join us at DEMO 08 and see how we will rearchitect the future of technology.

DEMO 08 • The Launchpad for Emerging Technologies
January 28-30, 2008
Desert Springs, A JW Marriott Resort & Spa
Palm Desert, CA
www.demo.com/D8PROMOKIT

We’re excited to announce that we have been selected to reveal our groundbreaking technology at DEMO 08, the premier, unparalleled event that showcases the latest, best technologies – those that promise to literally reshape our future and enrich our lives.

Happy New Year!  Lots of exciting announcements from us so keep your RSS newsreader warmed up and ready to ingest everything we are sending your way.  To start things off, I am very happy to announce that ChipIn has finalized the sale of our Versus franchise today.  What started off as an idea over a couple of beers as a fun way to market ChipIn on Facebook has turned into a pretty cool game franchise with many flavors.  From Pirates, Ninjas, Snowboarders, Skiers, Santa, Grinch, Cops, to Robbers.  Why did we sell an application with over 5M users?  5M pageviews per day?

FOCUS FOCUS FOCUS.

We are launching a killer new product at DEMO later this month and as much fun as we were having on the Versus apps, we need to put 100% of our resources into the future of our company.. as a dominant widget authoring technology (sheesh.. more on that soon).  There was a pretty cool article in Inc. magazine this month outlining why ChipIn decided to sell our Versus apps on Facebook. As much as we are sad to see our apps go, we are really happy to be working with Michael Lazerow, CEO and his team at Buddy Media to continue to grow our Versus franchise while integrating Acebucks into the applications to create a more robust and fun user experience for everyone.

; A big cheers to Austin and Dustin who have been building out the applications and a toast to Rob and Andy for writing much of the initial code base.So if you have not checked out the Facebook versus apps, go give them a spin.  And if you want to read more about the transaction, check out the Buddy Media blog post.   What’s going on with DEMO?  More info will be coming soon.  I’m back and blogging now.

Aloha to all you Chippy chipsters out there. It has been a long while since we blogged much about ChipIn or what the team is up to. Well, there is good reason. We have been very busy working on a new stealth project that will be unveiled at the DEMO conference on Jan 28th. I miss my normal rantings on this blog and have a bunch of postings Todd and I plan to write over the next couple of weeks that recap lessons learned from ChipIn that we hope will help others using widgets to fundraise and organize online advocacy. We just need to gather our thoughts and get things written down before unleashing them on the world.

We have been pretty open with our learnings here at ChipIn and today I thought I would share with you some stats from the past 12 months.

1) Our transactional volume each month grew from $20K to almost $300K

2) The number of new events grew from 600 to 2000 each month

3) The number of individual contributors grew from 500 to 7,500 per month

4) The number of new users at ChipIn.com grew from 500 to 1,700 per month

That’s pretty good growth for the site considering we have made no upgrades since we launched this version in Nov of 2006. We have big plans for a new version and about 75% of the code finished, but we don’t have the resources yet to make the final push to release the site. Maybe we should set up a ChipIn for ourselves?

One other funny fact to share with you all…. If ChipIn events selected the next president, then the following candidates are definitely in the lead (by number of ChipIn events set up for each candidate).

Dems
Obama - 20
Kucinich - 1
Clinton - 0
Edwards - 0
Richardson - 0

Repubs
Paul - 309 (!)
Guiliani - 0
Romney - 0
McCain - 0
Huckabee - 0

It is November and the South Pacific Ocean is brewing up winter class storms.  The biggest south swells of the year are hitting Tahiti, Hawaii, California and Central America.  What’s going on?  Is the world’s climate turned up on its head?  You know the answer to that question.

We have been pretty quiet on this blog for a while because we have had our heads down working on some new exciting projects.  First off, we launched a large campaign for the Case Foundation called Make it Your Own.  We also have been busying  scaling up our Versus apps on Facebook.  We passed 4M users and also about 185K  active daily users.  Pretty fun, but a pain  for scaling servers and keeping things up and running.   ChipIn continues to crank along helping people raise money.  Our widgets are spreading!

What have we been working on?  Hmmm… you’ll just have to wait to see.  We should have some very exciting announcements in the next couple of weeks.

Beth has been fundraising to attend the Cambodia Blogger’s Summit and she just hit her goal. It was another cool way that ChipIn fundraising widgets can play a part of a successful campaign. Beth wrote up some notes about what happened and will be posting more after her trip. Check our Beth’s Blog for the full story.

On other news.. things have been quiet on the blog for a while as we are hunkering down and planning our strategy for the rest of the year. We recently launched a series of Facebook apps that now have over 1M users. We also brought on a couple new faces that help round out our team. So much is going on that even this blog may change soon. Ok, back to my whiteboard.

So we have been going a bit Facebook crazy at the office.. but it is a good thing.  I guess that’s why I have been very quiet on this blog.  A couple of nice updates:

1) Always nice to get a mention, especially as a top 10 utility app on Facebook.  From the article: These are apps that are in some way useful. This was a pretty broad list, and probably took us the longest to cut down to a top ten. Check out the Read/Write article

2) ChipIn on Facebook just passed 2000 users.

3) Vampires vs. Werewolves infected more than 250,000 users.

4) Pirates vs. Ninjas just a few days old just passed 50,000 users.

We are also working hard on a new release of ChipIn.com along with numerous other projects.  Will be back with more soon.  Aloha