On September 18th 2008, Mashable’s Twitter followers donated $3536 to Charity:Water, an initiative to build wells in Ethiopia. On the same day, our Twitter friend Paul Young raised a further $637 through his Twitter and Facebook accounts. And Twitter user Sarah Townsend hauled in $400 - that’s more than $4500, almost exclusively from Twitter, in a single day. With $4000 buying an entire well to supply water to 200 people for 20 years, we can truly call this the “well that Twitter built”.

Twitting for Charity: The Backstory

It started with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone: his September Twitter newsletter included a mention of Scott Harrison, a 33 year-old Twitter user and founder of Charity:Water, which builds wells in Ethiopia. Scott’s September birthday inspired him to launch the “September” campaign, asking those with September birthdays to accept online donations in leui of gifts this year. Many did: the site claims to have raised $393,000 since the end of August.

September 18th: The Twitter Well

At least three Twitter users celebrated their birthdays on September 18th: myself, Paul Young and Sarah Townsend. Thanks to the large following that my company, Mashable, has on both Twitter and Facebook, I was able to raise a healthy $3536 in donations. As I was turning 23, the recommended amount was $23, but visitors could give any amount they liked. As mentioned above, Paul and Sarah also raised huge amounts, taking us beyond the $4000 needed to fund a well that day.

Twitter Users More Generous than Facebook?

Now perhaps this Twitter theorem isn’t utterly scientific: after all, personal friends could have chipped in without seeing the Twitter posting, and both Paul and I promoted on Facebook too. And yet, Paul went to the trouble of carefully logging his referrers, as explained in a lengthy and fascinating blog post. Particularly interesting: Twitter users donated far more readily than Facebook members - so much that Facebook referrers are almost insignificant:

Dollars per Click Through

Twitter: $4.50

Facebook: $0.29

So while Paul attributes $325 of his haul to a close personal friend, it’s reasonable to say that between Mashable, Paul and Sarah, one complete Ethiopian well was funded by Twitter users on September 18th. And it gets better: since sponsors match donations to the campaign dollar for dollar, two entire wells can be built from our collective efforts.

September Birthday? You Are Next!

September 18th wasn’t unique: scores of Twitter users report that they’ve been raising money for this great cause during September. So if you have a September birthday, be sure to turn your special day into an extraordinary one with Charity:Water and Twitter. And if you aren’t celebrating a September birthday, you’re still welcome to donate through Mashable’s page at http://tinyurl.com/charityw

PS. We receive a note of your name and the amount given for every donation. Time permitting, I will continue to thank everyone who donates on our Twitter feed - the amount is irrelevant and your generosity is deeply appreciated.

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Startup Meme would be blogging live about the WWDC 2008. Our commentary about Job’s keynote and product releases would be posted here right on this very post live. So watch this post swell as the event unfolds.

The live coverage would also be available in Startup Meme’s Friendfeed room. So stay tuned and stay agile, for this year’s "One Last Thing…"

You can also join us at:

• Twitter
• Pownce
• Plurk
• Startup Meme RSS Feed 

Ok guys, so we are live on the web. But the latest news is that even before the conference could kick start, Twitter has gone down or at least its showing its dead whale to us. Twitter had made several arrangements, but the pre-conference flock was a little too much for it to handle. Don’t know what would have happened to its servers once the conference would have been in full flow. May be it should really shut down.

Other bloggers doing the live coverage are:

• Techcrunch
• Engadget
• Gizmodo
• CNet

I will be updating the list as I will be coming up with more names from Techmeme. But you should follow each and everyone of these, if you are an Apple addict just to be sure that you didn’t left out on anything. Venture Beat also promised to do the live show but their post isn’t up by now. Will update the link as soon as they are live on the block

Covered Signboard: (9:40 AM)
Did Apple forgot to uncover it or is it a secret? So much hype has been created even before the start of the conference that everyone is observing each and every aspect of it (even the arena in this case). Lets see how many surprises we come across through out the day.

Picture via aarontait

9:48 AM

Just to tell all those who don’t know about it, already that this is the first WWDC in Apple’s history has been sold out days before the actual event. Apple is hot on the heals of iPod and iPhone, its definitely one stock to have in your portfolio even in this recession hit economy.

10:19 AM

The iPhone SDK has three parts, but Jobs is starting with the Enterprise version

10:22 AM

iPhone Enterprise has Microsoft Exchange, Cisco VPN and various other security options built into it. 35% Fortune 500 companies have taken part in the program.

10:23 AM

Next in line is the iPhone SDK, Scott Forestall from Apple will show off the apps to us.

10:25 AM

The iPhone’s OS X ships with stuff like Bonjour and SQLite (the very light DBMS), hardware accelerated Open GL and positional audio and the Cocoa Touch API that lets people access all these features

10:27 AM

The debugging and testing tools in the SDK include Xcode, Interface Builder and iPhone Simulator. You can use them to code, debug and test the apps you want to run on the iPhone.

10:28 AM

Scott is demoing the import of the API’s using Xcode.

10:30 AM

Scott’s sample app is a contact searching service. He is using location based services to filter the contacts of people who are within a mile of his location (pretty slick). Will they be including a GPS with the device or what.

10:32 AM

Developer survey of the SDK managed to get the following quotes from the developers “breath of fresh air” and “blows them away”. It blows everything away that they had worked with from RIM (Why is Apple bent upon destroying RIM).

10:33 AM

“you’re witnessing the birth of a third major computer platform, Windows, Mac OS X and iPhone.”

10:34 AM Next up is SEGA with Super Monkey Ball.

10:36 AM

Ethan Einhorn from SEGA is onstage. They have built 110 stages of the game in 95 days. He demo’s the “pin-point acceleration and turning and the tilt control”. The game will ship for $9.99

10:37 AM

Ken Sun from eBay is next in line to demo their app. Its called “Auctions”. They think that the phone is already a hot way for users to access eBay auctions, so they have come up with a cool app for this purpose. You can search for and bid for auctions, add stuff to your watch list and do almost everything that you can do on your standard web browser.

10:40 AM

Sam Altman the Loopt co-founder is next in line. Loopt is a social networking site, funded by YCombinator (for those who didnt knew already). I guess he’ll demo some social networking stuff.

10:42 AM

Sam Altman has come up with a map showing pins that in reality are your friends near by. Pretty slick isn’t it (Thanks to Google Maps  ). Using the app you can sms, call or just leave a Loopt service message. Pretty handy dating app what you think guys.

10:44 AM 

Than we have TypePad, they have come up with a iPhone version of their TypePad service, that lets you post to your blogs using the iPhone. Wonder when Wordpress will come up with something similar.

10:46 AM

Now we have Associated Press. My God, how come such a Goliath so quick to respond to iPhone. They have also come up with an app for the iPhone. You can fetch stories to your iPhone. Its a feed reader thingie + some sort of outlook, which allows you to save stories offline to be read later. Its not just stories but videos could also be fetched and viewed.

10:48 AM

Pangea Software is now demoing there physics based puzzle game which they are calling Enigmo. I guess the main reason for presenting these things is to let us know that the iPhone can handle lots of computations fast. They also are launching a second game called Cromag Ralley, its a 3D caveman racing game. Both games ship for $9.99.

10:50 AM

Jeremy Schoenherr of MLB is now displaying “AtBat”, which shows the latest game stats of the day and that too in real time. The service can show realtime video high lights as well.

10:58 AM

Now we have Modality,a software for medical science students, by a company called Epocrates. Students can use the software to view body parts. Study Anatomy and Physiology I guess (What do I know man). Looks like Apple has asked each and every market segmet to come up and present a demo app. I guess next in line would be a financial app.

– Apple stock is now 5% down since the start of the event. Man what are the investors thinking they are upto. Why has so much panic struck the wall street. Were they expecting something other than this. I for one will wait till the "One Last Thing…"

11:04 AM

MIMvista another medical company has also come up with an app. The app can allow medical students to do CT and PET scan. What the hell is this device. Is there anything in this world that cant be done with an iPhone.

Doctors can even share the the imagery with other doctors from iPhone to iPhone. What if the other doctor doesnt have an iPhone ? No answers.

11:05 AM

Digital Legends Entertainment a Spanish company has also come up with a game. Its a 3D game ported in just 4 days. Shit man the game wont be available till Sep. Than why the hell did they come up to demo it!!

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Related Articles at Startup Meme:

My buddy Scott in Ohio bought a PureDigital Flip. It was in an open box — it had been returned but he figured he could pop by his local Best Buy and return it if there were any problems. He started to use it and found about 40 minutes of it taken up by previously recorded video.

He popped in the recorder and found three videos, all called “Smoking” or something similar. On the recorder he found video of some kids having a super time puffing on some doobage. As Scott’s friend observed, “That should be an anti-drug commercial. ‘Do you really want to be like these douches?’”

Read more…

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