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Six months after the raid on Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s Auckland mansion a video of the events of that fateful morning has been released and it’s stirring up some controversy.  The video, released yesterday during a hearing in Auckland, features helicopters, armed special tactics forces, dogs and at least four police vehicles.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook is probably not the first place you would think to go for SEO advice. However, the social media giant is looking to change that. With the help of Distilled, an online marketing agency, Facebook launched a new video that provides users tips on how to optimize their Facebook pages. The video is aimed more at [...]

A little bit of a song and dance today from Icann as it released the full list of businesses and other organizations that have applied for their own customized top-level domain names. The full list is here.

In a press conference in London, Icann’s CEO Rod Beckstrom noted that over 500 companies and organizations have paid up tens of thousands of dollars to apply for the TLDs. They include some interesting twists: Google has applied for “.google” but the Charleston Road Registry has applied for “.android”.

Clearly not all will leave this process happy. Icann says that it will be going through a multi-stage process now to decide who will get what. That will include checking for whether names are too similar to each other, whether they meet technical requirements, and whether the names are geographical or not, and whether they applicants meet financial, technical and operational capabilities to run a registry. More details on the process for getting a name here.

More to come as we continue to look hrough the list and wait for Icann to resume its press conference. (Rather bizarrely it has chosen to take a 15-minute pause in the middle of proceedings, perhaps to get journalists to review the lists.)

What do you think? Perhaps not as iconic as the season 4 poster.

How do professional nonprofit fundraisers raise millions of dollars for their nonprofits every year? What are their secrets to fundraising?

Though fundraising is our nonprofit’s lifeblood, most of us aren’t professionally trained at fundraising. We know how to make an impact, yet we don’t know how to raise funds most effectively.

Let’s uncover the secrets of a nonprofit fundraising professional. As part of the Get Donors series, Ruthellen Rubin, a professor of philanthropy at NYU and CFRE, shares her secrets. She distills 30 years of fundraising experience into seven short videos.

Here are seven secrets, based on her videos, to getting more donors for your nonprofit.

Secret #1: Develop a case for support

Your potential donors are asking why they should support your nonprofit. You need to clarify why you’re asking for a donation then sell the successes of your nonprofit. Developing a case for support gets donors to invest in your organization. People don’t give to charity anymore; they invest in results.

Secret #2: Create real, personal, and urgent appeals

The most effective fundraising appeals are real, personal, and urgent. Use compelling storytelling with images and videos to connect a donor’s donation to a tangible impact or to a result of their donation.

Secret #3: Startup founders must have fundraising responsibilities

In a startup nonprofit, the founding team is responsible for setting an example. This team should be the first to donate to the organization so that others will follow their lead. The amount doesn’t matter; full team participation matters more.

Secret #4: Be good stewards

Committing to year-round stewardship will retain current donors and recruit new repeat donors. Their funds are an extension of their faith in the organization and the mission, so remember: You’re not only stewarding their money, you’re stewarding their trust. Care for your donors by investing in them. Send a personalized thank-you note; a formal, written thank-you note; a mid-year update; and a personalized ask the following year.

Secret #5: Create annual donors

Where can you find more donors? First, focus on your obvious prospects. Recruit from your board, staff, and pool of volunteers. You can also ask your vendors (e.g., accountant or lawyer) for an annual gift. Next, move on to the people that you serve, such as your alumni and constituents.

Secret #6: Create a culture of fundraising

Help your board envision what fundraising success looks like. Get the entire organization involved in the process by empowering and training everyone on the basics of fundraising, so they grow comfortable with asking for donations.

Secret #7: Develop an email strategy

Email is one of the best ways to encourage giving. You must have a set strategy and plan for your emails, so that they augment fundraising. Segment your emails to focus on specific niches of your audience. Personalize the “From” and “Reply To” fields with a person’s name rather than the name of a department or a general inbox.

To learn even more secrets, visit us at www.getdonors.com. Follow these fundraising fundamentals to help your nonprofit recruit more donors.

Rob Wu is a founder at CauseVox, an innovative online fundraising platform that empowers nonprofits.

(Photo courtesy of Bigstock: Head in Money)

With only a few weeks left to go until Samsung’s big London reveal, the leaks are just flying out of the woodwork now. If that recent Brazilian leak didn’t quite fill you with much confidence, this one just may — the team at Tinhte.vn recently posted an extensive hands-on with what claims to be the Samsung i9300, perhaps better known as the Galaxy S III.

I know, I know, we’ve seen scores of leaks up to this point, but it’s worth pointing out that Tinhte has an impressive track record. They went hands-on with the new iPad before just about anyone else, not to mention scoring early images of the iPhone 4 and Samsung’s 10-inch Galaxy Tab over the years.

Anyway. The i9300 — which BGR claims is the correct model number next big Galaxy phone — features a 4.6-inch 720p AMOLED display on the front, and an 8-megapixel camera pod around back. If the body looks a little strange (not to mention different from that other recent leak), The Verge reports that the device in question is wrapped in a dummy shell so as to keep the device’s true visage from showing through.

Inside that ersatz shell is a 1.4GHz quad-core chipset, and thanks to a quick look at the device’s System Information screen, it indeed appears to one of Samsung’s Exynos 4×12 series systems-on-a-chip. The device also sports 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, support for NFC, and the usual microSD card slot. The specs that Team Tinhte spell out are a bit more realistic rumor mill has circulated recently, and lends a bit of credence to the notion that the GSIII is more of an incremental update than a full-blown revolution.

At this point, there’s no way to be sure that this device is indeed the Galaxy S III (or whatever Samsung ends up calling it), but the fact that Tinhte has since yanked their post entirely fills me with a glimmer of hope. Fortunately, a copy of the video has made its way to YouTube with English subtitles, which I’ve included below.

In the annals of celebrities investing in tech startups, this one’s looking especially smart. Bono and The Edge, the singer and lead guitarist of Irish rock band U2, got into Dropbox’s $250 million second round last year, they said in a tweet today.

It’s the first individual, publicly announced startup investment for the vocalist, to our knowledge. And unlike grandly-conceived social media startups or late-stage investments that celebrities have gone after in recent years, Dropbox is still in its early days. I imagine some khakis-and-blue-shirt VCs are a little jealous of the multiples ahead.

Bono, of course, has something of a track record in tech investing already. He’s the co-founder and managing director of Elevation Partners, which has bet widely over the years with money in Palm, Forbes, gaming companies, Yelp and Facebook. Never mind some of those others, results from the last two have inspired the team to go raise a new $1 billion investment fund, according to reports.

But until now, Bono’s role has been more high-level, not so much in sourcing deals with the latest startups growing out of the Valley floor. The Dropbox investment — and the backstory — suggest that this is could change. Bono and The Edge seem to have gotten into the deal via a relationship that developed years ago, in a different era.

Back in 2007, entrepreneur brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi had just launched a fast-growing music app called iLike on Facebook. They had a new feature they wanted to launch, a way for artists to post videos to fans through the app, so they went through some mutual friends to reach out to U2. The result: a video interview with Bono and the band about a previously-unreleased track, Wave of Sorrow.

The relationship has developed from there, it appears. The Partovis were early angel investors in Dropbox, and have maintained contact. Judging from the photo recently posted to Twitter, they introduced the band members to founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi.

Even if Bono doesn’t get deeper into other early-stage companies, he has a lot of work left here — doing follow on rounds on Dropbox, possibly via Elevation.

@Dropbox is excited to welcome Bono & The Edge as investors. Thanks for the support and look forward to great things! http://t.co/17lpnfx2

—
  (@Dropbox) April 02, 2012

The rumors were true, everyone. After months of anticipation and speculation, the device once known as the HTC Edge (or Endeavor) has been officially revealed here at MWC as the HTC One X. The One X (called a “multimedia livewire” in the press release) has an 8-megapixel camera, 4.7-inc LCD display, and 1080p video recorder. The new One X runs Android with the HTC Sense 4 UI overlay.

The 1.5 GHz LTE Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor delivers “unparalleled Web surfing.” It will be available on AT&T.

The One S runs on T-Mobile and has similar specs to the One X.

Finally, there’s the One V with a nice “unibody design” and 3.7-inch screen. It’s a lower end model and has no front-facing camera.