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Kiva Ads is a nifty tool that allows you to customize ads to embed into your website. For example, a woman's organization promoting health in Africa can now make ads to promote borrowers that align with their mission. You can sort by gender, loan status, sector, and region:
Then you are given the code to a dynamic, rotating ad that sorts through entrepreneurs according to your criteria:
According to the developer, Rajat Mittal, the main audience...
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You've built it, now how can we get people using it? You may have seen the new App Gallery, which launched on Tuesday. This is a good way for Kiva.org users to find useful tools. And in just a few weeks, we'll be linking to the App Gallery from the homepage. When we find a cool app, we tweet, facebook, and blog our hearts out. But what else can Kiva do to support and advertise these great apps? We'd love to hear your ideas.
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Kiva Data is a handy set of charts taking a macro look at Kiva's micro loans. A look at the heat map of loans by country reveal that Peru and Cambodia have the highest amount of loans, with 11,814 and 10,569 respectively. Kiva Data also looks at top uses for loans, analyzing free-text of borrower profiles. Among top phrases, TO BUY A COW appears 136 times. And 109 borrowers will "USE THE MONEY TO DIVERSIFY AND EXPAND MY BUSINESS". Other interesting charts are Borrower Gender, Minutes Between Posted Date & Funded Date, Loan Size, and more. I got a chance to speak...
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Thanks to everyone who came out to the Kiva's first Developer's Garage today! We worked on five apps: Kiva iPhone, Wordpress Plugin, Facebook App, JavaScript Browser, and a special secret widget that we'll disclose next week. Check out this great video put together by @thomasknoll and @pistachio.
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Kiva + (a tool from Ahkun) lets you track individual loans, or your entire loan profile in new ways. For example, by typing in the Kiva Loan ID here, you're able to see a graph comparing Expected vs. Actual Payments of a particular loan: Similarly, entering your Lender ID displays loans by list or pie chart. We got a chance to talk to Sanjaya Punyaesena, developer of this tool. Sanjaya is a former Kiva Fellow, who currently works for a Kiva Field Partner. Tell us about yourself...
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In the month of May, you voted for your favorite Kiva Apps. Over 400 people voted, and the results are in!
#1 KIVA ALERTS: A suite of tools for facebook, mobile, and the web that tell alert you when loans of your interest appear on Kiva.
#2 KIVA WORLD: A live map of global Kiva loans in all stages: fundraising, funded, in repayment, and paid. Click on the markers to read more about the entrepreneur in the area.
#3 KIVA HEADS: Lets you browse loans on Facebook, and show off your loans in your Facebook page.
The winners...
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The past several weeks we have been busy adding a lot of new features to the Kiva API. Let's take a look at what's new... Lending Teams - This has probably been the most requested new feature, and of course by those with their own lending team sites. You can now fetch detailed information about a team (or a set of teams), and fetch all lenders or loans associated with a team. Baskets on Kiva.org - We see this as perhaps the most powerful new feature available to API-based applications –the ability to pre-compose baskets and send the user directly to...
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If you were going to rate Kiva loans by their potential social impact, what data would you look at? The team behind Kivuntu, came up with an interesting formula combining Kiva data (loan amount, number of borrowers, and duration) with country data (GDP per capita). Through this formula, their website produces a daily ranking of what they consider the 2o highest-impact loans. This is based on the assumption that the larger the loan with respect to GDP, the greater the business opportunity and cash flow of the business. They also assume that shorter loans...
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Since we’ve opened the Kiva API, developers have been tinkering away and creating great applications and widgets using Kiva data. Check out these cool apps and vote on your favorite one during the month of May! In alphabetical order:
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The Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco hosted 1,400 do-gooders interested in technology. There were over 100 sessions in 3 days, including "Web 2.0 Philanthropy: Crowdsourcing through the Kiva Developer Program" by Kiva's Skylar Woodward. In case you missed it, here's a description of his session: So now you have a hip,...
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