Blog.Lejer.Ro – Bloggers Heaven

Do you know what’s StreetAdvisor? A website from where you can see your neighborhood and places from all over the world (a future tool of course, for now only US, UK, Canada and Austria have coverage).
It’s a must visit site, for homeowners, renters, and house buyers from above countries, as the StreetAdvisor give viable images about the living places.
A great article (StreetAdvisor Launches New Services) by Duncan Riley will explain you more. Worth reading, just see the below quotes:

The new StreetAdvisor provides a real-life “insider” view that provides users the ability to learn and share vital details about where they live, including noise levels, traffic, neighbors, entertainment, and public services in a similar way to travel review sites. Recommendations and negative experiences about local businesses, entertainment and services will also be supported.
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Other new features include a member recognition system, “local expert program” and StreetAdvisor Billboards, a service that offers the ability to secure exclusive “run-of-street” advertising opportunities on a per city basis.

The site is currently in public beta and offers coverage for the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.

The full article also presents some great images that are self explaining.

According their own blog article Lending Club, that’s using Facebook for their operations, passed 500.000 Dollars on loans.
What’s Lending Club? It’s an online lending community where people can borrow and lend money, bypass the banks, and supposedly get better rates.
Quoted from Renaud article:

We continue to be impressed with the rapid adoption. The Facebook F8 launch has helped spread the word about our company. The community members have generated a tremendous amount of feedback to help improve our product. These improvements are preparing us well for our expansion beyond Facebook.

To date, there has not been any default or late payments, though it is still very early. The close ratio on the site went up to 84%: this statistic means that more than 4 out of every 5 loans obtain funding. A borrower always has the ability to relist a loan if the individual didn’t receive funding the first time.
Lending Club Statistics

First loan closed June 6, 2007
Passed $250,000 in loan origination July 5, 2007
Passed $500,000 in loan origination July 26, 2007
Loans issued 104 ($528,200)
Verified lenders 524
Total members 3,061
Facebook Installs 11,935
Top Facebook group Apple Students (102 users)
Fastest growing network New York, NY (82 users)
Average Interest Rate 10.71%

Lending Club was recently reported by Netbanker as the top “Money” application on Facebook.

The average interest rate continued to go up to 10.71% partially due to larger loans, which usually carry higher interest rates. For more details on interest rates calculations, please visit https://secure.lendingclub.com/info/how-we-set-interest-rates.action. The average loan size went up from $4,700 to $5,250 in the last 4 weeks.

All this information and more will soon be available directly from the secure site https://secure.lendingclub.com.

Worth to read the Lending Club Blog, to see their latest articles, here: http://blog.lendingclub.com/

TechCrounch keep having great articles. It’s a source of inspiration for my little blog:) So here’s another choosed article for today, from Duncan Riley

Theseus, a German based project that is aiming to develop “the world’s most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet.” will received a cash injection of $165 million from the German Government, under approval by the EU.

According to an AP report, the German Government will initially fund Siemens AG, SAP AG, Deutsche Thomson oHG and EMPOLIS GmbH to kick start the project with later funding to be given to small and medium businesses to build on the initial research.
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Read FULL article here
eu-google-competitor-gets-165million-cash-injection/икони

Google on Monday called on a judge to extend part of the US government’s four-year antitrust scrutiny of Microsoft, intensifying a lobbying battle in which the arch-rivals have sought to limit each other’s power.

In an unusual legal manoeuvre, Google went over the heads of justice department and state regulators to appeal directly to a federal judge to impose greater restrictions on the software company. However, Microsoft’s lawyers claimed the approach was part of an untested procedure that fell outside the judge’s remit.

Google’s intervention follows Microsoft’s appeal to the Federal Trade Commission in April to block its rival’s planned purchase of advertising technology company DoubleClick .

Monday’s legal challenge concerns software that people use to find information stored on their PCs by typing a word or phrase into a search box. Such software, made by both Microsoft and Google as well as other companies, is expected to assume increasing importance as people store more of their personal information on the web as well as on their computers.

Quick background: In April, Google sent a 50-page white paper to the US Department of Justice asserting that Microsoft was violating its 2002 antitrust settlement by not allowing outside desktop search engines (such as Google’s own Desktop Search application) to be installed in Windows Vista. Microsoft initially denied the claims, saying that users could indeed use Google’s application instead of their own, if not very easily, and assistant attorney general Thomas O. Barnett sided with the Redmond camp, writing a letter to state attorneys asking them to drop their investigations.

Then last week Microsoft agreed to make changes to the search application in Vista that would make it easier for consumers to install an outside default desktop search program. Google, however, wasn’t impressed. Monday, the search giant appealed directly to a federal judge saying that Microsoft had not done enough to mitigate their concerns.

Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association of Competitive Technology, called the intervention by Google a “PR stunt” (though as the Financial Times notes, his group generally sides with Microsoft), and I tend to agree. The Justice Department had already reviewed and dismissed Google’s complaint, and Microsoft had agreed to make concessions in an attempt to appease Google.

Read full article at Read/WriteWeb.com

Veoh today unveiled a serious challenger in the Web TV market. VeohTV Beta is being subtly billed as a “Joost Killer”.

Veoh’s been busy. In addition to running its popular video sharing site, which is known for higher-quality streams (in terms of bitrate), they’ve announced VeohTV, which is best described as a distributed Joost.

The service, which involves, like Joost and Babelgum, downloading new software which becomes a sort of “video browser.” But instead of doing deals with content providers and piping content directly to users, VeohTV is letting users pull content from around the web – a “single interface to search, browse and view all video on the Internet.” Accepting that IPTV will be decentralized is the same theme driving Truveo’s success, AOL’s video search tool.

Basically, if its out there on the Internet, and Veoh can pull it in, you can watch it. Veoh says this is great for video sites, since they can continue to embed advertising, etc with the content.

Will it work? It certainly might. I’ll have to wait and try out the software first. But the vision is solid. This avoids the time and cost of doing licensing deals with content owners. Like Real’s new player that allows users to basically bookmark and locally store video, it assumes that video will continue to be widely distributed across the Internet. Whoever creates the best interface for the content will win users, and liquidity events.

This also spells eventual trouble for online TV guides like Meevee (not to single them out). If people have a tv and its hooked up to a computer, as more and more people do, they’ll eventually expect video on demand from the Internet. The online TV guides weren’t able to figure out how to bring this content to them, and now services like Veoh, Joost, Babelgum and others have just done an end-around.

Meanwhile, don’t forget the social aspect of watching TV, and how the Internet can help facilitate that. BuddyTV is a service to keep an eye on. No IPTV, but lots of chatting going on during shows from loyal users.

Read full article (including screenshots) here.