Technically Speaking

AdaptiveBlue, the Smart Browsing Company, today announced that SmartLinks Feeds for books, music, movies, and stocks are now viral.

SmartLinks, created in BlueOrganizer, look like ordinary links, but when visitors click the SmartLink icon, they’re given intelligent, contextual shortcuts to related sites and services. The new SmartLink Feeds now feature a “Grab Me” button that allows anyone to copy a list of favorites and place it on their blog, Web site, and social network profiles. SmartLink Feeds can also be customized in appearance, content and can also plug in their personal affiliate ID to monetize traffic to participating sites.

AdaptiveBlue will also publish and update popular SmartLink Feeds for anyone to paste into their own sites including, New York Times Bestsellers, Netflix Top Rentals, Amazon Hot Gadgets, iTunes Top Albums and Wine.com Top Wines.

AdaptiveBlue, is the smart browsing company founded by Alex Iskold in early 2006. The vision of AdaptiveBlue is to invent new browser technologies that leverage semantics and attention to power better online experience. Their keystone product, BlueOrganizer, has over 800,000 downloads and is a recommended Firefox add-on. AdaptiveBlue has recently raised series A from Union Square Ventures.

Lending Club, the rapidly growing person-to-person lending service where people borrow and lend money among each other, bypass the banks, and get better rates, will announce tomorrow that it received $10.26 million in Series A funding led by Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners. Lending Club will use the funds to expand its person-to-person lending community beyond its initial Facebook® application.

Since its May 24, 2007, launch on Facebook, the Lending Club community has reached more than 13,000 Facebook users and $750,000 in loans have been transacted among those users.

Lending Club is available to individual borrowers with credit scores at or above 640. Using Lending Club, borrowers can apply for personal loans of $500 to $25,000 to be funded by individual lenders. To date lenders have funded 80 percent of all loan requests. Lending Club handles user authentication, bank account verification, credit checking, credit reporting, funds transfers and collections.

Lending Club’s proprietary technology, LendingMatch, helps lenders quickly identify the best loans based on pre-set criteria such as credit worthiness, being friends on Facebook, sharing network affiliations, belonging to the same groups or by geographical location. LendingMatch instantly presents lenders with a diversified loan portfolio (composed of ten to thirty borrowers) reflecting these relationships as well as the lenders’ individual risk preferences.

Lending Club(TM) is an online lending community where people can borrow and lend money among each other, bypass banks and get better rates. Lending Club is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA.

Full Disclosure: Rex Dixon is the Director of Social Media Content for Lending Club.

More coverage: GigaOM
More coverage: VentureBeat
More coverage: Mashable
More coverage: TC
Other coverage in BusinessWeek - they didn’t link Lending Club correctly, but we all know where that is, right? Great article on the Subprime Meltdown from last Saturday.

bub.blicio.us, has a show called BubCast.

Alison McNeil is the host of the show, and it’s a weekly show that I think will grow over time. Alison has interviewed such notable people as Robert Scoble, as well as many startup types. I’m hoping to see many more future shows, and watch as they get better over time.

One show as many of you know is the current Lending Club video. Alison and her crew did that, as already noted several times over. In fact the best place to see that is on the new Netvibes Lending Club page.

They even have their very own Justin.tv channel. Not sure if they are taking this today to Lunch 2.0, but it might be online.

Technically Speaking, keep an eye on the team there; I think there are some good things going on that will be coming very soon. And consider buying some property on the Outer Banks.

Scriggity is a new site that seems to be quite potentially fun. I uploaded a quick video from my Blackjack, don’t know if they will use it, as it was really quick and I didn’t really say anything interesting. The concept seems easy to understand, and if you don’t get it - just drop them a video via e-mail.

Technically Speaking, the site is run (founded I guess the correct term would be) by Drew and Shauna; Drew as many of you know is a tech evangelist for the company Pluggd. Now that is some cool technology there (Pluggd). You could also buy some Arizona real estate.

Planypus, a site that lets friends make collaborative plans, announced the closing of its Series-A financing. The round was over-subscribed and funded exclusively by private investors.

The Planypus service is designed around a shared discussion space that allows participants to make plans together. Users are able to suggest and vote on event details, make comments, and invite friends. With the ability to access the service via website, a mobile phone interface, text messaging, calendars, and RSS, even the busiest of people always have a convenient way to stay updated with friends’ gatherings.

Planypus is the product of Fifteen Reasons LLC, a startup based in Chicago and Washington D.C.

Full Disclosure: Technically Speaking, the Planypus guys are sponsors of this blog; and I have asked, but they are not allowed to release the amount of the funding. They are also better set up than a lot of these so called services that seem to be more popular. My theory - just because they are in Chicago /Washington DC and not Silicon Valley, which I think is the other investors loss - I’m so glad that they were able to get their funding, as they are much more deserving of it than some of the pretenders out there that have already received money.

Covered earlier on Mashable.

Better than having to buy Da Vinci baby furniture!