Happy $500 lent out via Kiva to me!
“Kiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.”
Today I’d like to congratulate myself for reaching 500 bucks lent out via Kiva! I reached it today when I lent the modest sum of $25 to Zikusooka Women’s Group-lugazi in Uganda. I think Kiva is fantastic and it’s really one of those places online were I can sit around browsing for a good hour or so, reading all of the amazing stories told by not-so-lucky entrepreneurs. Most of whom are driven, passionate, and possess all other possible traits that might be wanted in an entrepreneur in the “western world”.
The facts and history of Kiva is really something. In total, good people have contributed with over $155,400,000 to support other human beings around the globe that really just need a break to get themselves going.
Even though I thought that I’ve tried to keep my portfolio diversified as best as I could, meaning that I thought I hadn’t favourized any particular sector or country – it seems I was mistaken. This image shows a snapshot of my present and past loans:
As you can see, my favorite entrepreneurial country to lend to has been Peru, and it seems I’ve had a bit of a crush for the retail-sector when it comes to my “investments”. Luckily I browsed to the Kiva App Gallery by mistake today and found the KivaFolio-app. KivaFolio is an app that helps analyze your Kiva portfolio’s diversity across different sectors and countries, and recommends fundraising loans that would help to balance the portfolio. Great!
After taking the app for a test run it seems I should be lending more money to agriculture in Ecuador, Kyrgyzstan, Kenya, and Tajikistan. Maybe you should too?
Since you came here there have been …
Came across “Gary’s Social Media Count” today via Ronnestam. If this doesn’t have the famous “wow factor”, I’m not sure what does. All of these stats fits in quite well with the recently released “Did You Know?” from The Economist.
Unbelievable, wouldn’t you say? Kudos to Gary.
Footytube named among the top 25 football websites
Wow, this is great news from the team behind one of my favorite websites, FootyTube. In a recent article by Steve Wilson of The Telegraph (UK), FootyTube was named one of the top 25 football sites on the web, despite still being in beta. My many congratulations for all of the hard work! It’s finally starting to pay off.
There are of course a couple of other good spots on the list. Two of my other “must read on a daily basis” tips would be Soccernet, closely followed by BBC Football. You can also read what Lee of FootyTube thoughts are on the list, and what he feel was missed.
A site I didn’t know about, which I found through Lee’s post is Footballfilter, it’s sort of a popurls-clone, a mashup but with football sources only. Being a frequent flyer of the iPhone, I have to give Footballfilter credit for the Instapaper integration (hover over an article and check the right-hand side) as well as the use of RPX (OpenID and data portability). This is the way to go and I love it!
About Footballfilter
FootballFilter is a compilation of the best Football* content available on the internet, including news, blogs, forums, pictures, videos and podcasts. All content is updated automatically so you can quickly scan all the latest stories that are appearing on the web. You can read a summary of each news item by hovering your mouse over the text. To read the full article just click on the link.
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Oh and, here you go Lee. Let me know if you need an even ‘better’ one!
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Closed systems are at the mercy of their creator having guessed at the optimal solution.
– Dick Costello
Before I knew about the top 25 mentioning, this post was going to be on openfooty, FootyTube’s own API (featured below) which is currently in a closed beta.
As of now, openfooty promises to be the most advanced completely free football API available. It offers access to much of the data that powers FootyTube on a daily basis; including fixtures, league tables, team standings, player data, team news, and of course, video. From the sound of it, it sounds as if FootyTube will prevail in this space through opening up their data to developers – something I’m of course in favor of.
I hope it won’t be too long until FootyTube shows us what other fans, users, and developers have created with openfooty. Really looking forward to it!
Burt’s presentation from DEMO
Last week, Burt appeared in front of the crowd at DEMO (“The Launchpad for Emerging Technology”) to pitch/launch their latest invention Rich. Rich is the world’s first campaign analytics tool, built with creative agencies in mind. Rich helps to answer critical questions (or what should be considered critical) such as “was the ad visible?”, “how long was it visible?”, and “did people notice it?”. In other words, Rich goes a few steps beyond CTR (click-through rate) and reach.
About Burt
We make software for the advertising industry. We founded Burt to give people a better understanding how the online media works, and enable more clever, entertaining and persuasive campaigns.
Video from Burt’s blog Be the Meme. Rich logo from Burtcorp.com.