Martin Wright.tv

Kiva is an amazing organisation which allows me to loan money to entrepreneurs on the other side of the world. And I love it. And I want to tell people about it.

Using services like Foursquare and Gowalla I cannot do anything without my social network hearing about it through updates to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I’d like to see the same integration with Kiva. It goes someway towards doing this but not enough.

Foursquare and Gowalla award badges and mayorships for completing certain tasks as a reward for both learning the system and using it.

It would be great to be rewarded the ‘First Loan’ badge or the ‘Peruvian Loan’ medal, the ‘Repeat Loan’ award, the ‘$100 Milestone Mark’ or the ‘Entrepreneur x 10′ medallion.

Adding a game element is a proven way to keep users returning to a service. The rise of social gaming also makes this a more acceptable process too. It is no longer just in the realm of World of Warcraft where you have experience points but also Farmville. If we could have as many people ‘playing’ Kiva as there are ploughing on Farmville, then the game would be on.

Updated - 13 Jul 2010
There’s a great article on exactly this topic on Inc.com, How To Incorporate Badges Into Your Website. Using terms like virtual merit badges and trophies it describes how services are encouraging contributions to the site. Foursquare has awarded one million badges to 500,000 users.

I only know the Red Kite from the real ale produced by the Black Isle Brewery. It is the king of ales and was randomly discovered on a trip to Cawdor Castle.

Red Kites are massive. I’d imagined something the size of a kestrel. But they’re really massive. No, bigger than that. We first saw them flying over the market square in Thame, Oxfordshire. I’d have expected to have to trek for 4 days in the Scottish Highlands to see such a sight. It was much more of a surprise to see them swirling over the housing estates on the outskirts of Aylesbury.

They were culled between the 16th and 19th centuries and have gradually been reintroduced since. You’re not a #uktourist until you’ve seen one.

We chose our hotel for the weekend very carefully. It could be said that we exercised more care than the hotel.

We were given a room from the 70′s. Then got the room we had paid for as seen on the web site. The shower overflowed. The food in the restaurant was great. The service in the restaurant was great. Our shower was overflowing into the kitchen. Getting back to our overheated room was not so great. It’s summer in England and it’s hot – don’t complain. The music from the pub up the road is deafening. Close the window. Sweat. Sleep. Wake. Sleep. Sweat. Wake. Sleep.

Explain our situation to today’s receptionist. Trek to a room at the opposite end of the hotel to use the shower. Great breakfast. Great service. Great discussion about how we can’t stay there for another night and decide to cut the weekend short. Discussion with receptionist results in early checkout without charge.

The web site makes no reference to refurbishment. We lucked out on the room we had. Check the Trip Advisor reports for the Spread Eagle at Thame and you’ll see similar unhappy customers. Hopefully you’ll see them before you become one.

• 62% of travellers do not recommend

• “The sink is the size of a lunch box and far too small to be practical in any way.”

• “The website is very misleading, our room was not refurbished like some and felt more like a 3 star hotel which would have been fine but for £100 we were expecting something a lot better.”

• “Stayed at this hotel a year ago when they must have recently started the refurb, and a year on, they don’t seem to have made much progress. I gather about a third of the rooms are complete and there is a new reception desk, but otherwise the public areas/corridors are in a poor state of decor.”

Read more bad reviews of the Spread Eagle, Thame, then book to go somewhere else.

I’ve been patiently waiting for the new iPhone to be announced since my contract on the iPhone 3G finished in February after 18 months.

I’ve not really had any problems with O2 so was fine to carry on with them. Need to remember to monitor my data allowance use now that its capped/charged at 500MB/month. Preferably need to find an app for that. Difficult to predict how much I’ll use as adverts all state in terms of emails sent and websites viewed but not hours streamed on Spotify.

The charge not lasting any longer but as I’m doing more with it I suppose its holding up a bit better.

It is beautiful to look at and hold but I’m sure its going to get broken. That nice glass surface makes it much more likely to just slip and crash!

And nope. Not tried FaceTime yet.

Glastonbury Festival 2010 was amazing!

Not even a rubbish performance from our football team could dampen the heated spirits of 180,000 revellers in a field. And my god was it hot!

With Glastonbury, but not other festivals, the best bits are not the bands, but the sights and sounds you see on your travels. And travel you do with it taking about 45 minutes to cross the site. The Healing Fields and Green Fields have the true spirit of Glastonbury and are a must see visit. The Park is a recently added area which give great views over the whole site and this year apparently saw Radiohead playing! Arcadia, Shangri-La and assorted other ‘weird’ areas must be seen to be believed.

Relive the experience with videos and photos. Listen to the bands on Spotify.

Spotify has really come into its own recently and that’s because of its accessibility from elsewhere.

iPhone
The ability to run Spotify as a background task on the iPhone has finally made it usable on the device. Until then, it restricted doing any other task until music had finished playing. Now with background operation and integration with the iPod controls it finally offers a great experience. Also, with a 16gb phone I can download a ton of tracks for offline listening.

ShareMyPlaylists
ShareMyPlaylists.com is a great service that provides user generated content of playlists for Spotify. It provides a massive ecosystem for discovering and listening to music. Their iPhone app also works with the Spotify app.

Spotify has still not broken through into the mainstream yet. It still seems to be a tech audience which gets it. Perhaps the success of the iPhone 4 willl lead to success for Spotify too.