Kiva is of course also a technology shop and this weekend they are hosting the Kiva Developer Garage at their offices this Saturday, June 6 starting at 1pm. If you’re a developer in the Bay Area and want to hack on cool Kiva related projects and meet other people interested in Social Impact, you should definitely attend. A bunch of us, including myself will definitely be there so if you’re coming please tell us on Twitter and come say hi.

We do not celebrate our successes enough. When your moving quickly to create something big and meaningful, you sometimes forget to celebrate along the way. I am constantly looking at ways to reinforce the good work done by our employees. For example, if a customer has said something positive about the company, I take it back to the employees. I explain to them how their work furthered the company strategy. If an employee or team was singled out, then I make sure I talk to them and again relate it back to our strategic goals. Talking about current successes and relating it back to strategic goals is a great way to reinforce the belief in the company’s vision. People need to be constantly reminded that their work contributes to the company achieving its strategic vision.

This might same like stuff from the first lecture of Obvious 101 but when you’re in the middle of a startup and you have 50 things to do every day and more coming in every day you often forget to take a step back and really think about what you’ve accomplished. Additionally, the type of people that startups often attract are so focused on their work and just doing a great job that they don’t realize the importance of what they’ve just accomplished. At Apture we bought Champagne for celebrating our “official launch” (the one with lots of press) in June 2008 and it’s still sitting in the office unopened because we spent that entire day fixing bugs and revving the product and the same happened with every other release we do.

Dan is exactly right in pointing out how important rallying around a success is for your team spirit (and your own) and taking the time to celebrate is (almost) as important as releasing awesome products that people love. Oh, and Dan thanks for taking us all out to lunch this week, I think we came up with some great ideas!

A lot of people have been talking about the immense potential this offers to understand how people feel about any topic or product and learn from this data. Skittles was widely applauded for its innovative marketing campaign that turned skittles.com into a live display of what people were saying about skittles (including the campaign itself). At Apture we want to take the best ideas that people have on the web and make them available to everyone – to democratize them. With our new Apture Twitter Viewer anyone with a website can now integrate a live search stream about any topic right into their pages it takes less than ten seconds. We did this on apture.com/twitter/ and being able to see what people are saying about the things you write about is truly exhilarating - I’ve found myself visiting the page over and over to see what people are saying. It makes your webpage more powerful, more up-to-date, and gives your readers a reason to keep coming back. Apture user Steven Johnson realized this immediately and wrote an excellent post about the power of bringing internet conversations to your website with embedded Apture Twitter Viewer showing what people are saying about his new camera flash, the Lumopro 120.

We also pride ourselves on doing more than the obvious – apart from immediacy the most powerful features of Twitter are its interconnectedness and the ability to share. How often have you seen someone reply to someone else on Twitter and wished to quickly see the other side of that conversation? We make it easy, clicking on a person’s Twitter name inside of any Tweet will bring up their profile and Twitter stream. We do the same for hashtags, click on one to see what other people are saying about the topic. The other aspect is media. With the Apture Twitter Viewer will open any supported media you link to in a new Apture window so you can see it right there. We support Video, Images, Audio, Maps, and much more from more than 30 sources, all available right there.

Now combine immediacy, interconnectedness, and multi media sharing: See what people are saying about the things you care about, see who they are, where they are from, what else they are saying, and see all the media they like – isn’t that powerful. It really lets you dive into a conversation, all in just a few seconds.

Sign up for Apture, follow us on Twitter, and if you like my writing, follow me as well.

Much as I love reading I have always felt like getting the big picture of history is extremely difficult through books and even most history classes and I think that interactive media is extremely well suited to this. But who are all these people, you ask, the Hittites, the Seljuks? When it comes to digging deeper the map isn’t enough, wouldn’t it be great to have Apture in an interactive map like this? What do you think?

The video points out that more information will be generated in 2009, than was created in the past 5,000 years. That a weeks worth of the New York Times holds more information than most Americans living during the 18th century were likely to encounter in a lifetime. [...]Today, smart people who want to be “in the know” need to figure out how to filter the information fire hose. The challenge is not finding information, but finding trusted “filters” and then absorbing information through them while ignoring the rest.

I totally agree with the author but think there’s more to absorbing the right information than just filtering it down to the best parts. When we started working on Apture we wanted to give people a tool that helped them put new information into context by letting you view the most relevant rich media and guides without needing to leave the page to search for the material. We wanted to make the ideas expressed by the author, come to life. We believe that people will care more about events and ideas if they can relate to them, and that they will understand them better and relate them more deeply if they can put them in context. Good writing and story telling is a big part of that but we want to help everyone use the power of the web to communicate even more effectively.

Yes, more media can be even more overwhelming but by presenting it in the right way and allowing your users to discover more bit by bit, in chunks , instead of forcing them to drink from the fire hose we believe we can help make the things they do choose to read about more memorable and significant.

So if you want to show your readers what education in Eritrea looks like, how much you enjoyed the recent Coldplay concert, and how Large Hadron Collider works, Apture is here to help you do that more compellingly.