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Posts Tagged ‘michael-birch’

Playfire, a social network for gamers, has secured $2.1m of Series A funding. The news was first reported this weekend in the Sunday Times newspaper but, as is their usual form, with key details missing, including the full list of investors. What else do you expect from a newspaper that doesn’t even use Twitter properly?

The round was led by Atomico Ventures (founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis of Skype fame), in conjunction with Michael Birch (founder of Bebo), Brent Hoberman (co-founder of LastMinute.com), William Reeve and Alex Chesterman (co-founders of LOVEFiLM) and David Gardner (former COO of Electronic Arts and now CEO of Atari).

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For all the billions of dollars created here, Silicon Valley is remarkably stingy when it comes to giving. I first wrote about this when I moved here in the great Web 1.0 Internet bubble. Back then, as companies went public all around us, one-third of households earning $100,000 or more gave $1,000 or less to charity—roughly half what the rest of the U.S. gave per dollar earned. And those were the fat times.

I don’t have comparable data to back it up, but anecdotally it seems the Web 2.0 generation is doing a better job at giving. Or at least Bebo founder Michael Birch is.

Birch has spent the last six months working with a team of two other people to build a social giving site for the popular organization, Charity:Water. It launched its beta site today, and with just a Tweet announcing it nearly 400 members have already raised some $3,000.

Charity:Water’s accountability and simplicity of purpose has made it a popular charity in New York, Hollywood and increasingly the Valley.  Here’s the value proposition: One-out-of-six-people on the planet doesn’t have access to clean drinking water. $5,000 buys an African village a well. Every dime you donate, goes to these wells. You can even watch the wells being tapped for the first time via Web video. The non-profit is turning three in a few weeks, and it’s raised more than $10 million over that time—much of it in $20 increments from a base of some 60,000 donors. It was Obama-fundraising-math before that was invented. As a result some 700,000 people in the world now have access to clean drinking water.

It was all started three years ago when Scott Harrison, reformed bad boy and Charity:Water founder, asked people to come to a huge New York party for his September birthday and donate $20 at the door instead of giving him a gift. He raised $15,000 and built six wells in Uganda. Like any great accidental entrepreneur, Harrison knew he was on to something.

In addition to all kinds of creative fund raising, detailed in the video below, the following year, Harrison opened his birthday to everyone via the Web, asking them to donate $32 dollars, since it was his 32 birthday. That year, he raised $59,000 and other September birthday babies brought the total to $150,000, which went to wells in Kenya. Not bad. The next year he got more September babies to “give up” their birthdays, and Charity:Water built them individual donation pages online. Unfortunately, it meant hand HTML-coding everyone’s donation pages—pretty laborious work for such a small nonprofit. Still 800 people “gave up” their birthdays and raised some $965,000 dollars to bring some 50,000 people clean water in Ethiopia.

But Harrison knew that the value of a lot of micro-giving campaigns like Kiva and the popular Facebook application, Causes, is rooted in the ability to make small donations super-easy to solicit and to make via existing online social graphs. He was trying to figure out sites that knew when a huge number of people’s birthdays were and after MySpace and Facebook, he came across Bebo. Early last year, he cold-emailed Bebo founder Michael Birch to ask if he’d be willing to send a note out to his September born users and Birch wrote back that it was “a bad time.” It was actually a great time for Birch—he was selling the company to AOL for $850 million.

Once the deal was done, Birch called Harrison and suggested he build him a site that could help people born in any month instantly “give up their birthdays” for Charity:Water’s mission. It was fitting since Birch’s next project was his pre-Bebo project, a site called Birthday Alarm. Nine months later, Harrison is about to turn 34, Charity:Water is turning three, and Birch has finished the site. For a free project, it’s a pretty nice looking site.

The recession makes this perfect timing. If you’re panicked about money and job loss, giving up your birthday is an easy way to give to those less-fortunate without having to spend a dime yourself. My husband has a September birthday and has already signed up. I plan to sign up for my birthday in December. You can create your own campaign in a matter of moments and with a few clicks, share it via all your existing social networks.

I’m sure the coders who were up until 4 a.m. last night will have mixed feelings about this, but this is one time I really want to see TechCrunch users break a beta site.

The story of charity: water - The 2009 September Campaign Trailer from charity: water on Vimeo.

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Well it appeared to be signed and sealed when news leaked back in April that two icons of the UK’s tech startup world were joining forces to create a new fund to address the so-called ‘equity gap’ in Europe. But it gradually emerged that the actual name of the project would change and there were no real details, not even a web site to explain how it would work. But at last night’s Europas Awards in London, Bebo co-founder Michael Birch and Brent Hoberman (Lastminute and mydeco) announced the launch of the fund they’ve now set up together: PROfounders Capital. It’s understood that Birch, who exited from Bebo when it sold to AOL last year for $850m, is the prime investor, however they hope to double the “founder-lead” £30m fund over the next few months.

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The Europas, the tech startup awards from TechCrunch Europe, will be streamed live from this post from 6pm tonight London time/GMT (10am SF, 1pm NYC). We’ll kick off with a startup pitch competition, followed by a panel of some of the leading lights in tech consisting of: our own Sarah Lacy, Jolicloud founder Tariq Krim, MyDeco’s Brent Hoberman and Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo. The actual announcement of The Europas winners will be from around 8.30pm GMT onwards. he winners will be announce first on TechCrunch Europe (RSS and Twitter). After that, well, a huge party. Over 300 people are attending from all over the European tech scene. Our streaming partner is TechFluff.tv. If you couldn’t get to the awards, if you’re somewhere in Europe working on your own startup, then tonight raise a glass, put the projector screen on in the bar and have your very own Europas awards with us. We salute you.

After Google dropped its Chrome OS bomb yesterday, the news that Google is working on a new operating system generated a media frenzy. Our own MG Siegler covered the news from all angles, and did a live interview on Attack of The Show (embedded above).

As MG points out in the interview, this is just an entry point for Google (netbooks today, PCs tomorrow), and the announcement was expertly timed to take some of the attention away from Microsoft’s expected Office-in-the-cloud announcement next week.

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Preparations for The Europas - The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 - are coming together. Held on July 9 in London, these will be the first Europe-wide awards ceremony for technology innovation, honoring the best tech companies and startups across the web and mobile scene from the continent of Europe. The first tranche of tickets are now on sale. Put July 9 in your diary, get a flight and grab a hotel through our hotel search partner.

On the evening itself we will be joined by some of the great and good from the European startups scene, and some from the US. Check out who is coming already, and we’ll also be joined by a number of VIPs including Michael Birch (co-founder of Bebo),
Stefan Glaenzer (co-founder of Last.FM), Sarah Lacy (author & TechCrunch editor) and Tariq Krim (founder of Netvibes and now Jolicloud).

The main way is to make sure your company is able to be selected for nomination is to put it in CrunchBase, with all fields filled in, as well as key staff, like CEO etc. Don’t forget your logo and your picture! There are more details here. We will be releasing the list of nominees to vote on shortly. We’re also looking for sponsors for the award categories, details here.

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Two icons of the UK’s tech startup world are joining forces to create a new fund to address the so-called ‘equity gap’ in Europe. European Founders Capital (EFC) is being led by Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo, and Brent Hoberman, who set up the dotcom bubble era Lastminute.com but is better known more recently for being a serial angel investor and co-founder of MyDeco.

EFC will have an initial $29.5m (£20m) of seed funding but is aiming for $74m (£50m) in total. The idea is to increase the availability of early-stage funding in Europe, which historically lags behind the US, and has led to a gap between early stage and Series A funding. Europe’s seed funding eco-system has never matched Silicon Valley’s in part because the business angel environment for technology is undeveloped and because European VCs have historically not reached much lower than Series A rounds, unless in syndication with other parties.

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