The fundraising campaign I’m participating in for my birthday is called “Brick by Brick,” and the funds raised will go towards an organization called Restore NYC, which fights sex trafficking in New York City. The Brick by Brick campaign will specifically be funding a safe house that Restore is building for sex trafficking survivors, the first of its kind in the city.

Every $30 raised will fund one day of operations for the Restore safe house, and every dollar *you* contribute will be matched by an anonymous donor. The goal is to raise $50,000 by the end of September.

Will you join me in helping to raise $2,400 for Restore NYC to celebrate my 24th birthday? To support this campaign, just click here:

Also, be sure to check out CauseVox, which is a NYC-based startup that has created a brandable platform for small and medium-sized non-profits to facilitate their fundraising. This Brick by Brick campaign for Restore NYC is run on the CauseVox platform, so big props to the co-founders, my friends Rob and Jeff. If you are involved with a non-profit and are interested in using the CauseVox platform for your fundraising, email them!

Below you can see all of New York check-ins since October of last year, when I started using Foursquare. Interesting in making your own Foursquare map with Weeplaces? Click here.

See a demo here:

FourSquare Visualization by WeePlaces.com from Eric Wu on Vimeo.

Take Foursquare, for example. It is useful in New York for me because there are a large number of venues that I can check into, and also because I have  a large number of Foursquare friends that also live in NYC. Also, the density of Manhattan / NYC (in terms of both people and venues) further increases the usefulness of Foursquare. Why? Because there is a greater probability that when I see a pop-up notification of a Foursquare friend who is checking in, it’s actually in a close enough range that it makes sense for me to find the friend to say hi. In suburban Birmingham, where getting anywhere usually requires at least 10-15 minutes of driving at a minimum, the ability for Foursquare to help provide that same connection diminishes greatly. Plus, given the lower penetration rate of Foursquare usage down here, if I even chose to check in, I would have to add a new venue myself.

I think it’s this critical mass of New York users and New York venues, as well as the partnerships that Foursquare has made with NYC-based companies, that has greatly helped it to become the location-based application of choice compared to, say, Gowalla. Earlier this year, around the time of SXSW 2010, I was chatting with a friend from Austin Ventures about location-based services, and it seemed pretty clear that we each had our regional alliances. My friend was a backer of Austin-based Gowalla, and I was a supporter of New York-based Foursquare. This was not surprising, since you’d expect greater adoption and penetration in each startup’s founding city, leading to a critical mass of users in that location.

During SXSW 2010, it seemed as if Foursquare and Gowalla were still neck-and-neck in terms of their potential to become the dominant location-based mobile app, but if you had been a limited partner giving me money to invest, I would have put that towards Foursquare, something I mentioned to my friend. Why? Because the pure size and density of the New York user base, as well as the potential connections to media, advertising, and finance in NYC are a huge advantage in terms of customer acquisition, all other things equal. I think that that boost towards critical mass is a huge value add for many startups (though not all) and should encourage more entrepreneurs to base their companies in New York.

Agree? Disagree? Please add a comment!

P.S. Current stats (as of July): Foursquare is now over 5 times larger than Gowalla and growing 75% faster.

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In other SocentVC-related news, 40 billionaires have now pledge to give away 50%+ of their wealth as part of The Giving Pledge. The number keeps going up! Read more about The Giving Pledge here.

For a slightly less gritty spy show (maybe more like a spy comedy, if you will) check out USA’s new show Covert Affairs.

Want to see your own map? Foursquare has a page devoted to private feeds of your check-ins, available in RSS, KML, or ICS formats. So 1) go to your own private feed page, 2) copy the KML link, 3) paste the link into the Google Maps search box, and 4) click “Search Maps.” In terms of customizing the number of check-ins that show up, add the following parameter at the end of the KML link: ?count=25. “25″ will give you 25 check-ins, “150″ will give you 150, etc. In addition to the actual map view, you are also provided a list of all the thumbtacks you see on the Google Map.

I found this representation of my Foursquare check-in data to be fascinating, because it makes the previously “opaque” data so much more intuitively useful. Many people have expressed to me that they don’t see much value in checking in, but this type of “translation” of data makes the data much more useful.

As one example, Wilson comments:

“I would love to save these foursquare feeds in discrete chunks like this for future reference. Someone sends me an email saying “what did you do that was fun in Zurich?”. I could simply send them this list of checkins.”

Uses for me personally? A few that I thought of include:

• Giving a friend a few easy recommendations for restaurants in a given neighborhood
• Showing myself what neighborhoods that I have not really explored (Lower East Side, for example)
• Any others?

Key to the usefulness of this “translation” of data, though, is the ability to customize how you view the data, which is why the personal uses I’ve listed above are still rather limited. One can change the number of check-ins shown, but it would be nice to be able to show check-ins from a specific geography, a discrete time period, or for a specific type of check-in (only restaurants, only coffee shops, etc.) Hopefully this will be something that Foursquare (or a third-party app developer) builds out!

• Eli Broad (former CEO of SunAmerica)
• Venture capitalist John Doerr (of Kleiner Perkins fame)
• Media mogul Gerry Lenfest (founder of Lenfest Communications)
• John Morgridge (former Chairman of Cisco)
• Michael Bloomberg (founder of Bloomberg Communications and Mayor of NYC)

Eli and Edythe Broad commented:

“We agree with Andrew Carnegie’s wisdom that ‘The man who dies rich, dies disgraced,’ and we also believe ‘he who gives while he lives also knows where it goes,’” the couple said. “Philanthropy is unbelievably rewarding.”

This commitment to put money towards social good is inspiring indeed; but I hope that there is an effort not to hand away this money freely but for it to be used to invest, so that the returns from those investments can then be put towards more socially impactful giving. Maybe even use the model of Presumed Abundance?

Dealbook reports on some commentary from Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA:

“With the U.S. economy on shaky ground, investors are becoming more reluctant to gamble on more speculative sectors such as venture capital.”

But is the U.S. economy shakier than it was during Q2 of 2009? Seems to me that lower fundraising “performance” is perhaps due not just to negative impacts from the economic cycle but also to the trend of raising smaller funds / rise of micro-VCs & super-angels? And those, of course, have popped up in large part because of the capital efficiency of internet and consumer-web startups, so perhaps “lower” fundraising will become the new status quo? Read more about the seed fund phenomenon here.

Bottom line: I wonder if the situation is a bit more nuanced than just the “shakiness of the U.S. economy,” as Mark Heesen explained?

Thoughts?

D.light has been a great company to follow, not just because it’s doing great work by providing consumer products and lighting solutions to those living off the electric grid, but also because it’s been a perfect example of a social enterprise that helps those from both non-profit and for-profit worlds to see where they can intersect.

In D.light, you can see investors that are associated more closely with or well-known by the non-profit world (Acumen Fund, which specializes in “venture philanthropy”) as well as giants in traditional VC (Draper Fisher Jurvetson, although I think the actual investor is DFJ Frontier, not DFJ).

As a leading example of the potential for social good and traditional investing to intersect, D.light Design’s success will be closely watched. I hope that this social enterprise will continue prospering and serve as a much-needed example of success for this burgeoning “hybrid” investment area. In any case, congratulations on the Series B! You can read the press release here.

In other socent news, if you are in the New York City area, please consider attending the SOCAP10 Coast to Coast event taking place tonight, which is sponsored by organizations such as the Acumen Fund, Presumed Abundance, and StartingBloc–all organizations close to my heart. Buy your ticket here!

That’s why I was very happy to see yesterday’s announcement from IGNIA, an “impact investing venture capital fund that invests in high growth businesses that serve the base of the pyramid in Mexico and other regions of Latin America.” They just announced the close of their first fund of $102 million, which includes investors such as J.P. Morgan, Omidyar Network, Soros Economic Development Fund, and the Rockefeller Foundation. You can read all the details about this newest development in the world of social VC / impact investing in the press release here.

I want to highlight one quote from the press release that I really like. It’s from Michael Chu, co-founder and managing director of IGNIA, and I think it really highlights the aspects of social VC that make me excited:

“While today J.P. Morgan is pioneering the entry of commercial investors into impact investing, we believe this is a growing trend. We are deeply appreciative of the trust that all 34 of our investors have placed on us to simultaneously address important social issues while generating financial returns, thereby making possible a scale that until now was impossible.”

Awesome! IGNIA, I wish you the best of luck.

All this capital adds up to a LOT of money, and instead of giving it away purely as charity, what if the funds were instead used to seed a social PE firm, one that would work in conjunction with social VC firms to sustainably support social entrepreneurship? If you have any interest in the intersection of social good and sustainable methods of fostering social enterprises, you should definitely read Nathaniel Whittemore’s latest Change.org blog post: “Why the Gates-Buffett Billionaires Should Create a Social Private Equity Firm.”

Photo credit: Mark Peterson, via Fortune Magazine / CNN’s “The $600 billion challenge.”