If you’re looking for a gift for someone who has everything, and who would be interested in giving something to someone who has almost nothing, then take a look at Kiva.org. It’s micro-lending for the rest of us.

Micro-lending, as you may be aware, is the concept of lending very small amounts of money to people who live in poverty so that they can entrepreneur their way out, or at least improve their standard of living significantly. Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus introduced the idea with Grameen Bank, and it has been growing steadily ever since in various forms. According to an article in the June 2008 Harvard Business Review some 140 million have taken advantage of micro-lending so far, but that pales in comparison to the 3 billion people who live on $2 a day or less.

Micro-lending largely has still been bank or non-profit based. What Kiva.org does is open it up for anyone to make the loans. A visit to their site allows you to read about the many people who are looking for loans, and it’s a simple process to sign up and lend them money.

As is the case with other micro-lending schemes the borrowers are almost entirely women because they are more entrepreneurial and have a much higher payback rate (come on gents, get with the program!). As your selected borrower receives more loans or makes progress on their goals, or pays you back, you get update emails.

Note that this is not a donation, it is a true loan. So you get paid back. And then you can loan the money to someone else. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

The ten-year old son of some good friends of ours recently had his birthday and my wife gave him a $25 certificate to Kiva.org. After looking at the site he wanted to loan money to everybody! He searched for someone who had so far not received any loans, and was delighted to see that after he got the ball rolling, other people started loaning to them as well! He was just ecstatic, and it’s a double gift: the borrower benefits, and this young person has a sense that he can make a difference in a very personal way on a global problem.

In this cynical age, that is a gift in itself.

Related posts: Co-Creation in Emerging Market

New Scientist magazine has a good interview with roving Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase. He travels around the world observing and photographing how people live their lives, and how mobile phones fit into that. It’s kind of amazing that Nokia allows him to blog about it as much as he does, normally a large corporation would keep a much tighter lid on this kind of research. But he’s a good ambassador for the brand, and I’m sure there’s plenty he doesn’t make public (including the all-important conclusions!).

I appreciate Chipchase’s modesty: he avoids the term anthropologist as he’s not trained as one (a refreshing change from some other people who have adopted that bandwagon label), and he also doesn’t get too caught up in only seeing the world from the point of view of a mobile phone. As he says on his blog “life is way more interesting than little lumps of plastic and metal”.

His blog is well worth checking out if you haven’t seen it already, with lots of fascinating photos of details of life from around the world. 

<grumpy>

I’m fed up with advertising in places where you are held captive, like movie theaters. I’m going to call it “indentured advertude” - advertising where you are held hostage to look at it and you know all it’s doing is paying for the crappy experience you’re having.

I’m fed up with advertising appearing on every conceivable flat surface that you might possibly look at, like grocery store floors.

It is oppressive, aggressive and reeks of desparation.

I found a new example this week that manages to combine all of these. With oil closing in on $150 a barrel and people not flying due to high ticket prices and the ever worsening experience of actually getting on a plane, US Airways is getting desparate. They have started selling advertising on their tray tables. One flight I took this week GM had ads all over the plane (pictured above), on the flight back it was Verizon. (This was on top of the several minutes of forced advertising they subjected us to with the drop-down TV monitors, with the sound and jingles blasted over the PA.)

Luckily I discovered that they are just vinyl labels that peel off easily. That’s me stickin’ it to the man.

Gee, US Airways, think if you improved the flying experience that might help retain customers, rather than pissing them off with indentured advertude?

</grumpy> 

Off-topic, but too momentous to pass by: Barack Obama has become the first black presidential candidate in US history. Over two hundred years after the founding of the country, and almost 150 years after the end of slavery, we finally have an African-American presidential candidate. I don’t think I’m that sappy, but I’m rather choked up at the moment. I don’t care what side of the political spectrum you fall on, this should be a proud moment.

Unfortunately it meant that we couldn’t have our first woman as a presidential candidate, something which would have been equally momentous and pride inducing.

Obama gave a pretty terrific and magnanimous speech to close it out, too. Click the video above to play it. This is the only video of the speech I’ve found so far, and it’s unedited so takes a little while to get rolling, but worth sticking with.

Going to be an interesting few months til November! 

Fifteen years ago yesterday, the World Wide Web became official and was put into the public domain. In honor of that fact, one of our colleagues at frog (thanks Ben Tomassetti!) brought in a birthday cake for it today:

(Thanks to Cary Gibaldi for the photo) 

Note the nerd humor with the binary numbering of the years…there are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don’t. I can’t say that it actually was the “moistest cake I’ve ever tasted”, but, like the web, it was free, so I’m not going to complain.

This blog post at SiliconValley.com from yesterday sums up the situation nicely:

It could easily have gone differently. Fifteen years ago, the management of the CERN physics lab in Geneva could have decided that this World Wide Web thing that researcher Tim Berners-Lee was working on might have some proprietary value down the road and put it under lock, key and license. But they didn’t. Fifteen years ago today, they put it into the public domain and changed history. Of the many Web milestones we celebrate, that makes this one special.

The CERN directors took some convincing. “The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the Web was going to be,” Berners-Lee’s colleague Robert Cailliau told the BBC. “We had to convince them that this was going to take off and it was a really big thing. And therefore CERN couldn’t hold on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away. We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn’t very much in favor of that.”