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.

1) Started a 2nd side business which put www.learnfromaninja.com on the backburner. The new business is secret for now. It’s more lucrative but less philanthropic. Social impact neutral. Once it’s up and rolling strong I’ll be able to focus more on LFaN without worrying about over-commercializing the lessons.

2) My 401k dropped 55% with the economic downtown and I couldn’t care less. How’s that for Buddhist non-attachment? That said, I’m investing more than ever now. FYI - Warren Buffet just moved 100% into U.S. stocks. Combine this with Obama’s win & the timing seems right for alternative energy.

3) Helping as a judge for Project 10 to the 100. What a great time to be alive!

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.

It’s not quite there yet as they still need to find a way to open the bounties up so anyone can contribute their $50-2,000 to the innovative dilemmas challenging humanity, but aside from that they’ve pretty much got it. The incentive is there to open it up since it’d mean growing their revenues exponentially, but they’d probably no longer be able to take 40% of the cash, and would have to find a way to handle the complications that come up when multiple people with somewhat differing objectives pool money for a common innovative cause.

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!

It doesn’t allow people to track their contributions in as many ways as I’d like to see, but it does provide a beautiful/simple way for people to make a difference with hardly effort at all by “Enabling and optimizing your computer’s power management settings to help save the world energy.”

If I wasn’t already working on a different startup, I’d love to take this idea to the next level with my domain greenolution.com. Previous posts of mine detailing that business model & vision:

- The Greenolution Pitch
- Three Design Opportunities for a Brighter Future
- Anyone Join Me for $25 Million
- Count Down Your Carbon

If you combined CDYD and Google’s Energy Saver gadget and threw in a global goal, a gadget easier for people to paste on social networking sites than the Google Gadget, and some greentech product recommendations on the most cost-effective technologies currently available, you’d have my idea for greenolution.com.

Aside from possible ad revenue, you could add an e-commerce portion of the site to sell the greentech conveniently to consumers/businesses, or at least collect affiliate earnings.

This startup has been under development the past several months & it’s nearly time to unveil it to the public. Half a year ago I released a couple low-quality Game Theory lessons on YouTube to see the kind of response I’d get and what kind of market was out there for the concise teaching of academic material. Below shows some interesting feedback (see the comments.)

F’d up comment aside (hey, can you say he’s wrong?), if that’s the feedback for the junk recorded while hardly awake yet, I’m excited to see the impact & education I can provide when I invest significant time & effort and make it twice as fun. Wish me luck.

I’ve embedded Randy’s full lecture below (1h 15m)

Some of you may prefer this shortened (12 min) version he provided on Oprah.

& for some different thoughts with the same aim, you might enjoy this podcast where I share some of my personal strategies for keeping it positive despite impending death. Enjoy!

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