Kiva.org is an online platform that helps microfinancing organisations around the world get in touch with (potential) lenders. Lenders select the projects they want to support after reading through the information page and can start helping by lending as low as $25.00 and as high as their budget tells them.

The only fact that made me hesitate starting to lend money was the high interest rates. It didn’t seem fair that the loaners had to pay 20+ % interest, but after some searching and reading I got convinced this isn’t an argument not to start helping out.

If you’re interested you can visit my lender page on Kiva.org to follow the loans I’m currently participating in.

The virtual trip consists of a video stream showing the view from a train while you can see the position on Google Maps. To make things more interesting, you can listen to the rumble of the train wheels, a Russian radio station, some balalaika music or one of the three Russian books.

It’s a joint project of Google and the Russian railways to promote the Trans Siberian Railway.

Well… we are planning to make the Trans Siberian journey in 2011, so this gives us a little taste of what we can expect.

You can enjoy the trip yourself at this page.

Some patient designer at Design Outpost realized my idea after weeks of revisions and pixel tweaking. I’m happy with the final result, but as all things: it could be different, it could be better, it could be…

Some quotes from the project description as presented to the designers:

The idea behind the way I want to profile my company is as follows. It’s a company serving IT solutions (mainly web programming).Everyone associates IT guys with being (pussy) nerd. I would like to profile my company as being tough-ish, but still a bit nerdy.The tagline will be “When IT gets tough”. That way I want to express that I’m not only doing the easy stuff, but we handle tougher problems too.

That all said, the concept: If you think about who/what is tough, you might end up with a Viking.
So, I would like to have the head of a tough Viking wearing nerdy glasses as a company logo.

And some more:

What attributes would you like your logo to reflect about your business?
- Bit nerdy/geeky, but strong, tough and decisive

What is the overall message you are trying to convey to your target audience?
- We tackle all you IT problems

Now I need to create a new company website, but because the logo took about a year to accomplish and clients projects get priority, this might take some months… Hopefully I find a designer willing to create a design for me (a small hint to b-visual).

Feel free to grab a digital version of my business card.

One of my colleagues has sent me this link: “How to become an early riser” by Steve Pavlina.

Let’s see if he’s right…