Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of IP.Nexus 1.0.0!

The new IP.Nexus application is designed to help you earn money from your community both directly and indirectly. Direct options include features such as payment processing and shopping carts whereas indirect methods may be banner tracking and donations. Everyone here at IPS is very excited to introduce this new application and hope our customers will be able to take advantage of the variety of features in the product such as:

Introduction
Our first blog entry introducing IP.Nexus and a quick overview.

Developer Extensibility
Third party developers can easily extend the functionality of IP.Nexus into their own applications.

IP.Downloads Integration
Through integration with IP.Downloads you can charge your visitors for access to file downloads.

Package Types
Many package types including virtual items, physical items, recurring payments, and more.

Storefront
Easy to use storefront so your visitors can quickly order new products and services.

Processing Orders
Administration tools to make it easy for you to fulfill and review your orders.

Managing Invoices
Generate new invoices and keep track of pending invoices on existing sales.

Client Area
A single client area for your customers to manage purchases, submit support tickets, and purchase additional packages.

Donations
Set donation goals and allow your members to contribute to that goal right on your community.

Referrals
Your members can refer new members to your community via a referral link and receive commissions.

Credits
Assigning credits to an account either manually or through commissions allows a member to use their credit balance to purchase new packages or pay for renewals.

Support Desk Management, Support Desk Client Area, and Support Desk for Staff
IP.Nexus includes a robust support desk to manage interactions with your clients via a support-ticket system.

Alternate Contacts
Your clients can specify additional contacts who have the option to submit tickets and manage other account aspects on their behalf.

Incoming Email
Create support, sales, billing, and other contact email address that will route emails into IP.Nexus Support Desk

Customer History
Nearly every action performed on an account, from both your staff and your clients, is logged to provide a clear account history.

Advertisements
Expand the capabilities of IP.Board’s built-in advertisements feature by uploading banners, tracking, and more.

Customer Page
A detailed overview of a customer all on one page to allow you and your staff to easily service their account.

Server Requirements

As IP.Nexus deals with financial transactions we wish to do everything we can to ensure the security of your community and business. To further this goal, IP.Nexus source will be encoded using Zend Guard. This means that your server will need the appropriate PHP capabilities installed to run IP.Nexus. You can download our system requirements script which will check your server for Zend Guard encoding support.

Purchasing

You can purchase IP.Nexus right in your client area by clicking the green New Purchase button in the upper right corner. New clients can purchase IP.Nexus right along with IP.Board. If you an IPS Community Hosting client, the IP.Nexus features are coming soon to select packages (more information will be posted regarding IP.Nexus on hosting).

Don’t forget to try our free demo to see IP.Nexus in action for yourself.

If you have already purchased IP.Nexus, you can download it in your client area.

Version 1.0.1 Coming Soon

IPS is dedicated to promptly fixing any reported issues and will do so with the release of IP.Nexus version 1.0.1 very soon.

As mentioned in the release notes: because this is the first widely-distributed release there will be as yet undiscovered issues. You can expect several maintenance releases over the next several weeks. We appreciate your understanding and hope you can assist us in identifying any problems in this first supported release so we can quickly remedy them in our next updates.
IP.Nexus 1.0.0 Released

Causes, the startup that helps users leverage Facebook and other social sites to raise money for charity, has closed a $9 million Series C funding round led by NEA with participation from Founders Fund, Marc Benioff, Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, and Karl Jacob. Scott Sandell of NEA will join as an observer on the Causes board. Causes CEO Joe Green says that the company will be using the money to build out its team, including some senior hires (the company is currently seventeen people). Causes will also be moving from Berkeley, CA to San Francisco.

As we’ve recently reported, Causes is transitioning from living primarily as a Facebook canvas application to running off of its standalone website Causes.com, with social connectivity through Facebook Connect. This change, along with some other optimizations, led to a two-fold increase in the amount of money the site raises in donations from its ‘Birthday Wish’ feature on a daily basis — $20,000 a day, up from $10,000 two months ago. It raises money though other channels, too, taking in a total of around $40,000 in donations a day.

The company has also recently landed a deal that will put Causes gift cards in every Safeway and Vons location in California. After buying one of these gift cards, users can sign onto Causes.com and donate it toward the charity/cause of their choice. Causes earns revenue (it’s a for-profit company) by asking users for tips between 10-20%. Green wouldn’t disclose revenue figures, but says that Causes has 119 million installs on Facebook and has 25 million monthly active users.

Causes has now raised over $16 million, including a previously unannounced $5 million Series B round led by Case Foundation and philanthropist Ray Chambers’s MCJ Foundation, with participation from Founders Fund. That round closed in March 2008.

Causes Raises Another $9 Million To Help Spread Philanthropy Online

Causes, the startup that helps users leverage Facebook and other social sites to raise money for charity, has closed a $9 million Series C funding round led by NEA with participation from Founders Fund, Marc Benioff, Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, and Karl Jacob. Scott Sandell of NEA will join as an observer on the Causes board. Causes CEO Joe Green says that the company will be using the money to build out its team, including some senior hires (the company is currently seventeen people). Causes will also be moving from Berkeley, CA to San Francisco.

As we’ve recently reported, Causes is transitioning from living primarily as a Facebook canvas application to running off of its standalone website Causes.com, with social connectivity through Facebook Connect. This change, along with some other optimizations, led to a two-fold increase in the amount of money the site raises in donations from its ‘Birthday Wish’ feature on a daily basis — $20,000 a day, up from $10,000 two months ago. It raises money though other channels, too, taking in a total of around $40,000 in donations a day.

The company has also recently landed a deal that will put Causes gift cards in every Safeway and Vons location in California. After buying one of these gift cards, users can sign onto Causes.com and donate it toward the charity/cause of their choice. Causes earns revenue (it’s a for-profit company) by asking users for tips between 10-20%. Green wouldn’t disclose revenue figures, but says that Causes has 119 million installs on Facebook and has 25 million monthly active users.

Causes has now raised over $16 million, including a previously unannounced $5 million Series B round led by Case Foundation and philanthropist Ray Chambers’s MCJ Foundation, with participation from Founders Fund. That round closed in March 2008.

Causes Raises Another $9 Million To Help Spread Philanthropy Online

There’s a good chance you’ve seen prepaid credit cards on the shelves at 7-11, Walmart, CVS, Rite Aid, Radio Shack or a variety of other retail outlets. Those cards are usually issued by Green Dot, a Los Angeles based startup that went public earlier this year and is worth over $2 billion.

They allow people who normally can’t get credit cards – like teens and those with poor credit – a way to pay for things like the rest of us do, with a Visa or Mastercard. And people love them. The company made $64 million in profit in 2009 on sales of nearly $235 million. The company boasts over ten million customers.

That isn’t what makes Green Dot special though. You have to hear the story of the ten year old company from founder and CEO Steve Streit and early investor/board member Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital.

There were ups and downs, many of them, over the years. And we’ll have both Streit and Moritz on stage this morning at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about the good times, the bad times and, more recently, the exceptional times.

A few notes about the company taken from an investor presentation during the IPO process:

• Green Dot began its life ten years ago at a small table in the bedroom of my home in Pasadena, California. The idea was to provide MasterCard and Visa debit cards to people who otherwise couldn’t get a card from a traditional bank.
• Our first big innovation was creating a way for consumers to buy and fund a bank debit card right off the rack at a neighborhood store. The first card we ever sold was a so called “prepaid” MasterCard at a Rite Aid store in Loudoun County, Virginia.
• Now ten years later, Green Dot products are sold at roughly 50,000 retail stores coast to coast with a Green Dot location within a short walk of just about everyone.
• These locations along with our Green Dot website enabled us to acquire over 5 million new accounts and process over $7 billion in deposits to those accounts over the past 12 months.
• Our second big innovation was in 2004 when we created the first “cash reload network” where any prepaid card issuer- including our competitors- could have their customers go to a Green Dot retailer to load money onto their prepaid debit card.
• Today, over 100 prepaid card programs rely on our “Green Dot Network” for reloading cash- with over 25 million reload transactions sold over the last 12 months.
• Our third innovation, developed along the way to serve our expanding business, is our Green Planet technology platform that today serves as the “operating system” for how regulated bank issued debit cards are purchased, activated and reloaded at retail stores.

This is one of the companies that Mortiz is most proud of. He’s been with them since the early days and put $10 million or so into the company. Total investments from others accounted for another $8.5 million, and Sequoia invested additional cash to buy out some of those early investors.

By the time Green Dot began the IPO process Sequoia Capital owned over 30% of the company. It netted up to 35.2% at the closing of the IPO. Sequoia has never sold a single share in Green Dot, before or after the IPO.

So what’s that investment worth now? Roughly 35% of $2.1 billion in highly liquid public company common stock. By my count that’s about $700,000,000 in gain from a $10 million investment (plus another $10 or so put in to buy out other shareholders over time.

That’s a 35x on $20 million investment. That is what the big boys in Silicon Valley call a big fucking home run deal.

You may be familiar with other Moritz/Sequoia deals recently – Flip selling to Cisco for $590 million or so. And Zappos being acquired by Amazon for nearly $1 billion.

Those deals, which most VCs would kill for, don’t get Moritz out of bed in the morning. He expects every single company he works with to go for the big score – an IPO and a life an an independent public company. Zappos and Flip didn’t make it over the hump. Green Dot, by God, did.

Laws of awesomeness ensure that founders with the right level of intelligence, risk tolerance and patience can stay the course and get over the IPO hump. These are the companies that will forge the future of Silicon Valley and help spawn countless new startups down the road. We celebrate Green Dot and we celebrate Sequoia Capital for taking an idea and running with it, patiently, until they became a $2 billion company.

We, too, were too busy breaking news about Google’s most recent $15 million acquisition of meto.com, or whatever, to even notice what Green Dot was doing down there in the glitzier part of our state. Shame on us – this company is providing a low cost solution for people unable to get credit cards to be able to participate more easily in our economy. It’s a good thing.

Tune in around 9:30 am later today (Tuesday) to watch me interview Mike and Steve at TechCrunch Disrupt. You can watch the live stream here. It will be a rare treat to hear Moritz himself, a Silicon Valley legend, talk about how he helps companies through good times and bad, not selling a single share until well past the IPO.

To put it another way, getting the chance to listen to Moritz talk about how he does what he does is like being able to watch Michael Jordan play baskedball with you, one on one. You’ll want to be there as he dunks the ball hard a few feet over your head.

Green Dot: The $2 Billion IPO You’ve Never Heard Of

I’ve got to admit, the concept of “branded content” on the Web makes me cringe. It is generally used to refer to Web videos created and packaged specifically for an advertiser. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I like my videos created for the audience first, not advertisers. And yet, in the budding Web video industry, branded content is bringing in some serious dollars and even some serious talent.

There is a lot more going on here than advertisers bankrolling the production of their own videos because there isn’t enough professionally produced Web video to show their ads against (although that is part of it). The rise of advertiser-produced video entertainment is but a sign of a much larger shift that is happening as people consume more video on the Web. Advertisers love broadcast and cable TV because of its massive reach into every home. They are finding it nearly impossible to replicate that reach on the Web. The only way they can do it is by spreading ads across tens of thousand of sites through video ad networks.

Many of those video ad networks also create their own content for their own sites, but some are also starting to become broader video distribution networks as well. One of the biggest video ad networks that specializes in creating branded content is Digital Broadcasting Group (DBG). Last week, I met with COO Rick Kleczkowski, who told me about a few of the Web video shows DBG is producing, including the upcoming ControlTV, Built Green, and Family Versus Chef. We also got into a spirited discussion about why branded content seems to be taking over the Web, and whether or not that is a good thing. I ask him if guys like him are going to put guys like me out of business (see videos below).

DBG is one of the top 10 video ad networks in the U.S., with a potential reach of 167 million viewers (comScore), but the sweet spot of its business is producing Web TV shows with specific advertisers in mind, and then distributing it through its network of sites where they play in editorial slots rather than as in ad slots off to the side of the page. Some of these shows actually sound kind of interesting.

ControlTV will be directed by Seth Green, the guy behind the Robot Chicken animations on Adult Swim. An actor in his 20s will be the main character and the audience on the Web will be able to control his every move for 18 hours a day. It’s so We Live In Public, you kind of expect someone like Josh Harris to be behind it, not a video ad network. Whether or not it turns out to be compelling entertainment will depend on execution, but I can see the appeal. It will be shown on its own dedicated site, and DBG has already lined up Sprint and Ford to be sponsors (the main character will drive a Ford Fiesta and carry around a Sprint HTC EVO phone).

The other shows are Built Green and Family Versus Chef. Built Green will be a construction project and home renovation show focusing on green materials. It will be sponsored by Kohler, the faucet company. Family Versus Chef will be a cook-off show where a professional chef is paired against a home cook, and the judges have to rate each meal without knowing who prepared what.

I could imagine these last two on TV just as easily as on the Web. But if they were on TV, they would be created by producers at HGTV or the Food Network, not the advertisers themselves. The advertisers would just come along for the ride once the shows found an audience or because it fits thematically with their brand message. The difference is that TV can pretty much guarantee a minimum number of viewers no matter how bad the show.

On the Web, there are no TV networks. The new power brokers in video, other than YouTube and Hulu, are the video ad networks—companies such as Tremor and Break, and DBG. Advertisers like the video ad networks better because they give them more control over where their ads are placed. And if they can have shows created for them on spec, so much the better. They are more than happy to pay premium rates.

But will this produce good TV? (Do not doubt that sooner or later all TV will move online). Part of this is just early days, when advertisers can essentially have shows created for them just like at the dawn of the TV era. Eventually, though, new networks and talent will rise, creating TV with the Web in mind first. TV that looks great on your tablet computer and your flat screen TV.

Audiences can sniff out when branded messages are being pushed down their throats and will gravitate towards the good stuff. Smart advertisers and advertising companies already realize that and will separate the content creation part for the packaging and distribution part, and we will be back to where we are today with TV networks. The church and state between creative and money will be restored. But the TV networks will look completely different. These companies we see as nothing more than video ad networks could very well become the TV networks of tomorrow.

In the first video below, Kleczkowski describes the concepts behind some of DBG’s “branded content” shows. In the second, we talk about the rise of branded content and why it is happening. (Sorry for the audio quality, the video was taken on my iPhone in a loud New York City cafe).

The Attack Of Branded Content: Who Will Control TV On The Web? (TCTV)