I spent a couple of days at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco last week, but unfortunately the news didn’t slow down to accommodate my absence from the office.

—Our marquee infotech event of the spring, Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021, is coming up tomorrow at SRI International in Menlo Park; you can get your ticket now. One of the panelists coming in to help explore the long-range future of consumer computing is Dan Reed, head of Microsoft’s eXtreme Computing Group (XCG); on a Q&A published last week, I asked Reed how he compensates for the inevitable uncertainties in technology forecasting and where he thinks cloud computing, mobile computing, and AI research are heading.

—Staffers at PARC published a blog post taking issue with Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article last week about Apple, Xerox, and the nature of innovation. PARC argued that Gladwell’s picture of innovation at the legendary lab is outdated, and that if Steve Jobs were visiting PARC today, he wouldn’t be allowed to walk away with the lab’s best ideas—there’d be a collaboration informed by the philosophy of open innovation.

—The tech world buzzed with discussion over Microsoft’s $8.5 billion takeover of Skype, which has major operations in the Bay Area. My colleague Curt up in Seattle rounded up blog reaction to the acquisition, Microsoft’s largest ever, while Greg reported on his conversation with Microsoft online services president Qi Lu, who said Skype’s Internet calling functions will enhance existing Microsoft products like Xbox Kinect, Windows Phone 7, and Lync instant messaging.

—I was one of 5,000 attendees at Google I/O to pick up a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet computer. I’m a committed iPad fan and will remain so, but as I reported in my Friday column, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (which hits stores in the U.S. on June 8) comes closer to matching the iPad 2 than any other tablet on the market. In fact, it bests the iPad 2 in some respects—it’s thinner, with a larger screen and much better cameras, for example.

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This is the fifth in a series of profiles of Y Combinator Winter 2011 (YC W11) startups.

“Keep the change.” You might say that to a taxi driver who’d delivered you speedily and safely to your destination, but it’s unlikely you’d ever say it to a grocery checkout clerk or a Nieman Marcus salesperson. Yet over time the change on your daily purchases can add up to amounts that would make a significant difference to some group, such as your favorite charity.

In fact, if you use your credit or debit card a few times a day, round up each purchase to the next dollar, and add up the difference, you’ll find that you’re racking up $20 in “change” each month, or $240 per year. At least, that’s the average that SwipeGood, a Y Combinator-backed startup based in Palo Alto, is seeing among its users so far. Its mission is to help people give that money to causes they believe in, and, in the process, to help stabilize the fundraising process for non-profit organizations.

SwipeGood co-founders (top to bottom) Steli Efti, Anthony Nemitz, and Thomas Steinacher

Call it “smallesse” (as opposed to largesse). Signing up with SwipeGood, which tracks your purchases and adds the appropriate roundup amount at the end of each month, is a no-hassle, easy-to-understand way to be a mini-philanthropist. At the startup’s website you can choose to send your change to any of more than 500 non-profit groups, from Kiva.org to KQED. Once you’ve chosen one, your money flows to the recipient automatically, providing it with reliable, subscription-style revenue of the type that’s all too rare in the non-profit world.

SwipeGood keeps 5 percent of the donations to fund its own operations. That’s a lot less than the 10 to 20 percent of the annual budget that goes toward marketing and fundraising at most non-profits, says Steli Efti, one of SwipeGood’s three co-founders. “We thought this would be a way to make fundraising more affordable, and to turn it into month-over-month recurring revenue,” Efti says. “Our whole reason for existence is to provide the simple and most elegant solution for giving.”

Efti and his co-founders Anthony Nemitz and Thomas Steinacher made up one of the 43 startup teams to finish the Winter 2011 term at Y Combinator this spring. Even before the incubator’s Demo Day on March 23, the company had raised $500,000 in seed funding from individual investors such as Bebo co-founder Michael Birch. “We were already making revenue then, so we are looking at a very long runway,” says Efti. “I think we could become profitable in a very short period of time.”

An ethnic Greek who was born and raised in Germany, Efti came to the U.S. three years ago with big dreams. His first startup, Supercool School, built a white-label online education platform that’s now used at 4,000 schools in 43 countries. He thinks SwipeGood, which is already seeing weekly growth in the double-digit percentages, can sign up 10 million U.S. households over the next five years—enough to generate donations of $2 billion per year. That would put it on a par with the Salvation Army, the nation’s second largest charity, which raised $1.7 billion in private support in 2010.

The very same consumers who would balk at donating a set percentage of each purchase to a charity are perfectly happy to give away their change, Efti says. “People are afraid of … Next Page »

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It’s day 6 of our 7-day auction to raise funds for two of our favorite causes, Science Club for Girls and Technology Underwriting Greater Good. So hurry to eBay, because as of this writing you’ve only got about 20 hours left to bid on the amazing Lord of the Rings Online Collector’s Edition boxed set, autographed by the game’s developers at Westwood, MA-based Turbine.

I explained the whole back story to the auction last week. In a nutshell, Turbine gave Xconomy the autographed set back in July as a memento of our visit, and we decided (with Turbine’s blessing) to auction it off and donate the proceeds.

Lord of the Rings Online is Turbine’s award-winning massively multiplayer game world based on the famous J.R.R. Tolkien novels. The boxed set includes two Windows program discs, a Music & Art Collection bound volume including “The Music of Mines of Moria” soundtrack CD, a premium cloth map of the game world, a Middle Earth poster, the Collector’s Edition Starter Guide manual, a product key and three free 14-day buddy keys, a quick reference card, and—perhaps coolest of all—a gold-plated replica of the One Ring (evil powers not included).

Bid now—click here to visit the auction page. To whet your appetite, here are a few pictures of the set and its contents:

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The list of donors to Barack Obama’s presidential inaugural committee includes some Seattle-area luminaries. The families of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer each contributed $100,000, while several other Microsofties, including Craig Mundie, also made donations. Rob Glaser of RealNetworks and John Vechey of PopCap Games contributed $50,000 each, and Nick Hanauer of Second Avenue Partners donated $25,000.

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They say one good deed begets another. Apparently one good charity story also begets another.

The day after Rebecca published her piece last week on Givvy, the Framingham, MA, startup planning to offer online tools to help people track their charitable donations—and the very same day I wrote about Newton, MA, startup Jackpot Rewards, which plans to give away half of its profits to children’s charities—a public relations exec in New York wrote to tips@xconomy.com to let us know about yet another Boston-area company planning to use the power of the Web to orchestrate more effective fundraising for charities. This one is called Good2Gether. And it could prove to be the most powerful of the three, in terms of sheer ability to transform people’s charitable instincts into action.

The Cambridge, MA-based startup is constructing what you might call a “hyperlocal giving aggregator”—an advertising-supported, keyword-based widget designed to appear alongside news stories on the websites of major regional media organizations, where it displays information about local non-profit fundraising campaigns or volunteer opportunities related to each article.

Say you’re living in San Francisco and you’re reading a story in SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle’s regional Web portal, about a string of tornados striking somewhere in the Midwest. Good2Gether’s widget might give links to a local Red Cross chapter organizing a blood drive to help the victims, or to a local Humane Society chapter collecting money to help displaced pets, while at the same time showing an ad for State Farm insurance.

It’s one of those virtuous circles that the Internet is so good at completing: the non-profits get to make their pitch to a lot of readers, the newspaper website gets some ad revenue, and the advertisers get the glow of being associated with a humanitarian cause. The SFGate example is hypothetical—but the real system is scheduled to go live in eight major media markets this year, starting in Boston in April. (Good2Gether says it can’t yet reveal which Boston media outlet will run the widget, but the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle have already announced that they’ll participate.)

Good2Gether is the brainchild of Gregory McHale, the former CEO of electronic-whiteboard maker Virtual Ink and also the founder of cMarket, a 50-employee Cambridge company that’s the main provider of infrastructure services for the online auctions that thousands of non-profit organizations around the country use these days to raise money. McHale told me that the idea for Good2Gether came from his conversations with cMarket’s users about their frustrations getting the word out about their fundraising and volunteer needs, especially to younger crowds.

“I was meeting with non-profits all the time and listening to them about all the money they have to spend on marketing to their current constituencies, and about their terror about the crew of millennials coming at them just over the horizon,” McHale says. “Millennials,” also known as Generation Y, are young people born between 1980 and 1995; raised on the Internet, these folks are proving unresponsive to the communications channels that non-profits have traditionally used to raise awareness, such as print newspapers, local television, direct mail, and telemarketing.

“So on the one hand, you have lots of non-profits that are trying to reach people, including young people,” says McHale. “On the other hand you have these websites run by newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, college papers, and magazines that have millions of viewers but are desperate for … Next Page »

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Think about the causes that are closest to your heart—the environment? The wellbeing of children? Social justice? The fate of NBC’s critically acclaimed “Friday Night Lights?” Now think about the charitable donations you made last year. Even if you’re one of those incredibly organized people who has already gathered all of his 2007 receipts into neat piles and deposited them with the accountant, chances are you can’t really say just how well, or poorly, your charitable spending aligns with your beliefs and priorities. Givvy founder John Treadway thinks you’d feel better and make better decisions about giving—and ultimately, give more—if you had easy access to that and other information.

Treadway is building Givvy to provide online tools that give individual donors “more control and more empowerment over why, when, where, and how they give to charities.” What does that mean, exactly? I’d love to tell you, but the company is so brand spanking new (as in, founded in December, moved into its office in Framingham, MA, the week before last) that its only product right now is the intriguing, if coy, musings of its founder. (Delivered in person and via the Givvy blog.) Still, Treadway is giving away just enough to that you can imagine a Web portal that might help you plan, track, organize, and analyze your donations. Given the nagging guilt I feel over the fact that most of my own giving is done essentially at whim, usually in response to an over-the-transom appeal that happens to be particularly clever or resonant, I find the idea appealing.

A veteran of product management and business development at firms including Sybase, Powersoft, and Object Design, Treadway spent the last few years working on Digibug, a photography e-commerce services provider that he founded in 2003. When it became clear that the company wasn’t viable (Treadway says it will be sold or folded in the next couple of weeks) he started cooking up his plan for Givvy. The startup’s cofounders, Seth Lipkin and James Andrews, are developers that Treadway knew from his Digibug days. Givvy is operating on a bootstrap so far, Treadway says, and plans to try to drum up about half a million dollars in seed financing once the alpha version of its technology is ready, which should be next month.

Treadway promises to make more concrete details public once he’s produced something that people can get their hands on, but in the meanwhile he shared a few more tidibits: Givvy will target a broad audience of givers including “Xs, Ys, Zs, and boomers,” he says. It will incorporate lots of Web 2.0 features—user generated content, comments, and the like—as well as much of the same sort of tax data on charitable organizations that sites like Guidestar.org offer for would-be donors looking to peek under nonprofits’ hoods. But at Givvy’s core, Treadway says, will be very specific tools for “people who want to get a lot more systematic about how and what and where and why.”

There’s that “why” again. I told Treadway that when he says Givvy is helping people understand, among other things, why they’re giving, it almost sounds like therapy. “We can call it charity therapy,” he allows. Very wealthy individuals, he points out, often have lengthy conversations with their advisors about how they want to shape their financial legacy. “Why can’t the average person have the same thought process and discussion about what they want their legacy to be?” Treadway asks. “We expect it will be therapeutic, though that’s not the intention,” he adds. “But we want people to look back at the end of the year and feel good about what they’ve done.”

Treadway is, of course, saying close to nothing about how Givvy intends to make money amidst all this giving and feeling good. “I can tell you one way we’re not going to make money—we’re not going to touch a dime of the donations that go through the system,” he says. Beyond that, all he’ll cop to is the general notion that there are three ways to make money online: ads, subscription or user fees, and commerce. “It will be in one or more of those three categories that we will make money,” he says.

Givvy will be ready for a controlled beta test by the end of the second quarter, Treadway says. Meanwhile, I’m off to think about whether I’ve really been putting my charitable money where my public-health-concerned mouth is. Now where did I put those receipts?

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