Causes, the startup that helps users leverage Facebook and other social sites to raise money for charity, has closed a $9 million Series C funding round led by NEA with participation from Founders Fund, Marc Benioff, Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, and Karl Jacob. Scott Sandell of NEA will join as an observer on the Causes board. Causes CEO Joe Green says that the company will be using the money to build out its team, including some senior hires (the company is currently seventeen people). Causes will also be moving from Berkeley, CA to San Francisco.

As we’ve recently reported, Causes is transitioning from living primarily as a Facebook canvas application to running off of its standalone website Causes.com, with social connectivity through Facebook Connect. This change, along with some other optimizations, led to a two-fold increase in the amount of money the site raises in donations from its ‘Birthday Wish’ feature on a daily basis — $20,000 a day, up from $10,000 two months ago. It raises money though other channels, too, taking in a total of around $40,000 in donations a day.

The company has also recently landed a deal that will put Causes gift cards in every Safeway and Vons location in California. After buying one of these gift cards, users can sign onto Causes.com and donate it toward the charity/cause of their choice.  Causes earns revenue (it’s a for-profit company) by asking users for tips between 10-20%. Green wouldn’t disclose revenue figures, but says that Causes has 119 million installs on Facebook and has 25 million monthly active users.

Causes has now raised over $16 million, including a previously unannounced $5 million Series B round led by Case Foundation and philanthropist Ray Chambers’s MCJ Foundation, with participation from Founders Fund. That round closed in March 2008.

• You Know Where Else It’s Hard To Delete Your Account? Mahalo
• WhitePages Now Lets You Control Your Own Listings

We were fortunate enough to witness a lot of fascinating startups strut their stuff here at TechCrunch Disrupt, not just on the main stage but also in the Startup Alley and beyond.

But of course the event is and remains a competition, so the experts have been working hard to select those startups with the most potential to be genuinely disruptive, and vote them into the second round of the pitching contest. Just ten of the original twenty startups have been invited back to round two.

The final few startups will be announced tomorrow, and they’ll be back on stage for the final round of demo and rapid-fire Q&A with our experts.

Appbistro

Appbistro is an application marketplace for Facebook pages. At Appbistro, page administrators can quickly find applications that they can easily plug into their pages and quickly increase the engagement and reach of their pages. The applications within the marketplace are built by known and vetted Facebook developers, and feature applications for Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and more.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

Betterment

Betterment is the replacement for your savings account. It’s a smart investment that’s easy to use, and you have access to your money at any time. You invest in our two portfolios—a diverse basket of stocks and a portfolio of ultra-safe bonds—in a blend of your choosing. There’s no minimum balance, no transaction fees, and no investing experience required. So you earn more from your savings with fewer hassles.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

Compass Labs

Compass Labs is a social e-commerce company, which increases the effectiveness of social networks for both users and advertisers. Users obtain timely, highly relevant information, and advertisers to precisely reach users at the right moment. Compass Labs’s solutions are effective in extracting precise meaning from social media communication, and leveraging that for timely and precise ads targeting, and for enabling content/user discovery.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

LiveIntent

LiveIntent‘s mission is to help you create meaningful connections on social media. It helps answer the question: “Who do I follow?”. For publishers, having a LiveIntent window on your site is opening the door to let in engaged and repeat users to your site, significantly increasing pageviews, ad impressions, unique visitors, and revenue.

For advertisers, it’s an enabling technology that builds stronger and longer lasting relationships between brands and consumers in social media.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

MOVIECLIPS

MOVIECLIPS.com is a premium online video destination offering audiences the largest and most diverse collection of movie scenes. It allows fans to find, watch and share more than 12,000 movie clips. Each clip is tagged with up to 1,000 pieces of data (dialogue, actor, director, action, mood, etc) to make the most searchable collection of movie scenes on the web. Users can also compete in movie trivia games and create hilarious movie mashups.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

Plantly

Plantly is a risk-aware investment tool. They use a lot of advanced tools to show users exactly what will happen to their investments based on various scenarios. “We want you to touch this to get a feel for what will happen to your money,” is the way they put it.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

Publish2

Publish2 is an ambitious new project trying to find a fix for the Associated Press nightmare that newspapers are forced to deal with because of a lack of any viable alternative. It is the easiest way to share and distribute news for print and web publishing. Publish2 News Exchange enables newspapers to create a comprehensive, customized newswire for print, combining content sharing networks with the highest quality free and paid news sources. Publish2 Link Newswire captures the collective editorial judgment of journalists, based on what they read every day, to create engaging news aggregation features for multichannel distribution.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

Soluto

Soluto brings an end to the frustrations PC users encounter, with transparency, honesty, killer technology, and your help. Its software combines advanced technology with collective wisdom, to detect PC users’ frustrations, reveal their cause, learn which actions really eliminate them and improve user experience. Soluto is mapping the PCGenome, a knowledge base of frustrations and solutions built automatically through the usage of Soluto software, for the benefit of all PC users.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

UJAM

UJAM (CrunchBase) is a cloud-based platform that empowers everybody to easily create new music or enhance their existing musical talent and share it with friends. Like Jason wrote: “it can turn your humming, whistling, kazoo-playing or not-so-in-tune vocals into something people might actually want to listen to. And it’s really, really cool.”

Here’s our review (there are links to other coverage from around the Web in there).
Bonus: a video of Chris Sacca singing.

WeReward

WeReward is a mobile incentive platform that rewards consumers for actions they take in the real world. Consumers earn points for photo-verified location check ins or performing tasks. Each point is worth a penny, consumers can cash out directly from their mobile device. Businesses utilize WeReward’s self service platform to incent customer purchases and drive loyalty. The platform lets them see who their customers are, what their experience was and how often they purchase.

Here’s our review + video.

• Venture Capitalists Ron Conway And Sean Parker Battle For Charity
• TwitCause Is Yes, A Causes For Twitter

Last week, well-known web/iPhone developer Joe Hewitt decided to rant on Twitter. His target? The state of web development. In 25 or so tweets, Hewitt ripped apart the state of the industry. Obviously, his impassioned views caused some controversy. But more than a few people felt his views were right on the money as well. Today, at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, a couple prominent sides in the industry addressed his comments.

During the “What to Expect from Browsers in the Next Five Years: A Perspective” session, panelists were asked directly about Hewitt’s thoughts. Google’s Alex Russell stepped forward to say that while he was a fan of Hewitt’s work, and feels his pain, he disagrees with his assessment that web development is moving too slowly. In his view, web development is moving faster now than it ever has. “I feel like a lot of his comments totally ring true to me about two years ago,” Russell said noting that back then he was working on a JavaScript toolkit (just as Hewitt used to do), “it was hell.”

But now, thanks to WebKit and specially, CSS-based animations, life is much easier, Russell concluded. And, as more browsers continue to support the type of advanced CSS that runs through the GPU, things will only get better. “It’s buttery-smooth,” Russell said noting that this support was coming to all browsers shortly.

Perhaps Hewitt’s best quote in his rant was: “I want desperately to be a web developer again, but if I have to wait until 2020 for browsers to do what Cocoa can do in 2010, I won’t wait.“

Russell said he understands that frustration, but again, believes that the rate of improvement is increasing rather than remains stagnant. “It’s not all better yet – but it’s getting better at a pace that in 5 years we’ll accept what’s bleeding edge right now,” he said. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s Douglas Crockford echoed some of Hewitt’s sentiments later in the panel. “We have a strong risk of losing openness,” Crockford said noting that the web is based on standards, and standards have to move slowly or “they’re crap.” So who will they lose this openness to? The app stores.

Find the rest of the notes about the panel here. What’s interesting is just how much those that no longer have a stake in the game (Hewitt) are at odds with those who do have a stake in the game (Google, etc). While web development is no doubt better than it was 5 years ago, I can’t help but think that a lot of what Hewitt says is true. After all, this lack of innovation is at least partially to blame for the rise of the app stores.

• Zynga Is On A Tear; Claims Nearly 130 Million Social Gamers.
• Venture Capitalists Ron Conway And Sean Parker Battle For Charity

Index Ventures, a European based venture fund that has also invested heavily in U.S. startups, will launch a new seed fund on Monday to focus on early stage deals. Partners Neil Rimer, Danny Rimer, Saul Klein and Mike Volpi will manage Index Seed. The fund is partnering with existing seed fund The Accelerator Group, and TAG founder Robin Klein is joining Index as a venture partner.

The firm plans to make twenty early stage investments over the next 24 months, Klein told me. Investments will range from $50,000 – $1 million in size. And unlike many seed funds that have been carved out of larger venture funds, the partners will take board seats or otherwise be heavily engaged with their startups. With larger venture funds, the partners have time to make the investments but can’t spend a lot of time on them simply because they are managing so much other money. Index Seed is being carved out of Index’s existing $400 million fund.

The decision making process is streamlined, says Klein. “We are optimizing our process for due diligence and legals. We can make decisions quickly, don’t need a board seat, expect rights that are the same as other seed investors and can invest as little as $50k or as much as $1m in a seed round.”

Index already does seed deals occasionally, and Index Seed is a way to structure and organize those efforts. Saul Klein has been actively engaged in promoting young startups through SeedCamp, a startup competition and incubator, and OpenCoffee Club, a entrepreneur networking event that has spread around the world. And the partnership with TAG brings in additional expertise around early stage deals.

Index has done 40 seed stage deals since 1995, says Klein, and 30 of those were in the last 5 years. Those deals include MySQL, Skype, Playfish and RightScale.

TAG is a seed fund run by father and son team Robin Klein and Saul Klein. The fund, which won the Europa award for top European investor, is a co-investor with Index with 14 companies, including Moo, My Heritage, Glasses Direct, OpenX, Stardoll, Moshi Monsters and LoveFilm. Saul Klein works at both funds, and so there is already a lot of overlap. TAG’s exits include Agent Provocateur (3i), Sit Up TV (Virgin Media), Lastminute.com (IPO), Last.fm (CBS) and Dopplr (Nokia). They currently have 44 active investments. TAG will continue to make its own investments – Robin Klein will spend two days a week at Index.

Saul Klein says that Index wants to continue to invest with top angels in Europe and the U.S., and says that those relationships are crucial to bringing in deal flow. He talks about the notion of “fellow travlers” – investors who share Index’s philosophy of active engagement with seed stage teams. “In the nearly 100 or more seed deals, we have collectively done, we have seen time and again how important it is for founders to have not just relevant investors at the seed stage but investors who are accessible, honest and engaged,” says Klein.

• Venture Capitalists Ron Conway And Sean Parker Battle For Charity
• TwitCause Is Yes, A Causes For Twitter