Paradox: I have used a tiny surplus of time this week to be more diligent about reading my RSS feeds. As a result, I have added quite a few "to-do" or "to-blog" items to my list, thereby creating more work and crunching my time. Paradoxical or not, I've been coming across some very relevant blog posts, reports and other items of interest. Without further ado, a quick roundup:
Over at Green Light, Daniel Englander
dives deeper into the nascent
IGNIA Fund (which we've mentioned
before). NextBillion regulars will remember IGNIA as the $75 million 'base of the pyramid'-focused equity fund started by Alvaro Arregui and Compartamos' Michael Chu. Check out
Green Light, as Englander offers some sharp analysis in addition to the latest news. Hat tip to
Aman Bhandari for the referral.
Design and Reach - written by NextBillion ally Jocelyn Wyatt - highlights two new reports on
Design for Social Impact. The reports are outputs from a recent meeting on the subject, convened by IDEO and The Rockefeller Foundation (Wyatt now works for IDEO). Full disclosure: Acumen Fund, my employer, helped fund this exercise and took part in it. Check out both PDF files, which represent the first cumulative effort to guide design firms' work in the social space. And stay tuned; these guides deserve - and will receive - a longer post.
Finally,
What's a BOPreneur's Paul Hudnut points to a fantastic new site called
Alltop. The brainchild of venture capitalist/technologist
Guy Kawasaki, Alltop is basically a topical RSS aggregator. Users can visit topic-specific sections with pithy, one-word names (Living, Green, Good, etc.) There, they will find the Alltop team's top feeds in an easy-to-scan format. Check it out.
(And yes, I'm being self-promotional here. Alltop's
Good page includes a link from this blog, the Acumen Fund blog and a bunch of our allies:
Ryan Gunderson,
Paul Hudnut,
World of Good,
Emeka Okafor,
David Stoker,
Ethan Zuckerman,
Aman Bhandari and
WorldChanging. Pretty good company...so thanks, Guy.)
Happy Friday reading...