REDF, the San Francisco-based social enterprise pioneer has listed some interesting characteristics it wants in its next leader here : “Experience is helpful in environments that are rich with ambiguity and promote the use of analysis and knowledge as catalysts for systemic change.” If you are not comfortable with ambiguity you sure don’t need to […]

More than 20 people enthusiastic people showed up for the first Digital Village gathering last night. I met some new people like Brij Kothari of Planetread, which does same-language subtitling of the songs in Bollywood movies. It’s a literacy teaching tool that let’s people who speak Hindi learn the words in their language while English […]

A group is gathering next Tueday, August 29th at Medjool in the Mission in San Francisco to talk about the Digital Village Fund and how to bring social enterprise focused on the developing world to funding. We are trying to create a community/working group for this initiative to figure out the scope and boundaries of […]

Howard Ronder with 20 years of experience in marketing, including a recent stint at 20 years experience in brand marketing and creative direction to World of Good. Formerly VP of Marketing and Creative for Gaiam  a LOHAS (Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability) consumer goods products and information company he helped grow form $35 to $150 […]

Spent Friday afternoon with my friend Stu Gannes who runs the Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship at Stanford, a fabulous year long internship/study program that lets people stop their lives and spend a year looking at how they could use technology to have a positive impact on the developing world or disaster relief or other big […]

Kiva, the microfinance portal run by Matt Flannery, just got an amazingly positive story in Business Week. Matt, a spunky entrepreneur who has insisted all along that Kiva’s model is scalable, should be happy with this conclusion to the story: “Some compare Kiva to sites like Craigslist, LinkedIn, and MySpace and see it primed for growth. […]

There are so many organizations large and small providing services to the Social Enterprise space. How can we better work together and in turn be more effective to the community we serve? One organization, the Social Enterprise Group (SEG), wants to help these groups work together in a more strategic and efficient way. […]

If there was ever a good sign that it’s a good time to be thinking about a Digital Village Fund, it’s the fact that TED, the pricey, multidisciplinary thought leader event for techies based in Monterrey is holding it’s first conference in Africa, co-produced by entrepreneur and blogger Emeka Okafor

The messaging around the invite is […]

As we continue due dilligence for the Digital Village Fund we are figuring out how we partner with other folks with similar initiatives. I spent a long time talking (and an even longer time emailing back and forth with a guy who reminds me of myself. Don Bruce made his money as a physician and […]

I met with one of my clients today who is the COO of a national non-profit and he was talking about the importance of non-profit organizations getting into for-profit businesses to raise money.

We discussed the challenge of the current foundation-charity model, and it’s obvious limitations.

I’m going to sit down with him and interview in more […]