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)

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6184618910.html

An amazing plugin. Will revolutionize medicine by automating medical billing.

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1515217&from=rss

Just like many people who grew up in the 60’s and 70’s resisted the Internet and computers in general, only to decide that they had to catch up later, our generation is missing the use of the Internet in collaboration.

Every single person should learn:
1. How to create a wiki and use it to keep notes on projects.
2. How to use del.icio.us bookmarking.

http://davidseah.com/tools/ett/alpha/

This has got to be the neatest thing I’ve ever seen. It uses my time tracking strategy.

Okay, I’m excited about a web framework. Django is everything I could ever want in a web framework.

- A model for the Data-tier
- MVC separation
- A flexible and powerful templating language
- An integrated user model
- specification-driven, for the most part.
- developed with a very good methodology.

Seems very much like what we’ve been doing here at Robocommerce in python. I think it’s about time to open-source our results.

Wow. I thought that was going to kill their customer service. I just called them, though, and they were the best company in terms of customer service that I’ve ever seen in the e-commerce space.

We wrote a script to automatically post hurricane news for the renal community here:
http://katrina.szf.com

Steve and I just put this up a while ago:
Search for dialysis units.

It’s an AJAX-driven search for dialysis units based on the CMS (Read: Medicare) database.

However, I’m publicizing this now because we have Katrina data (what dialysis units are open after the hurricane).

Anyway, check it out.

I just installed Gallery 2 and love it.

Here are two photo albums that I just put up:
http://photos.szf.com
http://photos.brianrosenthal.org

Here is a free, best of breed image viewer (brought to my attention by Aaron Harvey):

Demo:
http://www.airtightinteractive.com/demos/

Download:
http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/

Mozilla has a scrapbook extension which lets you store web sites for later viewing, without requiring a network. This is really important if you’re viewing news articles that might expire or anything that you want to arhive. Here s the link:

Mozilla’s scrapbook extension

It has some advanced featured you’ll want to check out: you can edit your page, you can select to preserve javascript…

The shortcut once you install it is Alt-K, and you’ll want to install it and immediately update it because the latest version is not 0.12, I just cannot find the link to the latest version…

Good front page ui. Really interesting software package
http://www.netsuite.com/portal/home.shtml

Nothing’s really open source…

http://www.phpcoin.com/
http://www.modernbill.com/

I took a quick look at this and was really impressed.

http://moodle.org

Here are some demo sites, I’m playing around with:
http://learning.robocommerce.com
http://learning.letsgetready.org
http://learning.szf.com

Plone is an excellent content management technology, for organizations that want to be able to have and assign control of the content that they publish.

http://arma.robocommerce.com
http://clinicalresearchdynamics.com

Plone

These guys just keep going.

You can find theater showtimes around the country.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=movie%3A&btnG=Search

Google Suggest suggests how to complete your search for you, using data from other popular searches.

It uses a technology called “Ajax” (Asynchronous Javascript + XML) to get data without refreshing your page.

I’m really interested in the model that they use.

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

Google Maps is easier to use than Mapquest and Yahoo Maps.

Remember how you’ve always wanted to link to a web site with a bunch of stars signifying locations. You can. Any page, you can generate a direct link to, or email it to someone.

You can actually drag around the map to see the surrounding area.

The technology is significant beyond simply a good map interface. It uses a technology called “Ajax” Asynchronous Javascript + XML to make it where you don’t have to reload the page to get more information. This same technology is also used on Google Suggest and also from withing Google mail.

If you’re using Mozilla, you can make a shortcut so you type in “gdirections {location}” and it will come up automatically from your home or office.