Haiti has not had a good year. Many people are struggling to get by and need help to survive. For this reason, microloans have become very popular among small-scale entrepreneurs looking to get by, but even they are having trouble in the wake of absolute destruction of much of the country:
30%the lowest interest rate one will likely find on a microloan from Haiti, which is very reliant on them in the wake of the earthquake
53%the percentage of one lender’s microloans in Haiti that were late after the qake – a staggeringly high number that makes it hard for lenders
18%of microloans have defaulted or risk doing so in Haiti this year; in most third-world countries, it’s more like 2-3 percent source
» However, they’re still fighting: These firms seen to understand how important their services are to Hatians, so they’ve used various methods to raise funds to offer the high-risk loans. While they’re a ways off from, say, India’s broad microlending program, they are expanding their work so that they can offer a wider variety of services to the people that need it most.
issue Over the last week or so, Google and Facebook have been entwined in an argument over Facebook’s importing of Gmail contacts; Google wants them to open up, but Facebook instead has worked around Google’s roadblocks.
reason? So why has Facebook been so resistant to Google’s open-up-your-datastream advances? Well, it seems Facebook is about to launch some sort of messaging thing on Monday. Is it e-mail? Because if it is, that would explain a lot. source
This is how you get around gay-marriage laws. Mark Reed and Dante Walkup have long been in a committed relationship, and decided that they wanted to get married. Problem is, they live in Texas. So, here’s what they did: They had their ceremony in Dallas, but back in marriage-legal DC, they had marriage-equality activist Sheila Alexander-Reid officiate the wedding over Skype. (They got their marriage license ahead of time.) So they got married among friends, while still obeying local laws. Clever. Hopefully their union isn’t challenged. source
At this point, no one has come forward, no one in leadership for a long time. It will be very tough. It is probably a race we can’t win. But we need a moderate voice in the Democratic Party.
Blue Dog Democrat Rep. Heath Shuler • Suggesting he might challenge Nancy Pelosi for the House leadership. Shuler, known as much for being conservative on social issues as he is for his mediocre NFL career, has been one of Pelosi’s strongest critics in the wake of her planned run for House Minority Leader. Shuler would be an interesting wrench in the whole House Leadership mess, and we bet he’d get a bunch of support simply because he offers a clear alternative to Pelosi, who’s not exactly popular right now. source
It’s not often we have Pat Sajak on the blog twice in a week – he’s a nice guy and all, but we’re not regular watchers of “Wheel of Fortune” by a long shot. But this clip right here is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it’s one of Keith Olbermann’s first network television appearances, and he’s on Pat Sajak’s, lost, lamented talk show with his ‘stache talking about sports. Second, Sajak (a conservative) pulled the clip out of the vault, apologizing for being the first to give Keith a wide audience. Keith, however, denies this, claiming that he had been on CNN years earlier, and had been the subject of segments on The Today Show and the CBS Evening News before that. Finally, no matter what happened, this clip is great. Keith was really funny back in the day, even though he was more wacky newscaster than second coming of Edward R. Murrow. (Pat Sajak’s show did give Rush Limbaugh his first wide audience on television.) source
$10Mthe amount The Daily Beast is on track to lose this year; it’s relatively new, so that’s not bad
$20Mthe amount Newsweek is on track to lose; it’s been bleeding for a long freaking time
$1the amount Sidney Harman spent to buy Newsweek; he also took on all its debt source
» Is this a deal just to get Tina Brown? It wouldn’t be unprecedented. See, Brown, a longtime magazine editor for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, has the chops to help make Newsweek a success again, and Barry Diller’s Daily Beast, while growing at a nice clip (5 million online readers a month, which means that nowadays, it’s probably read about as widely as Newsweek, which sells 1.6 million print copies – significantly down from just a year ago), probably needs a print component to anchor its Web efforts and ensure profitability. And plus, NBC Universal bought Barry Diller’s USA Network back in 2001 basically to get Diller.
marketing Gorillaz, Damon Albarn’s ultra-popular cartoon-meets-music collective, has a marketing campaign with Microsoft for Internet Explorer 9.
muse Despite this, Albarn himself has been singing the praises of the iPad, to the point where he says he recorded an album on the iPad. Not good for Microsoft. source
