The $15 million round comes primarily from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam’s philanthropic investment firm Omidyar Network.

Change.org CEO Ben Rattray

Omidyar Network is taking a minority and non-controlling stake with the explicit disavowal of a future payday from a sale or IPO, two things Change.org has promised it will never do. Other investors in the round include a new “mission-aligned” San Francisco-based fund called Uprising.

Though Change.org may sound like a non-profit, in reality it is a for-profit, mission-driven company that’s certified as a B corporation.

Said Change.org CEO Ben Rattray of that perceived divide, “There’s this latent uncertainty about whether it’s possible to build a company focused on a mission, and we’re proving it’s possible. It’s not an open question, it’s pretty clear that we’re having substantial impact. People have a binary perspective of an organization. It’s an impoverished perspective of the possibilty of business to change the world.”

Rattray said he had first courted the Omidyars for investment when he started Change.org, so it was a deal nearly seven years in the making.

Change.org had $15 million in revenue last year based on its sponsored petitions, whee organizations can pay to get their causes in front of users in the hopes of securing their signatures and email addresses. It currently has 170 employees in 18 countries, and is spending much of its available resources on expanding around the world.

“We’re no longer trying to find product market fit; we’re scaling the organization,” Ratttray said. “And it became clear as we started to scale the site to support hundreds of millions of users that funding would be immensely useful in building out an engineering organization.”

Rattray said he still often finds himself combatting the perception that signing a petition is a form of lazy “clicktivism” rather than valid activism.

“People oftentimes criticize petitions as being too easy. They think clicktivism is a bug rather than a feature. But the goal isn’t to make social change difficult, it’s to make it effective. If we enable at greater scale and greater participation than ever before, we think that’s actually a good thing.”

As Quora’s co-founder, CEO and also a significant investor, Adam D’Angelo is the driving force behind the site as it expands from Q&A to other kinds of writing. In an interview last week at the company’s new Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, the former Facebook CTO downplayed concerns about the revenue-free Quora growing too slowly, saying he believes he can outlast the faddish companies that come and go by building a high-quality product.

Why harp on growth? Despite D’Angelo’s roots at Facebook, where the -illions of users now start with a “b,” four-year-old Quora had just 2.9 million global unique visitors in April, up from 2.6 million the year before, according to comScore. But comScore doesn’t count mobile traffic, which D’Angelo said now amounts to a third of Quora usage.

Here’s an edited and condensed write-up of the chat:

Liz Gannes: How would you describe where Quora as a company is now?

Adam D’Angelo: We’re about 50 people, and a year ago we were a third of that. We moved to Mountain View. All these startups grew up in Palo Alto — there’s us, there was Flipboard, there was Pinterest, there was Pulse, and most of the other ones went to the city, but we ended up as the only of those startup down here that’s hiring, so it’s been really good for recruiting because it’s different. We’ve become more data-driven. When you’re small, you have to do everything on intuition, but now we’re at the scale where we have a lot of users, so we can run experiments. We have a data team that’s pretty big, actually.

What do you use the data for — is it personalization?

No, it’s more about to make decisions about what to build. We’re looking at whether something’s going to be a good investment of resources. When you’re small, you can say, “I use the product myself, and I’m annoyed by these things, so let’s change this.” Now we can say, “Twenty percent of our users have encountered this issue that makes them less engaged or more engaged,” so we can test it. That’s really important, because then you don’t have to centralize the decision making. So it doesn’t all go through me.

How big is Quora? What are the most important metrics to you — volume of content, how many people use it?

We look at people who use it. We don’t share the particular numbers, but it’s pretty big, and it’s growing.

But are you happy with how big it is? There’s a perception that Quora is not as huge as it could be, or as people hoped it would be.

I’m happy with how big it is now, given it’s now, but I want it to be more in the future. I wouldn’t be happy it if stayed where it is now.

So you’re saying you like growth. Okay. It seems — and I speak as someone who has been using Quora for a while — that you guys have a bunch of growth initiatives, various things you’re trying to get people to log in more, in a way that looks like you’re trying to goose growth. But maybe people just want to read content without logging in, and that’s okay.

It comes back to the data stuff. When we get people to log in, they end up using Quora a lot more, and we can provide a lot better experience for them. We can show them a personalized news feed, we can send them digest emails, and do all this ranking to find some stuff they want to read. There’s a vocal minority that doesn’t want to log in, but most people just log in and have a better experience, long-term. We’re not trying to goose anything. It’s not like we’re about to raise money, and we’re not about to sell the company, so there’s no reason why we would be doing that unless we thought it would be better long-term.

How do you think about the long-term value of content itself? Quora seems to be all about the evergreen content, but isn’t there value in near-term, real-time discussions like what goes on over at Reddit or Twitter?

Compared to other products, we’re much more long-term. Most of the stuff that people look at on Quora today was not written in the last month. You write something really good, and maybe it’s the definitive answer on the Internet for the next 10 years. Maybe it’s only a year, but not like a tweet, where it’s only relevant for a day or a week. On Quora, it takes time for the content to accumulate, but it just builds and builds. That means growth goes a little bit slower than something like Twitter or these viral apps, but I also think it means we have higher long-term value that we’re going to reach.

You’ve introduced a bunch of new content types in addition to Q&A. What’s working?

So we have answers, blogs and now we have reviews. The area we define as what Quora’s good at is long-form text that’s useful over time, and where you care about who wrote the text. Not that you need to be friends with them, just that they’re someone trustworthy.

How do people find things on Quora? What’s the balance between search and social and topics?

I think it’s a third, a third, a third. Search is bigger than you think.

Really? But I don’t even know what to look for on Quora.

It’s not like finding a needle in a haystack like on Google, it’s finding a broad area. It’s probably most useful when you want to do something like visit a new place.

You reformulated the Quora core mission recently. Tell me about that.

Our new mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge. It’s what we always thought we were doing, but it’s a different way to say it.

If you were to say, Quora is a fill-in-the-blank service, what would it be?

That’s different from the mission; that’s positioning. I would say it’s a “knowledge-sharing” service.

How is Quora different from other companies?

We’re data-driven. We really value execution and getting things done. We do things more frequently than other companies; we have a faster cadence.

Everybody says that.

Everyone says that, but I think it’s not as true. We release code 40 times per day. And we have this thing where code, eight minutes after someone finishes writing it, is live on the site.

Also, I think we’re more focused on the mission, and people at Quora care about making an impact on the world. At a lot of other companies people are trying to make money in a short amount of time; this is their one hop in their Silicon Valley career before they go to the next thing. We talk to people before they join, and say, “We’re not acquisition-focused; you should only come work here if you’re willing to stick with it for a long time.”

What if Quora weren’t working? Hypothetically, how would you know when to quit?

I have a view that things don’t really decline for no reason. Other companies, when that’s happened, it’s because the users didn’t really like the product. Or that they were gaming Facebook, and Facebook shut them down and finally it caught up to them. I don’t think we’re doing any of this gaming stuff. Or maybe if there were competition, but I don’t think there’s competition for what we’re doing.

I have a view that if you build something that’s good, and you keep making it better, it lasts. A lot of times, companies will make these major changes that make things worse and that will lead to a decline. So if that were the case, we’d figure out what was happening and we would revert it.

It’s a totally obvious move that will make the popular bookmarking site more useful and less inspirational (a.k.a. full of pretty photos that don’t actually link to anything). You could think of it like the Pinterest version of Twitter’s Cards.

The added information comes from a whole bunch of stores (e.g. Anthropologie), food publications (e.g. 101 Cookbooks) and movie databases (e.g. Netflix) that have partnered directly with Pinterest. There are some sizable names in there of brands that are willing to pass over a whole bunch of metadata to Pinterest and its 50 million or so active users: eBay, Target and Sony among them.

The features are only available to Pinterest users who have opted into its recent redesign, which was not universally popular but has been modified since launch.

For now, there’s no reason to worry about surreptitious Meta usage in bars and locker rooms.

The latest is Meta, an immersive 3-D headset layered on top of the real world. Meta wearers can interact with virtual games, architectural renderings and other 3-D objects by using their hands. The device captures gestures with an outward-facing camera (similar to Kinect or Leap Motion).

Meta launches on Kickstarter today, and is also announcing that it will be participating in the next Y Combinator batch out in Mountain View, Calif. Backers who commit $750 will be promised an early version to be shipped in September of this year.

Meta is a young company developed primarily by a Columbia University undergrad student and his adviser, with 12 more employees recently hired. But it is getting a leg up through compatibility with widely used 3-D game-engine maker Unity Technology, and it has a hardware partnership with Epson, and it aims to get devices to buyers this year. (Correction: An earlier version of this story said Meta already had a partnership with Unity. It does not currently.)

Meta will support the popular Unity 3-D software, so other developers will be able to build applications in an environment where they’re already comfortable. A developer kit is available today.

A Meta rendering shows a wearer adjusting 3-D landscaping in front of a virtual building.

If Google Glass brings your phone to your face, Meta aims to bring the computing power of a PC to your face, said Meta founder and CEO Meron Gribetz. “Before you can have the phone, you should have the PC,” he argued.

The “meta1” is not pretty; it definitely looks like a camera mounted to giant wraparound stereoscopic glasses. But it does seem like it’s at least close to working. Yesterday, I briefly tried a demo version that was tethered to Gribetz’s laptop, and there seemed to be minimal latency between me wiggling my fingers and moving my hands farther and closer to interact with the virtual spaceships and hovering balls I was seeing.

Gribetz said he is launching the Kickstarter campaign primarily to build awareness of the device, so he set his goal at a relatively low $100,000 in order to sell a few hundred or a thousand of them.

Image copyright Vlue

And, after confining the audience to their seats for three hours of a hodgepodge of announcements, the CEO of the company came out and bemoaned the industry horse-race mentality (which could be read as hypocritical for many reasons).

Still, the company’s stock spiked up and beyond an all-time high, and everybody raved about how great it all was.

It doesn’t make any sense, of course, unless perhaps you were talking about one of the patented reality distortion field performances of the late Steve Jobs of Apple.

But somehow that’s how it worked for Google this past week at its 2013 I/O developers conference, where nothing big or particularly ambitious was unveiled. Unlike previous editions of the conference that had major reveals, every announcement on Wednesday — dozens and dozens of them — got roughly equal billing and were presented in much the same manner. An exec set up the larger initiative, a product manager did a demo, followed by a feel-good video that showed its potential.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

While there were better tools for app developers, a neat-looking new design for Google Maps, features to automatically sort and edit photos, a way to search by voice from your computer the same way you already can from your phone, a personalized music service, a program to distribute educational tablet apps to students, a different set of software for an existing Samsung smartphone and four more languages for Google’s Knowledge Graph, it was still largely incremental.

Why there was no new rev of Android, just when Apple’s Jonny Ive is busy with a radical overhaul of iOS? Where were the new Nexus devices as the smartphone market gets more competitive than ever? What happened to the promise of Android @home and Google TV? If Apple had done this kind of incremental WWDC, they’d be slammed.

Instead, Google I/O got away without launching any significant revisions — not even a .1 release! — or devices for either its Android or Chrome platforms. It didn’t even spend keynote time on its hot topic “moonshot” projects.

Come to think of it, Google CEO Larry Page’s closing speech about the amazing potential of technology to change people’s lives might have been more fitting at the end of three hours about Google Glass and the self-driving cars. Like last year, when his co-founder Sergey Brin organized his Glass skydiving stunt from an overhead blimp down to the stage, streamed via Google Hangout.

But Wednesday wasn’t about the dream-big stuff of tomorrow, it was about today being a better version of yesterday.

In many ways, Google was filling in a structure it had already built. The company brought many products from one device or platform to another. It applied its artificial intelligence smarts for everything from beautifying photos of faces to anticipating potential searches in context. It added analytics to do useful things like help Android app developers see how effective their Google advertising spending is on driving installs. It personalized, personalized and then personalized.

That’s not to say the many products Google introduced at I/O were not impressive when taken as a whole. Rather, the incremental improvements taken together are building out its massive vision. Maybe we’re getting cynical because today’s reality is too close to science fiction to remember when it seemed crazy. Or maybe Google just hypnotized us all.

Even some Googlers conceded this. In a conversation with Johanna Wright, an eight-year veteran of Google who is now VP of search and assist for Android, she made a similar observation about the keynote.

“Having been at Google so long, I feel like there might be no single leap, no single announcement, but the way it’s coming together feels like a huge leap,” Wright said. “There’s a deep understanding underlying it.”

That Google could pull this off so successfully is interesting, especially when you think about one of its main competitors like Apple, where the news cycle is all about secrets and supplier signals and hope and fickle investors and disappointment and scrutiny.

That’s perhaps because Google is not as caught up in that launch-dependent hardware wowing, but rather has picked a line of products that it commits to and continually improves upon and is then held to a different standard.

That’s one explanation, at least.

Whatever the reason, it worked. In after-hours trading, Google stock was at $918.70 after the big show. In its entire history, it had never crossed $900 before that morning.

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At $10.2 million and almost a year later, with 70,000 of 85,000 Kickstarter watches shipped to backers, and thousands more preordered on its own site, Pebble is returning to take venture capital on its own terms.

The company has now raised $15 million, largely from Charles River Ventures, led by CRV partner George Zachary.

Asked whether he would have changed anything about the Pebble design if he had access to this kind of capital from the start, Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky said he doesn’t think so — just that production and hiring might have been quicker.

Plus, he’s proud that Pebble’s Kickstarter success made people pay attention to crowdfunding. “If we hadn’t been rejected by VCs, I don’t think Kickstarter would have had the same effect on early-stage startups that it’s had.”

So why did venture capital bite this time? Just because wearables are so hot right now?

“I just think they have a big lead. The revenue run rate is very substantial,” said Zachary, who usually invests in Web startups like Twitter and Udacity. He added that this, his largest Series A investment ever, brings him back to his roots working on Nintendo 64 at Silicon Graphics.

“Eric thinks the battle will be won with the developer community, so I decided to take a risk on that specifically,” Zachary said.

That’s not to say Pebble is a sure thing — not at all, since Apple and others are expected to soon compete for wrist real estate with devices of their own.

Not to mention competition from Google Glass, the other wearable device that’s making waves now. Zachary said he’s skeptical that people will want to wear computers on their heads, something he worked on 20 years ago at virtual-reality pioneer VPL Research.

As for competing on the developer front, Pebble is releasing staged access to functionality that’s already in the watch. Developers can make their own watch faces and games (5,000 of them so far, installed 300,000 times), and as of today they’ll be able to rig up two-way communication with smartphones.

That should open up space for people to build things like emergency apps (e.g., press two buttons to send GPS to loved ones) and to-do lists, Migicovsky said. Also: Weather, traffic, stocks and Bitcoin prices. “But we’re more interested in the use cases we haven’t been able to predict,” he said.

New York is cracking down on Airbnb peer-to-peer home rentals, New York City is doing its darnedest to snarl e-hail for taxicabs and now car-sharing service RelayRides is pulling out of the state amid scrutiny of its handling of insurance.

San Francisco-based RelayRides, which said earlier this week it was acquiring its California competitor Wheelz, is suspending peer-to-peer car rental service in New York effective immediately, though it will honor existing reservations, CEO Andre Haddad disclosed in a blog post today.

That comes after a cease-and-desist order from the New York Department of Financial Services today that charged that RelayRides’ million-dollar insurance policy could still leave users personally liable in the case of an accident.

Haddad said his company was in discussion with the department about how it could comply and resume service.

The maker of Android and Chrome is just about to kick off a three-hour keynote, and if you want to see it for yourself, you can: Here’s the livestream. Meanwhile, we’ll be doing live coverage, but it’ll be quick blurbs and takeaways rather than transcribing every last Googley word.

Anticipation is high; Google shares just topped $900 for the first time ever.

“We are very fortunate to have two platforms,” says Sundar Pichai, who is now in charge of both Chrome and Android and also Google Apps. He’s addressing an I/O audience of 6,000 in-person attendees and some 1 million via livestream. He notes the advent of smartphones and connected devices has been a massive, rapid and global change over just the past six to seven years.

There have been 900 million Android activations to date, announces Pichai. Here’s some more context on those numbers, via Ina Fried.

As an update to Google Play services, Android product leader Hugo Barra announces three new location tools for developers that will reduce battery drain and add awareness of users’ location and activities for the purposes of geofencing and activity tracking (the latter thing is just like the Moves app for iOS, which understands the difference between walking, running and biking motions as you’re carrying a phone).

A few more of Barra’s Google Play updates that get cheers from developers will help sync accounts and notifications across multiple devices. Plus, new game developer tools on Android, iOS and web will show personalized leaderboards, help players challenge each other and save games.

Google introduces a brand-new development environment, Android Studio, for building applications. It helps rapidly visualize layouts across different devices, languages. This goes over extremely well with the developer audience.

And here’s some more stuff that developers care a lot about, and other platforms like Apple’s iOS don’t do a great job of. Later this summer, Google will add new Android analytics tools to help developers do things like track conversions from their app advertising and visualize revenue over time and geography. Plus, a biggie for people making new apps: Beta testing and staged rollouts with private feedback.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty APIed out,” says Barra. Yes indeed!

On to content and entertainment: Personalized recommendations for content in Google Play are rolling out “over the coming weeks,” and navigation is improved. This gets the mildest round of applause so far.

But here’s the real news: Google Play Music All Access, which comes with “a uniquely Google approach,” says Google content guy Chris Yerga. For some savvy handicapping, here’s Peter Kafka’s advance take.

What is interesting about it? The radio service is interactive (you can mess with what’s coming next), it has personalized recommendations and it includes Google’s collection blended with your personal library. It’ll cost $9.99 per month but there are some promo and trial options. Here’s a fuller summary from Mike Isaac.

Barra shows off a Galaxy S4 running Google’s Nexus version of Android rather than jammed with Samsung stuff. Not cheap, though. It’ll be sold for $649 on Google Play on June 26. Ina Fried has more here.

Back to Chrome and Chrome OS. The browser now has 750 million monthly active users, up from 450 million last year. As for Chromebooks, Sundar Pichai offers no actual numbers, but says they’ve been the No. 1 seller on Amazon for a while. (C’mon, where are the numbers?)

Next, an update on some of the underlying Web formats, tools and components that Google contributes to. This now includes a data compression proxy for Chrome for Mobile that sounds like like Opera and Onavo. Plus, some demos of what’s in the pipeline, including a nifty race car game played on a track made of five devices laying next to each other that keeps in sync using Web sockets. Lauren Goode has more on all the Chrome news here.

Sundar Pichai is giving out Chromebook Pixels to everyone at I/O, which they are rather stoked about.

How about them Google Apps? Lots of people use them — 74 of the top 100 U.S. universities. That was an extremely short segment.

And another little launch coming this fall: Google Play for Education. Google wants to help schools manage Android tablets, offering a library of apps recommended by teachers, and mechanisms to push apps directly to groups of student devices.

Plus, cute kids around the world use Chromebooks, as displayed in like the 30th feel-good product movie of this keynote.

Vic Gundotra says he’s here to introduce 41 new features for Google+, which I hope he is not going to go through one by one.

The G+ feed is now three columns, with posts tiled like Pinterest.

Google is also going to automatically tag posts with hashtags so people can find related content. These are extracted with image recognition and text analysis.

Also, Gundotra says as part of Google’s efforts to help computers get out of people’s ways, it will better support multiplatform conversations. That means: group messaging, persistent conversations between groups (a la GroupMe a few years ago), albums of shared images, synced notifications, free group video and support for Web, Android and iOS as of today.

On to photos: Google wants its data centers to be your darkroom, says Gundotra, who seems to only speak in slogans. G+ saves “all the pixels, because some memories are not meant to be downsized,” says Gundotra, with a nice visualization that shows how much larger G+ photos are than Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Also, new tools will help users find their best photos and edit them, especially faces. Vanity, eat your heart out.

For further reading, Mike Isaac has detailed pullouts on the new G+ stream design and Hangouts.

“Auto awesome” features like collage generation, smile detection, making a series into a GIF and stitching panoramics are now generated automatically. And these features have been in “dark launch” so Google is already ready to spring them live on every photo you’ve ever uploaded.

Next up: Amit Singhal wants to talk about “the end of search … as we know it.” He’s the smiley guy who always talks about the Star Trek computer. Yup, there we go: He dreamed as a child of building the Star Trek computer for the world.

Google’s Knowledge Graph is today coming to Polish, Turkish and Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, adding to nine existing languages.

Singhal announces conversational search for the desktop and laptop. Users can launch voice queries by saying, “Okay, Google.”

Plus, Google Now, the smart personal assistant app, is adding reminders, public transit and TV shows.

Johanna Wright demos a voice search using the new tools for Chrome and Chrome OS with the premise of planning a trip to Santa Cruz. Her computer listens to a set of queries including “How far is it from here” that returns directions with current traffic.

More snazzy voice demos: Saying “when does my flight leave” returns a personalized result based on email archives, “show me my pictures from New York last year” brings up photos with those characteristics, and giving commands sends emails and sets reminders. Basically it’s like Siri, but it seems to actually work.

Ina Fried has more on this voice search section here.

Maps head Brian McClendon comes next. Google has a long history of building and growing its map quality — subtext: Unlike some other noobs in the industry — and McClendon recaps the history of Google’s mapping layers: local data, imagery, street view (including underwater view) and base maps. Over 1 million websites are using Google maps today, he says.

Google Maps for iPhone is “sleek, simple, and let’s not forget, accurate,” says Daniel Graf. So what’s next for mobile maps?

Google is launching a unified five-point rating scale for local results, says Graf, which doesn’t really seem like an innovation to brag about. There’s also a nice new swipeable interface for browsing venues, plus discount offers appearing within listings (from Starbucks at first, with more to come). Also, some Waze-like features: accident reports and live rerouting. And, a tablet version for both iOS and Android. But none of it is ready yet. Will be out this summer.

An interface preview of the new desktop Google Maps UI shows that they’ve gotten rid of the uninformative map pins in favor of labels shown directly on each place. The big idea: “The map is the user interface.” Maps are personalized based on users’ history (like Google Now), so they can each navigate via their own landmarks and find related places and nearby streets each time they click.

A new transit schedule viewer looks a lot like Hipmunk. Users can also submit “photo spheres” from their phones by capturing a big multidimensional photo all around them. Also, here’s a mindblower: When you zoom out, the view of the Earth shows clouds in real time. And you can zoom all the way out to the Milky Way.

This isn’t released to the public yet, but you can sign up to check it out at maps.google.com/preview.

Larry Page appears onstage, a surprise given he just explained his vocal cord paralysis condition publicly yesterday. He has a message for developers: Technology is amazing.

Page is having a bit of a Bono moment. He explains the arc of Google’s vision: Technology should do the hard work, so people can live their lives. “I think we’re all here because we share a deep sense of optimism about the potential of technology to change people’s lives and help the world.”

Page says he wants to build great things that don’t exist, so press comparisons to competitors are overdone. “Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero-sum.”

Progress displaces the past, Page notes. “I’m sure people in the future will think we’re just as crazy as we think people in the past were, having to do hunting or farming all the time.”

And to that end, recruiting young people to care about science is important. Page explains that Google participated in the upcoming movie “The Internship” as a way to market computer science.

And now something even less expected: Page takes audience questions. First up, predictably, is Robert Scoble. Page notes that he didn’t need to see Scoble’s picture of himself in the shower wearing his Google Glass. Point for Larry.

Page answers a question about the potential of a Web-based operating system for mobile; he’s disappointed about the industry state of warring platforms, saying, “The software you write should run everywhere easily.”

How does Google protect freedom, asks a woman from Colombia. It’s difficult and important, says Page, but transparency is key.

About fiber, Page says increasing capacity increases the potential for doing interesting things. Beyond gigabits, the next step is low-latency connections.

Meanwhile, Google stock is trading above $906, with the company’s market cap passing $300 billion.

On Glass production, Page isn’t willing to say much of anything specific. He says it’s about making users happy. He loves using it with his young kids.

Page’s advice for a kid: Try to cut deep to the real issues. The power grid and manufacturing, not incremental stuff. Asking how far are you off the raw materials cost helps you think about the longer view.

Here’s Mike Isaac’s story on Page’s appearance.

12:19 pm: Just going to add in a timestamp here to note this has been ridiculously long.

Page extends his positivity riff into limitations. He says he doesn’t just want to inspire computer scientists, he also wants lawmakers who understand technology. There should be something in the world like Burning Man, Page says, where technologists can have safe places to experiment on the effects of what they build without deploying them into the normal world.

On healthcare, Page says the main problem is regulatory issues around keeping medical information private. He says he got tons of emails after writing about his vocal cord condition yesterday. “After disclosing, I feel I should have done it sooner. Why are people so focused on keeping medical history private? The answer is insurance companies. That makes no sense. We should change the rules around insurance so they have to insure people.”

Page endorses a question about getting more women into tech, and he says that cheap smartphones are key to global social development.

Page goes offstage as it’s announced that Billy Idol is the evening I/O performer. Meanwhile, nobody has the strength to stand given they haven’t had nutrition or water since dawn. What I mean to say is, it’s finally over.

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• With Sights Set on Spotify (And Pandora), Google Launches a Music Subscription Service
• Google on Android: 900 Million Activations, New Tools for Developers Coming
• Google Doubles Down on Music Subscriptions, Which Means Google Isn’t Serious About Music Subscriptions
• Where Are They Now? Google I/O 2012 Edition.
• At I/O, Google Tilts Toward Android Services Over Android OS
• Google Downplays Expectations Ahead of I/O Developer Conference
• Will Google Deliver on Its Nexus Q Promise? Not at This Year’s I/O.
• Ahead of I/O, Google Wallet Drops Plans to Introduce a Physical Card
• Google Goes With Unified I/O Keynote (But Will It Unify Its Products?)

Wheelz had raised more than $15 million from investors including Zipcar, while RelayRides has raised more than $13 million from investors including General Motors Ventures.

However, RelayRides has a car-sharing user base that is “several times larger” than Wheelz’s membership, said RelayRides CEO Andre Haddad.

The appeal of the acquisition was Wheelz’s hardware technology, Haddad said, which integrates into participating owners’ cars to allow renters to access them from a smartphone app.

RelayRides had previously tried to integrate similar technology that was originally for fleet managers with cars that are constantly being borrowed, and it had the side effect of running car batteries down while not in use. Needless to say, RelayRides car owners didn’t like that much.

The Wheelz “DriveBox” doesn’t have that problem, Haddad said. Incorporating DriveBox into RelayRides will help regular participants avoid the hassle of in-person key exchanges, which are the current alternative.

Plus, Wheelz had built its own distinct user base, starting at college campuses and extending to California cities, which will be incorporated into RelayRides.

Haddad said 10 of the 20 Wheelz employees will join RelayRides in San Francisco, primarily those with hardware and mobile app experience. One of those departing will be Wheelz co-founder and CEO Jeff Miller.

Explaining the difference between the two companies, Haddad said, “Their expertise was very automotive, and they were not as much at ease with building online consumer products.”

One interesting aspect of RelayRides is that it has moved much more into daily and weekly rentals than hourly rentals. That means it perhaps competes more with mainstream car rental companies than the Zipcars of the world. Hourly rentals are now down to 10 percent of revenue.

Haddad, who would not quantify nearly any aspect of the deal or of his business with exact numbers, said that RelayRides’ revenue was up 500 percent year over year.

They admit that much of the planned news is already out there — there have been solid leaks and clues about refreshes to mapping, video messaging and gaming products. They say there won’t be a big focus on unveiling new devices, unlike other years.

More unexpected Google platform news, like now-scuttled plans to release a physical credit card, isn’t happening. And even some news that might have made sense, like an update on Google’s kooky Nexus Q living-room device, isn’t in the cards.

Now Google is making that downplaying of expectations official. Sundar Pichai is Google’s undisputed developer king, since he now controls the teams working on both Chrome (his long-time domain) and Android (after Andy Rubin stepped down in March). So rather than two days of keynote announcements, this year’s I/O will have only one.

Asked what to expect at I/O, Pichai said in an interview with Steven Levy of Wired:

It’s going to be different. It’s not a time when we have much in the way of launches of new products or a new operating system. Both on Android and Chrome, we’re going to focus this I/O on all of the kinds of things we’re doing for developers, so that they can write better things. We will show how Google services are doing amazing things on top of these two platforms.

Pichai also pushed out timelines for combining Chrome and Android (in a year or two, “maybe there’s a more synergistic answer,” he said, but for now he defended the dual operating systems’ coexistence), and making Android updates more universal (“We need time to figure out the mechanics, but it’s definitely an area of focus for me and for the team.”).

A mellower I/O is in some ways a tough draw, given anticipation by Google fans and the press of razzle and dazzle in the vein of Apple. But unlike some other companies — that hype up launches that probably don’t deserve it — Google under Pichai is apparently going to try to host a workaday developer conference.

With some nice gadget schwag handouts, of course.

RELATED POSTS:

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• Google I/O: Music, Maps, Messaging and More
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• Ahead of I/O, Google Wallet Drops Plans to Introduce a Physical Card
• Google Goes With Unified I/O Keynote (But Will It Unify Its Products?)

Koum’s mobile messaging app now has more than 200 million active monthly users around the world — a larger audience than Twitter’s last public number.

But WhatsApp has largely resisted the public eye, ignoring most press requests and conference invites, and operating with a relatively tiny team of 40 people out of an unmarked office in Mountain View, Calif.

That’s not to say there aren’t questions about WhatsApp’s long-term viability. Can it make enough money to survive? Will carriers try to destroy it? Since its service is so simple, won’t fickle users switch to the oh-so-many free alternatives? Why hasn’t it expanded beyond basic messaging to become a platform?

So we were very interested to have Koum join us last month at D: Dive Into Mobile to answer those questions and explain a bit about how WhatsApp got to where it is today.

In a half-hour onstage interview, Koum addressed his antipathy toward advertising, his disinterest in selling WhatsApp to an acquirer and his dislike of people publishing rumors about that possibility, the business of selling 99-cent apps, WhatsApp’s relationships with carriers, the strategy of building native apps and many more topics. We’re republishing the full video below.

For instance, Koum said, after 10 years working at Yahoo, he developed a deep distrust of how ads corrupt the relationship between a company and its users. “The user experience would always lose, because you always had to provide a service to the advertiser.” That’s even more acute on mobile. “Cellphones are so personal and private to you that putting an advertisement there is not a good experience,” he said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130510/whatsapp-ceo-jan-koum-hates-advertising-and-the-tech-rumor-mill-full-dive-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130510/googles-wallet-plans-for-io-cloud-expansion-on-but-longtime-physical-card-plan-scuttled/ http://allthingsd.com/20130510/googles-wallet-plans-for-io-cloud-expansion-on-but-longtime-physical-card-plan-scuttled/#comments Fri, 10 May 2013 12:00:24 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=320036

Google will update its Wallet product at its I/O developer conference next week, but will not include the physical credit card that the company had considered launching at the event, according to sources.

Sources said the scuttling — for now — of an extended effort to roll out such a card was announced in a recent memo that also included the news that Google Wallet head Osama Bedier was leaving the company.

Those who have seen it said the Google card had a black face adorned with the whimsical rainbow “W” of the Google Wallet logo, a standard magnetic stripe and the usual raised numbers of a credit card embossed on it.

The card was part of Google’s larger strategic goal to know more about consumer purchases, given the immense potential value of that mostly offline-level data for its massive online advertising business.

Google is already sucking in that purchase data on many fronts — between Google Play payments, Google Checkout on the Web and also advertiser payments — in addition to the dedicated Google Wallet project.

But Wallet has been hampered by its focus on and use of NFC technology, which requires certain phones and special readers to make transactions. Google tried to make that easier by introducing a “cloud wallet” last year that accommodated existing credit and debit cards, but it could still go further toward mobile payments at the register without using NFC.

The dumping of the physical card plan was certainly abrupt, since it had actually been built into the new update of Google Wallet, said sources, and some partners had thought the search giant might be demoing it at the event.

But Google still plans to update its Wallet rewards, offers and loyalty points with the addition of a larger group of merchants, making it a fuller competitor to Apple’s Passbook. Within the Wallet, Google’s “proxy cards” help it get access to data by witnessing transaction flow to merchants.

However, these improvements won’t be integrated with another Google effort that’s similar, Google Now, which already includes support for mobile versions of United Airlines boarding passes and Fandango movie tickets in its Android mobile operating system version. Sources describe the Google Wallet and Google Now teams as “siloed,” which has presented some level of difficulty.

At Google, it was thought that a plastic card might be a way to attract a lot of consumers quickly with a payment method they are familiar with and that is convenient to them.

And the company seemed to have chosen a somewhat conservative approach. Sources said Google wasn’t planning to go so far as to become its own bank or try to disrupt existing interchanges — which would really shake things up in the credit industry — or to get data directly from Visa and MasterCard, which wouldn’t go over well with any number of players in the sector.

But sources also said that Google CEO Larry Page abruptly killed the card launch plan after he was displeased with a glitchy run-through demo last week. He had long been skeptical of a physical card solution, with several sources saying he felt it did not press forward innovation as payments startups like Square have done.

And as those plans fell apart, Bedier, VP of wallets and payments, was pushed out of the company. Google confirmed the departure yesterday; it followed the internal shift of former local and commerce bigwig Jeff Huber to its Google X unit.

Today, the Wallet program is within Google’s ads and commerce division, run by SVPs Susan Wojcicki and Sridhar Ramaswamy. Of the two, Ramaswamy is the exec directly in charge of Wallet.

Another recent addition to the Wallet team is Nik Sathe, who joined at the beginning of this year after being VP of architecture and infrastructure at eBay’s PayPal unit, leading the online payments giant’s technology strategy. Google never announced Sathe’s arrival at the company, and did not reply to a request on Wednesday to confirm it.

Lauren Goode contributed to this report.

RELATED POSTS:

• Shoot the Moon: How Google Turned a Hodgepodge of Upgrades Into a Show of Strength
• Google I/O: Music, Maps, Messaging and More
• Larry Page Takes the Pulpit to Praise Technology, Snipe at Competitors
• Next Google Maps Update to Include Better Venue Search, Waze-Like Rerouting
• Google Gives Search a Deeper Voice and Adds Reminders and More to Google Now
• With Revamped Hangouts, Google Aims to Unify Messaging
• Google+ Gets a Bit More Pinteresting
• Google Chrome: 750 Million Active Users, Synchronized Web and Mobile Browsing
• Coming Soon From Google: A $649 Samsung Galaxy S4 Running Stock Android
• With Sights Set on Spotify (And Pandora), Google Launches a Music Subscription Service
• Google on Android: 900 Million Activations, New Tools for Developers Coming
• Google Doubles Down on Music Subscriptions, Which Means Google Isn’t Serious About Music Subscriptions
• Where Are They Now? Google I/O 2012 Edition.
• At I/O, Google Tilts Toward Android Services Over Android OS
• Google Downplays Expectations Ahead of I/O Developer Conference
• Will Google Deliver on Its Nexus Q Promise? Not at This Year’s I/O.
• Ahead of I/O, Google Wallet Drops Plans to Introduce a Physical Card
• Google Goes With Unified I/O Keynote (But Will It Unify Its Products?)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130510/googles-wallet-plans-for-io-cloud-expansion-on-but-longtime-physical-card-plan-scuttled/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130509/salesforce-acquires-bookmarking-startup-clipboard-for-more-than-10m/ http://allthingsd.com/20130509/salesforce-acquires-bookmarking-startup-clipboard-for-more-than-10m/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 21:58:42 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=320124 Salesforce has acquired Clipboard, a social bookmarking service that had built interesting hooks for saving rich Web content across devices, both companies said today.

The deal was worth between $10 million and $20 million, according to a closely involved source.

Clipboard had raised about $2.5 million in seed funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, CrunchFund, SV Angel and Betaworks.

So while the deal was a successful outcome, it could also be attributed to today’s “Series A Crunch,” where raising additional money is a challenge, said the source.

All but one of Clipboard’s five-person team will join Salesforce’s Seattle office, but they will be shutting down their own tools in favor of integrating similar functionality into Salesforce products.

Clipboard CEO Gary Flake is a respected tech research executive with history at Microsoft, Yahoo and Overture.

Clipboard told users about the shutdown today, saying the service would end on June 30 but users could download their data.

Calling the news “bittersweet,” the company disclosed it had 140,000 users over the past two years.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130509/salesforce-acquires-bookmarking-startup-clipboard-for-more-than-10m/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130509/kickstarter-we-dont-have-anything-against-celebrity-projects-cc-zach-braff/ http://allthingsd.com/20130509/kickstarter-we-dont-have-anything-against-celebrity-projects-cc-zach-braff/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 21:41:32 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=320098 The founders of Kickstarter today rallied behind celebrities who have been criticized for hijacking their open platform to serve a more privileged cause.

Why does Zach Braff need Kickstarter’s sympathy? Because the crowdfunding platform is beloved as a site that can turn independent passion projects into reality when fueled by the money and goodwill of fans and supporters.

So people get a little huffy when they see stars like Braff raise $2.5 million (with 14 days left to go) for his film “Wish I Was Here” that apparently could have been traditionally financed, if Braff had liked the terms. Or the “Veronica Mars” movie that raised $5.7 million on Kickstarter even though it was owned by Warner Bros.

Kickstarter, they say, is for the little people, not the celebrities who already have a whole industry built around them.

Braff, for his part, has gone on the defensive, saying in an interview posted on Mashable yesterday, “I’m making this movie for you and, ostensibly, with you. You’re coming along on the ride, you’re going to be a little GoPro camera on my shoulder experiencing how an independent movie is made … I owe [the fans] everything.”

But what about Kickstarter the company, which had previously gone out of its way to limit participation by hardware projects on its platform that might give people the impression that they are buying a product rather than supporting an endeavor.

Well, Kickstarter actually supports Braff, its founders said today in an open letter titled “Who is Kickstarter for?”

Kickstarter’s mission is to “help bring creative projects to life,” according to co-founders Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler. So the Zach Braff and Veronica Mars films qualify.

And second, celebrities have a halo effect for everyone else on Kickstarter. For this, they offered some numbers:

The Veronica Mars and Zach Braff projects have brought tens of thousands of new people to Kickstarter. 63% of those people had never backed a project before. Thousands of them have since gone on to back other projects, with more than $400,000 pledged to 2,200 projects so far. Nearly 40% of that has gone to other film projects.

And third, both of the celebrity projects in question were fully in the participatory, all-access spirit of Kickstarter. The Zach Braff rewards included attending premieres and Q&As that fans normally wouldn’t get access to; the Veronica Mars rewards included star Kristen Bell recording for fans outgoing voicemail messages of their choosing.

P.S. It’s not like all celebrity campaigns succeed; a would-be Kickstarter film from actress Melissa Joan Hart is currently only 2.5 percent of the way to its $2 million goal, with 16 days to go. It just recently added more interesting rewards in the style of the other two successful campaigns.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130509/kickstarter-we-dont-have-anything-against-celebrity-projects-cc-zach-braff/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130509/first-profit-top-score-from-consumer-reports-tesla-stock-surge/ http://allthingsd.com/20130509/first-profit-top-score-from-consumer-reports-tesla-stock-surge/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 14:36:19 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=319896 Shares of Tesla jumped this morning, driven by yesterday’s earnings and today’s glowing review from Consumer Reports.

The electric-auto maker’s stock is at $66.81, or up about 20 percent, after opening up even higher.

Yesterday, Tesla posted its first quarterly profit: $11 million on revenue of $562 million. That was earnings per share of 12 cents, when analysts had expected 4 cents per share.

Today, Consumer Reports gave the car a 99 out of 100 rating, equalling its highest score ever.

The trusted reviewer wrote:

“There, we said it. The Tesla Model S outscores every other car in our test Ratings. It does so even though it’s an electric car. In fact, it does so because it is electric …

“So is the Tesla Model S the best car ever? We wrestled with that question long and hard. It comes close. And if your needs are confined to the Tesla’s driving range, it just may be.”

Tesla is also heading in the right direction to hit promised margins by the end of the year. Yesterday’s earnings showed total gross margins of 17 percent, up from 8 percent. The company said it was aiming for 25 percent by the end of the year.

However, the company recently reformulated a promised resale guarantee for its Model S car that had used some funny math.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk will be speaking at our D11 conference later this month.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130509/first-profit-top-score-from-consumer-reports-tesla-stock-surge/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130508/donald-trump-launches-fundanything-a-kickstarter-clone-meant-to-bring-crowdfunding-to-the-masses/ http://allthingsd.com/20130508/donald-trump-launches-fundanything-a-kickstarter-clone-meant-to-bring-crowdfunding-to-the-masses/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 15:43:30 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=319406 Crowdfunding now has a celebrity mogul endorsement.

A new site called FundAnything from Learning Annex founder Bill Zanker launches today with help from loudmouth businessman Donald Trump.

Bill Zanker and Donald Trump

Trump’s approach will be to effectively trump the crowd by fully funding some FundAnything projects himself. He also committed to tweet new projects on a weekly basis — alongside his regular patter of political commentary, “Celebrity Apprentice” promotion and skirmishes with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart.

Trump said in a phone interview yesterday, “So many people need help, and this is a good way of doing it by helping very specific problems.”

He said his interest in crowdfunding came from this specificity. “It’s something different that it could be pinpointed.”

Yes, FundAnything looks just like a ripoff of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and Zanker is unapologetic about that.

“Crowdfunding got traction with creatives and tech, but you go anywhere but the coasts and they don’t get it yet,” he said. “What I’m trying to do is bring crowdfunding away from the Brooklyn hipsters and bring it to the masses.”

Look familiar? You must be a Brooklyn hipster.

At a launch event this morning at Trump Tower in New York, Trump plans to give away suitcases full of cash to someone who is raising money for her husband’s double lung transplant ($40,000), a children’s party business wanting to hold a weekend for kids impacted by Hurricane Sandy ($15,000), and a singer-songwriter from Nashville making an album and music videos ($25,000).

The event was supposed to be livestreamed, but I’ve just been told that technical difficulties will prevent that.

Trump described the fundings as his response to people feeling “bullied by the economy.”

Trump added that he had a long-standing relationship with Zanker after making speeches for the Learning Annex that drew crowds of 80,000 people. The two wrote a book called “Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life.” “We really have had great success together,” Trump said.

But the whole notion of crowdfunding is about peer-to-peer distribution of resources … right?

Zanker, who bootstrapped FundAnything with about $1 million, said that the startup wasn’t trying to be an elite site.

Non-Trump users will be encouraged to donate only to friends and family that they know until they feel comfortable, and will be promised a guarantee of up to $100 if a campaign turns out to be a fraud.

FundAnything will charge campaigns a 5 percent administration fee, or 9 percent if a campaign doesn’t meet its goal.

“We want to make it so we are the brand that everybody knows,” said Zanker. “There’s a wonderful way to pass the hat online, and nobody knows about it.”

For crowdfunding to become a multibillion-dollar industry, it needs more attention, he argued. “Bringing a concept to the masses takes star power.”

Asked what the Donald Trump brand stands for in this case, Zanker said, “It stands for money and it stands for luxury, for first class, for being proper. From ‘The Celebrity Apprentice,’ it’s about charity and it’s about building businesses.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130508/donald-trump-launches-fundanything-a-kickstarter-clone-meant-to-bring-crowdfunding-to-the-masses/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130508/to-avoid-a-revamp-backlash-hipstamatic-clones-itself-into-an-entirely-new-app-oggl/ http://allthingsd.com/20130508/to-avoid-a-revamp-backlash-hipstamatic-clones-itself-into-an-entirely-new-app-oggl/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 13:00:40 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=319319 Photography app Hipstamatic pioneered the square-shaped-and-evocatively-filtered mobile photo craze three years ago. And though Instagram’s free and social approach to the same form has been massively successful, Hipstamatic still has four million monthly active users who take 60 million photos per month, plus other projects like the iOS art magazine “Snap” and photostrip app IncrediBooth.

Scenes from my not-very-artistic Oggl feed: Hipstamatic CEO Lucas Buick on the office roofdeck and animal heads on display

So, what next? Rather than evolve the core Hipstamatic experience — you know, one of those overhauls that results in pissed-off users who liked your old product just fine, so please change it back — Hipstamatic is launching an entirely new app called Oggl. And, surprisingly, it has all the same functionality as regular Hipstamatic, but with a new interface and business model.

Most importantly, Oggl is also meant to be more of an artistic community than a photo-editing tool.

“We’ve never really cared where you post your photos,” said Hipstamatic CEO Lucas Buick on Tuesday at Hipstamatic’s fancy-dancy San Francisco office. He noted that splintered communities of people who use Hipstamatic to take pictures have naturally emerged on services like Flickr.

But creating an entirely new app for a Hipstamatic community is kind of a drastic move — and one that reflects the ongoing trade-off between change and users’ resistance to change.

Spurned after so many “pivots” by app makers that get rid of their favorite functionality in favor of spammy new features, we users now wield our #fail hashtags readily.

Companies — which need to evolve and change, even if they are succeeding, and especially when they are not — are trying to figure out how to deal. So Hipstamatic’s approach with Oggl is to relinquish its core brand and audience, built with years of work, in order to reshape what it already built into something new.

Buick noted that the changing lineup will give stability to existing users. “Hipstamatic Classic is still awesome,” he said.

(Still, the fresh paint and the swank office don’t erase earlier Hipstamatic hiccups, like staff layoffs made last year in an attempt to regain focus.)

Launching for iPhone later this week, Oggl is a free invitation-only app that will cost 99 cents per month or $9.99 per year to access the full library of Hipstamatic lenses and films. Oggl will feature a curated selection of photos, and users will be encouraged to share only their best work.

People who have been frustrated with Hipstamatic’s inflexible editing may be pleased to learn that Oggl allows users to capture first and edit later. Oggl also has a sparse navigation around various icons that looks neat but seems like it might take a while to learn.

Buick described mobile photography as a balance between making art and capturing life. So Oggl is perhaps not the place to post your daily breakfast, but if you happen to eat at one of the world’s great restaurants, go right ahead and make a pretty photo.

“This isn’t a place for duck lips, it’s not a place for your cereal. But we do want your French Laundry shots,” Buick said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130508/to-avoid-a-revamp-backlash-hipstamatic-clones-itself-into-an-entirely-new-app-oggl/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130508/healthtap-raises-a-more-than-healthy-24m-in-funding/ http://allthingsd.com/20130508/healthtap-raises-a-more-than-healthy-24m-in-funding/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 10:40:41 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=319316 HealthTap, the mobile medical Q&A app, has raised $24 million in Series B funding led by Khosla Ventures. The two-year-old company describes its service as a remote “triage” for health care, something that may become increasingly relevant with the advent of Obamacare (also in this vein — an upcoming concierge health care app called Better). New Khosla partner Keith Rabois is joining the HealthTap board.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130508/healthtap-raises-a-more-than-healthy-24m-in-funding/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130507/patreon-is-a-recurring-tip-jar-for-fans-who-love-everything-you-make/ http://allthingsd.com/20130507/patreon-is-a-recurring-tip-jar-for-fans-who-love-everything-you-make/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 13:57:00 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=318993 Kickstarter funding might be a good fit for an independent artist making a big project like a movie. But on YouTube, there are many creators who dribble out new projects as they make them.

For instance: Jack Conte of the band Pomplamoose makes intricate remixes, mashups and original songs where the videos are an integral part of the experience because they depict how it was made. With Pomplamoose or independently, Conte releases about one new item per month. Here’s his latest hit, a mesmerizing Daft Punk-Skrillex remix with about 2.5 million views:

Conte thinks it would be a better model for his superfans to support him by committing to pay for everything he does. Say, $1. This isn’t a recurring monthly subscription; it’s a Jack Conte subscription.

So he’s starting a new site, Patreon, that launches today, for himself and other artists.

Patreon users will be able set the terms of the perks they’ll give to patrons at various payment levels. (They pay a 5 percent cut to the platform, with payments handled via Stripe.)

On the one hand, Patreon is yet another spin on crowdfunding that really only serves one particular form of fan-artist relationship. On the other hand, Conte is exactly that guy, and he thinks there are many more musicians, short filmmakers and bloggers like him.

“On YouTube, there are now tens of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of followers each,” Conte said in an interview yesterday via phone from Sonoma, Calif., where he is based. “This is the burgeoning artistic middle class. It’s not a Bono or a Zach Braff, but micro-demi-celebrities. So, power and fame, instead of being in the hands of the few, is incredibly distributed.”

But wait a second, isn’t YouTube announcing its own paid subscription plans any day now?

That’s totally different, Conte said, because it’s likely to be for premium networks and channels rather than creators themselves. It’s a way for YouTube to try to cut a deal with a Disney or an HBO, not a Pomplamoose.

Conte argued that for independent artists like himself payments shouldn’t be mandatory; they should be an option. If he were to set up a pay wall, nobody would share his content. “The backlash would be awful. Talk about adding friction,” he said.

And, on the other extreme, Patreon probably isn’t a fit for major stars, Conte agreed. If Lady Gaga or Louis C.K. were to ask fans to pay directly per new release, millions of people might sign up, and the Kickstarter-like transparency of Patreon would show just how much money they were making per new video. And Conte thinks that would turn people off at some high number.

So is Patreon a tech startup? Conte — who built the site with ChompOn and OurSpot founder Sam Yam, who happens to have been his freshman roommate — said he isn’t sure yet.

“I’m not part of Silicon Valley and I don’t intend to be,” Conte said. “Not that I have anything against it. I have a succesful band with one million downloads on iTunes, so I’m approaching this from a fan perspective.”

Here’s a video of Conte explaining the Patreon model, and here is his own Patreon page:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130507/patreon-is-a-recurring-tip-jar-for-fans-who-love-everything-you-make/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130507/circleup-raises-7-5m-led-by-union-square-ventures/ http://allthingsd.com/20130507/circleup-raises-7-5m-led-by-union-square-ventures/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 11:30:27 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=318971 CircleUp — a company we’ve covered closely, given that it is one of the only crowdfunding platforms so far that legally helps people make equity investments in startups — has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by Union Square Ventures, and also included Google Ventures, Rose Park Investors and Maveron.

In its first year, CircleUp helped companies that make physical consumer products raise $10 million, ahead of the approved-but-still-not-yet-implemented JOBS Act, which would expand equity crowdfunding to a broader range of investors.

One notable aspect of the CircleUp investment is that lead investor Union Square Ventures has assembled an unusually dense portfolio around similar businesses that you might think would overlap too much. Other USV investments include Kickstarter, Lending Club, Funding Circle and Science Exchange.

“We like those models in almost every flavor they come in,” said Andy Weissman, the USV partner who led the investment and joined CircleUp’s board.

Which models, exactly? “It’s a peer marketplace matching up two sides of a transaction,” Weissman said. “It takes something very hard — raising money for consumer companies — and makes it more transparent and more liquid. That’s interesting regardless of the JOBS Act.”

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