News

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

Facebook put us live on Friday to the surprise of the entire team.  A bit of scrambling, but the app seems to be working well.  Techcrunch picked us up soon after with a nice writeup  Nice flow of initial users, not the millions seen by iLike and other apps, but we should see more as the word gets out and new features are added.

If you have time, check out our new Chipin Facebook application:

http://apps.facebook.com/mychipin

Please add me to your facebook friend list if you want. Please use the built in support system to report bugs. Yes, we know we have plenty of bugs left to squash!

I also want to share our first Facebook Chipin fundraiser.. College Connections

The big buzz around here and with about 1000 developers a day is the Facebook API platform that was opened up almost three weeks ago.  There were a bunch of apps that received a six week headstart, but for the rest of us, we started learning fbml and getting under the hood as fast as possible.  We quickly got one of our Widget Management System clients up and running right away.  We then huddled and came up with a plan on how to get Chipin as a legit Facebook App.  We are sooo close.  As many of you know, the final mile or 10% of a software app is often times the hardest to finish.  All the little bugs and polish… just want to squash enough to make a good first impression.  So, keep an eye on this blog as I’ll be announcing a rapid beta period before launching our new app.

So you ever wondered what life at a startup is all about? Check out this video. NOTE! This is not our company.. it is from college humor folks

We are exploding! Actually, we are not really going to blow up, but we are overwhelmed with projects and need to find a couple really good people to join us. If you know anyone that can help build the most kick ass “people powered fundraising” toolkit online, then send them our way. So who fits with our Ohana? Well, we are a socially responsible business. We set aside 4% of our founders shares into a foundation, we believe in the basic 1/1/1 principle. Give back to the community 1% of profits, 1% of time, and 1% of licenses/products. We have fun, work hard, and innovate like crazy. If you want to be part of an agile and forward looking company, give us a shout.

So who are we hiring? We need a visionary VP of Engineering that can understand our underlying technologies, make the tough roadmap decisions, and most importantly build what our clients need quickly. Our product line is growing, so we also want to bring someone on that will own our multiple services.. live it, breath it, be one with it (ok… we are not that crazy). Finally, you got a good eye for design? Flash/Flex experience? Come help Kev create functional and beautiful designs for our sites and clients. Location either in San Francisco or Hawaii.  Check out our job board for more info.

Our good friend Francesco in Italy was kind enough to post our widget fundraising case study on his Italian fundraising portal today We plan to have language support and internationalization in our next release, so if anyone can volunteer to do some translations for us that would be great!

Crazy week. Facebook launched their API “Platform” and we have been on high alert ever since. We immediately got our biggest client’s widget on Facebook. They should be announcing it very soon. We went to the drawing board to huddle on how to best get Chipin onto the Facebook platform without just embedding a widget. We came up with an elegant and innovative approach that is going to blow people away! Luckily we had a pretty crack set of contractors already signed up to work on a new Chipin.com and a couple stealth projects. As with most startups, we needed to be agile to a changing market, so we quickly re-deployed resources (100% of resources) onto our FB-Chipin app. The plan is to launch it hopefully by the end of this week.

Look for more updates here soon. If you want to volunteer to help us beta test the new product, drop us a line: contact I did run across a neat site today that should help me get smarter….

Also a big shout out to Rob and Olin for work on the Big Ideas website at U.C. Berkeley (go bears!). It was one of our very early integrations of the Chipin Widget with an external client. An article about the site was even posted up as the front page of the Drupal.org site today.

A couple articles on the project:

http://alumni.berkeley.edu/calmag/200701/goldwitz.asp

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/13/berkeley_marketplace.html

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/12/31/BAG1VNAMD71.DTL

http://alumni.berkeley.edu/calmag/200701/goldwitz.asp

“Cal students have great ideas for addressing some of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. This marketplace will help them mobilize additional financial and in-kind resources to support their ideas, and recruit additional committed students.”

- Robert Birgeneau, University of California, Berkeley, Chancellor

“Big ideas at Berkeley inspired me to pursue and develop a concept that I had always thought was pie in the sky. Now I see the idea as ripe opportunity for transportation reform, and myself as an agent of change.”

- Kevin Shively (2006 Bears Breaking Boundaries/Green Cities winner)

“This is absolutely AWESOME! Incredibly well constructed and one of the most innovative student services I’ve seen in all my time here.”

- Ilan Gur, Ph.D. – Materials Science & Engineering, UC Berkeley

“Serving as co-president for Berkeley Nanotechnology Club, which is funded by Big Ideas, has been the most valuable experience of my grad school. The skills and knowledge that I acquired through interaction with business students, industry experts, and venture capitalists helped me a lot in getting a bigger picture of things and seeing the light!”

- Bala Pesala, co-president, Berkeley Nanotechnology Club,

“Tom Kalil is always willing to open up his rolodex and help us make connections with people across Berkeley and the professional community.”

- Tim Kuruvella, co-president, Berkeley Biobusiness Association

From Beth… Of course you should donate on the Chipin widget

Posted by carnet in ChipBlog on May 18th, 2007
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