:Michael Anuzis

By now everyone knows Kiva.org is my favorite website on the internet. It’s where I go when I’m feeling great, feeling down, or feeling average. It’s pretty much perfect at all times.

I know I’ve written about Kiva many times in the past, but today feels special because it marks my one hundredth loan… sometimes it blows my mind to think about the amazing impact we can make as individuals…

The ability to take $1,000 and have a volunteer team distribute it to 40 different entrepreneurs in developing countries all over the world. To think of the entrepreneurs who don’t have the collateral to take out loans alone, who form groups and hold each other accountable to succeed together. Once the 40 entrepreneurs pay back their first $0.62 each, it makes another $25 which can be re-loaned immediately… to think this entire operation was started only 3 years ago… to think of it’s explosive success… to think it’s all been made so simple that I can manage my 100 loans from the comfort of my home in less than 5 minutes per week… is there anything cooler on the planet?

I don’t know… but Kiva sure amazes me…

Anyway, if you’ve read this far then you probably deserve a reward. I’m giving away $250 in free Kiva gift certificates to the first ten people who request one in the comments section. I did this once in the past with good success. The only thing you have to promise is to loan the money through Kiva at least once before withdrawing it for yourself.

My hope, of course, is that you get addicted to Kiva as well. There’s no need to promise that, though. I expect it will happen naturally.

If you don’t mind, I’d also love to hear comments or see links to the business you decide to support. Thanks!

By the way, if you’re curious: my lender page.

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What a clever idea – allowing gamers to leverage their skills to help solve protein folding: http://fold.it

Excerpts from the site…

Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research.

What big problems is this game tackling?

Protein structure prediction: As described above, knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. A small proteins can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans’ puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.

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You heard it right – I’ll lay down $ for tiny ninja doodles. They could be doodles of anything ninja related. It could be a bunch of ninjas in a tree. Could be a ninja disguised as a pirate. Could even be a corn on the cob dressed like a ninja. I need as many mini-fun ninja doodles as possible to incorporate into ninja-based educational material.

You can come up with the craziest/zany-est ninja doodle idea you can think of and let me worry about finding a way to incorporate it into the lessons. No limits on the funky kind of stuff I’ll buy. I’m thinking of paying around $5 per doodle, purchasing up to ~20-50 doodles, so, up to around $250. I know my price is cheap, but it’s also a reflection of how small the doodles are I’m willing to accept. They could be 2″x1″, 3″x2″, 1″x1″, any random ninja doodle. (I actually would like a corn on the cob in ninja garb, if someone can doodle that; probably around 1″x1.5″)

The only thing is the doodles need to be in a digital form, e.g. a JPG or GIF file. If you can doodle it on paper and convert it to digital without it looking too weird that’s fine.

So, if you’re interested go ahead and send me a sample of what you can do! 1-2 sample doodles is fine, & if your stuff is usable we’ll chat about an on-going ninja-doodling deal based on how many you’re interested in making.

If you’re not much of a ninja doodler yourself, but you know someone who is please pass this post on to them. I could really use a great doodler. Thanks!

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I don’t normally post music videos (in fact this is the first one ever), but being the most amazing video editing I’ve ever seen I wanted to share it with you. Watch it full screen if you want to catch the hidden stuff.

Fun Fact: Played soccer with Joe (red tie) in elementary school. His hair hasn’t changed since.

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Imagine if you could play a fun game that would teach you vocabulary while providing food for hungry people around the world for every word you guess right. Let’s cut to the chase – there’s no imagination necessary because you can do just that at FreeRice.com!

This is a beautifully innovative website that personalizes the difficulty for you with each question you answer. It contains vocabulary advanced enough to help prep someone for the SAT, GRE, or LSAT, while also being able to provide a fair challenge for people new to English.

I was planning on prepping zero for the vocab section of the GRE (unacceptable opportunity cost). Sitting alone with a static-text book learning vocab you’ll rarely use just to prove you have the cognitive discipline to memorize a bunch of jargon? Screw that. Make it a fun and addictive game, and give my winnings to starving people while you’re at it, now you’ve got my attention! It almost sounds too good to be true, but check it out and you’ll see for yourself – FreeRice.com

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Sorry for the delay in posting – work has been quite busy. To make it up to you I’m giving out four $25 Kiva gift certificates to the first four people to claim them in a comment on this post. It’s basically $25 you can do what you want with, but I hope you will lend them out at least once before you choose to withdraw the money for yourself.

For those of you unfamiliar with Kiva, it’s a way to invest in an entrepreneur in a developing country. There’s a 97% likelihood they’ll pay you back, which is really great. When the entrepreneur pays you back, you can withdraw your money or re-lend it to another entrepreneur – whatever you want! Here’s a quick clip on Kiva for those interested:

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I try not to write about boring personal stuff in this blog, but a colleague and I made front page of the Detroit News Business section yesterday for our work on Google Apps for Education.

[Read the Full Article Here]

To make this post more worth your time, I should tell you that if you know any small/mid business owners, they’ll love you if tell them about the Google Apps Standard Edition. In short, it’ll give them a custom-branded e-mail solution with free anti-spam and anti-virus while saving them thousands per year. No joke.

In closing, I’m not allowed to speak on behalf of Google so this post is purely informative and of my own opinion.

Update: Just came across a great 1min57sec Google Apps ‘Quick Tour’ for those interested:

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If you hear me say ‘uh’ or ‘um’ I will give you five dollars. This offer stands until the day I die.

This goes for in person and in my podcasts as well (I’ll PayPal you the money if you’re outside Michigan).

Fine print:
1) I’ll only pay $5 once per ‘uh’ or ‘um’ said. (Replaying a recording of me saying ‘uh’ or ‘um’ ten times will only get you $5 once.)
2) If the ‘uh’ or ‘um’ is in a podcast, the first person to point it out in a comment will be the only person eligible to receive the cash.
3) This commitment is effective from here forward. Past podcasts are not eligible!

Fun fact: This commitment was inspired by the following YouTube video.

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Just a brief podcast on appreciating life in 2007.

 My Kingdom for a Podcast [8:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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