News

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.

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

Musestorm just launched.

Pete at Mashable says:

Their service can now distribute feeds via customizable web widgets, create Yahoo Desktop Widgets for Windows and Mac, create Google Desktop Gadgets and (most importantly) track the number of impressions across the web and desktops, view data about the domains hosting your widgets and receive data about every clickthrough from web and desktop widgets. The tracking service is free for 2 months, after which you pay $4/month per feed for tracking web and desktop widgets.

This service is geared towards RSS feed syndication by bloggers. They provide some simple analytics. Not as robust as Widgetbox Widget Syndication Metrics, but probably good enough for most users.

Are we worried? Not at all… I think this is a great sign that Widgets are now starting to hit their stride and companies are working on ways to give content creators more control. We are taking a slightly different approach as we will soon announce.

Sample Musestorm widget:

Beth Kanter has written an excellent case study on her experience using the ChipIn widget for her personal fundraising campaign for the sharing foundation.  We registered a domain name to host the case study: widgetfundraising.org  It is in an almost final format, so any comments  or suggestions is greatly appreciated. We will be releasing the cast study under the  Creative Commons license so others can take the lessons learned to make their fundraising efforts more successful.

It has been a busy week for ChipIn as we develop new business requirements for engineering to start on our new white label product.  Michelle has been super busy getting up to speed on our new business model and product needs.  She is a superstar hanging in as we go a million miles per hour.  We also moved folks around a bit in our office space.  Kevin, Olin, and Matthew (our flash whiz from Maine) are huddled together in my old corner of the office.  It is great to hear all the amazing thinking coming out of their experiments… it makes me more confident each day that Netvocate will soon be a reality.  We are planning to have an early alpha ready by next month.  Michelle is on the other side of me and I can hear her typing away like crazy.. she seriously has fingers that fly.  The engineers are still in their open room next door sitting in the dark cleaning up our personal product by pulling out the institutional features we rolled out and designing our next release.  So at this point everyone except Todd is focused on engineering and product development.  Todd is holding our torch with the clients that are in queue.
So.. lots going on.. but it is all good.  We are humming along and pretty soon I will open my eyes and we will release our new product(s).. oh yeh!

Today we bid farewell to ChipIn V1. It was not ago I wrote about our launch. We set out with what seemed like a simple mission: to help organizers collect money. Our business philosophy is to listen to our customers and build what people need and use. After four months of listening and watching how people use our site it became very clear that we needed to take the time to re-tool both our underlying systems as well as our user interface. We realize that we are not just helping people collect money, we are helping them do it smarter. . . ChipIn - The Smarter Way to Collect Money.

To all our existing users, hang in there, we are coming back with an amazing new system that will define a model for social payments. We will be launching a payment service that integrates into the conversations that occur between social media content creators and their audience. If you want to be notified when we launch our Beta test, please go to chipin.com and sign up for our mailing list.

Existing users should be receiving an email from me with instructions on how to end your current events and collect your money. If you have any problems, please do not hesitate to contact support.