July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

An online petition urging Verizon to ditch its wireless contracts is gaining momentum.

Verizon customer Mike Beauchamp made the case for “an affordable way for consumers to purchase their devices” on online petitions site, Change.org. Since launching on April 5, his petition has already received 90,000 signatures and over 800 comments.

Beauchamp, a Verizon customer from Wichita, Kansas, said he was inspired to start the petition after reading an article citing Verizon’s CEO Lowell McAdam saying it would be “pretty easy” to eliminate contracts. McAdam reportedly hinted at a recent conference that customers should start asking for it and the message would be received.

“We needed a way to collectively be heard, which is far more powerful than individually asking Verizon’s customer service reps,” said Beauchamp in an interview.

To subsidize the high cost of smartphones, wireless carriers are requiring customers to switch to long-term contracts, essentially locking them in for a period of two to three years. Customers that choose to transfer to a different network face hefty fines — up to $350, according to Verizon’s termination policy.

Contracts have received widespread resistance from customers, so T-Mobile recently announced that it would shake up its payment model to eliminate contracts.

Verizon has not responded to Beauchamp’s tweets and phone calls. When asked for comment, a Verizon spokesperson would not offer any further information beyond this prepared statement: “Verizon Wireless has for years offered many different choices for customers, including contract plans or month-to-month plans that do not require a contract.”

Still, Beauchamp remains confident that Verizon can’t ignore a direct request from thousands of its customers. ”I don’t know how many signatures we’ll need — maybe it will be 500,000 or we’re nearly there — but I know we’ve already caught their attention.”

If the network ultimately yields to popular pressure, this wouldn’t be the first time.

In late 2011, a petition started by a young nanny, Molly Katchpole, pressed Verizon to stop charging people a convenience fee to pay their bills online. 166,000 people signed her Change.org petition, and in under 24 hours, Verizon caved. Cynthia Butterworth needed to cancel their shared cell phone contract so her sister’s abusive husband couldn’t track her phone calls. Verizon said it would cost $500 to end her contract, but after she received 194,000 signatures on an online signature, the company changed its policy.

“On two separate occasions, they’ve have successfully pushed Verizon to overhaul its policies in response to consumer outrage,” said Charlotte Hill, a spokesperson for Change.org, who said it’s “in the realm of possibility” that Beauchamp’s campaign will succeed.

Despite his grievance with contracts, Beauchamp won’t consider an alternative carrier. He believes that Verizon has other networks like AT&T and T-Mobile beat on reliability and service. As a result, many of its policies, such as the convenience fee or a recent decision to extend the wait time for an upgrade to 24 months (up from 20 months), have not been customer friendly.

Beauchamp believes that Verizon customer’s won’t stray, even if they’re offered more freedom and flexibility to switch networks — so long as Verizon continues to offer the most reliable coverage.

He cites one of the most popular comments on the Change.org petition from a customer in Tampa, Florida: “As a Verizon customer, I also don’t believe in contracts. If a company’s service is superior to others, people will remain loyal.”

Dulski started her career by founding a nonprofit — an academic program to help poor kids in urban Pittsburgh go to college and break the cycle of poverty in their lives. She left and went to business school when a tech-savvy woman on her board told her about a new company just starting out called Yahoo.

“I fell in love with the internet in the early 90s,” she told me in a telephone interview. “So I went to b-school, got my degree, and started at Yahoo when only 400 people were working at the company.”

After 10 years in various roles at Yahoo including VP and general manager of local commerce and VP of Yahoo Autos, Dulski left for another startup: DealMap, which built a local deals aggregation service. While it had its ups and downs, DealMap grew very quickly. Quickly enough that Google snapped up the company in 2011 —  with Dulski – after luckily failing to acquire Groupon.

Source: LinkedIn

Jennifer Dulski

“I spent a year and half at Google leading product teams for the shopping and ads group,” Dulski said. “It was a big and exciting year as Google Shopping transitioned to a commercial model, and I grew that business substantially for Google.”

Dulski first heard of Change.org in April of 2012 when the parents of Trayvon Martin posted a petition to prosecute their son’s killer, whom police initially failed to charge. Almost 2.3 million people signed that petition, and Dulski was one of them.

“I worked with kids very much like Trayvon in Pittsburgh,” she told me. “I felt very passionate about kids in those situations … what they face every day. And as soon as I saw the Change.org petition I went to sign it.”

When she became a Change.org user, Dulski started seeing many more petitions and was inspired by them, and by the site that made collective action on social justice and other issues possible — and effective. One of the petitions that also influenced her was initiated by three high-school girls in New Jersey who successfully convinced 122,344 supporters — and the powers that be behind the presidential debates — to end a “20-year drought” on women moderators of presidential debates.

“I was inspired by the company long before I got the call from the recruiter,” Dulski told me.

Now that she’s at Change.org, Dulski is planning to continue to grow the company … and continue to “pay it forward” for other women leaders. She already mentors women in executive roles in various Bay-area technology companies, and is part of a program with Young President’s Organization in which all the chapters have started an “Albright Angels,” cohort, focusing on developing women angel investors who are working with companies with female CEOs. Change.org has set up a women’s mentorship program as well.

For the site and services that Change.org offers, Dulski’s planning to expand its international expansion and drive the company to be able to continue to support rapid growth and scaling.

“We have 25 million users around the world,” she said. “Today when I walked in, our traffic is exploding as we’re hosting a big petition in Spain in which people are asking for presidential pardons. My role will be to help us really scale so we can continue to make the site fast and useful.”

And, she said, to listen to the site’s users and make the site “universally useful” to drive change at all levels … including for women leaders.

Image credit: Cornell

In the crowds at major Apple stores across the U.S. for the new iPad were a few people who were decidedly out-of-place: protestors who wanted to remind the shoppers about “unethical” working conditions of the Chinese laborers who make Apple’s products.

Apple has attracted criticism for treatment of workers at the Foxconn plants that manufacture iPads, iPhones, and other popular items. Factory workers receive little pay and work very long hours to make these products. Foxconn and Apple opened their factory doors to ABC News, but the report felt lightweight in its treatment. Foxconn factories also produce products for other big electronics companies such as Nokia, Microsoft, Sony, and Motorola.

At the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York, first time launch protestor Charlene Carruthers from Change.org told VentureBeat that Apple CEO Tim Cook has not done enough to address the alleged hardships of Chinese laborers.

“We want Apple to release a clear strategy on how they plan to treat workers,” Carruthers said. “Apple is based around innovation, so in this case we want them to ‘think differently’ about how they treat workers.”

Carruthers and a few others held up a large sign (see above) and attracted interviews from several media outlets. The online petition she was there to support now has more than 250,000 signatures.

At the Market Street San Francisco Apple store, a dozen people from Change.org stood in front of the iPad line handing out fliers and holding a large banner covered in comments taken from the online petition. Volunteer William Winters said what the protesters want is “an iPhone or iPad that doesn’t have blood in it.”

While the protesting could be viewed as commendable, the throngs of Apple fans clamoring for a new iPad didn’t seem phased as they shuffled by toward the front door of the Apple store.

You can see more photos of today’s iPad launch in the gallery below:

Protestors photo: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

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