I will light and hold the candle, you make the moth flutter and we can go look for promising curtains onto which we can project our fantasy...when the curtain opens the moth flies up their noses...we throw down the candle and grab the sacks of money and all they hear is the sound of low running in the darkness

Temporary living near Palo Alto, California where I plan to work on new ventures and make new connections in the Silicon Valley area.

I picked Jackson Hole, Wyoming as the best detox location after having lived in China for so long. Inside Teton National Park and right next to Yellowstone, we plan to live there for the summer and fall season and do a lot of backpacking.

Another three months has passed since my last update. This quarter much of my time has gone towards long term planning and working out details with outside vendors for projects that have yet to be unveiled (stay tuned!). Still, a number of significant improvements have been made.

Advocate Tracking Tools

A few months ago I released the Advocate Program, where Wokai Members can refer friends and earn impact points redeemable for prizes. In the last few months this program has been further supported with new and improved tracking tools.

• Contact Importing -- We now have contact importing working for Google, Yahoo and MSN so referral emails can easily be sent to all your contacts. More ISPs will be supported as APIs are made available.
• Referral Codes -- Members can now create their own referral codes so that handing out social cards or even telling people about Wokai in conversation can lead to tracked referrals. Visit the Referral Codes page to create a code for people to enter during registration. Anyone who enters your code during registration will be linked to you as the referrer and you will earn credit for their contributions over the lifetime of their account.
• Redeem Codes -- Wokai Advocates can now sell their own products or services and exchange for a Wokai Gift Card Code. The seller simply generates as many Wokai redeem codes as they want and records which codes sold. Later the seller transfers money to Wokai to fund the redeem codes that were sold. This system gives Wokai Advocates complete freedom to fundraise in all kinds of creative ways while greatly simplifying the process of getting donors registered and transferring fundraising collections to Wokai. Advocates will be credited for any new referrals.

New Loan Products

I have changed the way Wokai's generates amortized schedules for loan repayment. The new system is much more flexible and allows field partners to choose exactly how loan principal and interest is broken down over a series of repayments. The system also prevents Wokai from having to write or maintain business logic for each field partner.

Language Preference

Wokai Members can now choose Mandarin or English as their preferred language. All automatically generated emails from Wokai now respect this setting and send a Mandarin or English version. Additionally, Member names are properly handled for last name first or first name first preference. Wokai's blog is also shown in both languages now, just click on the Chinese or United States flag at the top of the page. More work remains to make Wokai's website completely bilingual, but the pieces are coming together quickly.

RSS Feeds and Wokai API Framework

Wokai will soon be integrating with a number of outside websites and mobile phone applications. In preparation, I have put together a REST-style API framework resting upon the same scalable infrastructure and MVC web framework as Wokai's consumer website. More details will be made available once it has passed a piloting phase and I've had time to fully document, but for those of you who have development skills, stay tuned!

In the meantime, we've made a simple RSS feed showing all loans for which we are actively fundraising. Visit /loans-rss.xml to see the XML output.

Financial Posting Journal

I've improved Wokai's accounting system to include formal journal postings which tie together sets of financial transactions that together represent a single business transaction. This makes auditing much easier, allows for batched transactions and is generally more in line with standard accounting practices of much larger systems.

RMB Support

By far the biggest accomplishment I've made in the last month is support for handling RMB. Significant effort was put into reworking our financial model to handle both USD and RMB in cooperation with Wokai's partnership with CPWF (China People's Welfare Foundation), as well as allowing for for billable donors. You may have noticed the USD/RMB symbols at the top of Wokai's website. Now you can switch between either currency and all amounts on the website will be converted on-the-fly. Wokai now settles all incoming funds into RMB at the daily exchange rate (and all previous contributions/donations have also been converted). Choosing RMB as Wokai's standard makes sense for a number of reasons and will keep Wokai operations simpler and allow for future support of other secondary currencies (like USD).

Other Minor Developments:

• borrower/loan profile information structure changes
• website monitoring service changed
• closing of 2010 financials
• blog navigation turned session-less

Amazon Cloud Outage

Many of you may have noticed that Wokai's website was hit by Amazon's major datacenter outage last week and was down for a period of almost 20 hours before I gave up looking for signs of control and restored Wokai's service on completely new infrastructure in Singapore. Amazon's outage went on for another four days. This was an unprecedented outage not only for Amazon, but for the cloud computing industry overall. It is clear that they have a flaw in their design and some serious explaining to do. That being said, it only takes one mistake and those of us who have designed or otherwise been around fault tolerant architectures know that it is not a simple thing to build, much less to do it as a consumer service with aggressive feature buildout. Wokai leverages a great number of features from Amazon that we would not otherwise be able to afford, so I for one hope that they will be providing clear details on their architecture design, flaws and all, such that we can build in the safety we need.

At the minimum I was able to prove the resilience of our architecture by how quickly everything was recovered on new equipment, and users in Asia will be happy to find Wokai's website much faster with our new Singapore datacenter location.