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Web 2.0 - Monday, May 21, 2007

Honolulu's P2P Fund Raising Widget Chipin Says Aloha To Angels

Honolulu-based Chipin acknowledges that it is on its third business model since founding the company it launched in May of 2006. It launched as an online money collection service. The original service enabled users to organize small amounts of money collection for gifts or group lunches. A Chipin user would invite others to chip in for the event; and then use the site to collect and distribute the money.

At launch, The Hawaii Business Journal get a bit over-heated in describing the startup: "The initial concept became the impetus for a dot-com startup with the potential to be not just Hawaii's – but the world's – hottest tech phenom in recent memory."

The Journal got it wrong as the launch of the business however, was killed by spam attacks. Thanks to spam filters, less than half the emails sent out, inviting people to chip in to events, were ever even opened.

In October 2006, the Chip-in site not only went dark but they canned their next version knowing that it would fail as well. The company founders brainstormed for almost 2 months and came up with version 3 - fund raising widgets.

For its seed round of funding, which closed in mid-January 2006, ChipIn secured $200K from two small angel groups. CommerceNet founder angel investor Marty Tennenbaum also invested.

Chipin competes with Carebadges and with change.org widgets.

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