kiva - wah kya idea hai !

For the non hindi speaking - the title says "kiva -wow what an idea !"

I came across this company while I was reading Guy Kawasaki's blog.
An amazing startup idea, it is like that perfect bollywood entertainer with all the ingredients.

Kiva opens up micro lending to the public, pretty much any one can be an investor, investing in peoples dreams, empowering them sitting way away from where they live. This is realizing the potentials of the connected world.

This is a startup idea which has a huge social impact and has a good business model.

Kudos to Matt and Jessica Jackely Flannery who started kiva.

visit kiva

Ankool.com - making things easy....

It has been a while since I wanted to write this blog on Ankool.com. The above website has been live for some time now. I wanted to share what this website does and how it does its small bit in "making things easy".

Inspiration for this application:
A couple of months ago I was planning on a road trip from New York to Niagara and I knew that the weather had been really harsh on the east coast that week. I was wondering wouldn't it be nice if I could get the weather on the map all along my route, that way I can decide what route to take, when to start etc. Thus I ended up writing this tool.

What ankool.com can do today.

• Given your source, destination addresses and the day of your travel. It can give you the route and the weather on your route.
  
• Click for weather - you can right click on the map to get weather information on that point.

Ankool.com is powered by Microsoft's Virtual earth. I should say the documentation for Virtual Earth is really good.

Use ankool.com and let me know how you like it.

Headlines on techsites I read

Pheromonetrail a Trailblazer

If you are wondering about the widget under the heading "most viewed posts" on my blog, let me elaborate.

It is one of the coolest things what pheromonetrail.com gives us.
In most blog sites what I miss is good blogs or most viewed blogs get burried in archives after a while, but I want people to see them. I want to see an index on the main page of the most viewed pages on my blog. This is exactly what this widget does. And you see the most viewed blogs surface.

It is very easy to put in this widget on your blog, go here to get the required code and paste onto your blog template and you are set.

Extending this to any standard website, wouldn't it be good to see
a list of pages which had most views. Say some kind of page ranking within a domain. It is a good metric to have for targeted ads (adsense) on those pages.(Ads on those pages can be priced higher)

Site traffic comparisons