Pop!Tech - Innovation From the Bottom Up

Rob Katz — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:10:54 -0500

Pop!Tech session two is about to start, and I'm pumped. As you'll see from the schedule, the speakers in session two (Jessica Flannery, Paul Polak, and Adrian Bowyer) are probably the most apropos for our "base of the pyramid" audience here at NextBillion.net. Not only that, but Pop!Tech curator Andrew Zolli just mentioned the "bottom of the pyramid" concept and The Next 4 Billion in particular. I'm thrilled!

Jessica Flannery is the first to present - and starts her presentation with a video excerpt from Oprah about the Kiva.org model. Of course, Kiva.org is nothing new to the NextBillion.net community - former staff writer Alex Bloom actually "broke" the story of Kiva back in 2005, and Sara Standish conducted a multi-part interview with Kiva execs about 6 months later. So what's new?

First - an interesting fact: the day Oprah ran a story with Matt and Jessica Flannery, their site crashed - too much traffic. Furthermore, there was a time when there were more people willing to loan money than there were loan recipients. Kiva's back up, and they've done a lot of outreach to new MFI partners to build their portfolio.

It's clear that Kiva is growing up - hey, Matt and Jessica were on Oprah - and Jessica's presentation gives us some data points on that growth. First of all, they are working with MFIs to make their partners better. They have their choice of MFI partners, whereas when they launched, they had to beg MFIs to join up. They're getting big-time donations to support their NGO center from foundations, corporations, and lenders. And they're refining the model.

(This post continues past the break; click "Read More" to continue, including wrap-ups from Paul Polak's and Adrian Bowyer's presentations)

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Pop!Tech - Innovation From the Bottom Up