In a move that could end up having a massive impact on US entrepreneurism, Kiva.org has introduced their peer-to-peer lending service to the US. Kiva was originally built to alleviate poverty by creating a new capital market for global social entrepreneurs — to the US.
In their report on today’s announcement, TechCrunch reports,
For those of us interested in alternative economics, it was a very interesting week on the Front Range of Colorado. There was significant activity among and between many groups who are innovating better ways to flow capital (financial capital, sure, and also social, human, intellectual and natural capital) through our economy and society.
Slow Money, a movement that evolved from Investor’s Circle, is a new network of investors focused on making long-view investments which accept below-market rates in addition to social and natural captial returns related to localized, organic food systems. Fast Money metaphorically defines the success of Boulder’s TechStars web 2.0 startups, which are moving at speeds reminiscent of Silicon Valley circa 1998. Local money was at the hub of the Business Association for Local Living Economies (BALLE) annual conference. And sustainable money reared its head in the form of a new bank that has been founded from the ground up on sustainable principles.
People who think their social business concept is too important or too smart to share with people, and needs to be protected from prying eyes and potential copycats will probably not understand what’s going on at Futureshifters right now.
Social entrepreneurs from around the world are freely sharing their ideas for socially-minded businesses that ought to get started. The idea was inspired by Seth Godin. As Futureshifter Zack Schwartzman explains, Continue reading
The partnership with Innovation Networks for Communities, which centers on the development of nuPOLIS.com, has been a fascinating and rewarding journey into scalable social innovation.
Here is the May Update from this amazing network of innovators:
Online release of Chapter 2–”The Disruption of Community Life”–of new book: How Social Innovators are Transforming America’s Communities by Peter Plastrik and Theodore Staton. “Visit San Francisco, New York, Worchester, or nearly any community in America, talk to its leaders, look at their newspapers and data—as we have—and you will be struck by the presence of disruption wherever you go. In small and mid-size cities; gigantic metropolitan regions and rural towns—the largest, most complex places and the smallest, simplest ones—five forces of disruption are imposing new realities: economic globalization, environmental damage, cultural division, immigration, and self-empowered citizens…”
There’s much more hype and pointless activity surrounding social media — much less social media analysis — than there are meaningful results. A recent piece on Business Week, Debunking Six Social Media Myths, is well worth the read, hitting the proverbial nail on the head when it comes to using social media for business.
Their six key points all support the basic premise on which nuance intelligence does business, and therefore, we want you to hear someone else saying it:
I couldn’t be more excited about getting to work with AWhere on helping design a collective intelligence engine for the UN Foundation.
Here’s a recent two-part intervew I did at the AWhere Blog with UNF change agent Kevin Starace. In his words:
As chair of the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Performance Subcommittee we’re mandated to help the sector improve effectiveness. Starting in 2007, we’ve been trying to find a technology that enables several things:
- This one is the most important: we’ve got to break down silos across all boundaries, sectors and specialties, including but not limited to funding, institutional knowledge and to create a sector-wide peer review process.
- Performance evaluation – how are we, collectively, achieving these huge global targets? Specifically, those in alignment with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG), including an 85% distribution of bed nets and reduction of child mortality.
- Provide platform by which all health initiatives can input information that is relevant to scientific advancement, investment evaluation, and providing a complete picture of what’s going on at the ground level.
After I first talked to [AWhere CEO] John Corbett, I realized that the common denominator for all of those problems is location. What matters is not our organizational and bureaucratic divisions, but what’s happening to the people on the ground. If we organize information sharing around the location of the problem, it helps us create a new collaborative holistic vantage point…
The ability to geographically correlate meaningful information from disparate sources in real time will forever alter our ability to improve the lives of people around the world. That has never been possible before, and it’s literally going to change everything.
On a personal level, it’s incredibly humbling to even think in these terms. That I’m helping design a small part of it is an honor. Any advice?
At Business Catapult, we’re powering the Angel Capital Summit.
As I wrote at the Business Catapult Blog,
As supporting partners, Business Catapult provides our entire suite of tools, and provide many new features to what would otherwise be a typical investor fair. For instance:
- Investors can review deals prior to the conference, and participate in a collective intelligence process that identifies the best companies to present.
- Entrepreneurs use our Benchmark Survey as one component of the nomination process, and are able to refine their plan, based on the results of the business logic we build into the Benchmark Report.
- Trusted Advisors can contribute to the deal screening process, and gain an insight into the strongest new companies in the region.
- Organizations, including Business Schools, Small Business Development Center (SBDCs), incubators, angel investor networks and entrepreneurial meetup groups can each organize a group on the system, nominate their entrepreneurs and, after the conference is open, see the entirety of the pool of entrepreneurs who nominated themselves.
Entrepreneurs can apply now. Investors can learn about unusual benefits. Coloradans can look forward to what we’re calling an Entrepreneurial Renaissance, for as usual, the independently minded (seen the polls?) folks in the Centennial State are thinking differently.
Note: We’re back from holiday, digging out of email and catching up with news.
Really good data on growth in social network traffic in the first half of 2008. Inside Facebook carries results of recent comscore rankings. In short, Facebook and Hi5 are the fastest growing networks, while MySpace is less hot in terms of growth, although still a goliath.
What’s the nuance?
During the first half of 2008, the market became increasingly concentrated amongst the 6 market leaders. Although uniques to the leading 6 social networking sites increased by 88 million, uniques to the other 276 social networking sites in the category actually fell by 24 million from December to June. Despite all the new social networks being launched, it’s proving to be really hard to gain traction at this point.
As a base to the acid of web 2.0 tools, their blogs, tweets (twits?), Duncan Work’s blog — 100 Trillion Connections — is an interesting balance.
Recently, Duncan posted some of his thoughts on the connection between the important work being done in mapping the human brain, and it’s implications for the social brain.
His conclusion?
… mapping bigger-scale social structures and processes will be much more challenging and will require both better data (including dynamic data) and better techniques. Large scale real-time participation by individuals and groups in online social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, etc., can someday help us do a better analysis of large-scale social intelligence — if the data can be truly open for analysis, while also insuring users’ privacy.
Spent Monday afternoon at the New Media Summit, hosted by Metzger and Associates.
The audience was largely PR and communications professionals — people whose bosses, clients and clients’ clients are frequently turning towards to answer the ever-maddening questions about how to deploy new technologies, what social networking, mobile applications and new media in general is all about.
It’s a big change from the GoogleIO I attended six weeks ago, which was the uber-geek center of the universe, where the discussion was more technical, on the far side of the cutting edge.
Highlights of today’s discussion were Twitter, mobile applications and general new media trends. Here’s a good wrap up from the Metzger blog.
What’s the nuance?