Monthly Archives: November 2007

I can be a genius, but not most of the time.

Thanks to Ron Shevlin for this cute little bit of web fun. It’s called The Blog Readability Test, and it ranks your website according to the intellectual level of your writing.

When I input my homepage (www.azaroff.com), I get this:

But when I input my blog page (www.azaroff.com/blog), I get this:

My take is that it merely ranks the basic language I use and assesses it according to certain milestones of education. Simplicity is key, so I’m not offended, I want to be accessible.

A cute little tool. It also advertises something called cashadvance1500, which I removed in the code the tool spits out. This is a payday loan service, and is likely to be evil. So I need to give that caveat as well… Everything comes back to banking, doesn’t it?

eBay in the Microfinance business.

MicroPlace.comA friend recently sent me an article in BusinessWeek about eBay’s Microfinance engine. The article, EBay: The Place for Microfinance, speaks of eBay’s 2006 acquisition of MicroPlace.com.

MicroPlace.com’s mission is “to help alleviate global poverty by enabling everyday people to make investments in the world’s working poor.” Pretty impressive.

Pierre Omidyar, eBay’s founder, is also an investor in Kiva.org, which is a similar site for investing small amounts of money to entrepreneurs in developing countries.

MicroPlace.com fits eBay’s direction so nicely, and takes advantage of their infrastructure to do good in the world. Nice to see big players enabling Microfinance and bringing it to the masses. That’s doing well by doing good.

Speaking at CUES Experience.

CUES ExperienceI’m excited to be going to Minneapolis in May to speak at the new CUES Experience: Immersion Learning for Marketing, Technology & Operations Leaders. This is a new conference CUES is putting on, and they’re planning on mixing a traditional conference with on-site visits to some of the more innovative companies in Minneapolis.

They have some amazing speakers lined up, including Arkadi Kuhlmann from ING Direct, Jeremy Gutsche founder of trendhunter.com, Steve Williams and Terence Roche of Cornerstone Advisors and GonzoBanker.

But, I’m especially excited to meet one of my favourite bloggers, Ron Shevlin.

Plus I’ve never been to Minneapolis, so that should be very fun. I’ll do my best to live blog it as well.