Kiva microloans is a very promising business model
I can’t say enough about Kiva. I joined the Stanford Kiva lending team about a year or two ago and it looks like it is really taking off. $600k+ loaned out with a 100% repayment rate. You see this kind of thing occurring in the the third world while subprime Americans here bankrupt the nation taking out $800K loans with a family income of $120k…..
An ex-girlfriend, who was CFO, always used to pitch me on the benefits of microloans in Micronesia. I see the light on this one now. And so I’ve also decided that my first iPhone app to publish to the Apple store will be a free kiva analytics app. I’ve been pondering what to build in Objective-C for a couple weeks while quickly learning the language. Conclusion is that this would be the perfect little project and should not be all that difficult. Lord knows I am not doing any management science or true analytics these days at my day job….so this will free me from that rut.
The api that they use at kiva is json-based. Check it out at http://build.kiva.org/
Stay tuned for more. I think I’m feeling more obliged to post my ideas here in detail since I can’t really go into technical details when I post on facebook.