Brian Rosenthal's Weblog

This is the coolest idea I’ve seen, possibly in my entire life, and the best gift idea that I’ve ever seen:

http://www.kiva.org

Kiva.org is a new idea in economic development. It’s peer-to-peer micro-lending, the way Skype is peer-to-peer telephony.

What the developing world needs most is access to capital, and this site lets you loan as little as $25 to small businesses around the world, to buy farming equipment, inventory for stores, etc.

My wife and I loaned money to street vendor can buy more inventory in her soda business in Nigeria:
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=3847

The idea is: let people loan money to entrepreneurs around the world, interest free. You can basically browse entrepreneurs (like facebook) and see what businesses they run, and what they want to expand.

And the coolest thing is you can give a gift to someone, and they get to choose who gets the loan, and when the loan is repaid, you can either take the money out, or re-loan it to another entrepreneur.

Kiva loans almost $500,000 / month to entrepreneurs in the third world, through interest-free loans to non-profit banks that act as loan officers.

Check out:

NYTimes:
NYT coverage

CNN:
CNN Coverage

I learned about this through Matt Flannery, the founder, and now my friend Zvi Boshernitzan, is now helping them scale up their web site. (I’m pretty impressed at its speed… Kiva.org is super-fast)

I just went to SDWest (awesome!) and learned about commonality variability analysis. I think it’s one of the most important advances in computer science theory out there, and it’s worth a blog entry. Zvi and I spent years trying to come up with a core idea for how to measure the virtues of abstractions, and it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a foundational theory.

CVA has two important ideas:
1. Contain what varies and only what varies.
2. To find abstractions, find differences that play the same role.