Ecomonkey Blog

For those not in the know, Kiva is a Micro Loans Programme. It specialises in loans to small family-owned or community businesses mainly in the developing world, but also in the USA and some of Eastern Europe.

Ecomonkey started lending on Kiva a couple of years ago as Ecomonkey. We always lent out $25 amounts to reduce the risk of losing the principal, as you don’t get any interest back on your (for we are helping build up human capital too!) and there is also some risk associated with exchange rate fluctuations (wow!). We started this from our own pockets at first, just a few hundred dollars, and then proceeded to use the unclaimed commissions received from participating retailers on the Ecomonkey shopping programme. Continue reading →

What about it? The idea for weegreen (wee small, and perhaps as in ‘we’ collectively; green – you know what that means don’t you?) was to marry the power of Google and its Co-op search engine  (a ‘collaborative’ search engine) and have real people filtering and categorising stuff, perhaps collaboratively – but not necessarily.

People like to search for things before they do anything else. They don’t know the url can be placed in the url bar cutting out a few steps. Oh and whats going on here? Where has the url bar gone? So how do you get to places then? Have you heard of a search engine? It is almost universal now that the search engine is used to find even the most familiar website, which any half decent browser will remember. People would rather type in a complicated search query into google than type one letter to return a familiar website.

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The short answer? We had already decided it was over. At the outset, being an affiliate based site, we resisted the temptation to run competing adverts (even for our own affiliate partners’ ads).  Google however kept pushing traffic our way long after we had decided the numbers were not stacking up. So we thought we would reciprocate, as they were not always finding what they wanted on EM, and sent customers on the way. Continue reading →