The highlight of the night was a series of demos:

• I was particularly impressed by Amit and Gil’s Amazin’ Giftbox app. Virtual gifts are quite viral, and this app unlocks all of Amazon’s icon inventory to be both virtually and physically gifted to another user. I see this app getting very hot.
• Aryeh Goldsmith’s My Bucks app is exciting. He created a virtual currency (Facebucks) to be used inside Facebook and other apps. Currently, there’s not much to spend Facebucks on, but people are still fascinated with collecting the currency. The metaphor of money is very powerful. It taps into the same social phenomenon that drives the daily wealth creation effort that almost everyone participates in. I can’t wait to see what happens as Facebucks start to get assigned value (or conversion rate) compared to both time and USD.
• Finally, this was not demoed by the author tonight, but Amit did give a quick tour of Appsaholic, a Facebook app to measure the growth of Facebook apps. It has some very sexy visualizations, and it’s fun to see so many graphs bending into steep hockey stick curves :)

Thanks to all the people who demoed tonight, and A BIG thanks to Amit Gupta for bringing his Facebook group to USV. I think this event went really well, and I look forward to hosting future developer meetups like this in the future at USV.

Microfinance is obviously a hot topic in the wake of Dr. Yunus winning the Nobel Peace Prize for work on microfinance. It was a fruitful and entertaining night. I learned a ton about Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) and the infrastructure that needs to be built in order to support Microfinance in rural communities.

A few interesting gems from the night:

• There are approximately 10,000 MFIs, but Kiva can only work with MFIs that have internet access, which reduces the number of MFIs that Kiva can do business with to 300. In other words, this is still a significant digital divide.
• Kiva actually had interest rates on the site for awhile, so you could actually make money with Kiva… but they had to remove interest rates due to legal issues.
• The motivations behind someone investing in a person via Kiva are incredibly diverse. Some people use Kiva in the same way they use a charity, even though it is technically a loan. Others use Kiva because it is NOT charity, and it forces people to pull themselves up on their own without giving anything away. Others do it for novelty/entertainment value. Some people could be pessemisticly described as interested in creating a portfolio of people they own a stake in… driven by voyeurism. There are many other reasons too, and I find it really interesting that there can be so many diverse/conflicting motivations for the same action.

We at Union Square Ventures had no prior connection to Matt Flannery, but Art Chang of Tipping Point Partners had a connection to Kiva’s President and offered to organize the event. Thanks to Art for making this happen!