Tycoons Row

The Year 2007 will be the year of the Widgets. The successful companies will take their widget and consistently innovate, improve, and make sure that there widget is scalable and will grow with the times. ChipIn, founded in early 2006, is one such company that is staying innovative and will be successful. ChipIn provides a web-based service for users to collect money. The process not only to sign up is easy, but also to use it is simple as well. It boasts a 3-step process of: 1.) Create - Create an event to collect funds, 2.) Promote - embed your Chipin widget on your site or use your Chipin page (ie: yourpage.chipin.com) and 3.) Collect – Collect funds through your social network. The great thing about ChipIn is that allows you to customize an event and allows anyone to collect money for a personal cause, fund-raiser, campaign, emergency, etc. I find this service very useful for when groups of friends go out, they can all Chipin for a night out on the town. Monies will go instantly to a Paypal account and can be transferred/withdrawn instantaneously.

Chipin is also great given that the company, as a 3rd party collector, seeks to not only make the service easy, but also make it secure. The bytecode of the widget makes it difficult to copy. This will hinder others from copying your widget and making it fraudulent or susceptible to phishing scams. Other security features include authentication using encryption keys and SSL. An additional way to make your widget secure is to add an element of uniqueness. Chipin also provides customizable backgrounds, you can add Flash movies and additional content panels.

Chipin is headed by Carnet Williams, an entrepreneur who hails from Stanford. Additionally, he serves as an Associate Dean at Stanford Law, and is a Founder of two additional companies, Netcorps and Boardtactics.com.

One interesting point about ChipIn is that they do not put advertisements on the site to generate revenue. Their theory is that they provide a valuable service to event/cause organizers. The company just recently changed their model in regards to fees. They will continue to charge NO fees to an organizer that collects money to their Paypal account. ChipIn will charge, however, a 3.9% fee to cover the credit card acceptance fees and administrative overhead. Lastly, ChipIn has streamlined some of their business processes by not sending out checks. Printing, stamping, and licking envelopes was just too much time and money.

Overall, ChipIn will become a great service. If they stick to the values they state, as creating a great service. Overall, if the system is that valuable, it may wise to take on advertising as another way to generate revenue for the company, rather than changing their fee structures every year to include another “added” fee.