EBay: The Place for Microfinance

clipped from www.businessweek.com EBay: The Place for Microfinance On the online auction giant’s new MicroPlace site, investors can lend as little as $50 to would-be small business owners around the globe Tracey Pettengill Turner doesn’t want to give handouts to poor people. But she does want to make investments in them. So on Oct. 24, Turner is launching MicroPlace.com, a Web site that lets small investors provide low-interest “micro” loans, of $50 or more, to would-be small business owners. Her hope is to create sustainable economic growth in the world’s most impoverished communities—and do her part to expand the reach of the microfinance industry to more than 1 billion people worldwide, from about 100 million people currently.

Huge HIRO Opportunity/Product Launch in Vietnam

clipped from docs.google.com More than 5,000 IPCs recently gathered in Hanoi, Vietnam, to welcome HIRO™ beverages to their exploding market. The sold-out event included dance performances, music, a play introducing HIRO, and models showing off the brand new Energy, Mobility, and Vitality drinks. IPCs came from all over the country, some traveling overnight in buses and trains for five, seven, and even 12 hours just to be there.

Woman Married To 10 Men At Same Time

clipped from www.local10.com 26-Year-Old Accused Of Being Bigamist Eunice Lopez is accused of being married to 10 different men at the same time. A 26-year-old Miami woman was married to 10 men at the same time, prosecutors allege, in a marriage-for-pay scheme to enable the men to remain in the United States.

Commodore 64…We miss you!

I really miss my Commodore 64. It opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me. How about you?

I still have my Amiga 500 in the garage and just can’t get myself to part with it.

clipped from www.news.com The Commodore 64 may be gone, but it’s certainly not forgotten. Fans turned out in the hundreds Monday night for the PC’s 25th anniversary party at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. CNET News.com’s Kara Tsuboi raised a glass and chatted with industry leaders, including Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, and Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore International, about the Commodore’s impact on the personal-computing market. clipped from mail.google.com Compose Mail

‘To your health’; Beer may fight cancer

There is already a company which has isolated the active ingredient in hops ( http://rurl.org/ajo ) so that you can get all the benefits without having to drink 60-120 gallons of beer. Cool!

clipped from abclocal.go.com Some day soon, you may be able to buy beer from a health food store. Scientists are developing a new kind of brew that appears to fight cancer. But don’t go drinking up just yet. German researchers are working on a new beer brew that appears to fight cancer. The secret a compound found in hops — xanthohumol.

Google Releases Chart Image Generator

clipped from blogoscoped.com Google released a chart generator service they are calling the Google Chart API. Usage is quite straightforward: you link to an image in the form of a parameterized URL, e.g. (line break added)

Vista SP1 will deliver big network speed boost

clipped from blogs.zdnet.com I downloaded the release candidate of Vista Service Pack 1 yesterday and was prepared to wait till its public debut next week before writing about it. But after upgrading a few machines here and doing some tests, I changed my mind. If Microsoft’s decision to ditch the WGA kill switch in SP1 didn’t convince you, would you be interested in a 300% increase in tripling your network file transfer speeds? As you can see, the file transfers under Vista SP1 were dramatically faster than the Vista RTM times. For the directory full of many small files, the performance increase throughput was more than 300%; for the large files, the speed increase was roughly 260%. Note that you can expect similar results when transferring files from Vista to systems running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003.

ZOTERO – a powerful, free online/offline research tool for Firefox 2.0 Web Browser

clipped from www.zotero.org Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.

New Jaiku Mobile for the Nokia S60 Phone

clipped from jaiku.com Nokia S60 Download Jaiku Mobile S60 Edition Version 0.80 Beta Live contact list See what your friends are up to right in your phone’s contact list Browse Jaikus from your contacts Browse the latest updates from your contacts, add comments Post Jaikus Post new Jaikus and have them instantly show up on the Web and in your friends’ phones Share presence Share your availability, location, and calendar publicly or with selected contacts only Learn more about Jaiku Mobile from the User’s Guide [PDF] and Frequently Asked Questions List of compatible phones

The Magical Minimalism of Microformats

clipped from open.blogs.nytimes.com Microformats are a collection of recipes for creating structured markup: consistent HTML structure and class for common useful little things like