5 Quick Thoughts

September 26th, 2006

1) I’ve loved Kiva for months now. And yet I didn’t get involved.

That ended the other day.

Inspired by Niblettes I’ve made my first (small) loan to a mother of five in Kenya for the purchase of five steers that will be sold to support his children’s education.

Kiva has tremendous potential and embodies the change that 2.0 can bring to the world. This experiment will help me validate the service before getting further involved. I’ll let you know how it progresses.

2) “Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.” - Thomas Berger [entrepreneurial-minded individuals will enjoy this]

3) Yahoo’s Tom Coates presented a must-view slide-deck at the Future of Web Apps conference on social apps [notes found here]

The talk is about how to generate systems and models wherein large groups of people can publically create something together that’s more than the sum of its parts. It’s about Wikipedia, Flickr, motives for social engagement, how to derive value from innumerable small contributions and what challenges this form of creation may be causing in a world of proprietary data.

4) From the Times, Venture Investing as a Strategy, Not to Make Money, further movement towards specialization companies.

â€œWe try to make sure that all the relevant players in the ecosystem are ready about the same time,â€ said Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital.

5) “Please don’t make me laugh at this.”