TipiT.to

Sinds februari is het helaas niet meer mogelijk om geld te doneren via TipiT. Uit veiligheidsoverwegingen hebben wij onze faciliteit uitgeschakeld. Aan al onze enthousiaste gebruikers bieden wij hiervoor onze excuses aan.

Wij beseffen dat het steunen van goede doelen door ons besluit moeilijker is geworden voor u. Ook organisaties die uw steun nodig hebben, zijn hiermee getroffen. Het uitkeren van geld uit de bestaande fooienpotten aan doelorganisaties blijft overigens onverminderd mogelijk, zij het met vertraging door de noodzakelijke extra controles.

Juist om in ons gestelde vertrouwen waar te maken, hebben wij tot deze drastische maatregel besloten. Dit als antwoord op pogingen om TipiT te misbruiken voor creditcardfraude. Deze pogingen zijn dankzij onze controles mislukt. Uw donaties zijn dan ook geen moment in gevaar geweest.

Onze controles zijn afdoende om incidentele pogingen tot fraude via TipiT te blokkeren. Maar tot onze teleurstelling schiet ons systeem tekort om operationeel te blijven bij grootschalige pogingen tot fraude. Hiervoor hebben wij helaas nog geen oplossing gevonden. Elke dag werken wij met volle kracht aan een vernieuwd en volledig veilig TipiT. Wij houden u vanzelfsprekend op de hoogte van de voortgang.

Mocht u vragen hebben, aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen.

English translation:

As of February it is no longer possible to donate money via TipiT. Due to security considerations we disabled money receiving facilities. We apologize for the inconvenience caused to our faithful users.

We realize this has made it more difficult to support charities and this has reduced options for organizations that need support. Payout of money from existing tipjars has been and remains possible, though with some necessary delays for additional checks.

Attempts to abuse TipiT for credit card fraud forced us to take this drastic measure to be able to continue to meet all our obligations. None of these fraud attempts has been successful and your donations have not been at risk at any time.

Our checks suffice to prevent occasional attempts at fraud through our system. But we are disappointed to say that our system cannot stay operational during large scale attacks. We haven’t found a sustainable solution yet to deal with this. We are looking for a set of adjustments that will enable us to resume operations in a secure manner and we will keep you posted of developments.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us.

Hello everybody,

TipiT has gotten a lot of attention recently. We are very glad about that. Most of this attention has been positive but a significant part of it has turned out to be fraudulent. These fraudulent attacks are taking its toll on the site to a degree that operation is not sustainable right now.

We will be disabling creation of new tips and tipjars until we figure out a way to solve this problem in a scalable fashion. Payment out remains possible but may be subject to delays to screen for fraud.

We apologize for the inconvenience and we thank you for your patience.

Thanks,
The TipiT Team

Some effort recently was focused on making the site available in different languages. TipiT is now available in a Dutch translation (try it out now!) because we also support a specialized Dutch payment method. Other languages are forthcoming.

Translation:

We hebben pas wat moeite gestoken in het beschikbaar maken van de site in verschillende talen. TipiT is nu ook beschikbaar in het Nederlands (probeer het direct uit!) vooral omdat we ook iDeal ondersteunen. Andere talen volgen spoedig.

TipiT was represented at the Dutch Media Professionals event last week called “Show me the Money”. A small writeup can be found on Alper’s blog.

Another still-born attempt to try to make people pay for content: bitcents. Didn’t we try this before?

Also compare that to Springer’s jump on the bandwagon idea to charge for online content. A broader initiative with richer content linked to a tremendously easy payment method may have some success, but the old media executives trying to safeguard their bonuses indulge in a nontrivial amount of wishful thinking:

“How much would people pay for that? Surely €5,” he said. (NYT)

And an interesting remark at the end of the article:

American publishers, he said, have been too timid in dealing with threats to their future […]
“The Americans don’t give a damn if the newspapers go down,” he said. “This is very different in Germany. This is Gutenberg’s country. We invented this.” (NYT)

A collaborative strategy such as the one discussed by Murdoch and Microsoft vs. Google, may work in the short term but in the long term it will probably provide a too lucrative and seductive upside to defectors. At least it would be an interesting play in a too boring discussion.

The above initiatives are why TipiT allows people to pay whatever they think your content is worth after they have seen it. This solves many of the problems associated with the pay-for schemes above.

I just wrote a comment at Techcrunch to explain why we think tipping does have a future and what we hope to do once we relaunch the site.

Running a startup or any other kind of small creative company in the Netherlands is an interesting experience, but it poses its own share of hurdles which in large part are unnecessary. On my own blog, I posted an article summarizing all the friction you need to overcome to get some office space.

To help startups in the Netherlands overcome these obstacles and join their efforts together the STIKK foundation has been founded, which Tipit will be joining in the near future.

Two notable new tipjars on Tipit.to this week:

PluginAudio.net — a site which seems to be about audio plugins as far as I can tell put up a tipjar and got a big flurry of initial visitors and tips. This kind of community knowledge site is exactly the stuff we envision Tipit supporting.

Spotlight Effect Movember — some friends in Amsterdam decided to participate in Movember this year (and I’m joining them). They put up a tipjar all proceeds of which will go to the Dutch cancer foundation.

So much for this week. Keep the tips coming!

We recently added a thermometer widget so you can ask your readers to pledge tips for a goal. We have thermometers in a large vertical version and in a smaller horizontal variant, both of which are visible below:

You can reach the thermometer configuration from your tipjar page along with the other widgets and get the code necessary to paste it anywhere you want.

More stuff coming, but do let us know what you think about this.