It’s been a while since we’ve taken a look at the social lending industry in the U.S. Both Lending Club and Prosper are out with new updates that are worth taking a look at. It’s no shock that social lending has taken off during the current economic crisis. If you are new to social lending, check out our 3-part series.

Lending Club

Earlier this week, Lending Club Sr. Director, Product Strategy Rob Garcia posted an update on the company’s progress. Rob noted the following stats:

Lending Club provides a near real-time stats page that shows figures including: loans funded, total dollars funded, use for funds and investor return rates.

Prosper

Last month Prosper released findings that showed debt consolidation loans at an all time high. “Over the course of the last six months, debt consolidation loans have been ticking up, and in January hit an all time high of 59% of loans. Historically debt consolidation has tracked at approximately 45% of loans.”

The Prosper release also discusses the new credit card rules and notes that will be included in customer’s statements beginning this month. Chris Larsen, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Prosper noted, “We’ve always believed that credit cards provide a convenient payment mechanism, but are terrible as a financing solution. As more consumers start realizing it will take them approximately 30 years to pay off their credit card if they pay only the minimum payment each month, we think more will realize that they need to eliminate their credit card balances quickly. So seeing more people turning to Prosper to pay off destructive, high interest credit card debt is probably a trend that will continue for the foreseeable future.”

Have you used social lending tools to help with debt refinancing or new purchases? Leave a comment (you can post anonymously) about your experiences.

I have just returned from an intense 3-day media summit in Abu Dhabi. I took some photos and tweeted from the summit, but here are some key take-aways:

Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi is very ambitious. And is not shy to show it. The summit was held at a brand-new futuristic hotel built on top of a Formula-1 race track. Abu Dhabi has established the Abu Dhabi Media Company (with an unlimited fund for investments) and twofour52 to become a media center. Recent investments of ADMC include the very promising Vevo (Hulu for music videos, with Sony Music Entertainment) and Gazillion (which holds the rights to all Marvel Comics characters).

Carriers

Carriers are very afraid. Not from competition or government regulation. They are very afraid that they won’t be able carry all the upcoming heavy bandwidth from mobile web and smartphones with streaming media.

Read the rest of this entry »

Below are some of the latest jobs posted on the CenterNetworks Job Board. Subscribe to the CN Jobs feed and get all of the latest Web industry jobs delivered directly to you.

Featured Jobs:

More Jobs:

Employers – Join other top companies on the CN Job Board. Post your jobs today – only $10!

As with previous years, I met a ton of new people at the SXSW conference. I have to admit that I was very much looking to meet Dries Buytaert. Belgium-based Dries is the founder of the Drupal CMS. If you are a regular reader of CN, you know that all of our sites were in Drupal until a year ago when we shifted to Wordpress. I always liked Drupal but the admin interface just isn’t as usable as the Wordpress admin interface. Dries told me that the upcoming Drupal 7 release will have a redesigned admin interface.

Check out my video discussion with Dries below (make sure to watch in HD!). We talk about SXSW, the upcoming Drupal 7 release and the Drupal Gardens product. Drupal Gardens is a service provided by Acquia. Drupal Gardens is basically a hosted Drupal service similar to the Wordpress.com hosted service.

Dries notes that the Drupal 7 release has a focus on usability (they hired usability experts to help make the product stronger). They are also making lots of improvements for developers – including better APIs and better database abstraction layers. The Drupal 7 release is in alpha and they are hoping to get it out in public within the next few months.
Read the rest of this entry »

While at SXSW this week, I met with Shawn, the AOL product manager over the new AOL Lifestream product. AOL Lifestream brings together a variety of social services including Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, etc. The service is available on the iPhone, Android and on the desktop.

Interestingly, AOL now allows you to post status updates to AOL along with the other services you select. AOL Lifestream also allows you to follow places and find updates related to a place. So if you are interested in a certain hotel, bar, etc. you can subscribe to that location and any updates will hit your stream. To make these location pages very valuable, AOL will need to aggregate additional services including Yelp and even Google results (blog, web, news, etc.).

Similar to Google launching Buzz inside of Gmail to gain an instant audience, AOL Lifestream has the same instant audience as the new version of AIM includes the Lifestream product.

I asked Shawn about the comparisons to FriendFeed, his response is worth listening to.

Check out the video demo below.
Read the rest of this entry »

Today is the last day of the South by Southwest 2010 interactive conference. I will probably do a wrap-up post although overall this year felt very different for me than the previous years. Here are a few more photos that I snapped over the last few days. It seems like I didn’t miss much at the keynote judging from the other posts I’ve read.

If you were at the conference, what’s your take? What were the best moments? What could the conference improve on?

It’s the squid! Scott Beale from Laughing Squid

Read the rest of this entry »

At the Mashable party during the SXSW conference, I caught up with Cliqset founder Darren Bounds to learn more about where the social service is today and where it is headed. Louis Gray also spoke with Darren and recorded an audio interview that’s worth listening to. Lastly, check out the Cliqset SXSW mashup which pulls in content from Cliqset users from the following services: Brightkite, Flickr, Foursquare, Gowalla, Qik and Twitter.

Darren described Cliqset as a real-time conversation and aggregation service.  Currently they aggregate content from a variety of services from their users. Comparisons to Friendfeed are included in every Cliqset review although now that Friendfeed development has stopped, Cliqset could take over the tracks and move forward. Darren noted that their goal is to be more user-friendly than Friendfeed was.

Darren noted that the Florida-based Cliqset team is working hard to organize the social web. He also mentioned that they are looking to move to the valley soon. I think this is a smart move – when you are attaching yourself mainly to Twitter and/or Facebook, being closer to these companies is a smart move.

The company recently partnered with Evernote and the Cliqset application is available in a browser, as an Air app and also on the Boxee Box.

In terms of the Cliqset roadmap, Darren noted that they are working on a tighter integration with Twitter. The integration will become visible over the next few months. For the balance of 2010, they are focused on content people are interested in. I assume this means we will see more mashups like the SXSW mashup noted above along with pulling in additional content outside of content provided by Cliqset users.

Darren shared that they have 50,000 users and 85% of those users have created accounts since November 2009. Their overall goal is to create a place that works for both the bigtime sharers like Louis Gray and Robert Scoble while still providing a place that is comfortable for the average Facebook user.

(also note Darren’s awesome Voltron shirt – just like Voltron brought together the cats, Cliqset brings social services together. Darren wouldn’t comment regarding if there is a way to form blazing sword)