Microfinance Gets Macro Push

by David Burn | Nov 4, 2005 | Digital culture

USA Today: Entrepreneurship turned eBay founder Pierre Omidyar into one of the world’s richest men. Now, he’s betting it can ease one of the world’s most daunting problems: poverty.

Omidyar, who started eBay 10 years ago, will announce Friday that he is donating $100 million for a new Tufts University program to generate millions of tiny loans, some as small as $40, to finance entrepreneurs trying to escape poverty in India, Bangladesh and other poor countries.

The gift is a big endorsement of social entrepreneurship — a field of growing interest for the new generation of technology entrepreneurs. The shift could recast traditional philanthropy dominated by non-profits such as the Ford Foundation built on Old Economy wealth.

The microfinance industry began about 30 years ago in rural Bangladesh when economics professor Muhammad Yunus launched what is now Grameen Bank. It has 3.7 million borrowers, virtually all women, relying on the bank’s nearly 1,300 branches covering 46,000 villages. Repayment rates are 95% to 98%, says Grameen Foundation USA, the bank’s U.S. affiliate.

Since Grameen’s launch, a network of other microlenders — as many as 10,000 — has sprung up worldwide, lending about $24 billion annually, says the Microcredit Summit Campaign, funded partly by Omidyar. Over the next 10 years, he expects the Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund could unleash $1 billion in loans, many to women, as capital is repaid, then lent again.

Omidyar, with $10 billion, ranks No. 18 on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans.

Gas Up The Boar

by David Burn | Oct 26, 2005 | Digital culture

One of America’s funniest and most popular bloggers, Heather B. Armstrong, on her virgin 4-wheeler excursion.

The moment I straddled my legs over the pulsating black seat I could feel the spirits of my dead redneck ancestors crushing beer cans against their foreheads, ancestors who raced on the backs of giant boars.

Josh Rubin’s Triple Play

by David Burn | Oct 14, 2005 | Digital culture

What Does Tropolism Mean?

Tropolism means Metropolism.com was taken.

Tropolism means believing that cities are the crowning achievement in our civilization. After ultrasuede, of course.

Tropolism means urban life is a glorious mess, as are the buildings and spaces that enable it.

Tropolism means addicted to density.

Tropolism means loving the works of architects, and all the public conversation that surrounds it, while retaining a healthy skepticism for what architects say about their work.

Tropolism means writing about loving works of architects, and about skepticism for what they say.

Tropolism means calling bullshit.

Tropolism means no complaining.

Tropolism means proposing new alternatives.

Tropolism means finding beauty everywhere it exists.

Tropolism means making the hidden city visible.

Tropolism is edited by NYC-based architect/writer Chad Smith. It’s published by Josh Rubin, who also puts out Cool Hunting and Needled.

Let Them Eat Lobster

by David Burn | Oct 14, 2005 | Digital culture

Halley’s Comment: You’d have to live under a rock, or have a brown paper bag as your favorite hat, not to notice that things are getting very bullish and “dot com-like” in the blogosphere these days.

Halley showing Scoble some love

So what to do about this atmosphere of fame and fortune suddenly being visited on blogging? A bunch of us were talking about that at dinner Monday night in Seattle at MSN Search Champs Camp. The “champs” included Chris Pirillo, Robert Scoble, Mary Hodder, Liz Lawley, Gina Trapani, Andru Edwards, Raymond Chen and yours truly, Halley Suitt.

I guess we all wondered Monday night if these newly arrived MEN WITH MONEY will twist, divert or blow up the bridges on this natural path of innovation we have been walking in the blogosphere. We made editorial decisions and built blogs based on passion — because that’s all we had in the beginning — when there was no money and the need to amuse and entertain one another was the key motivator in blogging.

The dinner plate said it all to me … it was surf and turf and Mary Hodder and I looked down at it, shocked to see such a plentiful plate, an amazing piece of prime rib WITH a gorgeous piece of salmon. An embarrassment of riches really for bloggers who were used to the old days, when we were throwing together blogger dinners of cheap Chinese food and hoping to hell when the bill came we could each come up with $9.00 or less.

Thinking Big. Doing Huge.

by David Burn | Sep 30, 2005 | Digital culture

Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab chairman and co-founder, is working to bring $100 laptop computers to schoolchildren in developing nations. To achieve this goal, a new, non-profit association, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), has been created.

The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop that will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data. These rugged laptops will be WiFi- and cell phone-enabled, and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel.

When these machines pop out of the box, they will make a mesh network of their own, peer-to-peer. This is something initially developed at MIT and the Media Lab. We are also exploring ways to connect them to the backbone of the Internet at very low cost.

The idea is to distribute the machines through those ministries of education willing to adopt a policy of “One Laptop per Child.” Initial discussions have been held with China, Brazil, Thailand, and Egypt. Additional countries will be selected for beta testing. Initial orders will be limited to a minimum of one million units.

Five initial companies who have committed to this project are AMD, Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, and Red Hat.

American Firms Help China Keep Online Dissent At Bay

by David Burn | Sep 22, 2005 | Digital culture

Christian Science Monitor: As China began to go online, observers made brash predictions that the Internet would pry the country open. Cyberspace, the thinking went, would prove too vast and wild for Beijing to keep under its thumb.

Now these early assumptions are being sharply revised. Under an authoritarian government determined to control information, China has grown a new version of the Internet. As former US President Bill Clinton noted recently, China’s Internet is very unlike the cauldron of dissenting voices that is the hallmark of the Internet familiar to Americans. Instead, it’s heavily filtered, monitored, censored, and most of all, focused on making money.

The success of Beijing’s strategy – to harness the network’s business potential while minimizing it as a conduit for free speech – has some concerned that it has established a medium and new censoring tools that other countries can adopt.

“The biggest danger is that China creates a very large market and testing ground for surveillance and filtering software,” says Danny O’Brien with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.

As Chinese Web companies seek to enlarge their markets particularly in developing countries, the question looms about whether they will export their values as well. Chinese tech firms have an eye on emerging markets in Africa, South America, and India. These firms are probably peddling censorship tools, says the free-speech advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.

Part of the Chinese success has been co-opting American tech companies with the lure of its lucrative consumer market. Microsoft blocks bloggers from posting politically sensitive words in Chinese; Google shuts down for several minutes when a user in China looks too many times for forbidden words like “Falun Gong;” and Yahoo recently admitted turning over private e-mail information that helped lead to the jailing of a Chinese journalist.

“I do not like the outcome,” Yahoo chief Jerry Yang said of incident. But it’s a decision he said he had to make when he decided to do business here.

Unlike other authoritarian regimes, notably North Korea and Cuba, which depend on keeping the Web away from the people, China has promoted access – a fact that initially surprised observers. Chinese leaders, says Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders, knew they needed the Internet to attract global business and trade. Access is abundant and cheap, and those who cannot afford a home computer rely on more than 2 million Cybercafes nationwide. An estimated 134 million Chinese will be online by the end of this year, according to the Beijing-based research firm Analysys International, and nearly one-quarter use broadband.

The country’s Internet Service Providers remain controlled by state-run companies, giving the government a window on every user’s connection. It’s an open secret that around 30,000 telecom workers are dedicated to policing the net as part of the country’s “Great Firewall.”

Thanks to R Conversation for the pointer.

Fake For Real

by David Burn | Sep 9, 2005 | Digital culture

Caterina Fake, one of the brains behind Flickr, is also one of best writers and freshest thinkers online.

Geeking is not about high tech. It’s about taking stuff apart and putting it together and making something new. It’s about curiosity and tinkering, whether it be with gardens, vacuum tubes or PHP.

While, I’ve not met Ms. Fake, on paper she hardly strikes a pose associated with geeks. She’s a Vassar grad who studied English literature. Milton and crew are a long way from MIT, ditto an apartment in Finland.

Sometimes I forget how much “tinkering” on the web I actually do. What began six years ago is now a full blown obsession. No doubt about it. It’s an obsession but it’s pleasin’.