fundraiser

Donate to tattoo your Twitter handle on this guy

Want more Twitter followers? Have you considered advertising by tattoo?

TechCrunch writer Drew Olanoff is selling some real estate on his body to the biggest giver. Whoever wins will get his or her Twitter handled permanently etched on the 33-year-old.

Olanoff is, until November 14, raising money to help research into children's cancers. He did it before in 2009, when the high bid and donation was $2,112 by Melanie Mitchell, whose handle was inked on Olanoff's arm.

In an astonishing twist, Olanoff himself was diagnosed with cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, after that campaign. … Read more

Silicon Valley big shots to pay $36,000 for dinner with Obama?

President Barack Obama will be the special guest at a dinner tonight in Silicon Valley that will cost attendees a sizable sum to brush shoulders with the commander in chief.

Details on the dinner party and how much it will cost attendees have been mixed. However, the event is scheduled to take place at the Atherton, Calif., home of Lisa and Doug Goldman, well-known Bay Area philanthropists. According to reports, attendees will pay $35,800 for a ticket to the event. The Mercury News reported earlier this month that President Obama's campaign will receive $5,000 of that contribution, … Read more

iPhone-compatible 'smart watch' raises $100K in two hours

The concept of Pebble's "smart watch" is simple -- a clean interface running useful apps and wrapped in a fashionable watch interface. The key to Pebble's inevitable success will be its apps.

According to its Kickstarter page, the Pebble E-Paper Watch will ship with the capability to run several apps using some of the functionality of your iPhone or Android smartphone via Bluetooth connection.

For example, bikers can get information about their speed, distance, and total time by using the GPS capabilities of their connected smartphone. Runners will also get a similar functionality.… Read more

Obama's staffers to use Square mobile in fundraising

It's no secret that President Obama is a fan of technology.

Just this past month, he joined Instagram, visited Intel to discuss high-tech manufacturing jobs, made plans to have a Google+ video chat with voters, and his wife, Michelle Obama, joined Twitter.

Now, he is beginning to use Square mobile to process his re-election campaign donations, according to Politico.

Obama's headquarters staff, field organizers, and volunteers will all be given Square mobile credit card readers, which will let them receive campaign donations through their smartphones.

"The rollout will happen nationwide, and involve staff at all levels," … Read more

Small charities get TLC from mobile mentors

A new network employing mobile devices and social networks wants to make it easier for small charitable organizations to raise the money they need to help their causes.

MobileCause, a Web service for nonprofit fundraising in the social-media age, has launched a new mobile mentor program, One by One, in an effort "to increase mobile philanthropy and provide essential mobile tools free-of-charge to smaller nonprofits."

According to MobileCause's stats, of the more than 1.5 million established nonprofits in the United States, more than 50 percent raise less than $500,000 a year from donations because they don't have the budget to cash in on a diversity of fundraising tools in the Information Age.

So, MobileCause will provide an online, mobile giving setup allowing large and medium nonprofits to support a charity of their choosing. The hope is that mentoring and support will provide hundreds of early-stage and smaller charities access to various mobile solutions they couldn't use previously. … Read more

Is our children learning? Geeks make sure they is

SAN FRANCISCO--The "gospel according to Goldberg." Turns out it can't be found in a local synagogue, Jewish deli, or Rube Goldberg device, though a couple of us puzzling through treasure hunt clues Saturday night were stubbornly stuck on those ideas.

If you're thinking more along the lines of churches and singing nuns, we want you on our team next year.

The Goldberg gospel was just one hint in the Tech Search Party, a semi-geeky scavenger hunt set in San Francisco's Noe Valley and organized to benefit the neighborhood's Alvarado Elementary School, which needs a technology boost. One-third of the classrooms there don't have working computers; many that do work are held together with duct tape, according to Tim Smith, the event's creator.

About 250 people descended on the normally quiet little Noe with flashlights (or flashlight apps) to solve as many clues as possible in two hours and score prizes like Geeknet gift certificates, Electronic Arts games, a date with Kara Swisher of AllThingsD (PR teams only), and, of course, bragging rights.

Smartphones were essential to the endeavor, as Web searches were needed to decipher clues like "cost $45,499 in year of Beverly Cleary's birth" (answer: the San Francisco Library in Noe, which was built in 1916), or 1:3.226 (answer: the grade of the steepest street in San Francisco: 22nd between Church Street and Vicksburg).

My team, the "Noe-it-Alls" (a runner-up for best team name, I might brag), joined 50 other teams with names like "Several Sassy Sleuths," "Is Our Children Learning?" and "Indominable Immersion Mamas" (Alvarado offers language immersion programs).

On hand were family and friends of Alvarado students; random geeks who learned of the event via Twitter or were recruited from lines for the Google and Apple commuter buses that swing through Noe Valley to take employees to work; candidates for San Francisco supervisor; and even Tyler Hinman, winner of the 2009 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. The "Scribble Monkeys" team included CNET's Rafe Needleman of Webware fame and former CNET.com Editor in Chief Steve Fox.

My team consisted of Tom and Rayna, parents of Alvarado students and owners of a Palm Treo and Motorola Q, respectively; Jonathan, who brought along his semi-functional Motorola Razr from 1913; and me, with my little ol' Samsung Alias 2. Needless to say, Rayna and Tom did the Web searching. … Read more

PGP, IBM help Bletchley Park raise funds

A campaign will be launched on Tuesday to ask U.S. tech companies to help save Bletchley Park, whose wartime work helped lay the foundations of modern computing and crytography.

The fund-raising campaign will be led by cryptography provider PGP, together with IBM and other technology firms. Phil Dunkelberger, chief executive of PGP, told ZDNet UK in a video interview that the group of companies would be making donations to repair the buildings at Bletchley Park, including the National Museum of Computing, and would be calling for other organizations to get involved.

"We're calling attention (to the fact … Read more

Campaign 2008: Small Internet donations add up

Small donors are having a significant impact on the amount of money that the Republican and Democratic candidates for president are raising. The Internet, providing the tools for grassroots activists to self-organize and conduct "p-commerce" by giving political money online, has clearly contributed to this.

The interesting story after six months of presidential fund-raising is that some candidates, notably Barack Obama, are doing much better at reaching small donors than others.

In a July 3 CNET post on what the Internet has done for presidential campaign fund-raising, I wrote, "the story technophiles should celebrate and fear how … Read more

What the Internet Has Wrought: Presidential Fundraising '00, '04, '08

As the Republican & Democratic presidential candidates report their fundraising numbers after two quarters, there are lots of stories to tell. What's one of the really amazing stories? It's not that Clinton the Democratic "frontrunner" raised about $10 million less than Obama the "challenger" in the last three months or that McCain the Republican "frontrunner" is in third place in fundraising for his party. (Well, those are pretty neat.) The story technophiles should celebrate and fear is how the Internet has enabled such an extraordinary, incredible, surprising increase in dollars collected compared … Read more