In my last post, I talked about visiting a client with Phanith, the AMK Kiva coordinator. The client officer (a.k.a. loan officer) was not available to take us, so we relied on a hand written map that got us lost many, many times. We had to ask almost every villager we saw, before we finally [...]

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Continue reading → Using GPS to Map Out Borrowers

Loanland launched last October as the first p2p lending company in the swedish market (see ‘Loanland launches peer to peer lending in Sweden‘). Since then about 5.7 million SEK (approx. 0.75 million US$) loan volume has been funded .
Ville Vesterinen has published more information about Loanland in the ArcticStartup blog:
The company is currently providing [...]

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Continue reading → Loanland update - p2p lending in Sweden

No, not talking about fruits or birds here. Nexx.co.nz develops a p2p lending service in New Zealand. Nexx now succeeded in raising 600,000 NZ$ (approx 330.000 US$). Quite an achievement in the surrounding conditions of the credit crunch.
Nexx, an on-line social lending business being developed by four young entrepreneurs at business growth centre The [...]

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Continue reading → Nexx - P2P lending for Kiwis - gets 600,000 NZ$ in funding

When I first started this blog, I announced that I’d write about technology 5% of the time. Since I have written more than 700 articles at this point, I’m allow some 35 articles on technology. I think I used up a few of them with articles on my Asus EEE. As usual, with any technology article, I’ll attempt to tie it back to personal finance.
You may have already read about the Amazon Kindle. It’s yet another attempt by the technology industry to replace books. Companies have been at it for a few years, but it’s [...]

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Continue reading → Amazon Kindle: Buy or Not?

Editor's note: This is a paid story (ad), written by a third party which I have agreed to publish, since I believe it fits the interests of the readership of this blog. I am not involved in the sale.
Company looks to sell all rights to its proprietary P2P lending technology. The company has been quietly in development [...]

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Continue reading → For Sale: P2P lending technology

A year ago, I was looking for a portable computer that could allow me to blog from places like Aruba. I thought I found an acceptable solution with a PDA and bluetooth keyboard. It didn’t work quite as well as I hoped. As two pieces, you can’t put it on your lap and type. The PDA had some difficulties connecting to WIFI access points. The small screen with 640×480 resolution made web navigation, and blogging difficult. In the end, I realized I had to bring my real computer making that travel computer a poor [...]

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Continue reading → Asus Eee: I’m In Techno-Lust With You

I thought we’d give you a behind-the-scenes look at one of the technical issues we’ve solved in order to bring you Zopa (seeing as how I’m the CTO and all).
When we set out to build the partnerships with credit unions, one big technical question we had to answer was, how do we integrate all [...]

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Continue reading → A Note on Zopa Technology

http://www.ovelha.org/pasteler0/2007/07/08/rss-feeds-for-those-who-dont-know-rss-feeds/is a great link for understanding RSS and Atom. I recommend you read it to understand how your children (and you) can benefit.(c)j S Shipman 2007

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Continue reading → Update your Computer Skills: RSS and Atom

But I’m afraid we’ll have to turn it off for a little while first.

Zopa will be off-line from 2pm to around 3pm.
Zopa will be off-line from 8am to 9am on Friday.
Zopa will be off-line from 8am to 9am on Monday.
We aren’t having system problems. The techies are being sent out to the countryside [...]

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Continue reading → Zopa’s Getting Even Better

Zopa has been working with Microsoft for a few months now - looking at ways in which we can use some of their new Windows Live services to provide useful tools for our members. As a result of this, they were kind enough to invite me over to Las Vegas the other week to take [...]

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Continue reading → Mixing it up in Vegas (baby)

I came across this really nice website that helps catalog personal libraries: LibraryThing. I always wanted something like these to keep a record of all the books I buy or read. I am slowly indexing all my books. You can check my library at this link.

The site also provides this wonderful widget to put in blogs. You can configure this widget to show many interesting things. Right now if you look on the right hand column of this blog - you will see a random selection of books from my library. You can click on them and that takes you to Amazon, where you can read about the book.

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Continue reading → Cataloging my library

Face recognition technology has been improving rapidly for past few years. Advances in face recognition, and pattern matching in general, has significant potential for new products in security, personalized service, etc. A proof positive of improvement in this technology comes from this site: MyHeritage. It provides a wonderful free service that matches your face with faces of celebrities and tells you which celebrities your face matches best against. For example: here is what it had to say about me:

Considering that John Cleese is one of my all time favorite actors, I don’t mind the above comparison at all. More impressive than the final result is the process though. You can upload any kind of complex image and the site can “identify” a face in that. I tried feeding the site images where my face is in the middle of complex patterns, and it successfully identified a “face” in the middle of all the clutter.

Good Stuff!!

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Continue reading → Cool new technology: face recognition

I am a teaching assistant for BIT 582 - Enterprise Systems Strategy course at Ross. During last class the class discussion went towards a remarkable analysis - which countries has more people looking for information about cutting edge technology . After all, tomorrow’s technology leadership will be decided by how many people in which country are knowledgeable about advanced technologies. So here are some startling information from Google Trends, which tracks origins of search requests for popular search terms.

So, to start, lets pick a popular and generic advanced technology: Nanotechnology. There is no doubt that Nanotechnology will be exceedingly important in future. So - which cities have most people looking for information in Nanotechnology? Google trends provides the answer:

Chart 1: Searching for Nanotechnology: Top Cities (from Google Trends)

Whoa! Look there - of the top ten cities, none are in developed countries, six are in India and all ten are in Asia! May be top cities is not capturing the full information - lets look at the same data by Countries, rather than Cities.

Chart 2: Searching for Nanotechnology: Top Countries (from Google Trends)

This is definitive now - Developing countries are the one most important in finding out more about cutting edge technologies. US comes 8th in the list - quite troublesome, considering that its current “adversary” Iran is at the 2nd spot. BTW - this is not happening just because developing countries have more people than the developed world. While overall population is surely bigger, the number of people with Internet access is developing world is smaller than that in developed world.

Just for fun, lets take something from manufacturing, say “Lean Manufacturing” - very effective and well known concept. Which countries are looking for information on Lean Manufacturing? Lets also look at something more specific, say “Service Oriented Architecture”. Google Trends provides the the following information:

Chart 3: Searching for Lean Manufacturing: Top Countries (from Google Trends)

Chart 4: Searching for Service Oriented Architecture: Top Countries (from Google Trends)

The trend is consistent - Developing countries are more inquisitive about technology then developed countries. India seems to be right on top on every technology search. Is this a cause of concern for developed countries? I think so. These kind of things are the leading indicators, the weak signals that portends a structural shift in balance of technology leadership. A few more years of this and we will have a developing world well versed in technology and a developed world ignorant of the same. What makes it even more striking is the fact that *all* advanced education and technology facilities are in developed countries and even then we have this disparity. As developing world improves their education systems and builds technology facilities, this gap will only increase and the trend will get even more momentum.

Some caveats are in order too: Google is mostly used by the English speaking world - that’s why China is conspicuously absent from all the charts above. I am quite sure it will be neck-to-neck with India (or even above) if all search engines are taken together.

My take on this: the four billion poor people of the world have finally information at their disposal (Thank You Internet!) and they are voraciously consuming all this information. The knowledge barrier that kept them down has vanished - and they will be down no longer. We are looking at the emergence of a global knowledge base - that will further feed globalization, and the developed countries are looking at strong (and knowledgeable) competition for tomorrow’s technology leadership.

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Continue reading → Future of Technology Leadership