April Donation - $340

AP Tests are over!!
Okay, now that those are done with, we have a bit more time to work on Benelab. Thanks to your help, we were able to decide on the May cause in the midst of all the craze within the first week of May. We are donating to the Ronald McDonald House to help provide a "home away from home" for cancer patients and their families.

So back to the point - we just wrote the check for $340 to World Concern, which was the chosen charity for March and April. The funds will go towards providing hearing aids to 4 children in developing countries! You can check out our updated donations page here.

Help us decide the May Cause!

Hey everyone!

I'm sure you all are aware of the fact that Benelab is entirely comprised of highschool students, mostly juniors. And the month of May is the "nightmare month" for all juniors who are taking AP exams. Why are we telling you this? It's because 'tis the lovely AP season right now, and our main members at Benelab HQ are spending countless hours studying for these very important tests, not leaving that much time for Benelab work. We know, it's the last thing we want to do, but we also believe that going to a good college will help us help more people in the future!

Anyways, we have been super super busy for the past few weeks and will continue to be for the next couple weeks. We will of course keep up work on Benelab, but the workload will be a bit less till theis lovely AP season is over. We ask for your patience and understanding!

So... back to the main purpose of this post! Because we have been so busy, we have not been able to decide on the May cause of the month yet - and we need your help deciding, fast. So please pitch in any suggestions to us, so that we can expedite the process a lot. You can directly email Jack at
jack@benelab.org

Or, if you're feeling a bit busy today like us, save a few seconds and just comment on this post right below!

Thanks so much for your support everyone!
-Jack & the very busy Benelab team

Hydrave Results - Good News!

Wow! Sorry it's been such a long time since we last updated our blog! We juniors are getting pounded with AP tests lately and we just barely have time to do anything else...

Anyways, we have some updates! More specifically, we got the numbers back for how much we raised at the Hydrave dance a couple weeks ago. An astounding $870!

But that's not all... World Concern, the organization we will be working with to drill the well, provided matching funds, so the total money raised is $1740!

We're super excited about the results of Hydrave. It's quite amazing how that much money was raised in a mere 2 hours. It also showcases Benelab's approach to philanthropy very well - to bring it to the norm and make it cool. We always like to innovate new, effective ways to raise money to donate to meaningful causes that we can easily relate to. We are happy Hydrave turned out super well!

HYDRAVE!!!

Last Friday Night, King's ASB and Benelab hosted the Hydrave dance, a rave to raise money to drill a freshwater well through World Concern. Benelab kindled the idea back in September last year, and it finally happened! Our chapel theme at King's HS this year is "hydrate", and the idea was that we would raise money to physically "hydrate" others in need of fresh water. Cool, eh? :)

Even more awesome, we were able to get funding from the school, so that 100% of ticket donations would go directly to the well! It costs around $3000 to drill a well, and World Concern has matching donors for our donation.

Anyways, the dance was awesome (pictures to come)! The event was completely student-run, which was super cool. Even the DJ was a King's student!

Even if we're short on the money collected, we'll go out of our way to make up the rest; all that matters is that this well is drilled. We'll keep updated on Hydrave, so stay tuned!

new Benelab.org - beneDROID

Did you see the big news yesterday? We released a press release stating we are ceasing operation of the current search engine Benelab.org and launching a new site. Here's part of the press release:

4/1/2012 - Edmonds, WA. Benelab announces plans to cease operation and development on its current search engine Benelab.org; private beta for new search engine beneDROID released. Benelab spokesman Jack Kim: "there comes a time when a web startup simply needs to step back and rethink its product. [we have] reached this stage today. beneDROID. Search and Destroy."


And he're a sneek preview of the new beneDROID site we're currently launching in private beta. Tell us 
what you think!

P.S. - happy april fool's!

Update on March's results, April's goal

March was a big month for us, having gone through a complete search function remodel. We're back with a stronger, more profitable search platform powered by Yahoo now, but we are still working out the little kinks to make Benelab.org the single best charity search engine in existance. We also went though a monthly charity change during the month, and which might have confused some users too. With crazy stuff like our remodel and monthly charity confusion, we have been unable to fully meet out goal of $400 in March. So we decided to carry over March's charity and goal into April. Hopefully this month we can finally reach the goal!

Radio Ad Recording!

We finally recorded our Spirit 105.3 radio ad today! It was really cool, we'd never been in a recording studio before! We were handed scripts to read off of, and Mckayla and Devin took turns recording. Once our producer adds the background music, our ads should go live within this weekend in Seattle and Austin, Texas! Thank you CRISTA for everything!

P.S. - Wonderful photos cred goes to Ms. Tonie Duchemin!