Three fine projects were picked as the top three of the 21 finalists at the second annual Net Squared conference. It was great to be a panelist asking some of them about their financial sustainability. They are : MAPLight.org, an effort to make government more transparent, Miro, an open source video player, and Freecycle.org, which […]

Money Tree, a collaboration of PWC and NVCA, has been reporting on venture capital trends for many years and is considered by many as the go-to data source. This April they added CleanTech as a category. Money Tree pulls data from Thomson Financial. They report than in Q1 2007, $264 million was invested in […]

The other month I received an emergency call from a friend. A major corporation was holding its annual shareholder meeting the following day, and a socially important shareholder resolution would be silenced unless a qualified shareholder could be produced to support it at the meeting. With one telephone call we found a sympathetic […]

Aavishkaar Goodwell has announced its first investment in microfinance in India, an equity investment of US$ 2 Million for a minority interest in SHARE Microfin Ltd. With over one million clients and US$95 million in outstanding loans, SHARE is one of the largest MFI’s in India. Aavishkaar Goodwell is investing in SHARE alongside Legatum Global, […]

When Fast Company Magazine listed R&R Consulting and CDSF’s microfinance project as 15th in their 2007 Fast Fifty, they went out on a limb picking something incomprehensible to Editor Keith Hammond as world-shifting disruptive technology. What Fast Company hit upon was a Byzantine slice of the financial markets: debt ratings. As I wrote […]

This is Christian Pennotti’s profile in xigi. I think it’s one of the more interesting personal stories that anyone has put in this week:

I’ve spent the majority of my adult life looking for and pursuing opportunities to better understand the world around me and how I can play a role in making it more socially […]

I came to California as a toddler when there were 20 million fewer people in the state, gas was two bits a gallon, technology came in a vacuum tube, and the closest thing to global warming was a nuclear mushroom cloud. Call me a dinosaur, but the thing I can’t get out of my […]

Lucy Bernholz has some ideas.

The folks from SEEP (The Small Enterprise Education and Promotion) Network, the leading international network and promoter of best practices in enterprise development and financial services, have built the map of the week on xigi; adding in a lot of their partner connections

Unfortunately though not unexpectedly, Google’s chief legal officer made only a brief statement that this was deemed not in the best interests of the company’s mission, so I don’t know all the debate that must have happened in the executive boardroom about whether or not to censor. But think they missed an opportunity to summarize the thesis they based that ultimate decision on, and let the shareholders and public know.