We were excited to see a new app roll out this week– created by developer Amol Mittal from San Francisco.  When Amol noticed that the current Kiva badges were geared towards specific publishing platforms (namely wordpress and facebook), he decided to create something that could work for multiple platforms.

Humsara makes it easy to embed your personal loan portfolio in a slide-show format directly into your website.  Let’s learn more about the developer behind the app:

Tell us about yourself.

My name is Amol Mittal.  I’m a freelance designer/developer specializing in Flash applications living in the San Francisco bay area, CA.  As far as hobbies are concerned, I’m
a foodie, which is why I’m glad I live in the bay area.  Otherwise I enjoy hiking, user interface design, movies.

How did you get involved with developing apps for Kiva?

I just love what Kiva does.  At first when I heard about it and went on to make my first loan, in my mind I was still thinking of Kiva as a “donation/charity” website. Some time passed and then came the timefor my first repayment. The moment I got the email of my first loan repayment, I then realized what Kiva has accomplished; and that is they have made a loan feel like charity.  I don’t lose any money, I get it all (mostly) back eventually.  When I learnt that a developer API had been released, I just felt compelled to try building something.  Build something for a worthy cause and get some development practice at the same time.

What are you plans for the future?

I have a few ideas that I would like to try out.  Most of these ideas are centered around making Kiva’s data more accessible, and providing users with tools that make it much
easier to see how kiva works.  One Idea is a Loan Timeline Visualizer; which would let the user see exactly when and where the money came from and went to. I also am considering writing an api wrapper in Actionscript 3 for Flash developers.

This week’s Behind the Apps is a guest post from Vaibhav Domkundwar, Founder of Better Labs.

Hi there! My name is Vaibhav Domkundwar and I am an entrepreneur and founder of , a small product incubation firm where we like to experiment with development very early stage concepts and products. We work with founders in the concept stages of their startups (most times the company is not even incorporated) as co-founders to prototype concepts, test, iterate and build customer-validated alpha versions. We are fully self-funded so we have full freedom to do whatever we like (which I know may be good and bad – we love it, though, and KivaAlerts.com is a product of that freedom!).

An inspiration behind this was a nagging feeling I have had for years that I don’t give back enough. One of the reasons I usually don’t donate as often to charities is because I don’t feel like I am “really” reaching out and helping someone in need – just cutting a check or paying online to a large charity is just not tangible enough. I also have always longed for a way to give back in whatever small way everyday, and not just once a year. In our busy lives its extremely difficult to achieve that and I wished there was a way we could all give-back in a small way but more often. Unfortunately, I did not act on this nagging feeling for a long time. Kiva is perfect in a number of ways – its helps you help someone directly, it gives you that tangible feeling of helping someone in need, and it allows you to give back in a small way as often as you like. So when the Kiva API was launched, I just shot an email to one of our developers, Nilesh Navale, to check it out. Then we started to think what to do with it.
I really admire the folks who build Kiva everyday as they are, in a way, getting brownie points and that “feeling” of helping someone every time any lender loans to a borrowers on Kiva. My product geek mind started to roll and we zeroed in on an idea – how about we use Kiva API to

• Make it easier and faster for current lenders to lend, so the loans are fulfilled more often and we don’t let busy schedules come in the way of a lender loaning to a borrower.
• Make it easier for existing lenders to introduce Kiva to their online and offline community and increase the number of lenders on Kiva.

I was very happy to learn that our team at BetterLabs was also excited about this and we called it the do-good initiative at BetterLabs.  The rest kinda fell in place. We allocated our team’s time to KivaAlerts, got a good a server in place and launched the service, I believe, within a week of the API launch. We also decided that we will not treat this as a side project and allocate the necessary resources to making sure that it works, its up all the time and it really fulfills the purpose for the users. While everyone at BetterLabs is a contributor, I want highlight the core team members who include Nilesh Navale, Yuvraj Shelke, Tejas Shah, Gampesh Sahu, Ameya Shetti, Chetan Muneshwar and Shrikant Lokhande.

We absolutely love all the users who are using KivaAlerts as they have helped us identify and fix bugs, and have contributed a lot in terms of feature requests which we could not have been able to understand all by ourselves. We get an email almost everyday with a suggestion or a request and I want to thank all of our users for their participation and help. I believe every one of our users is also part of the KivaAlerts team and help us everyday in our goal of achieving larger distribution for Kiva loans.

We have a lot in the works for the product. We expect to add several enhancements to KivaAlerts email alert application as well as our iPhone, Twitter and Facebook applications in the coming weeks. We haven’t done as much of proactive outreach so far but will be doing a lot more once these enhancements are in place in the next few weeks. Our users will know as the enhancements go live right away, as we use the top header part of the alert emails to communicate with our users.

Lastly, a huge thanks to the Kiva team for releasing the API. I believe it will help spread the cause of Kiva further and empower it to reach a greater milestones.

While Jon and Laura refined the bare-bones code base and product design that was in place, it is now and open source project. Developers, get moving and help launch the Kiva iPhone App!

Now, more about the developers:
Jon (Co-creator/Lead Engineer) is an iPhone app obsessed programmer who hails from Florida but now is happy living on Treasure Island. He loves coding, his dog Dixie, watching Lost, and social gaming.
Laura (Co-creator/Product Manager) is a Bay Area local who is interested in new technology, microfinance, and surfing. She’s an internet marketing buff and is the community manager for the SF Surfrider Foundation.

After Jon heard about build.kiva, the idea to create a Kiva iPhone app became a no-brainer. It’s the perfect union of two of his interests: building iPhone apps, and the microfinance opportunities Kiva enables. He then shared this idea with Laura and they began to nail down the specifics and think about features, product design, and how to spread the word.

They find their inspiration to build.kiva from the amazing amount of potential to effect other people’s lives for the better.  “This open API lets us tap into the power of Kiva in innovative and interesting ways that will enable many other people to give loans that change lives through our app,” said Laura.

“We also chose to embark on this project because while we may not be able to loan thousands of dollars through Kiva ourselves, we can give resources in the form of our talent, in a way that will enable even more people to access, discover, and ultimately lend with Kiva”.

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.

]]> http://blog.build.kiva.org/2009/07/06/behind-the-apps-kivalytics/feed/ 0 http://blog.build.kiva.org/2009/07/02/data-by-the-gigabyte/ http://blog.build.kiva.org/2009/07/02/data-by-the-gigabyte/#comments Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:29:57 +0000 skylar http://blog.build.kiva.org/?p=195 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….

Kiva World, one of the earliest and most coveted Kiva Apps, was created by a team of developers in Northern Italy. The company is called Wonsys S.r.l. and was founded by Simone Dall’Angelo, Michele Finotto and Matteo Nodari. And although I tried to convince Kiva to send me there for this interview, I settled on a few email exchanges.

Kiva World is a user-friendly google maps mashup of real time loans on Kiva. The Wonsys team describes it best:  “It’s nice to have a glance at world map and see what’s happening, who need money, who’s working to repay their loan, etc. It really helps to give a sense of what’s going on at Kiva, because it’s ok to look at a list of entrepreneurs on the Kiva website, but seeing them spread out on the map makes it a tad more impressive, because you know you’re helping a lot of people around the globe.”

The Wonsys Team having fun in Roma

The team has been using Kiva to make loans for years.  And as soon as the API was introduced, they jumped on the opportunity to build something to help spread the word about Kiva.

We think everyone should use Kiva, because you don’t need much money to start making a difference.  So we would like to help spread the word about Kiva and help you reach as many people as possible.

When I asked them about plans for the future,  they hinted at a new product idea they’d like to work on in the future.  In the meantime, we can all look forward to a Kiva World companion site that will be launching soon.

About Wonsys S.r.l.:

Wonysys was founded in 2006, by a small team of developers and computer consultants with offices in Milano and Bergamo.  Wonsys believes in building efficient and usable products custom tailored to clients’ needs.  Wonsys deems a constant two-way dialog with clients of utmost importance in order to create a successful product day after day.

The Wonsys team is always on top of new technology, which allows them to offer clients a wide range of alternatives to build the finest product in the shortest time possible.

If you need Ruby on rails engineers, you can contact Wonsys directly.

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 of this app “are people who are gung-ho to get someone funded. It is also particularly useful for Kiva field partners who want to showcase and promote their own loans on their website,blog etc.”

We got a chance to to interview Rajat and learn more about his work on the Kiva API.

Tell us about yourself.

I am a master’s student at the Department of Computer Science, ASU with a background in Information and Communication Technology. I am interested in using technology for a social cause and in creating ideas centered around utilising the universal nature of the web. My hobbies are brainstorming new ideas, travel and photography.

How did you get involved with developing apps for Kiva?

I have been a big fan of Kiva as a concept and I admire the idea of using technology to help entrepreneurs. After I saw the Kiva API and the fact that it recently launched, I thought I could contribute to the idea. My first app was a simple google maps mashup showcasing recent loans on Kiva on a map.

What do you think about Kiva extending loans to entrepreneurs in the US? Would you loan to someone in the US?

Extending loans to entrepreneurs in the US is great. My google maps mashup helped me understand that loans usually dont come from US. We can now think of applications which are more region specific and can easily test their utility using the data related to US. More coverage of MFI’s is required to truly understand and harness the potential of the concept.

What are your plans for the future?

I am brainstorming on a few more ideas on top of Kiva Platform these days. Ideas that change the model of searching loans on Kiva. At the same time, I hope to maintain the PHP wrapper I wrote to acess the Kiva API called PhpKiva by keeping it updated with the API.

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.

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 with Jon Heller, hacker of Kiva Data:

Tell us about yourself.
I’m a 30 year old database developer and I live in Durham, NC, with my wife Lisa. My main hobby now is trying to do something cool with the Kiva API.

How did you get involved with developing apps for Kiva?
I’ve been a lender and a big fan of Kiva for a while, and as soon as my wife told me about the API I started planning ways to use it.

Tell us about the product you built- who should use it? How is it useful?
Kiva Data explores and visualizes the data from Kiva. It’s a collection of trends and statistics that I think are cool, but I’m not sure if it will be useful to anyone.

What are your plans for the future? Do you have any other products you’d like to launch on Kiva?
First I plan to continue exploring all the available data, such as lenders, teams, etc. There are a few areas where I may try to get more in-depth, such as finding out what makes some loans more successful than others. Eventually I want to make my site more interactive, and provide direct access to a database of all the information. Also, I’d like to collaborate with other people on their projects, so if anyone has some specific data requirements send me an email [jonearles (at) yahoo (dot) com] and I might be able to help you out.