The Mustaches for Kids benefit the other night went swimmingly. Me and the other Mustachioed Men of Kiva rocked the party 1972 Olympics style (I was a golfer), and as you can see by the pictures the evening was fun, yet also disturbing. In all, we raised over $75,000 for Donor’s Choose. The video below is Team Kiva reading our Stache-Ku’s. Rich, our IT guy goes first, and then he’s followed by my dramatic reading at 1:45 in. Fiona, as always, did an amazing job shooting the video.

In case you can’t hear it in the video, my Stache Ku was:

Mustache, a black hole
You cannot resist it’s pull
Come to the stache. Come.

For more reading material, check out this article in SF Weekly and this video on ABC News.

(click for photo album)

click for low bandwidth video

Heya everybody! Long time no blog. I don’t even know if the feeds are still working, but I don’t want to spend my time debugging a website that nobody reads so I suspect we’ll never know.

Fiona and I are still in SF, still with Kiva, and we’re headed to Tanzania in two weeks. It’s been a long slog with Kiva, and I’m super excited to finally be heading out to visit some of the entrepreneurs we (and you??) have hooked up with loans.

Our plan for now is to leave the States on Sept. 26. Our route to Africa will be:

SF -> NYC
NYC -> Dubai
Dubai -> Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania (arriving on Sept 28!!)

I’ll be spending the first week between two different partners – BRAC Tanzania and one as yet to be determined. For the past 9 months, Kiva has been working on a new back end interface for our partners, so I’m curious/terrified to see how they react to it. Hopefully they’ll take to it like water, but I suspect things won’t be so smooth. I mean, are they ever?

Fiona will spend the first week behind a video camera trying to get as much footage as possible for future use by the Oprahs of the world. I’m not sure what her tactic will be, but I have no doubt it will be efficient and insanely productive. Hopefully some of those videos will make their way onto the web sooner rather than later.

I hope this post finds you all healthy and happy. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard from many (if not most) of you, so if you have a spare minute shoot me an email!

Not a whole lot of time for a proper update right now, but I just wanted to take a moment to gloat about the fact that we\’re on our way to Chicago to be on Oprah!

Of course, when I say “we” I mean Kiva. Fiona and I probably won’t actually be appearing on TV, but still – pretty sweet! And the best part is that we’ll be on the same show as Bill Clinton. Yeah, that’s right – Fiona’s going to be chilling in the Green Room with the Big Dog. Hopefully the wacky cigar antics will be kept to a minimum, but I told her not to wear any blue dresses just in case.

Bubba’s going to be talking about “Giving”, his new book on philanthropy and civic action (AP). The show will be airing on September 4, so get your Tivo fingers ready.

Also, this Friday Kiva’s going to have a segment on the Today show which should be pretty cool as well. Don’t miss that shit either.

Remember the TV show that crashed our servers six months ago? Turns out it was the most successful broadcast of the program in the Frontline’s history in terms of reader response. So, they did what any self-respecting network would do – they re-aired it.

For obvious reasons, I was pretty nervous about it. Last time the attention brought our servers down for three days. This time, however, it was a different story.

We’ve been working on our code for about six months trying to make it more efficient and scalable. I’d say we’ve probably made it about 1000 times faster, which is pretty damn impressive if I may say so myself. We’ve been planning for something like this for weeks, and I’m pleased to report that it went off without a hitch. Actually, that’s not true. There were a couple of Apache misconfigurations that plagued us for about an hour after the East Coast broadcast aired, but we got it sorted out quickly and it was all gravy from there.

I’ve just finished compiling the stats from the first day following the airing, and here’s the breakdown:

Loans Yesterday: $258,550
Donations Yesterday: $18,956
Total Users: 53284
Users Added Yesterday: 2960
Total Loans: $4,938,550

Imagine that – a quarter of a million dollars in less than a day. It makes the past year of sleepless nights worthwhile.

It’s been a pretty remarkable week at Kiva. On Tuesday, Nicholas Kristof wrote an editorial about Kiva in the New York Times. I wish I could provide a link to the article (other than this PDF), but apparently in an effort to hasten their impending irrelevance the NYT has decided to make people pay for their editorial content. Stupid newspapers.

For those readers who ask me what they can do to help fight poverty, one option is to sit down at your computer and become a microfinancier.

That’s what I did recently. From my laptop in New York, I lent $25 each to the owner of a TV repair shop in Afghanistan, a baker in Afghanistan, and a single mother running a clothing shop in the Dominican Republic. I did this through www.kiva.org, a Web site that provides information about entrepreneurs in poor countries — their photos, loan proposals and credit history — and allows people to make direct loans to them.

So on my arrival here in Afghanistan, I visited my new business partners to see how they were doing.

It was a great article and the response was huge. This time, however, it was NOT overwhelming. Not only did our site stay up, but it was faster and more responsive than it had ever been thanks to a new four chip/quad core server (16 processors!!).

On the day the article came out we sent over $130,000 in loans to the developing world. Within three days we’d cracked a quarter of a million dollars. As a point of comparison, the day before the article hit we’d done about $30,000. Not only was the response on our site huge, but the NYT also saw some pretty impressive numbers. Usually, an average editorial gets about three comments on the NYT website. Kristoff’s piece on Kiva generated an amazing 150+ comments.

To think that one article could generate that much power is impressive. Kind of makes you wonder about all the potential wasted by Anna Nicole Smith/American Idol/Paris Hilton “news”.

The upcoming months are going to be big at Kiva. We’re going to be in Time magazine on April 6, and Frontline is rebroadcasting the original show that brought our site down back in November. CNN is doing a short spot on kiva, as is NHK (Japanese PBS). Hopefully we’ll be ready for it.

watch the NYT video

A couple of days ago we got an email from an astronomer who was excited about Kiva. I forwarded it on to Sundeep (our volunteer coordinator) who joked that he didn’t know what to say to a rocket scientist except to suggest that he name a planet after Kiva. I jokingly replied:

“Tell him we don’t need a planet – we’d be content with a sub-planetary object in the Kuiper Belt or some other trans-Neptunian object. I’d also be happy with anything from the Oort Cloud :)”

Yes I am a massive nerd. However, little did I know that Sundeep would include my geeky quote in his note back to the guy. Check out the reply we just got from our astronomer friend:

“… Oh.. about the planet / or sub-planet Kuiper belt object – I am not a planetary astronomer – I research galaxies and study the formation and evolution from the first galaxies to te ones we see today – but I am going to try and think of creative way of getting Kiva into my next paper and presentation.. I will keep you updated… In the meanwhile, I will certainly mention it to Mike Brown – the discoverer of Sedna, Xena and other KBOs which started the whole Pluto controversy – he is sure to find more – may be he can think of a good thing to name for Kiva :)”

My inner 8-year-old is having a total spaz.

The big news around here is that Frontline is going to be doing a segment on Kiva. It’s exciting because Frontline is pretty much the high water mark in American Television Journalism (which isn’t saying much). They produce excellent shows, and really do in-depth investigations into whatever it is they happen to be presenting. They recently did a show on the Tank Guy from Tienanmen Square that was fantastic.

But I digress… The point is that Frontline has decided to produce a segment on us, and it will definitely be the biggest press we’ve gotten. They came to the office on Friday and interviewed everybody which was an extremely strange experience. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but it was really difficult for me to try to talk to them. They were asking me about how the website works and what I do every day, but there’s really no easy way to explain it without geeking out all over the place.

I wound up talking about a piece of software I built that allows Africans to update our web sites with their cell phones (which is an entirely separate post), but I have a feeling they won’t even use that. By the end of the interview the guy was literally standing over my shoulder asking me to point to different sections of my code. It was so bizarre. There I was thinking that I was going to be on TV sounding all smart about the future of telecommunications in the developing world, but instead I bet they’ll only use three seconds of me pointing to a stupid XML file. Oh well – some days you’re the cool kid, some days you’re the nerd. C’est la vie.

Fiona, on the other hand will almost definitely be on TV. She was great in front of the camera, and she was actually talking about stuff that more than 1% of the population could understand. Plus she’s pretty, and not even Frontline can resist putting a hottie on air.

After they filmed us at the office, Frontline followed us to Olana’s house for her going away party from Google. Olana is Kiva’s COO, and she’d worked at Google for about six years before coming to us. Needless to say, it was pretty funny rolling up to a party full of Google people with a film crew trailing us. I felt like Puff Daddy (or P Diddy or whatever the fuck). I also enjoyed telling everyone who asked about the cameras that they were from Girls Gone Wild.

Not to get off the subject, but I do want to mention that at Olana’s party I met the guy who invented the Google Adword. For those who don’t know, that’s basically what Google’s entire revenue model is based around. It would be like meeting the person who invented the television commercial or the movie preview. People think that Google’s a search engine but that’s just a convenient misconception that they’ve propagated. They’re actually the world’s largest advertising agency that happens to provide some search functionality.

But I digress again… From what I understand, Frontline is going to spend a few more days filming us here in San Francisco before flying Matt and Jessica over to Africa to film for a week over there. The show is set to air on October 31, but I’ll definitely let you all know when the time gets closer.