A Conversation with
Matt Flannery
The co-founder of the world's first Internet microfinance site, Kiva.org, talks about tenacity, Oprah versus President Clinton, and how fantasy basketball can lead to innovation.

You started developing Kiva, which in the last two years has loaned a total of over $18 million dollars to 28,000-some borrowers living in 39 different countries, with your wife Jessica when you were 27 and working as a programmer for TiVo. Your business credentials, especially in the banking area, aren't particularly overwhelming. What's your secret?

It's true that I'm notoriously unqualified to be a banker. I think that's one of my strong suits however! I tried to start dozens of businesses in my life before Kiva. The thing that separates Kiva from all of my previous attempts is that I like it. I love going to work every day. I'm not just doing it for the results, but for the journey. I personally connect with it on a day-to-day basis.

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A Conversation with
Luis von Ahn
The man partly responsible for those little boxes filled with fuzzy letters you have to decipher when you sign up for websites talks about wasting time, why the Egyptian pyramids are child's play and why we want computers to be smart.

Why shouldn't we hate you for inventing those blurry letter boxes - called Captchas, short for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart - we're now forced to fill in almost any time we buy something online or sign up for an email account?

When I first came up with Captchas (along with my PhD advisor Manuel Blum), I was quite proud of myself. They solved the spambot problem at sites like Yahoo! and TicketMaster. They presented a simple problem - reading a distorted, fuzzy word - humans can do and computers can't. But then I did start feeling bad about wasting people's time. It takes about 10 seconds or so to solve a Captcha. With an estimated 200 million Captchas being solved a day, that added up to more than 500,000 wasted hours I was responsible for each day. I figured that if I was going to take up people's time like that, I should put it to productive use.

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