3rd day...Facing Netvibes and Kiva

Yesterday (January 14th) was very fruitful as I was able to clear out certain misunderstandings i had about Netvibes and especially Kiva. Netvibes is a social media company that is expanding at a high rate due to the organised and personalized dashboards it offers to individuals, small businesses, agencies, non-profit and government organisations and even giant corporates. The fact that Netvibes operates from three offices; London, Paris and San Francisco, gives it a competitive advantage, which is very vital for the progress of the company. It is a company with bright future and i believe it will be a global dominant company in few years.

One of my top priority companies that I really wanted to visit was Kiva.org. I was expecting a bigger company due to its fame, but to my surprise, it was located in a neighborhood far from the central business district of San Francisco. I was also expecting to meet a large group of staff, but it had a small group of workers with the right skills and knowledge who seem to direct Kiva in the right path.

It was great to face most of the staff members and had them explain all the misunderstandings and confusions I had about them. Although they are doing a terrific job, I think there is still so much room for improvement, especially when it comes to creating a better condition or system to make sure that the main beneficiaries of the project are actually benefiting from all the money that thousands of generous people are loaning out. The poor systems in developing countries are a huge challenge for trying to deliver the needed amount of money to the right people. (I wonder why the number of 'field-partner' applicants is increasing at a high rate.)I look forward to working closely with this non-profit organisation in order to introduce them to millions of poor Ethiopians who could benefit from this organisation.

In addition to the valuable conversations and discussions we had with entrepreneurs from Netvibes and Kiva, it was another day full of long walks and beautiful observations.

As we were just walking around the city near the Ferry building, I saw the Abraham Lincoln Brigade monument. There were many notes written on the translucent stones and one of the notes caught my attention, which reminded me of the conversation between Arjuna and Krishna from the Bhaghavad Gida book that I read for my Paideia class.