A growing crop of Silicon Valley startups are finding ways to make money and make a positive impact.

Change.org is one of the most successful examples. The company generates revenues through its cause-based ad model (last year it brought in about $15 million), and is arming ordinary people to strike out against perceived injustice. “If you show them that their voice matters, you can radically change behavior,” founder and CEO Ben Rattray said in a recent interview.

Change.org CEO Ben Rattray

After months of testing, Change.org is ready to launch a new revenue model that is geared to consumers, not organizations.

If you’re perusing the site and come across a cause that is particularly close to your heart — anything from a plea to Verizon to nix contracts or a campaign against Twitter to ban “thinspiration” hashtags – you can pay to promote the petition.

“This is what our users wanted,” said Jennifer Dulski, Change.org president and COO in an email interview. Dulski said the team is consistently asked how supporters and petition-creators can promote their campaigns to more people.

Organizations already have the ability to sponsor petitions, which is the primary way that Change.org makes its money. It’s not disimilar to how Facebook asks brands to pay to promote posts on the company page.

San Francisco-based Change.org has grown to 35 million registered users around the world, and its petitions often garner thousands of signatures. Generally speaking, the more signatures a petition receives, the more likely it is to catch the attention of the press and/or key decision-makers.

Related: Change.org CEO Rattray will speak at HealthBeat, our San Francisco-based conference on May 20 & 21, on the topic of consumer-driven health care reform.

By targeting consumers, the team expects to pull in steady revenues in smaller dollar amounts. Contributions are capped at $1,000 per user per petition, but beta tests found that 98 percent of contributions were under $100. During the test period, a total of 5800 people contributed to promoted petitions.

Change.org’s ad-based business model has been critiqued in the press. Clay Johnson, author of “The Information Diet” told the Wall Street Journal he has “huge problems” with the site as it is a “lead-generation business disguised as a social-change organization for whoever is willing to pay them for the email addresses.”

But Change.org is proud of its B-corp status; Rattray recently told me that unlike most non-profits, the company can afford to hire the best talent.

Has Change.org crossed the line between change-making and profit-making? Leave feedback in the comment section below. 

Images at Change.org office // Christina Farr

GoodData is a privately-held company, but that’s not stopping it from crowing about its revenues — to a point.

The business-intelligence service provider (aka cloud-based big data company) plans to announce tomorrow that its first-quarter revenues in 2013 were three times bigger than the same period a year before. The company isn’t saying say exactly how big those revenues are except to note they are “double digits.”

We got a peek at a few more numbers:

• GoodData has increased its total number of customers from 8,000 at the end of Q4 2012 to 10,000 at the end of the first quarter.
• Also in that period, it closed seven annual contracts worth $250,000 or more.

But that’s as far as its quarterly disclosures go. There were no specifics about any other performance metrics from the quarter.

GoodData may be warming up for the kind of quarterly earnings disclosures that it might do at some future point as a public company — and founder Roman Stanek has stated his intentions for an IPO in the past. But it’s a pretty limited warmup for now.

This much we do know: The six-year-old company has raised $53.5 million to date in several rounds of funding, and employs about 200 people. Its headquarters are in San Francisco. And it’s really hard to find art to illustrate business intelligence or big data, which is why we are giving you this photo of small and big Datas.

Photo credit: JD Hancock via photopin cc

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July 9-10, 2013
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Early Bird Tickets on Sale

You know the old story about statistics and liars, right? Statistics lie, and liars use statistics, or so the old saw says. There’s a good reason for that: Statistics are so damn easy to lie with.

Even when you don’t mean to.

Yesterday morning I posted on App Annie’s report that Apple’s app store revenues grew only 12.9 percent in 2012. And yesterday afternoon I posted — after Apple contacted me and disputed the story — that, actually, app store revenues had increased perhaps as much 200 percent in 2012.

Guess what: They’re both right. Bring out the gee-tars and let’s sing Kumbaya.

How can that be, you’re asking? Here’s the short version, based on a conversation with App Annie this morning, and reams of additional data the company sent me. Essentially, it boils down to the fact that Apple and App Annie are looking at the numbers from two different perspectives. Apple’s numbers are based on a historical perspective: growth from year to year to year. When you view the numbers that way, there’s significant and real buildup:

App Annie’s numbers — and specifically the 12.9 percent — were based on 2012 data only: growth of app store revenue from January to October. Very specifically, this is what App Annie was saying, and what CEO Bertrand Schmitt told me this morning:  “iOS’s October 2012 monthly revenues were 12.9% higher than their monthly revenues in January 2012.”

App Annie will be posting an update to its report shortly, which will more clearly specify exactly what the company was measuring and will include the following caveats:

Amazon has launched a full frontal assault on Apple’s new iPad mini.

The massive online retailer is not just comparing the Kindle Fire HD with Cupertino’s latest. It’s not just saying ours is better than yours. And it’s not just hiding its message under the proverbial bushel. Amazon is using its home page — perhaps the most valuable digital real estate on the planet — to absolutely ambush the iPad mini.

Source: Amazon

Amazon’s front-page attack on Apple’s iPad mini

This is not just trash talking. This is in-your-face dialed up to 11, fist in the face, calling Apple out, dropping the gloves and saying “let’s go.” And gadget blog Gizmodo is helping, in a way.

Amazon is using a quote from Gizmodo to help drive home the point:

” … your [Apple's] 7.9-inch tablet has far fewer pixels that the competing 7-inch tablets! You’re cramming a worse screen in there, charging more, and accusing others of compromise? Ballsy.”

Amazon is hitting Apple where it hurts: the display, the dual speakers, and yes, most of all, the price, the price, the price. It’s what we said when we first saw the iPad mini: light, portable, awesome, expensive. And it’s the difference between a company that makes money on the device — no points for guessing Apple, people — and a company that sells hardware at cost so that it can make money on content sales.

Razor, meet blades.

Truthfully, it is also the tale of a company that makes money hand-over-fist – still no points — and a company that makes less than nothing on $14 billion in sales.

The issue is perhaps not so much whether Amazon is freaked out by the iPad mini as whether it is freaking out with joy, amazed to be handed a potential marketing coup on a platter. And it’s one that, if Apple had started its pricing at $250, as the rumors had at one point indicated, would be a tougher sell.

The real question, if you’re an Amazon shareholder, is whether Jeff Bezos can ever turn the biggest digital marketing platform on the planet into a content cash cow. Or, when he wants to.

For Apple shareholders, of course, the question is whether Apple’s legendary brand, its content and apps ecosystem, and its industry-best quality, fit, and finish are enough to overcome a $130 price gap.

photo credit: Dunechaser via photopin cc

As popular ticketing startup Eventbrite moves slowly toward a likely IPO in the next year, the company’s financial situation appears strong with more than doubled revenue in 2011, the company has revealed exclusively to VentureBeat.

This has been quite a week for Eventbrite, as the company just announced Wednesday that it has issued its 50 millionth ticket. During 2011, the number of events posted on Eventbrite doubled from 222,353 posted in 2010 to 458,207. The number of tickets issued almost doubled as well, from more than 11 million to nearly 21 million.

I was able to speak to Eventbrite founder and CEO Kevin Hartz about what has been happening as of late with the company. While he was coy about strict details, he was able to reveal that the company’s overall revenue more than doubled in 2011, a fact the company has kept under wraps until now and one that solidifies a strong position of growth on the financial side.

Eventbrite makes its money by charging $0.99 per ticket processed and taking a 2.5 percent cut of each ticket. Companies and individuals that use Eventbrite also are charged a 3 percent credit card fee, meaning anyone who uses the service keeps about 93 percent of ticket sold.

Hartz was an early investor in PayPal, so Eventbrite’s model of charging a small fee per ticket makes quite a bit of sense. And it’s working: As event coordinators realize Eventbrite charges less than both Ticketmaster and rival startup Ticketfly, larger organizations are approaching the company for ticketing. Recently, the Governor’s Ball Music Festival in New York City (featuring Beck, Passion Pit, Modest Mouse, and more) opted for Eventbrite over other options. We should also note that we’ve used Eventbrite for some VentureBeat events and it has worked smoothly.

Coupled with the company’s huge $50 million funding round last May, the news that it has doubled revenue means it is almost certainly inching its way toward an IPO in the next year. Hartz admitted that the company has set “internal goals” for moving in that direction, but because it has “close to $60 million in the bank” it was not a rush. He did, however, disclose his philosophy on IPOs, saying, “An IPO is just another funding round.”

Hartz said the largest driver of traffic to Eventbrite was Facebook, as the company has taken advantage of social networking as an opportunity for encouraging others to attend events. The company also has ties to LinkedIn for business events.

Eventbrite’s plans to launch its first translated products in French-speaking Canada, France, and Spain, all of which will happen by the end of March. And of course, as soon as we hear more on its IPO plans, we will let you know.

Concert crowd photo: Nikola Spasenoski/Shutterstock

Japanese game industry revenue fell 8 percent in 2011, due primarily to a lack of software hits and a steady decline in a major console game sales.

Famitsu, a well-respected Japanese video game magazine, is reporting the decline in revenue. Hardware sales were actually up 2.4 percent thanks to the Sony PlayStation Vita and the Nintendo 3DS which were released last year. However, software sales fell fell 13.7 percent to way below the average from a year before. This marks a string of years in which the Japanese video game market has seen a decline, according to andriasang.com.

While Japan relies on Sony and Nintendo for its gaming needs, the Xbox 360 is still the odd man out overseas, which continues to hurt the Japanese game industry as a whole. The remodeled Xbox 360 and its newest peripheral, the Kinect, are both hits and have had a huge effect on the American market. However, in Japan, the Microsoft machines seem to be an oddity. That makes the market dynamics look a lot different from the western world.

While the western market continues to grow and have a stronger, more stable market in place, Japan may continue to see stats like this in the future.

Here’s are the top hardware sellers:

Nintendo 3DS: 4,135,739

PSP: 1,960,177

PlayStation 3: 1,467,261

Nintendo Wii: 937,451

Nintendo DS: 711,204

PlayStation Vita: 402,794

Xbox 360: 114,075

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