I recently heard a report on NPR about the role Yahoo played in China helping the Chinese government track down and imprison a political dissident Shi Tao-
Shi Tao’s political offense was contacting the Asia Democracy Project through his Yahoo email account to tell them about an order the Chinese Government gave to all journalists: not to report on any democratic protesters on the 15th anniversary of Tiananmen Square (June 4, 2004).

The Chinese government found out about this email, and demanded that Yahoo provide the user’s private information, which Yahoo did without asking why. This became a US scandal when the US Yahoo representatives told the US Senate that Chinese Yahoo had done no such thing, which it later retracted, claiming that it had made this claim on the grounds of an inaccurate translation from the Chinese Yahoo office.

Matthew and Jessica Flannery are founders of Kiva.org, what the New York Times calls "D.I.Y. foreign aid"

MP3 File Subscribe via iTunes Add to del.icio.us

Great things are afoot at Kiva, featured today on Oprah alongside Bill Clinton.

Kiva is a person-to-person microcredit lending platform which allows any individual in the world to be a banker to the poor: it does this by connecting the working poor with microloans from anyone in the world.

Kiva straddles innovative intersections, and does it well. By combining philanthropic motivations with the marketplace, Kiva is entrepreneurial, rigorous, capitalistic, and charitable all at once.

iinnovate caught up with Matt and Jessica Flannery for an insightful chat on how it all started, the experience of starting an endeavor as a husband-wife team, as well as Kiva's challenges, successes, and future directions.

- Nir Eyal and Min Li Chan of iinnovate