Change.org got its start in 2007 as a social network for non-profits and for project-based giving. For years, growth was slow for the fledgling social action platform, but, over the last year, that changed dramatically. Change.org has grown from six million users in early 2012 to more than 35 million users today, and, as a result, has become one of the largest and fastest growing companies of its kind.

In fact, this growth has led Change.org to take on its first round of outside financing in its six-year history. The company announced this morning that it has taken on a sizable $15 million investment led by the Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam.

The firm, which has also backed platforms like Meetup and micro-lending giant Kiva.org, will be taking a minority (and non-controlling) stake in Change.org, even without the promise of a traditional liquidity event — as the company has expressly stated that it will not sell or IPO.

Other investors in the round, which brings the startup’s total capital to around $20 million thanks to previous angel investments, includes Uprising, a new “mission-aligned” San Francisco-based fund, among others.

Part of what makes Change.org unique (and appealing to investors) is that, unlike many others mission driven companies of its ilk, the startup is decidedly for-profit and is certified as a B corporation. It’s a similar approach to the one taken by sites like Rally.org, though it runs counter to an exciting new wave of non-profit startups, like the much-buzzed about Watsi, for example, wich is Y Combinator’s first not-for-profit incubation.

Change.org Founder and CEO Ben Rattray tells us that both becoming a for-profit company, while simultaneously proclaiming that his company will never go public or seek an acquisition, aren’t decisions that were made lightly. Not, at least in the latter case, to simply to attract attention. Rattray and company are on a mission to prove to startups, investors (and the world) that it’s possible to build a socially-minded, mission-driven business without being a non-profit. A business that can have a real impact, but also make money and afford to hire the same level of talent that the Facebooks and Googles of the world attract regularly.

That’s been a stigma that non-profit and mission-driven organizations have had to wrestle with for some time. While a whole new generation of people have grown up on the social activism of Twitter, Facebook and Reddit and want to make a difference while making money, the perception that it’s impossible to do both remains.

“If we’re going to build real tools that help people create change, we need to generate revenue,” the founder says. “Many of my friends told me I was crazy to seek venture capital, but if we want to be fast, to build an innovation-focused business and create the kind of scale you find in the for-profit world, we need this capital to help us get there.”

Now that it’s reached 35 million users, Change.org wants to encourage more social enterprise investors and help evangelize for the development of a third, alternative means of creating liquidity. Whether it’s stock buybacks or some form of dividends, mission-driven businesses need a method that allows them to remain independent without seeking a one-time liquidity event.

Granted, the founder continues, these kind of social enterprise businesses are working over the long-term, 15 to 20 year windows, which is beyond the scope of most venture capitalists. “I have no doubt this is going to change, that eventually more investors are going to start backing socially-conscious businesses,” Rattray says, “but that support probably won’t come from existing funds; instead, it may come from sources like large foundations.”

Either way, by focusing on being fast, on hitting scale and generating revenue (the company hit $15 million in revenue in 2012), the founder says that the company has made an effort to offer comparable compensation to the big tech companies, even if it can’t offer the same perks on the equity side. Instead, it uses a different hook: Join us, and you can actually help make a difference in the world.

This hook, whether it appeals to your or not, has seen the company grow to over 170 employees in more than 18 countries over the last year. But, even if Change.org eventually runs aground, Rattray tells us, the key is to show other startups and investors that there’s opportunity to create big, sustainable businesses within this space, which offer social and financial returns.

When asked what pushed Change.org to the tipping point early last year, which has led to those 35 million users (nearly half of which are international), the founder credits simplicity. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, he said, the company focused exclusively on petitions; in other words, making it easy for users to create and sign digital petitions.

While this may sound too simple, or like it just encourages “lazy clicktivism” instead of true activism (as Liz points out), Rattray says that the key has been embedding its petition tech within social communities.

Twitter and Facebook have emerged in the last five years as remarkably effective advocacy and community organization tools, but they’re not built to harness real, sustained social movements, the founder says. By embedding petitions within social communities and by allowing people to find out what kind of movements or campaigns are happening now, are happening locally and by highlighting the most effective campaigns, Change.org can go beyond just being a simple “online petition site.”

Skeptics may roll their eyes at that statement, but SurveyMonkey, now a billion-dollar company, would probably say the same about surveys. And, for Change.org, when 35 million people have used the site, it doesn’t really matter, does it?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’ve all by now heard about how Yahoo is trying to get some “cool” with a supposed $1 billion purchase of hip blogging platform Tumblr, but it may be a moot point if Tumblr’s users fail to stick around post-sale.

Microsoft and Facebook may be trying to make a move ahead of Yahoo, Tumblr may be inching ever closer to running out of cash, and (despite that) may not be afraid to play a little hardball. But here’s something you’re not hearing much about: Tumblr’s users are almost universally unhappy with the news that the site might get sold to Yahoo. And they may let their fingers do the talking, and the walking.

Do a search on Tumblr for “yahoo” and you get a stream of distress, interspersed with the occasional bit of helpless resignation, and some calls for activism. The voices of reluctant acceptance (usually because of the aforementioned cash situation) or anything like positivity are few and far between. No outright enthusiasm.

(Daddy!) See for yourself.

It’s a problem that extends to some of Tumblr’s oldest users.

“If Tumblr goes to Yahoo, I will seriously consider moving my personal blog to Medium, if that’s possible,” Alexia, co-editor over here at TC, told me. She’s had a blog on Tumblr since June 2009, and, while not part of that coveted 18-24 age bracket, is a significant representative of that other cadre of important users: digital influencers. “I don’t know exactly why, but my Tumblr is a part of my identity. And for whatever reason, I don’t want to identify with Yahoo.”

Some have tried to start a petition, with a goal of 5 million signatures although others are cynical about whether this will actually have any effect.

User attrition is not something to be dismissed, especially when it appears to be underpinned by wider usage trends on the site.

When I wrote a post in January about what might come next for Tumblr as a business (it focused on how it could make money; not how it might need to get sold because it doesn’t), I noted that in the prior month, December 2012, it had 167 million visitors and nearly 18 billion pageviews worldwide (Quantcast figures). The trend over the last six months are down, however: in the U.S. page views are down 21% to 5.3 billion, and uniques down 5% to 76 million. Worldwide the picture is better but still not growing: pageviews are down by 4%; uniques are down by 3%.

Not a sinking ship, but not a zippy little speedboat, either. Yahoo’s MySpace, indeed.

Image via Tumblr

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Secret sharing app Whisper has seen tremendous growth since launching last fall. But until recently, it’s only been available on iOS. With a launch on Android’s Google Play store this week, Whisper is going to be available to a whole bunch of new users, particularly in its key demographic of young adults aged 18-24.

Whisper, in case you don’t know, is an ultra-hot app designed for easily sharing secrets anonymously with other users. It’s like PostSecret for mobile phones, allowing users to upload or search for images online and then adding text messages on top of them. Whispers are shared with all users of the app, and the most popular are surfaced based on the number of hearts or responses received from other users.

In addition to public responses, Whisper users can also privately message each other, as long as they’re willing to pay for the feature. That not only keeps the amount of marketing down, but it also provides a way for users to connect with other users that they wouldn’t have otherwise known.

The app continues to grow phenomenally fast. When we checked in with Whisper, users were viewing about a billion page views on the app per month. That’s up to about 1.5 billion per month now, according to co-founder Michael Heyward. Messaging on the app, which makes up the bulk of Whisper’s revenues, is growing even faster. Heyward said there’s essentially zero churn among users who sign up — and pay — for messaging.

“Any time there’s a new person that enlists in that feature, we grow it at a more exponential rate,” he told me. As a result, there are more than millions of messages being passed around privately among users.

While Whisper has seen pretty fantastic growth over the last several weeks, being on iOS limited the app’s addressable market. That’s especially true since Whisper’s most important user base — those between the ages of 18 and 24 — tend to overindex on Android devices. As a result, Heyward believes that its iOS app could only access approximately 40 percent of its most important audience.

With that in mind, the team worked around the clock to get its Android app released. It initially started work on the app about six weeks ago, looking to replicate all the features and functionality of its popular iOS app.

The Android app first hit Google Play earlier this week and received about 50,000 downloads in the first 48 hours — all without any real promotion from the company. More importantly, the engagement levels with early Android users have been on par with or better than iOS usage. For instance, about 40 percent of initial Android users have created Whispers already.

Whisper has raised $3 million in funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from investors like Trinity Ventures, Shoedazzle founder Brian Lee, and Flixster’s Joe Greenstein. The company now has 14 employees, but Heyward says they’re looking to add a few more hires over the coming weeks.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google today launched version 1.1 of its open source Go programming language. It’s been more than a year since Google launched version 1.0 of Go. The language, which puts an emphasis on concurrency and speed, has seen three maintenance releases since then, but the team has been conservative with bumping up its version numbers. This new version, however, the Go team writes, introduces a number of significant performance-related improvements that warrant the new version number and existing Go code should run noticeably faster when built with Go 1.1.

Version 1 was meant to show that Go had arrived at a level where users could expect a certain level of maturity and stability, as well as compatibility with future releases. Today’s release, the team says, lives up to this promise. It introduces a number of significant languages and library changes, but all of these remain backwards-compatible. “Very little if any code will need modifications to run with Go 1.1,” the team writes.

Among the changes in this new version are, “optimizations in the compiler and linker, garbage collector, goroutine scheduler, map implementation, and parts of the standard library.”

The new version also introduces method values, makes some changes to return requirements (which should lead to more succinct and correct programs, Google says), as well as a new race detector, which can find memory synchronization errors.

Over the last few months, Go has definitely seen an impressive increase in developer interest and quite a few companies have now adopted it as their go-to language for problems that can benefit from Go’s support for concurrent programming. CloudFlare, for example, uses it in production to run important aspects of its Railgun software, Bitly uses it to power some parts of its infrastructure, as do Heroku and an increasing number of startups and established companies.

While Dart, Google’s browser-based replacement for JavaScript seems to have trouble catching on, the company is clearly on to something with Go and the language, which was first conceived in 2007, looks to have a bright future ahead of itself as developers look for a modern language with built-in garbage collection and concurrency.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

With India’s annual GDP growth of about 5 to 6 percent per year, a new wave of affluent consumers is coming. While there have been e-commerce successes like Flipkart, a handful of local startups are targeting the upper-end of the market.

Squarekey is a startup that brings high-end fashion brands to India for the same prices as ones that a consumer would pay in the West.

“Retail is stagnating the Western world,” said founder Avantika Daing. “The growth story is now in markets in India. We’re really addressing a big unmet consumer need. Our core base will include about 300 million users by 2015. Those are the potential users — the aspirational class that spans from the middle class to the upper-middle class.”

The site offers clothes from about 65 brands including Nanette Lepore, Nicole Miller, BCBG Max Azria and Ben Sherman. While the site only opened last fall and Daing declined to share volume numbers, she did say that sales were growing by 30 percent month-over-month. Their average price point is around $175.

India has strict regulations about allowing in “multi-brand” stores, or ones that offer multiple clothing brands. At the same time, individual clothing brands may not be at the point where they’re willing take the financial risk of entering the Indian market.

“A Bloomingdale’s or a Barney’s cannot enter india with the current regulatory environment,” she said. “Single brands are permitted in India. There are some foreign direct investment nuances around minority and majority shareholders, but you do need a local partner.”

She said brands give Squarekey access to their current season inventory, and they take care of everything from fulfillment to the last-mile delivery. They can drop ship to the first-tier cities in India within a few days for most of their goods, but other pieces that are flown in from the U.S. may take 10 business days.

Over the last few years, a slightly older generation of e=commerce companies has figured out the logistical hurdles of delivering goods to consumers in the major cities. Plus, credit card penetration is improving.

“Things like credit card usage are issues of yesterday,” Daing said. “The marketplace has evolved and an ecosystem of small and large e-commerce players have helped make barriers disappear.”

She adds that Squarekey doesn’t take on inventory risk by buying merchandise upfront.

“For the first six months, we did take inventory risk just to prove ourselves out,” she said. “It was just a kind of good faith move to prove to brands that we were creating this compliant and trustworthy platform.”

But now, Squarekey pre-stocks from clothing in India after taking products on consignment from the brands. They also let Indian shoppers buy pre-season clothing if they’re willing to wait six to eight weeks.

With Squarekey’s model, Daing says she’s not playing the discount game that has made other Indian e-commerce startups less profitable. Local investors have rationalized a bit over the last year, according to a survey from one of Squarekey’s backers, the Indian startup accelerator GSF India.

“What happened last year was that we had a lot of your Amazon-like business models come up in India, then a lot of me-too Gilt Groupe-like business models. One questions the sustainability of the latter model.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’re anything like me*, your calendar is a mess. You actually have multiple calendars through which you try to keep track of various different meetings and you’re always bouncing back and forth between your email and your calendar, trying to keep track of whom you’re meeting when, trying not to double-book — and more often than not, failing.

There have been any number of calendaring and so-called productivity apps which have emerged over the last several months — apps like Donna, Tempo, Fantastical, and whatnot. But each of them seeks to simplify the process of keeping track of and getting to all your meetings. Few actually simplify the process of setting them up.

That’s where Atlas comes in.

Atlas is a mobile app not just for notifying you of when and where you have meetings, but more importantly, for setting them up. The app works by getting you through the gnarly process of setting meetings with an easy, step-by-step process for connecting you with other people.

Instead of bouncing back and forth between multiple browser windows — one for email, one for calendar — and trying to schedule things that way… And instead of sending multiple emails back and forth between meeting participants, Atlas provides a simple way to create meetings on your mobile phone, and then have those meetings imported back into the calendar program of your choice.

With Atlas, users simply create an event, and then invite people to participate in it. If users are looking at multiple possible meeting times, they can send a few which work and have the other participant pick which one works for them. The originating meeting creator gets to see a matrix of when everyone’s available and can then pick a time that works for everyone. In the meantime, while waiting on a final meeting time, those times are blocked off so that you can’t accidentally double book. Participants can also counter offer places and times and stuff, because they might know of a better sushi joint than the meeting creator.

It’s kind of like Tungle.me before, well, you know. Oh yeah, and it’s mobile first.**

Atlas isn’t trying to take over your calendar, which is nice. Instead it works with the calendars you work with. That includes GCal, iCal, YCal, and Outlook. It also works with newer calendar apps — you know, the Tempos and Sunrises and Fantasticals of the world.

Anyway, while Atlas has lots of cool features and will unsuck your calendar if you’re a power user, it might not be the best choice for everyone. Still, might be worth giving it a try because hey, anything is better than two browser windows and back and forth emails, right?

==
* And by God I hope you’re not, if just for your own sake…
** Because we were all born mobile nowadays, y’know.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Shakil Khan, an angel investor and advisor to Spotify, just launched Coindesk, a Bitcoin resource and news site, amid a boatload of hype and VC interest in the crypto-currency.

Khan says Coindesk was a project he conceived of about four weeks ago, around when Bitcoin was surging to an all-time high. It’s now trading at around $124.38, or about half as much as it was trading at a few weeks ago.

“I was just sitting there and I literally had five e-mails that day from very seasoned entrepreneurs, asking me — what do you know about Bitcoin?” said Khan, who has invested in the space. He was part of a roughly half-million dollar round in Bitpay, which is trying to make it dead simple for merchants to incorporate Bitcoin as a payments method.

“There’s a lack of transparent information. Where do you go to read what’s right or wrong?” said Khan, who has been a head of special projects for Spotify for five years. He was also briefly a head of special projects for Path too.

No, Khan’s not starting a Bitcoin media business. (That would be a head-scratcher.)

“I have absolutely no desire to be publisher,” he said. “That is not my goal. I am just fascinated by the digital currency space.”

Khan says that existing resources out there like Bitcoin Magazine and other message boards are too technical for a more mainstream audience. While helping put together the deal to sell Summly to Yahoo over the last couple weeks, he got together a team of people and part-time writers to publish news about the Bitcoin ecosystem.

But he adds that building a news site is not just a side project either. “CoinDesk, Bitcoins and digital currencies are way, way more than a hobby for me,” he said.

Khan has personally vetted about 15 deals in the Bitcoin space, and moved forward with just one.

“The early guys who are having the ideas have not necessarily run businesses before. They’re looking at it more from an idealist perspective or vision,” he said, explaining why he didn’t go in on other deals.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last quarter, Amazon, which has been a freight train and Wall Street darling over the last year, surprised analysts by reporting lower-than-expected earnings. Expectations were high considering the holiday shopping season, but Amazon saw net income drop 45 percent to $97 million in Q4, compared to $177 million in 2011, although on the bright side, net sales continued to increase (by 22 percent) to $21.2 billion.

Today, Amazon continued the trend, still finding itself in a bit of a hangover after missing expectations in Q4. The eCommerce giant reported earnings from Q1 after the market closed this afternoon, in which it saw cash flow increase 39 percent to $4.25 billion, compared to $3 billion for the prior year, while net sales increased 22 percent to $16.07 billion in Q1, compared to $13.18 billion in first quarter 2012.

And by mixed results, we mean that Amazon blew away earnings-per-share expectations at $0.18 in Q1 on revenue of $16 billion. Leading up to today’s announcement, Wall Street expectations were much lower for EPS, with analysts expecting $0.08 EPS for the quarter. In turn, the Street expected Amazon to report sales of $16.2 billion, which the company just missed with $16.07 billion in sales.

In spite of the mixed results, as the market has been wont to do over the last year, Amazon’s stock was trending up, closing at $274.70 per share, on rumors that the company could be launching its own TV set-top box this fall, bringing more of the company’s hardware into your living room.

Tellingly, in today’s announcement, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos didn’t touch on the numbers or falling profits, instead plugging the company’s efforts to take on Netflix with some original programming of its own for Instant Video customers. Last week, the company launched 14 new comedy and kids pilots on Instant Video, which quickly became the “most watched TV shows on Instant Video,” the company said Monday.

“Amazon Studios is working on a new way to greenlight TV shows. The pilots are out in the open where everyone can have a say,” Bezos said in today’s earnings release. “I have my personal picks and so do members of the Amazon Studios team, but the exciting thing about our approach is that our opinions don’t matter. Our customers will determine what goes into full-season production. We hope Amazon Originals can become yet another way for us to create value for Prime members.”

Other points of interest: Amazon’s free cash flow fell 85 percent to $177 million year-over-year, compared to $1.15 billion in the year prior, due in part to dishing out $1.4 billion to purchase new office space in Seattle. Operating income decreased 6 percent to $181 million in Q1, compared to $192 million in the same quarter last year, while net income fell 37 percent to $82 million from $132 million in Q1 2012.

The upside for Amazon continues to rise, thanks to its move into original programming and the expansion of its selection for Prime Instant Video, which is in part due to new licensing agreements with A+E, CBS, FX, PBS And Scripps. This means that shows like Downton Abbey, Justified and Under The Dome, as well as content from Food Network, the Cooking Channel, the Travel Channel and HGTV will all be headed to Amazon. The company said that Prime Instant Video now has 38,000 movies and TV episodes in its collecton.

In addition, Amazon touted the launch of its new MP3 store for Safari, which allow iPhone and iPod touch users to discover and purchase digital music from the company’s catalog. This comes on the heels of reports today that the influence of the company’s Appstore is growing and shows high revenue potential. Amazon also announced its Cloud Player for iPad and iPad Mini this quarter, extended AutoRip to vinyl records and announced the launch of Kindle Fire HD 8.9″.

Good news also came for authors and readers, as Amazon announced that it will start paying its authors their royalties monthly, ahead of the twice-a-year industry standard, along with the acquisition of popular book recommendation hub, Goodreads.

All in all, it was a busy quarter for Amazon, especially for AWS, which launched a slew of new products over the last few months and again lowered its prices. The company said in its announcement today that AWS “has lowered prices 31 times since it launched in 2006, including 7 price reductions so far in 2013.”

Looking forward, Amazon is lowering expectations, however, as it said today that it expects sales to come in between $14.5 billion and $16.2 billion next quarter — equivalent to a 13 to 26 percent increase from Q2 2012. In turn, it expects operating income to be between -$340 million and +$10 million. In other words, a potential loss.

For more, find Amazon’s Q1 earnings announcement here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

WordPress.com now offers hotel, inn and bed and breakfast owners and managers the ability to showcase their properties with the help of a new responsive theme just for hotels. In addition, the service also today launched a special site dedicated to showing hotel owners how they can use the service to promote their properties.

For WordPress.com, adding this hotel vertical is part of a now-familiar pattern. Over the last few months, WordPress.com has been making a concerted effort to launch special verticals for businesses like restaurants and use cases like sites for schools and personal portfolios for photographers and designers. The emphasis here is clearly on showing how WordPress.com can be more than “just” a blogging tool and emphasizes the service’s overall content-management features.

The new responsive theme is fully customizable and specifically geared toward hotels. It uses WordPress’ page template feature to allow owners to add the details about their rooms and amenities and also features a reservations widget that allows users to easily contact the owners with their travel plans. This widget, it is worth noting, does not allow users to directly book a room, however, and isn’t currently integrated with any payments solution.

Typically, WordPress uses these announcements to highlight some of its paid upgrades like custom domains, extra storage and custom design features. Most hotel and B&B owners probably don’t need these, so the company doesn’t highlight them in today’s release, but chances are, WordPress.com’s overall strategy of launching these verticals is mostly geared toward adding more professional users to the platform, given that they will also be more likely to pay for these upgrades.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mobile personal assistant apps are all the rage these days. First there was Google Now for Android, but over the last several weeks we’ve seen a whole bunch of new apps pop up — apps like Donna, Osito, and Sherpa — all of which seeking to make our lives easier by simplifying how we organize our meetings, travel, and other personal information.

With that in mind, I sat down with my colleague Drew Olanoff to discuss why this is such a hot space and whether these apps deliver on their promise. On that latter question, we still think these apps have a long way to go.

As Drew says, all the technology is there — and yet, no one has really pulled it all together in a way that makes these apps truly smart. There’s also the issue of finding an app that fits everyone’s lifestyle. As he points out, his personal workflow is different from mine. Finding a way to make a personal assistant which suits everyone’s needs is a difficult process.

As for me? I like what I’ve seen so far from apps like Donna or Osito, but I don’t want an app that I have to enter information into to make things work. I want something that will scour my email and calendars, figure out where and when things are happening, and then from that information plan my calendar for me. No one quite comes close right now.

Check out the video above for our discussion on the topic, and let us know what you think in the comments.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch