This Christmas, I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to give back and help others. There are a staggering number of charitable options out there, so choosing between them can be a somewhat daunting task. This year, I want to focus on one of my favorites: Kiva.org. Kiva organizes microfinance loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world to help them start simple businesses in their local communities. I believe it’s one of the best ways you can give back this holiday season – by loaning money to those who are less fortunate as they try to change their own lives. It’s important to know that a contribution through Kiva is a loan, not a donation. It’s a way to help people get on their feet while also encouraging independence, accountability, and entrepreneurship. Kiva borrowers are required to pay their loans back over time (Kiva’s repayment rate is 98.92%). Once loans are paid back, you can re-lend the money again to help another aspiring entrepreneur – a single capital commitment can be reused again and again to help people all over the world.

Kiva borrowers are people that live in impoverished and war-torn areas, and instead of looking to the government or the Red Cross for a hand out, they’ve decided to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and start a business. Their ventures are nothing complicated – I’ve funded cafes, agriculture, electronics repair, tailor shops, grocery stores, and construction businesses. They aren’t world changing projects, but they are life changing enterprises for these people and their local communities. Your loan could be the difference between a person literally breaking rocks for a living or working in a skilled profession – both for the entrepreneur you back as well as the local employees they hire.

The picture attached to this post is of Elva Pineda, a 43 year old entrepreneur living in Choluteca, Honduras. Elva runs a general store out of her home, selling consumable items to many of her neighbors that work at nearby okra plantations. Elva’s Kiva loan of $650 will be used to buy inventory that will allow her to serve more customers and eventually move the store out of her home and into a dedicated building.

Kiva can put you in touch with entrepreneurs across the globe like Elva who simply need a little startup capital to get on their feet. When you loan to a Kiva entrepreneur, you can see their picture and have a chance to read their background and their business plan. You’ll get updates as they build their business and gradually repay their loan. I’ll be able to follow Elva and several other entrepreneurs I’ve funded as they put my loan to work.

Since Kiva is a non-profit, the entire sum of the loan is delivered directly to the entrepreneurs – over 470,000 of them so far in 57 countries have received over $180 million in microloans. You can start lending with as little as $25. So I hope you’ll take some time this Christmas to reflect on ways you can give back to those around the world who are trying to lift themselves up and break their own cycle of poverty. You can get started in 5 minutes at Kiva.org.

I have begun to think and write about China more and more lately; there is such an incredible opportunity across the Pacific that seems largely unobserved by a majority of Americans. The Chinese economy and population base is so large and modernizing so rapidly, and has transformed from 3rd world to 1st world in a matter of decades (that same evolution took us hundreds of years here in America). As you can see in this chart from Google, China’s internet adoption has blown past the United States, both in terms of growth rate and sheer number of users. And they’re still at only 20% internet penetration. Mobile phone penetration is actually higher than internet penetration, approaching 60% depending on what study you read – that’s over 500 million mobile phones. This in itself is an interesting dynamic, as it seems that in China the mobile phone (rather than the PC) is the primary method of internet use and communication. As I understand it, this is a result of the relative difficulty and expense of getting a computer and home internet line installed – particularly in rural China, which does not yet have the widespread and developed communications infrastructure that we enjoy in the United States. Coupled with pervasive and cheap mobile phone service and a proliferation of advanced smart phones, the mobile internet has become the single point of connectivity for millions of Chinese. However you measure China’s growth, it doesn’t take an economist or venture capitalist to see that the pace of technological change, adoption, and transformation in China is unlike anything experienced in America or anywhere else.

I saw a statistic the other day that by the end of 2010 China will have more mobile internet users than there will be people in the United States. That’s staggering. There are countless companies with tons of VC hype and astronomical valuations climbing all over each other to try to capture even a sliver of the ~90mm user U.S. mobile internet market. And yet there is a Chinese market that is orders of magnitude larger and remains relatively unaddressed by America’s top online properties.

For example – Facebook has experienced tremendous user growth outside of the United States, adding almost 10 million global users in March 2010 alone. Below you’ll see a top 10 table of Facebook’s growth by country in March – millions of users were added in Asian countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, and according to Facebook nearly all of those new users access the service exclusively on mobile devices (wow). And yet despite the obvious resonance with Asian consumers, Facebook remains conspicuously absent from China due to a near total blockage by the Chinese government.

Not to say there aren’t very significant and well established Chinese social networking players (including Tencent Inc., which is debatably the largest social network in the world) but I just find the under representation and seeming indifference of so many American Web 2.0 properties to be surprising. So many of today’s startups seem laser focused on attacking the United States mobile market, and are at the same time so haphazard in their Chinese strategy.

I do understand that there are significant regulatory and cultural hurdles to clear when moving a U.S.-based service into the Chinese market. In addition to censorship and restrictions on foreign business ownership, there is no guarantee that a product that has been successful in the United States will resonate with Chinese consumers. Many of today’s social media and self publishing centric products and services simply aren’t workable in a country that does not allow the free flow of information or exchange of ideas that we enjoy here in America.

It seems that the swell of Chinese internet users (on mobile devices especially) are like a tsunami being held back by poor access to broadband and isolated by the dam of government censorship. Though there are millions of users already climbing over and around the dam (with things like proxy servers and other methods of circumventing the “Great Firewall of China”), I expect that the real wave will come over the next several years as the government finds it increasingly difficult to censor its citizens, and increased broadband penetration plugs more and more Chinese into the web. As China comes online in a bigger and bigger way, it’s going to be harder than ever for American startups and social media players to compete without confronting the tsunami head on.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the American “Wild West” was a place of great opportunity and great adventure – rapid development, gold rushes, land grabs, and a booming population provided an opportunity for enterprising young men and women to strike out on their own and “grow up with the country”, as the famous quote goes. The West took on an almost mythical aura as a place where anything was possible and success was limited only by ambition.

Even after the American West had been developed, the United States has remained the epicenter of the world’s economic growth and a proverbial “land of milk and honey” for immigrants from across the globe. The best and brightest students from countries the world over aspired to one day travel to America to make their fortunes and pursue the “American Dream” – and countless many have done just that. However, while the western world has been the place to be for the past 150 years, I’m beginning to think that the next 150 may see a stark reversal of the compass needle.

Take a look at the picture that accompanies this post (click for a striking full size version). That’s Shenzhen, China – the biggest place you’ve never heard of. With some 14 million residents, it’s far bigger than New York City and remains the fastest growing city in China. Not only is Shenzhen exploding, it’s young, smart, and hungry. It’s estimated that 20% of China’s PhDs work in Shenzhen, and the average age of its citizens is less than 30. Thanks to billions in foreign investment, it’s young and educated population, and its status as the first of China’s Special Economic Zones, Shenzhen is also the #1 export center in China, accounting for 22% of the country’s total. All of this is particularly striking when you realize that less than 30 years ago, Shenzhen was nothing more than a sleepy fishing village with a population of 30,000 (that all of this growth has coincided exactly with the establishment of the special economic zone and a capitalist economy is best left for a separate discussion). Shenzhen has also developed as a manufacturing powerhouse, and is the origin of nearly every shiny consumer gadget you own with “Made in China” stamped on the bottom. And if you’re reading this on a Mac, iPhone, iPad, Thinkpad, Dell, Kindle, or HP (among many others), that includes the hardware your browser is running on right now.

John Biggs from CrunchGear spent several weeks in Shenzhen and wrote an excellent series entitled “CrunchGear in China: Where Tech Sausage is Made”, which explores the massive consumer goods (mostly electronics) manufacturing industry that has catapulted Shenzhen to prosperity and global prominence. CrunchGear paints an incredible portrait of the Chinese culture and the efficiency with which they conduct their manufacturing. If you have some time to read through them, they provide some awesome perspective on the seething, dirty, and ruthlessly effective economic powerhouse that’s growing up in the East. The articles are here: Introduction, China the Factory, Getting from There to Here, The Ex-Pats, Shanzhai.

So for all the reasons laid out above (and even more that I’ll elaborate on in a future post), I see the East as having many of the same characteristics that made the American Wild West so appealing – rapid development, a population boom, and a modernizing economy. And although the modern day Chinese gold rush has already begun, I can’t help but think there is still a vast opportunity in East Asia for those willing to make the leap and “grow up with the world”.