King is the founder of HopeMob, a nonprofit crowdfunding site dedicated to supporting charitable causes, organizations, and individuals around the world. HopeMob primarily funds smaller scale, focused projects and provides direct aid to recipients instead of just wiring money. Despite the proliferation of crowdfunding platforms, King felt that too many people remained underserved because they did not have the tech or social media savvy to wage effective campaigns.

“We founded HopeMob to fill holes that we saw in the crowdfunding space,” King said in an interview with VentureBeat. “I don’t see our competition as other crowdfunding sites, I see it as the ills of society that cause people harm and prevent them from living their best life. A lot of people with compelling stories are totally blocked on other sites and this is often because if you don’t already have a crowd, you struggle to raise money. We flipped that on its head by building the community first around the idea that when generous strangers come together, we can get a whole lot done.”

HopeMob’s community is now 150,000 people strong and has funded over 100 campaigns, ranging from $400 for a medical procedure to $100,000 for victims of Hurricane Sandy. Before campaigns go live on the site, they go through a series of steps to make sure they are legitimate, as well as presented in the best possible way. HopeMob verifies stories that goes through the system by asking for references, conducting interviews and researching on social media. The fact that campaigns don’t receive money, but rather the actual aid they need, also weeds out disingenuousness. For example, a teacher raising money for her school receives the specific textbooks or water purifiers she needs and a cancer patient may have her bills paid for her, rather than getting a check to do it herself.

Once HopeMob approves a campaign, the user can ask for help building a compelling profile. King has extensive experience leveraging social media to achieve goals and built that into HopeMob so that if someone goes to the trouble of posting a campaign, they have a better chance of reaching their goal. Before founding HopeMob, King raised millions of dollars for the relief and recovery after the earthquake in Haiti, largely through social media, and he realized that bringing together social good with social media as “his calling.” He went on to launch an auction site called TwitChange where people could bid on the chance for celebrities to mention them on Twitter.

Along these lines, King launched Upfront today, an online community for influencers and their devoted fans. King said that the “value of fully engaged celebrities in a platform” is huge. Upfront provides opportunities for influencers to communicate with their fans through messages, photos, videos, emails, unreleased music, status updates, and live-streaming of events. Access is available on s subscription basis and a percentage of every transaction completed on Upfront goes into the Upfront Foundation to support causes they believe in.

King has played a number of roles through his life, including victim, teacher, pastor, community organizer, social media consultant and entrepreneur. He is driven by the desire to empower the downtrodden, and believes in the power of social media (and the influential people using it) to rally support for charitable causes.

Brenner and Lein are the founders of Tumml, a new ‘urban ventures’ accelerator program that empowers entrepreneurs to solve urban problems. Eighty-one percent of Americans are now living in cities, and yet many entrepreneurs and investors are hesitant to get involved with companies focused on improving city life. Brenner and Lein conducted a survey of entrepreneurs from around the country to assess their pain points.

“At the same time that more people than ever are living in cities, the fiscal climate means that cities are less able to provide certain services and quality of life,” Lein said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Entrepreneurs can shoulder that load. There is such a market opportunity here. This is where entrepreneurship should enter, there is so much they could do. We were curious why more entrepreneurs are not stepping up to fill the gap.”

The investigation yielded some interesting results. Lein, who has a background in political and community polling, said that even after normalizing for demographic factors, entrepreneurs working on urban problems are less than half as likely as traditional entrepreneurs to receive seed stage funding. These companies often work with physical products and services and need physical space. For example, a city bike share or a new waste management system can’t just start running with the same ease that software can. In many cases, they require permits and paperwork to avoid conflict with municipal regulations.

Another challenge is expansion. Every city has different people and a different set of bureaucratic hoops to jump through. Brenner said entering new markets involves fighting new battles each time and relying on government workers who “hold [the entrepreneur's] fate in their hands.” All of these challenges make urban impact startups less attractive to investors.

Tumml will help early-stage companies address these challenges by providing $20,000 in seed funding, work space at The Hatchery in San Francisco, a three-and-a-half month curriculum that teaches entrepreneurs how to navigate these issues, legal support, and a network of mentors that includes civic and government leaders, investors, and successful urban-impact entrepreneurs. Participants include executives from B Lab, Airbnb, Revolution foods, the former deputy secretary for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, the General Manager of San Francisco’s Recreation and Parks Department, San Francisco’s Chief Innovation Officer, as well as the mayor’s offices in San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

The duo reached out to cities that prioritize technology and innovation, since working with government can be one of the biggest obstacles urban impact entrepreneurs face. Tumml is not for companies that are trying to sell to government or even work alongside government, like Code for America. Rather, Brenner said, it is trying to find innovators to augment what government can do.

“There is not necessarily a place for entrepreneurs to go right now when they want to solve a problem in their own backyard,” she said. “We want to be the place that addresses those needs, and create a meaningful pipeline of urban impact entrepreneurs to prove that these companies have the ability to succeed, and people have the ability to shape our cities in important ways.

‘Urban impact’ is a board term that can mean anything from collaborative consumption/shared economy ideas to alternative transportation systems. Applications opened earlier this month, and a large number of applicants have public policy and urban planning backgrounds. Ultimately, they share the common goal of strengthening communities and making people feel more connected to their neighborhoods, whether that is through food or safety efforts.

The deadline for applications is April 30, and the first cohort begins in June. Brenner and Lein expect to take five companies into the first class, depending on the quality of the appliance. Tumml is a non-profit organization that is philanthropically backed. Donors include Accela, Nixon Peabody, and the Blackstone Charitable Foundation, and MIT is on the board. Tumml will take a small portion of equity to be held by the non-profit trust, and in the event of liquidity, that money will go right back into growing the program and hopefully supporting more urban impact entrepreneurs.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

While volunteering at an orphanage in Ecuador, former Amazon executive David Risher came across a padlocked library. When he asked the orphanage’s leader why it was locked, she said that the key was lost, the books were out of date, and the children were uninterested in reading. That’s when Risher decided to set out to make books more accessible to people in the developing world.

He founded Worldreader in 2009, a nonprofit organization that puts Kindles and electronic books (e-books) in the hands of children and their families. Today, WorldReader expanded its program by launching a mobile application that will deliver e-books to millions of people around the world.

“Worldreader has this crazy vision that every child on the planet should have access to the books they need to improve their lives,” Risher said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Mobile phones are the way people in the developing world stay connected and learn about the world around them. This is an opportunity to have an enormous impact on education in these parts of the world.”

Fifty percent of schools in sub-Saharan Africa have few or no books, while the USAID found that nearly ever home in sub-Saharan Africa has access to at least one mobile phone. Worldreader Mobile is designed for low-end feature phones most commonly used by people in Africa and Asia. Users download the free app and have access to a library of 1,200 books, ranging from romance novels to health textbooks.

Feature phones don’t high processing capabilities and usually operate on slower 2G networks. Furthermore, users cannot afford to spend a large amount on data. The new mobile program takes all of this into account. Worldreader partnered with BiNu, a platform that improves Internet connectivity on mass-market phones, to develop the app. All the data processing happens in the cloud, rather than on the phone, and the data is compressed so people do not rack up high charges while reading.

After months of beta testing, Worldreader Mobile is already on five million feature phones around the world. The organization has over 500,000 active readers a month, and they spend 60,000 hours reading on their phones. In January alone, people consumed roughly 17,000 books on their mobile phones. Risher said the biggest mobile market is India, with 106,000 users, and that the app see use from teachers caregivers, siblings, parents, and children.

Risher formerly served Amazon’s senior vice president for retail and marketing. After leaving Amazon, he took a trip around the world with his wife, their two daughters, and two Kindles, which were just coming to market. Growing up, Risher spent hours at the library and went on to major in comparative literature at Princeton. Reading has always been his passion, he said, and many of the opportunities he had were a result of having books in his hands.

“We heard there were 200 million kids in sub-Saharan Africa with no books,” he said. That is a whole generation of children who are growing up in a world with no culture of reading. Publishing, printing, and shipping books is expensive and books are often out-of-date. But beaming books into kids hands over a cell network should be easy.”

The first Worldreader program began in Ghana in 2010, which distributed e-readers to 20 students. Worldreader works with publishers around the world including international companies and small local publishers alike, to distribute their content, and the digital library includes over 440,000 e-books. This mobile program is a significant step for the organization because it does not require procuring and delivering devices, but works with the technology people already own. It will greatly expand Worldreader’s reach and scale and make books of all kinds and subject in the hands of those who need them most.

“Worldreader is a combination of my pragmatic and romantic vision,” Risher said. “It was opportunity to take technology and put it to a higher use. As I look at my own background, loving books and working at Amazon, it was a way to tie it all together and find a way to change world that taps into my passion and skills.”

 Photo credit: Worldreader

Watsi is a crowdfunding platform to fund medical treatments for people in need. People all over the world are dying of treatable illness because they don’t have access to basic medical care. Projects include helping a Kenyan woman relieve a gastric outlet obstruction or a Guatelaman widower cure a urinary dysfunction. The cost can be as low as a few hundred dollars and backers can donate as little as $5. One hundred percent of donations directly fund these treatments.

Y Combinator learned about Watsi through a post on Hacker News. YC founder Paul Graham said he had entertained the idea of including a nonprofit before, and this was the perfect fit.

“After about 30 seconds of looking at the site, I realized I was looking at one of the more revolutionary things I’d seen the Internet used for,” Graham said in a blog post. “Technology can now put a face on need. The people who need help around the world are individuals, not news photos, and when you see them as individuals, it’s hard to ignore them … I’ve never been so excited about anything we’ve funded.”

Unlike other companies at the event, Watsi is not fundraising. Instead, they are accepting donations for treatments and tips to support operating costs. Adam said Watsi is pioneering what it means to be transparent, and this model is working because the platform is growing an average of 30 percent week-over-week. Adam said donors are funding medical treatments faster than they can find patients.

Since participating in YC, Watsi has scaled from working with one small clinic in Nepal to working with 13 of the largest medical organizations in the world. It has gone from funding an average of three patients a week to 17.

“Its blows my mind to think if Watsi didn’t exist, this 12-year-old girl wouldn’t live to see her next birthday,” Adam said about the first child to receive treatment through Watsi.

Data startup SumAll has established a foundation to use its resources, expertise, and equity for the greater good. The objective of SumAll.org is to collect, visualize, and present data to help nonprofit organizations tackle global issues. Instead of making a donation or spending $100,000 to build a school, SumAll allocates that money to hire engineers and data scientists.

“We wanted to make doing good a central part of our company,” said VP of analytics Korey Lee in an interview. “We thought we could reach farther and make dollars stretch more by leveraging our core skill set, which is understanding, analyzing, and providing insights with data. This way, we can help 100 charities better achieve their goals and raise more money.”

SumAll’s core product is a “connected data” platform that marketers can use to make informed business decisions. Following an oversubscribed funding round in November, every employee offered up 10 percent of their equity. The company sold $500,000 worth of shares to form SumAll.org. The foundation’s first initiative was to collect data about the human trafficking and the global slave trade.

This first report on human trafficking uncovered some pretty shocking information. Twenty-seven million individuals worldwide, including children, are held against their will, and the global median cost per slave has not changed much from the 19th century. Slavery is still a prevalent problem, and one that intimately affects Americans even if they are unaware of it.

“There is not a lot of information about this topic out there,” Lee said. “We thought it would be challenging, and we wanted to shed light on it. A lot of the data we found was locked up in PDF reports and long research papers that few people will read. We are making it available in a digestible fashion to bring transparency and efficiency to the non-profit sector.”

Part of the overall vision is to help nonprofits better understand their data, helping them achieve their goals. In his 2013 annual letter, Microsoft founder-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates drove home the importance of metrics in development- ”I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition,” he wrote.

SumAll’s foundation is a part of this idea, that setting concrete goals and tracking progress, can enhance individual, organizational, and governmental abilities to enact positive change. Gates is the most well-known example of the successful-entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist, but he is not the only one. Many people who strike it rich in the corporate world donate money to good causes, and many businesses support charitable programs. However, this startup is taking a unique approach by interweaving its day-to-day workflow with efforts at international development.

“Everything we do to build the company also builds our foundation,” said Lee. “As we prosper, we can help nonprofits prosper. We hope other companies will model themselves after this and it will change the way people think in the corporate world. People care about these issues, but there is a lack of resources allocated to it.”

True to its vision of turning data into actionable information, SumAll has partnered with organizations working to combat human trafficking. To learn more and get involved, visit FreeTheSlaves.net, PolarisProject.org, or WeAreThorn.

SumAll is based in New York, New York, and has raised $7.5 million from Batteyr Ventures, Wellington Partners, General Catalyst, and Matrix Partners.

Check out the infographic: Read the press release.

More than 1.2 million donors contributed to this campaign, which ran in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. The foundation said that its most successful 24-hour period for donations brought in nearly $2.4 million. Last year, it took 46 days to complete.

This was the foundation’s ninth annual drive. The fundraiser takes place each year to keep Wikipedia and its sister projects alive and free. These funds pay for software upgrades, hiring editors, maintaining the infrastructure, and the ad-free user experience. The money also supports the foundation’s efforts to deliver information to people in the developing world, who often access Wikipedia articles from feature phones on less-than-strong mobile networks.

This financial support is, of course, vital to sustaining Wikimedia’s work. In a statement, the foundation not only thanked the donors but also the volunteer contributors that “are the heart of the world’s largest encyclopedia.” To highlight their efforts, the Wikimedia Foundation is now conducting a “thank you campaign” to showcase some of their stories. This campaign starts today and includes a Malaysian botanist, an electric engineer from South Africa, and a U.S. Air Force veteran-turned-fly fisherman. You can watch their videos here.

This landed in our tips line this morning, and really, how could we not write it up?

Come4.org is a not-for-profit porn site that takes all the glorious ickyness of online porn and channels it toward the greater good.

Here’s how it’ll work: Each video clip on the site will be associated with a specific cause. The Come4 spank bank will feature amateur videos as well as professionally produced erotica, and users can upload their own clips, as well. The site will serve ads and sponsored videos from adult brands, including sex toy stores; that revenue will be used to fund the causes.

If you think about it, the Come4 premise makes a lot of sense. In terms of web traffic, online porn sites are third only to Google and Facebook; Come4′s founders say porn is a $100 billion market. Yet while we spank and buzz our way to self-satisfaction, people around the world go without life’s necessities: food, clean water, shelter, medicine, education, etc.

So why not crowdsource a little free pornography and use the money we spend on it to help those in need?

Here’s a video from the founders explaining what it is and why they think it’ll work:

“The tech is well-known. It is the idea that is disruptive,” wrote co-founder Riccardo Zilli (pictured above) in an email to VentureBeat.

The founders also acknowledge the flawed nature of porn itself, saying on the site that most online porn “fosters a one-dimensional perspective that is often fake, violent, macho-centered, and in many cases barely legal.”

The first cause Come4 will tackle is the Asta Philpot Foundation, an organization that raises awareness about the rights and issues (including sexual issues) faced by disabled people.

Future causes will be selected based on a few criteria, such as whether they provide cost-effective solutions to real problems and whether the Come4 community supports the cause. The organization will also give special consideration to organizations that support and defend individuals’ sexual rights and raise awareness around violations of those rights.

To date, the Milan-based company has raised just a bit more than $4,000 through crowdfunding on Ulule.

Ferriss is all about impact. His #1 New York Times Bestselling books “The 4-Hour Workweek” and “The 4-Hour Body” deal with achieving maximum results in the most efficient way possible. In 2010, he channeled this ethos towards fundraising for charitable organizations by initiating his Give-Back Birthday campaign.

This year he chose Vittana as his cause of choice, a non-profit startup that raises micro loans for students through crowdfunding. The deadline is tonight at 11:59 pm PST, and Ferris will match every dollar given up to $60K. At the time of publishing, the total was at $94,822. Just over $5,000 to go.

Vittana gives loans to students in developing countries who are seeking to further their education. The emphasis is on one additional year of training that provides specific skills and trade development.

“The difference between basic literacy and being able to put in an IV needle, write a couple of lines of HTML, weld a metal joint, or speak English is profound,” said CEO Kushal Chakrabarti. “It’s a shift from farming in a cassava field to standing in front of a classroom filled with students. I can’t overstate the incredible economic and emotional transformation that occurs.”

On average, Vittana students see a 3x increase in income and have a 99% success rate paying back their loans. It achieves significant results with a small amount of time and money- the Tim Ferriss way.

Ferriss joined Vittana as an advisor last month after meeting Chakrabarti at an event. After hearing about the organization’s ability to turn a micro loan into a lifetime of benefit, he hopped on board and brought over 700 of his followers with him.

Chakrabati was formerly a software engineer for Amazon.com and described Vittana as a non-profit that “thinks like a tech company”. He tapped into Silicon Valley’s resources while fundraising and received money from Google and a team of angel investors.

With these investments, Vittana has grown to 22 programs in 12 countries and has sponsored over 4,000 students. The average loan is between $25 and $50, and users can search by multiple parameters depending on their interests. Some donors may only be interested in funding women, while others may focus on a particular country. Chakrabati chooses to funnel his loans towards aspiring teachers and programmers.

“The story you hear over and over again from parents is that they work so hard so their kids have a better chance at life,” Chakrabati said. “$4 of additional income a day, 365 days a year, for the remaining 40 working years of life is powerful.”

Chakrabati estimates that the $100,000 raised through the Give-Back Birthday will lead to $12 million in total impact.

charity:water has already brought clean drinking water to 2 million people around the world and is supported by some of technology’s biggest names including Sean Parker (Napster), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Marissa Mayer (Google), Dennis Crowley (Foursquare) and Michael Birch (founder of social network Bebo). So how did charity:water conquer the tech world?

Harrison spent 10 years working in the nightclub industry in New York. “I got paid to fill up nightclubs with beautiful people and sell them very expensive drinks,” he recalls. “After 10 years of that, on a trip to Uruguay, I took a look at my life and realized that I would never be happy chasing the things I was chasing. There would never be enough girls. There would never be enough money. There would never be enough status. I started reading the New Testament and theology, and I’m in Uruguay hungover, so this was an interesting push-pull. It was a debauched vacation where we were drinking Doms (magnums of Dom Perignon) every day. So I came back and I couldn’t throw these parties with any joy anymore. I made a deal with God that I would make my life 100 percent the opposite.”

Never one for half measures, Harrison volunteered as a photo journalist with Mercy Ships (the only NGO that would accept him), which operates a fleet of hospital ships in developing nations. “I thought I would be able to use those photos to bridge the gap between this new life and the 10,000 people on my nightlife list, ” he explains. Aged 30 and back in New York, he started charity:water to bring clean water to some of the billion people in the world who lack access to this basic necessity.

charity:water now has 4,282 water projects all over the world from Bangladesh to Bolivia. A network of 25 experienced partners in 19 countries actually implement the projects. “Many of them stink at fundraising and telling their story, so that’s where we come in,” comments Harrison. Access to clean water doesn’t just reduce levels of disease but also frees up large tracts of women’s time (women and children usually collect water) and improves the economic situation of the poorest households.

Projects use a variety of technologies, since there is no single solution that suits every situation. Some projects protect existing natural springs. Others filter water using biosand, harvest rainwater or rehabilitate existing wells. Donors can see photographs and GPS coordinates for each project on Google Maps.

Harrison didn’t just want to provide clean water; he wanted to reinvent charity. “When I talked to people about giving, there were so many excuses,” says Harrison.”They didn’t know where their money would go, and they didn’t know the impact it would make. Those were two solvable problems. The first problem was solved through the 100 percent model (100 percent of donations from the general public go directly to water projects). I found a group of people who would fund staff and operations. There is now a group of 81 such investors.” Other  ”investors” are Michael Birch, Sean Parker, Matt Mullenweg (the founder of WordPress) and Jason Fried of 37signals.

The Dollars to Projects feature tracks every dollar though the system. Every three months, charity:water sends a batch of money out. It is tracked for the next 12 months while the implementation partners are digging and drilling. The partners create a report, charity:water audits that data and presents it back to the donor. “Even if you only have $4, you can see where those $4 ended up,” says Harrison.

He also wanted to build a brand. ”To solve a problem this big, we needed to create an epic brand, an aspirational and transparent brand.” says Harrison. “So many charities seem to market guilt. We tell a story of opportunity. We needed to present the problems, the solutions and the joy that results when those solutions are implemented, in beautiful ways.”

Technology entrepreneurs got involved early on. “I wanted to spread my birthday idea (giving up your birthday presents and asking friends and family to donate instead) through social media so I googled the top five social networks, one of which was Bebo.

“I wrote Zuckerberg. I scraped Michael Birch’s (founder of Bebo) address and shot him an email in the dark. I got an email back saying ‘Wow that’s a really cool idea’ but the timing was bad and he couldn’t really help at the moment. Some months later, he was passing through New York and we met. A couple of days after the meeting, he wrote me an email saying ‘I’ve wired $1 million to your account’”.

Others followed. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey gave up his 33rd and 34th birthdays for the charity. Investor Chris Sacca and Spotify’s Shakil Khan visited Ethiopia to see charity:water’s projects there. ”In many ways we are a startup and a tech company, except that I have no equity and there is no exit.” Harrison claims. “Our shareholders are 65-year old women in Africa who walk three hours to get clean water. We are raising 73 percent of our money online. We are up 80 percent in a sector (charitable contributions) which has been falling. The bigger we get, the more people we can help.”

The charity’s latest initiative is WaterForward, a brainchild of Michael Birch, which is an online book filled with the faces of people helping to end the water crisis. Each slot in the book costs $10, and 100 percent of that money goes to charity:water. You can’t put yourself in the book. Someone else who is already in the book has to sponsor you with a $10 donation. Once you’re in, it’s up to you to pay it forward. WaterForward has raised $175,000 so far.

One consistent problem with water projects in the developing world has been maintenance. Wells are built, then fall into disrepair after the NGO that builds them moves on and the locals don’t know how to fix them. Harrison is now looking at innovating in this area. ”We are piloting a mobile mechanics project in Ethiopia where locals visit all the local projects and bring back data. We have funded women entrepreneurs in India [who] go and rehabilitate water projects. We are working on giving cell phones to women in these villages and incentivizing them by topping up their cell phone minutes to text us data on the water project, as simple as ‘Water is flowing’ or ‘Water is not flowing’.”

I ask Harrison about his plans for the future. He says “We’d like to help 15 million people get clean water by 2015.” Not many have that in their business plan.