MVNO veteran PlatinumTel is launching a new carrier brand called GIV Mobile Wednesday, separating it from the pack not by offering unlimited data, selling app-specific plans or implementing bandwidth sharing features. Instead GIV is playing the role of charitable fund-raiser. You don’t just sign up for a voice and data plan. You sign up for one or more charities such as the American Red Cross or the Alzheimer’s Association. GIV claims it will donate 8 percent of your bill to those selected charities each month, or up to $50 per year per customer.

Of course, it might seem easier to cut a check for $50 to your charity choice rather than build your mobile service around the idea of giving. But GIV seems to targeting the same segment of the population that latches onto to charity vanity credit cards, which donate a small portion of every purchase to a customer’s organization of choice, rather than award points or miles. By allowing customers to divide their giving between multiple charities GIV acts a bit like a donation box; it aggregates a bunch of tiny gifts from individual consumers into one big check.

The MVNO is offering customers dozens of initial charities to choose from, ranging from animal welfare groups to environmental causes to disease research (you can see a full list here). Every six months GIV will take submissions from its customers for new charities, and then those same customers will vote to name one new organization to its roster each period.

As for the actual mobile service, GIV looks like many of the new breed of smartphone-centric prepaid MVNOs popping up. It offers two plans both of which have unlimited voice and text, both of which use T-Mobile’s network. The $40 plan includes 250 MB of monthly HSPA+ data before speeds are throttled, while the $50 plan includes 2 GB of data. There’s still new word on what phones GIV will sell starting tomorrow, but it will support any GSM phone that works on T-Mobile’s network for customers who just buy a SIM card.

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Up until now, all projects had to originate in the U.S. though it was possible for projects to be funded by anyone around the world. The main limitation was Kickstarter’s use of Amazon Payments , which was until last year limited to the U.S. Kickstarter relies on Amazon Payments because it allows for instant charging when a project meets its goal and cancels pledges immediately if it fails.

With the geographic expansion beyond U.S. shores, we should start to see similar quirky success stories on the other side of the Atlantic. I asked Kickstarter for more information about its international plans but a representative declined to comment.

Kickstarter has proven to be a game-changer for a lot of creators and gadget makers. Last year, users pledged $100 million to projects and by May of this year, the platform had received $250 million in pledges overall. Though it started out as a funding mechanism for artistic projects, the platform now supports a number of projects in the design and technology categories. Success stories like the Pebble smart watch, which raised more than $10 million, have helped demonstrate Kickstarter’s potential in getting hardware projects off the ground and even helping developers build software platforms.

People in the UK will be able to launch projects on Kickstarter starting this autumn! More info soon! <3 <3 <3—
Kickstarter (@kickstarter) July 09, 2012

The crowd-funding service unveiled a new stats page last month, breaking down categories by successful and unsuccessful projects. To be sure, there are still a lot of projects that don’t make it on Kickstarter and my colleague Michael Wolf has a good analysis of what works and doesn’t. It’ll be exciting to see what other creators around the world can do with Kickstarter in their corner. There are other crowd-funding mechanisms but Kickstarter has such a big audience and a track record for success that it offers a huge boost to people who can figure out how to use it to its fullest.

As co-founder Perry Chen explained to GigaOM in May, he wants to see Kickstarter go from being cool to just being an important tool that anyone can use. Going global will certainly help with those plans.

You start from being something that works really well and is cool. That’s what makes people want to use it. Then you ride that for a little bit, knock on wood. Then at some point this magical thing happens where you become a utility. You’re like Wikipedia. You’re like CraigsList. That’s really where we want to take this. We want people to understand very simply how Kickstarter works and how they can use it. It’s just a utility out there on the web.

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The company — which now has major presence in Geneva, London and San Francisco — is best known for investing in European internet businesses like Skype, MySQL and Lovefilm. But over the past few years it has expanded its presence elsewhere too, with significant moves in San Francisco, New York and Tel Aviv.

It’s three years since Index last raised an early stage fund, which was around the same size.

Partner Neil Rimer told me that the new money would be invested in around 35 companies over the next three years — linking up with entrepreneurs at the very beginnings of their business, and (where possible) following them all the way to an exit.

“In terms of where the rubber meets the road in our business, it’s really early stage,” he said. “It’s meeting two guys with an idea and an early version of the site and deciding to help them. This is our core, this is really what we do.”

Europe remains a focus for the company, not least because Rimer recently railed against ‘defeatist’ European companies who shied away IPOs in London in favor of New York. His argument centered around the idea that this created a vicious spiral in which the fact that few successful tech IPOs happen in Europe causes to discount going public in Europe.

So will he be making sure that Index’s European investments stick by their guns?

“It definitely struck a chord,” he said. “When I called people defeatist, they thought I was calling them wimps — but I’m calling myself a wimp too: unless we fix this thing, we’re being defeatist. We can’t just assume that all of our great companies, all of this work will go into enriching American investors, and all of our great companies will move to the U.S.”

Index’s focus will remain on areas where it is already active: things like fashion, marketplaces, big data and knowledge. And the money is already starting to be distributed, so keep your eyes out for new funding announcements coming soon.

And what about long term vision? Venture capitalists have investors of their own to worry about — and getting returns on €350 million is no small feat in an industry that many say is broken. So what’s Index looking for this time?

“The best funds return between three and 10 times the fund, and sometimes more than that,” he said. “We’re shooting for 10x.”

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So credit Swedish startup Mancx for trying something different.

The Stockholm-based company — which is today announcing a $1.65 million round of financing from Swedish backers Almi Invest and Chalmers Innovation Seed Fund — has spent the past year developing a twist on the traditional Q&A formula: it’s a service where people can get paid for giving answers.

The idea is that there are some questions that people would happily pay money to get the right answer to, rather than wade through huge swathes of opinion or commentary, like many free Q&A rivals.

“We’re targeting the premium segment of information that people won’t give away for free,” says co-founder Henrik Dillman. He suggests that the potential is substantial. “Stack Exchange is one of the best Q&A sites out there, but even it has over 600,000 unanswered questions. If five or 10 percent of those people were willing to pay for the answer, that’s big.”

The site works much like any auction site or marketplace: people post questions and suggest the price they’d be willing to pay to get a good answer. Those who think they can provide a solution place their own bids in the auction, and the asker gets to pick the winner (people can also offer answers for free if they want). There’s a money-back guarantee in case the answer is no good, and a reputational system in place to try and prevent people from gaming the service.

“It’s a big challenge,” admits the site’s other co-founder, Mattias Guilotte, of the need to make the reputation system work. “Once you have information, you have it — you can’t take it out of somebody’s brain.”

I’ll admit I am skeptical of the concept working long-term, purely because the internet drives down the value of information — something we have seen time and time again. But the duo insist that they are making headway, and they’ve got some pretty strong data behind them. Riding on the back of LinkedIn, the site has access to more than 600,000 users, and currently has 10,000 ongoing questions on site.

But here’s the real killer: people are paying serious money already. Right now the average transaction, they say, is worth around $150, and it’s going up over time.

That’s partly because there’s a community — mainly centered around marketing and sales — that places a high value on the answers they get. And the team plans to extend that opportunity by pushing hard in new communities and new countries, using the new funding to first open an office in San Francisco, and then targeting India and China. Put it all together, they say, and the opportunity here could be significant.

“Around 300 million people turn to Q&A online each month, but low quality answers are a big problem,” says Dillman. “It’s a big shift from three or four years ago, when people expected everything should be free.”

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Three years in, Kickstarter has become two distinct businesses, said co-founder Yancey Strickler. The company was originally conceived as a patronage service to help artists give life to ideas. But it’s now becoming a store front where products are getting pre-ordered and sold, helping entrepreneurs gauge real-world demand for products.

Speaking at the Wired Business Conference Tuesday, Yancey recounted the success of the platform, which has grown to $200 million in contributions, 22,000 successful projects and 2 million backers. Now, 44 percent of projects meet their goal. While the growth is dizzying, the evolution of the platform has also been a challenge, said Strickler.

While 95 percent of the projects are still artistic projects–film is the largest vertical–the design and technology categories now represent 5 percent of all projects and 15 percent of all money raised. Increasingly Kickstarter is known for selling gadgets including the Pebble smartwatch that has raised more than $7 million. Fueling this kind of direct commerce wasn’t the original goal of Strickler and co-founder Perry Chen, but it’s what Kickstarter has become.

“As a business we have a sense of what Kickstarter is, but other people have different ideas of what it is,” Strickler said.

Kickstarter’s evolution is a function of the open nature of the platform, which for its first two years had very little instructions on how creators and investors could use it. We’re starting to see some people try to take advantage of that to push scams. Strickler said even now, Kickstarter is not doing much screening beyond ensuring that creators are starting finite creative projects that pass their rules. He said Kickstarter is proving that it’s really about tapping the community and that anyone can use the service to raise funds if they engage with an audience.

But he said that investors need to be aware of the limitations of using Kickstarter as a retail store. Pledging money down doesn’t necessarily mean that users are guaranteed to get a product.

“My concern is they’re buying something that doesn’t exist yet,” Strickler said. “It’s not like the Pebble guy has a warehouse in Ohio. He has to make these things.”

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Started by Brits Stephen Chandler and Jos White, who sold their messaging security company Messagelabs to Symantec for around $700 million in 2008, Notion says it has already deployed a fund of $50 million — and is now expanding with the backing of Britain’s Enterprise Capital Fund and the European Investment Fund.

And flying high on the IPO of social games company Zattikka, which Notion invested in two years ago, the venture firm says it’s ready to start putting that money to work.

I caught up with partners Chandler and White to find out more. Here’s what they told me:

The fund has a deliberate, narrow focus

“We focus on the B2B space — that’s where our pedigree is,” said Chandler. “We’re really excited about the opportunities. The consumer space can be exciting, but business are prepared to pay for technology, whereas consumers expect to get most things for free these days. In B2B it may take longer, but you can build a real business with revenues and customers.

White says that ideally they are looking for companies that can disrupt or digitize an existing area of business.

“We’re very interested in business process — that sounds boring, but take financial services like invoicing or currency exchange: these are services that have been traditionally delivered by banks and there is room to disrupt them. Marketing automation is also something we’re really interested in — something delivered via the internet rather than through an agency.”

And there are specific requirements

Many of the investments are likely to be in the series A range, around $2 million, but Notion is prepared to back companies with up to $15 million in series B and C rounds.

“We break it up between SaaS and infrastructure, and we’re more focused on SaaS because it’s our background and it’s less capital intensive,” said White. “We like to see recurring revenues, products that are available on a subscription basis, ideally with some customers who are quite sticky.”

But there will still be seed money available

… even though it won’t be the focus of the team’s investments.

“Our model is not to do hundreds of investments, it’s to work very closely with founders,” says Chandler. “And that strategy will continue. We do some seed investing, but it’s not film script stuff — we like to see working prototypes or very early products. Our focus is really on series A investing, but we still have an allocation for seed. “
The group

It’s not just public sector money

The announcement made play of the fact that there was money from the British and European governments going into the fund — but in fact there is actually much more private cash going in. That includes around $10 million from the Messagelabs founders themselves (their previous $50 million fund was entirely self-financed) and from a number of private individuals. However, said Chandler, the public money was very important.

“At the moment institutional investing is an important part of the ecosystem that’s pretty quiet,” he said. “It’s a challenging fundraising environment, and the public sector has done a good job of stepping into the gap.”

Big data, big exits

White gives a hint at the sort of investments Notion plans on making when he tells me he’d have liked to back DataSift, the U.K.-based service for interrogating Twitter.

“It’s a really interesting business, and big data is really interesting to us: being able to understand and interpret large amounts of data is really valuable,” says White. “We were disappointed that they felt they had to go to the U.S. for money — but we hope to do some deals like that ourselves.”

Part of the problem, they suggest, is that Europe isn’t necessarily hunting down big exits for companies — the sort of deal that they secured for Messagelabs, or valuable public flotations.

“The tendency in Europe is to be pre-occupied with protecting the downside — people are almost embarrassed about chasing big exits,” says White.

“And not cashing out too early,” adds Chandler. “European investors often take their money off the table too early on.”

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Now the company is cranking it up a notch, with a fresh injection of funding of $32 million that’s aimed at turning it into the site the rest of the world uses to do business.

The investment, headed by the French Sovereign Wealth Fund, Allianz, Jefferies and a number of Middle Eastern funds, also includes backing from existing shareholders like Idinvest and Ventech.

In particular, there is a lot of focus on Tianji, its Chinese operation, which is already the biggest network of its kind in the country, and growing fast.

Here’s the blurb:

Viadeo’s success is based predominantly on its “multi-local” approach to Professional Social Networks, which focuses on leveraging and honoring the local language, business and culture of its members. This strategy has allowed the group to be very successful in emerging markets. In China, for example, Viadeo’s subsidiary Tianji has seen tremendous growth in the last year, going from 100,000 to 500,000 new users per month with a total member base of 10M.

“We’re a global society where critical business connections span multiple languages, geographies and cultures,” said Dan Serfaty, CEO, Viadeo. “We have always been laser-focused on our ‘multi-local’ approach, which goes beyond simple translation and focuses on catering to, and understanding the business and cultural needs of each market. This approach has awarded us tremendous growth and success in both European and emerging markets.”

Viadeo, which we identified as one of the European startups to watch last summer, has been consistently profitable since 2009 and bought a number of smaller, rival services on its way.

This latest move is a confirmation of the company’s change of direction: it had originally considered going public itself last year, but decided to put that scheme on ice in order to focus on expansion on fast-growing emerging markets.

With that in mind, the money will be useful, but the strategy is more important. How will it compete with LinkedIn — which will surely come under increasing pressure to expand its global footprint now that it’s a public company? And will it be using the cash to build, or to acquire?

I should be speaking to CEO Serfaty later this morning to get some answers.

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Earlybird, the VC that moved all its operations to the city last year in response to the frenzy of activity there, has just announced a $100m first close of its new venture fund for European tech and internet startups — and is targeting an overall fund of $200m, with an emphasis on German-speaking countries.

As the 15-year-old firm points out, Berlin is now second only to Silicon Valley in terms of tech startup founding rates. According to Earlybird partner Ciarán O’Leary, the German capital may even catch up at some point.

“Silicon Valley will always be Silicon Valley but Berlin is a city where change and creative destruction is part of its DNA,” O’Leary told me. “If the startup scene focuses on nurturing that, it will become just as good a place to start a company, but for different reasons.”

Whereas the Valley offers proximity to Stanford and Google, Berlin is a city that’s constantly in flux.

“Everybody’s new and fresh, so they’re super-open. They’re sucking up ideas, and teams are forming up. Berlin founders are a bit more destructive; they’re focused on themselves and the city,” he said.

‘Focusing on themselves’ may sound like a bad thing to some, but O’Leary’s point is that the services these founders are creating tend to be single-minded solutions to specific problems.

Berlin is going to start tidying up the social mess we created. Facebook is turning into AOL – it wants to be ‘the internet’. Berlin startups are trying to do the opposite: they can do one thing really well. They’re ahead of the curve in the –- this sounds awful –- the antisocial movement. It’s about dividing into real use cases that people want, and giving people control again.”

That sounds like the traditional German industrial strength of finding a niche and dominating it. But the privacy issue also helps, of course. On the one hand you have German regulators’ extreme adherence to privacy principles, and on the other you have the privacy-be-damned attitude of the Googles of this world.

According to O’Leary, the result is that Berlin is developing a healthy balance and a “heightened awareness of certain fine lines” that contrasts with what he sees as a privacy crisis developing in the U.S.

Of course, Berlin’s not where it needs to be yet. There still isn’t enough cash (“There should be at least five Earlybirds here”) and the VCs funding local startups are doing so from afar, rather than setting up offices in Germany.

And then there’s the other big European startup hub: London. Despite having “a very rigid society and economic structures” –- the lack of which works in Berlin’s favour, O’Leary argues –- the UK capital is where a lot of big operators such as Index and Eden are based.

“London will remain incredibly strong,” O’Leary said. “It has a much stronger local economy, which is based on finance, but big U.S. companies also have their headquarters there for business reasons. In London you’re engaging with large corporations on a daily basis –- you’re going to struggle to meet them in Berlin. There’s a lack of top-level decision makers in Berlin.”

But Earlybird’s hoping that its new fund changes that to some extent, and here’s how it’s going to work.

“We’re going to have a dedicated seed program,” O’Leary explained.

“We’re noticing that founders here are much more technology-oriented — they’re already advanced and capital-efficient. They just want a couple of hundred thousand euros in venture capital to continue working on their product. We want to take smaller percentages with small tickets and get in much earlier, then continue to invest through the lifetime of the business,” he said.

O’Leary said he wants prominent angels to buy in and co-invest in these early stages, and help perpetuate the cycle. He reckons the first big exits in the Berlin scene will come in the next year or two, which will in turn create a “really big base of angels”.

Hype may have brought Berlin to the point where it finds itself now, but the means to take things further are now starting to appear.

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So perhaps the news that DST is on the verge of launching a new $1 billion fund, reported by Bloomberg on Wednesday, was simply a matter of time.

The detail of how it is happening is fairly interesting:

DST has committed Facebook stock valued at $50 million to the fund, meaning limited partners get a chance to own the shares through their investment, according to an investor presentation obtained by Bloomberg News. Early investors were offered the Facebook holding at a 12 percent discount to an internal valuation of about $74 billion, as well as a 25 percent reduction in the fund’s management fee.

But the real question on everybody’s lips is where the money will go.

The company seems to have put some serious constraints on the destination for cash it manages. DST only plans to make minority investments in late-stage startups that are valued at $500 million or more: effectively using the money to priming the IPO pump. It’s a tactic Milner has used to great affect already, putting money into LinkedIn and Groupon shortly before they went public.

Given DST’s previous investments — Zynga, Twitter and Airbnb are also in there — it seems to like consumer-facing services that are well-known and have strong levels of media attention, which is always useful for driving up valuations. And with the other limitations it appears to have put in place, the number of companies that could be looking at taking this investment are relatively small.

Forbes Russia suggests five companies in the running: Dropbox, Square, Pinterest, Quora and Storm8.

Those are all fair bets. Square’s Jack Dorsey has already teamed up with Milner at Twitter, the business has good relations with startups that come out of Y Combinator, and it often invests alongside Andreessen Horowitz (which has money in Pinterest, for example).

Who else could be on the list?

I doubt there will be many surprises, but businesses like Foursquare, Tumblr and Instagram also certainly have the current valuations that would satisfy DST’s requirements. Businesses like Etsy and Box.net might appeal too. Meanwhile, it’s not beyond DST to invest in non-American companies (it has Spotify on its books for example), but the pool of candidates outside the U.S. is even more limited, especially if Milner wants to take the companies onto the American markets to maximize his returns — possibly leaving Angry Birds maker Rovio as one of the only options that fits.

Any others?

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