If you like data, you’ll like Kivalytics.  This Kiva App is a nifty set of graphs looking at loans. 

For example, you can view a bar graph of loans by country, and see that Peru has by far the most loan dollars, followed by Cambodia. Hovering over any of the bars gives you the exact number of loans.  Some other things I learned from Kivalytics:

• Food and retail are the two most popular sectors, education and entertainment are the smallest
• Behind the US dollar, the most common disbursal currencies are the Pervuian nuevo sol, the West African franc, and the Tanzanian Shilling
• Total amount lent by Kiva = $80,485,635 USD

We asked the developer of this app a few questions, and here are his responses:

Tell us about yourself.
My name is Aart-Jan Boor and I live in The Netherlands. I’m a partner at the company behind www.ktplugins.com. We deliver services for users of a commercial open source document management system. My hobbies are sailing, reading and browsing.

How did you get involved with developing apps for Kiva?
I already knew about Kiva trough an article in the newspaper. Once when I was looking around on the website I saw you recently launched an API. My background in Economics and Computer Science combined with an interested in Business Intelligence triggered me to do something with this API. I had some spare time so I decided that I wanted to explore the Kiva database and started working on what became kivalytics.

What inspires you to build.kiva?
Basically I think the division of wealth is unfair; in my opinion everyone deserves a chance to have a decent life. I realize that this change must be supported by many people which is why I support Kiva; its reach makes it possible to change (many) lives.

Tell us about Kivalytics- who should use it? How is it useful?
To be honest Kivalytics isn’t that special. It’s just a website that presents some Kiva data in a user-friendly way. If you’re interested in Kiva and microfinance in general check out the website; it has some interesting information and charts.

What are your plans for the future?
Realizing that the website in its current state isn’t that special there are things I’d like to change to make it special. I’m eagerly awaiting the data dump functionality for developers – this will make my life trying to keep my database up to date a lot easier. Once this is sorted out I’m hoping to provide a lot more statistics/charts.

I’m also specifically interested in defaulting borrowers. I’d like to do some research in to why they are defaulting and if some loan properties have a relation with the likelihood of a borrower defaulting. Ideally I might like to set up a classification tree for estimating the likelihood of a borrower defaulting.

In the end I just want to make a small contribution to the Kiva ecosystem/community to help Kiva change lives.

Ok, almost. We launched data snapshots this week. For the first time you can grab a snapshot of the Kiva data through a single download here at build.kiva.org. Many of you working on data have been asking for this to simplify your study. For now we only capture individual information for a loan or a lender, but this will expand going forward as we have feedback from those of you using the snapshots.

For those already doing data analysis on Kiva, we encourage you to switch to snapshots where possible to reduce load on our API servers. For those of you pulling extensive amounts of Kiva data regularly for your app, you might make use of the snapshot as a way to seed or bulk update your copy of the objects then use the API to track more volatile data or recent changes.

New snapshots are published daily and you can grab the lastest from the front of build.kiva.org. Check out the related documentation for more….

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 checkout on Kiva.org. This allows applications to all but complete the loop on a loan purchase and certainly paves the way for entirely new loan shopping experiences to emerge.

More Search – We added search methods for more of our core data objects – lenders and journal entries. Having these as searchable also means you can easily fetch a list of all the newest lenders or journal entries. We’re anxious to see how this powers new ways of discovering this data at Kiva.

For more, check out the API Reference and the updated documentation.  We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments or on the Google Group. Happy building!

Mark your calendars! The Kiva Developer Garage will be Saturday, June 6th at 1pm in San Francisco.  We’ll have snacks all day, and pizza for those who stay through dinner.  Collaborate with other developers and designers, including members of the Kiva engineering team.

UPDATE: RSVP via Facebook or Upcoming!  For more information, see the wiki.

(Special thanks to ncbeets for use of her awesome garage photo on the front page.)

In 10 days we’re holding the first open event for Kiva Developers!  Nothing too formal, we’re just opening up the Kiva offices for friends and developers to meet-up, chat, and hang out.  We’ll have drinks and snacks on hand, all starting at 6:30pm on Thursday, April 9:

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2295671/

It would be great to have people showing off and taking about the applications they’ve been building, so if you’re in the area, please drop by! It’s a great chance to collaborate with others and hear from folks in person who’ve been using your apps.

Coincidentally, April 9 is also Yuri Gagarin’s birthday, so we’ll be celebrating outer space as well. Cosmonaut jumpsuits are encouraged.

See you Thursday!

Today marks our first feature update to the Kiva API. It is appropriate, perhaps, that part of this release is a way for you to track future updates we make to the system.  You may have noticed a new section on the front page of build.kiva.org this evening which shows the current API status and the release number and age of the current build. This way, if things seem to have changed since you last tested your app, you’ll know if it was us. The build number of the API will always change if we push new code (coincidentally, this applies to changes to the Kiva website too, for now).  As you might expect, info on the current release is also available as an API method.  Now on to things more exciting…

This big change in this release is video! You’ve heard it here first. Starting today, our partners and volunteers will start uploading video to entrepreneur profiles and journals so it is important that your application can handle this as well. Actually, we made it easy for your old application to work with this since every business with a video also has a thumbnail image which doubles as the primary image for the loan. However, users may start to see iconography in these images which clues them in to the presence of video, and they may expect to be able to click through to the new content. To help you make the transition to video with us we updated the media section of the documentation. Since our video is hosted at YouTube, it also helps to be a bit familiar with the YouTube API.

Finally, we made a small change to the Kiva website to help out application developers; lenders can now find their Lender ID (previously called UID) at http://www.kiva.org/myLenderId. Previously, there wasn’t a good way for you to point lenders to this information making it difficult for most users to take advantage of apps that required this bit of information. The suggestion for this feature actually came from Jason via the discussion group, so we’re stoked that the community is already helping guide how the API and developer tools evolve.

Let us what you think in the comments below or in the forum…

Wow.  We’re pretty excited about what’s happening with the API thus far. Within a couple of hours of the launch we saw the first use of the API on a blog and in the first week there were four API toolkits for accessing the API in a range of languages. Here’s a couple of other things that popped up that caught our eye:

• a service that lets you sign up for email alerts for your favorite loan categories
• a map that lets you browse for new loans geographically
• a Wordpress widget for lenders to showcase their loans
• this world cloud generator which shows popular terms from loan profiles

In related news, we’re opening up the wiki to editing now. All you need is a pbwiki account (or OpenID) to get started.  Most of the pages are editable.  In particular, we hope that people will add to this list of Applications, Widgets, and Analyses as they discover or create new things on top of the Kiva API.

Thanks to everyone who has helped make the first two weeks such a success!  Keep the innovations coming…

This is build.kiva.org, our brand-spankin’-new destination for developers wanting to build and extend the microlending platform we’ve created at Kiva. Over the next few months we plan to shape this into a hub for builders, mashers, and other creative types looking to make a difference in the world through loans to the working poor.  Here you’ll find news, discussion, and documentation around the Kiva API and other tools we provide to developers. You’ll also be able to connect with other Kiva Developers, share your ideas, and keep up with activity going on in the developer community.

Moreover, this is a place where you can help us shape the Kiva API.  You’ll find our API roadmap and evolving designs on our Wiki, and we expect these to change in direct response to your participation in the community. This site is yours too – let us know what needs to change and how we can make it a more powerful tool for everyone building Kiva.  (If you like what you see so far, help us give thanks to our designer-friend, Omar Lee.)

We’re excited you’re here. See you in the forums and the intertoobes.