“How you build the future is you motivate people to pay attention and act, to improve their circumstances and run their own lives”, LinkedIn co-founder and philanthropist Reid Hoffman tells me. That’s why his support of microlending platform Kiva’s kiva.org/free program has a double positive impact. He put up $1 million so 40,000 people could try helping the impoverished via microfinance without spending their own money. They get inspired, while those who receive the microloans can start small businesses and become self-reliant.
In an inspiring interview, Reid also told me about how he thinks governments should start microlending, that people need to accept that charities and causes aren’t perfect, and the life philosophy he thinks everyone should live by. Be sure to participate in the kiva.org/free trials before they run out. → Read More
Today you can help someone escape poverty by trying out microlending platform Kiva, and it won’t cost you a dime. Go to kiva.org/free where Reid Hoffman has put up $1 million of his money to let 40,000 people give $25 microloans to help those in need start farms and general stores that can support their families. The Kiva Free Trials program hopes to introduce people to the positive impact of microfinance philanthropy, and get them to lend their own money next time.
TechCrunch is proud to work with Kiva to officially announce the Free Trials, and we’re challenging you our readers to see how fast we can loan out $250,000. So visit kiva.org/free and share it with friends. Let’s use entrepreneurship to makes the world a better place. → Read More
Kiva.org, one of the pioneers in micro-lending to international entrepreneurs, has expanded into a new vertical today— Kiva Green Loans.
Green Loans, which can be accessed from a new module on the lend tab, is a new vertical that allows the Kiva community to make loans towards green businesses and individuals who are helping make the transition to cleaner and more efficient sources of energy. Kiva Green Loans include both business and personal loans that contribute towards reducing energy expenditures, minimizing waste and pollution, recycling, or re-purposing used materials. → Read More
The crowdsourced funding craze is picking up steam. Tonight we see the launch of 33needs, a site where socially-minded startups can raise initial seed funding from individual contributors on the Web. It is Kiva meets Kickstarter.
Social startups post their “needs” in terms of how much money they are looking to raise, what problems they are going to solve and how they are going to do it, along with a video to help spread the word virally. People can invest $10, $100, $1,000 or more, and in return instead of getting shares in the company, they get a promised percentage of revenues for a specified period of time like 5 percent of revenues for three years. → Read More
Last year, Kiva.org, one of the pioneers in micro-lending to international entrepreneurs, opened up its service to needy U.S. entrepreneurs, which caused some controversy. Since then, Kiva has facilitated more than $1 million in loans to U.S. small businesses. The new market has steadily gained its supporters, and today Kiva is launching a new partnership with Visa, that will help Kiva deliver new grants to small business owners in the U.S. Under this partnership, Visa will donate $1 million to Kiva to help with operations and the deployment of these micro-loans.
Kiva, which just celebrated its five year anniversary is a peer-to-peer lending site that began as a way to facilitate micropayment loans between citizen lenders and extremely low-income entrepreneurs in developing countries, Through Kiva’s platform, anyone can loan $25 or more to support an entrepreneur and the specific progress of the loan can be tracked from initial funding to repayment. Upon receiving repayment, lenders can withdraw their funds from Kiva or lend again to another entrepreneur, thereby continuing the lending cycle. → Read More
Who is Kiva’s biggest competitor?
If you rattled off a list of non-profit-centric startups, the micro-lending site’s President Premal Shah would tell you that you’re dead wrong.
Try Zynga, the gaming behemoth that has given rise to Farmville and Mafia Wars and other disturbingly ubiquitous internet classics. What does virtual fertilizer have to do with micro-finance? Shah says a lot: It’s a never-ending fight for eyeballs and discretionary income.
“If building a real farm on Kiva can be as compelling as building a virtual farm on Facebook, then I think we’ve done our jobs really well.”
According to Shah, over the next few years, the non-profit will focus on the integration of game mechanics, social tools, mobile and new philanthropic verticals like green and water loans. In terms of numbers, Shah predicts Kiva will raise $1 billion in microloans by 2015. But he will need the best engineers Silicon Valley can offer to do it. Video with Shah ahead. → Read More
Kiva.org, one of the pioneers in micro-lending to entrepreneurs, is entering the educational space today, launching the pilot program of student microloans on the platform.
Kiva is a peer-to-peer lending site that began as a way to facilitate micropayment loans between citizen lenders and extremely low-income entrepreneurs in developing countries, Through Kiva’s platform, anyone can loan $25 or more to support an entrepreneur and the specific progress of the loan can be tracked from initial funding to repayment. Upon receiving repayment, lenders can withdraw their funds from Kiva or lend again to another entrepreneur, thereby continuing the lending cycle. → Read More
The microfinance model has proved to be a valuable way to raise funds for entrepreneurs all over the country, as exemplified by the success of Kiva. Seattle-based Vittana is taking a similar approach to helping fund education in developing countries by allowing you to lend directly to students in the developing world. The idea is to bring student loans to the developing world through the power of person-to-person microlending. Today, the site is existing its beta period.
Vittana partners with microfinance organizations located in developing countries to donate to students in need of funding. Loans for students range from $200 to $1,500, are then funded by individual lenders, via $25 donations or more, on the Vittana website. One hundred percent of the loans are given to the student. Launched in beta last May, the Vittana community has made over $110,000 in loans to nearly 200 students around the world, who are now getting their degrees. Thus far, Vittana has programs in Mongolia, Nicaragua, Paraguay Peru and Vietnam and plans to expand to India and countries in Africa soon. And Vittana students have had a 97 percent repayment rate. → Read More
Proving that microloans can help to change the world one little bit at a time, Kiva.org hit a major milestone today. Since it’s founding four years ago, it has now made possible $100 million in microloans between individual lenders and entrepreneurs all around the world. The company has brought together 573,000 lenders (people like you and me putting in $25 or more towards a specific project), and 239,000 entrepreneurs.
Most of the entrepreneurs who benefit are in developing countries, but Kiva opened up its service to needy U.S. entrepreneurs last summer (which caused some controversy, but was the right decision). It also has APIs for other developers to build on its data set. → Read More
For all the billions of dollars created here, Silicon Valley is remarkably stingy when it comes to giving. I first wrote about this when I moved here in the great Web 1.0 Internet bubble. Back then, as companies went public all around us, one-third of households earning $100,000 or more gave $1,000 or less to charity—roughly half what the rest of the U.S. gave per dollar earned. And those were the fat times.
I don’t have comparable data to back it up, but anecdotally it seems the Web 2.0 generation is doing a better job at giving. Or at least Bebo founder Michael Birch is.
Birch has spent the last six months working with a team of two other people to build a social giving site for the popular organization, Charity:Water. It launched its beta site today, and with just a Tweet announcing it nearly 400 members have already raised some $3,000. → Read More
When we reported on Kiva.org’s decision to open up its micro-lending platform to U.S. entrepreneurs, Kiva CEO Premal Shah told us he was concerned about backlash in the community. Shah acknowledged that the decision to open lending to U.S. recipients may draw criticism because it goes against the idea on which Kiva was founded—lending to help development in third world countries where credit options are limited.
It looks like Shah’s prediction was correct. There is now a lending team on Kiva’s community platform titled “Unhappy Kiva Lenders.” The members, which total 375 lenders from around the world, are angry that Kiva is extending loans to U.S. entrepreneurs. The team’s page states that “including borrowers from the USA has undermined the very core of what made [Kiva] so unique and special; small, impactful contributions to entrepreneurs in impoverished situations in developing countries.” → Read More
The financial crisis has made a lasting impact on small businesses around the world and here at home in the United States. With the credit crunch creating a virtual standstill of lending, small businesses in the U.S. are facing an uphill battle to find funds, especially if their financial history isn’t stellar. Kiva.org, one of the web’s most interesting innovators in the micro-lending space, is hoping to come to the aid of U.S. entrepreneurs and small businesses by launching a pilot expansion that would allow individuals anywhere to make small loans to low-income U.S. entrepreneurs through Kiva’s platform.
Kiva is a peer-to-peer lending site that facilitates micropayment loans between citizen lenders and extremely low-income entrepreneurs in developing countries. Through Kiva’s platform, anyone can loan $25 or more to support an entrepreneur and the specific progress of the loan can be tracked from initial funding to repayment. Upon receiving repayment, lenders can withdraw their funds from Kiva or lend again to another entrepreneur, thereby continuing the lending cycle. → Read More
Last night we released the finalist names for the Crunchies Awards. Vote here for who you think should win. We’ve set up a site that is pretty self-explanatory, with all of the names of each finalist for every category, along with links to their Websites and Crunchbase profiles where you can learn more about each one before voting. The Crunchies represents the best the Web had to offer in 2008, and you get to help choose who will win. Below is a voter’s guide for two of the major categories to get you started.
Best Overall is the big prize. Amazon Web Services makes it as a finalist this year because of the sheer number of startups that are built on top of its cloud computing infrastructure. Facebook won last year, but makes a return as a nominee due to popular demand. Facebook continued to gain massive mainstream adoption in 2008 (with 140 million members now) and launched some major initiatives to extend its social computing platform beyond its site, most notably Facebook Connect (which by itself is a finalist for Best Technology Innovation, going up against Google Friend Connect). But does Facebook deserve to win again? → Read More
The financial crisis in world markets over the past few weeks has been a real eye-opener, but even those of us who have seen our stock portfolios decline by 30 percent or more don’t have much to complain about. It could be worse. It could be a lot worse. A third of the world’s population lives in poverty, and 20 percent lives in extreme poverty, meaning they are always hungry.
What can you do? How about making a microloan of a $20, $50, or $100 to an entrepreneur in a poor country? Today is Blog Action Day, with blogs around the world making a concerted effort to raise awareness about global poverty and ways to fight it. What we’ve decided to do is to start a TechCrunch lending team at Kiva.org. Anyone can join. → Read More
Despite sub-prime loan worries rocking the economy, peer-to-peer loans are gaining some traction. You’d think loans between individuals would be much riskier than loans from a bank, but it turns out that individuals can be more risk averse than banks when it comes to lending out money. If you look at Prosper, the leader in P2P lending with more than $100 million in loans out so far, only 7 percent of its loans in October were sub-prime, despite their higher interest rates. Prosper is about to get a lot more competition. After more than a year of waiting, UK-based Zopa got the go-ahead from regulators to launch its U.S. Website last week. Zopa, which doesn’t allow sub-prime loans at all, has a 0.1% default rate, whereas Prosper has a 3 percent default rate. And Lending Club, which started as a Facebook-only application, just got clearance today to operate nationwide. (It had been awaiting approval from half a dozen states, including big ones like California, Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania). Lending Club launched six months ago on Facebook, and opened up its own Website three months ago. In that time, its members have issued 489 loans worth $3.5 million. Of that amount, only $16,000 worth are between 16 and 30 days late on payments (see stats here). It also does not allow sub-prime loans. Lending Club’s loan portfolio is too small and its loans have been out too short a time to really know what its average default rate will be. But if it can match its larger competitors, it should do fine. Social lending is here to stay. CrunchBase Information Lending Club Prosper Zopa Kiva Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Peer to peer lending service Lending Club will close a $10.26 million series A round of financing from Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners tomorrow. This comes a few months after the company’s $2 million angel round. Coinciding with the investment, Jeff Crowe and Dan Ciporin (former ceo of shopping.com) are joining Lending Club’s board of directors. Similar to other P2P lending sites (Prosper, Zopa, Kiva), LendingClub matches borrowers and lenders. However, LendingClub doesn’t work through their own website, but solely through Facebook on the application they launched at the F8 platform launch conference. Borrows and lenders a linked up using their “LendingMatch” system, which recommends loans based on credit and their social relationships to each other. The idea being that trusted relationships make lending more likely and defaults less likely. The application currently has over 13,000 installs. Unlike Prosper, interest rates aren’t determined through bidding, but calculated based on the borrowers credit score, debt to income ratio, and amount of the loan. There are no hidden fees, and the interest rate is fixed for three years. In July the service surpassed $500K in loans. They recently claimed a little more than 4 out of 5 loans get funded and haven’t reported any defaults or late payments. It’s still the early days for this industry, and as TC commenters point out, it’s very much a case of Caveat Emptor. → Read More
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