Technically Speaking

I Love Rewards Inc., one of North America’s leading web based reward program providers, today announced that it has completed a $3.3 million Series A financing round with JLA Ventures, Laurence Capital and other angel investors.

I Love Rewards develops innovative web-based reward solutions for small and medium- sized businesses and Fortune 1000 companies. JLA Ventures is one of Canada’s leading venture capital firms that invests in growth companies that are focused on the Internet, digital media, e-commerce, communications security, mobile computing, and enterprise software companies.

Technically Speaking, I find it quite interesting that web sites and businesses that I have never heard of are making good money. $3.3 million is a good round, and proves that the web economy isn’t slowing down at this time. top diet pills

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.

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!

JS-Kit has landed $1.2 million in seed funding which is expected to carry them to their Series A. This funding came from The Entrepreneurs’ Fund 3 which will propel JS-Kit’s expansion through its next phase.

They have also landed a new member to their board of directors, Kim Miller, currently VP of Marketing for HP.com. She will be on the board with Frank Lesher, former General Counsel for Sony America and CEO and Chairman, Khris Loux.

Technically Speaking there is more information right here. Giving the above a look is a lot easier than buying a new cookware set.

Telstra apparently sent shockwaves through their company. They cut off Facebook for their employees! The horror! The cruel and unusual punishment! Ok, now that my sarcasm is done, seriously Allen is correct - you sign something at any corporate company I have worked at about internet usage. Does that stop most, such as myself? Nope, you still surf when you can, and when you have nothing to work on. It’s better than talking to your cubicle person who may be busy working on some other project. Nevertheless, the company has the right to do whatever it wants.

twittercal is just another by-product of twitter. Now the thing that interests me is that with twitter receiving funding, how are they going to reign in all these freebie created by someone applications? There are dozens of them, all based off twitter. Kind of like the Google Map API I suppose; all the companies that use that mapping for their core. I guess it’s ok for now, but I just wonder where twitter will make the money.

twitter equals following. Plain and simple. The reason they were funded without a business plan is the same reason that some bands can go forever without a record contract. Following. You want a sound business plan? Build a freakin’ following. If you can do that, you don’t need one. twitter did that.

They built a HUGE following, and basically when you say twitter, people know what you are talking about; just like (for you music types) - say “Cowboy Mouth” - and there is a perfect example of building a following. There are other bands that did the same thing. None had a business plan (pretty sure about that, refute me if you are in a band with a business plan!), all reached a level of success without a record label.

Technically Speaking, it’s a Friday and I just did my Link Blog lock n’ load. Time to get back to work, my e-mail is whistling at me. bodystockings