From the release, “The California Department of Corporations, recognizing the urgent need to get consumer and small business credit flowing, accelerated the process of granting regulatory approval to Prosper so that it could reopen immediately. Prosper had ceased all lending activity on Prosper Loans Marketplace and has been in a quiet period since October 2008 while it registered for approval with the Securities & Exchange Commission. That process has not yet been completed and is still ongoing. As such, Prosper is open to borrowers nationwide, but for the time being only residents of California and institutional investors whose primary place of business is in California can take advantage of the alternative investment opportunity Prosper loans provide. Likewise, only California lending companies can list loans on the Prosper Open Market.”

The updated Prosper Loans Marketplace now require that individual borrowers have credit scores above 640 as part of their new “Prosper Ratings” system. Prosper notes, “Prosper Ratings are based on historical loan performance data and are designed to better convey risk. While the estimated loss rate and estimated returns have been shown at the point of bidding since October 2007, the Prosper Rating letter grade as well as the estimated loss rate will be shown in the listing along with a narrower credit score range and other extended credit data.”

Prosper has also launched an Open Market initiative which lets financial insitutions participate in their network.

Competitor Lending Club exited the SEC quiet period last October. If you are new to social lending, our three-part social lending series will get you up-to-speed. 

A lot of people are increasingly convinced that capital is no longer solely tied up in dollars and cents; the concept of value is beginning to carry as much weight as traditional concepts of cost/price, largely due to public relations and marketing in social media.

In other words, try explaining to a client, a typical B2C brand, that they’ve just spent $10,000 to create a Facebook app that will generate no revenue. You have to get that client to agree that mindshare and conversation, a.k.a. social capital, are as necessary in the new marketplace as more traditional media measurements such as impressions and conversions.

So, as my checking account teeters along the fine line between “I can afford a good sandwich” and “I can’t afford to take calls from debt collectors,” my social accounts are beginning to grow and thrive in a separate but related economy.

This becomes exciting when I realize that I can trade my mindshare for goods and services (maybe a website design from a rad youth branding firm, maybe a better laptop from a sponsor who wants to associate itself with my video blogging).

It becomes even more exciting when I think about leveraging that mindshare into enough microdonations to accomplish a noble goal, say, helping my little sister raise money for cancer research.

Yep, the little ladybug is all grown up; in addition to being passionate about the environment and working hard in her undergraduate studies, she’s also a conscientious philanthropist who is trying to raise a paltry $200 for Relay for Life (a program run by the American Cancer Society).

What do you think: With my social capital, would it be possible to leverage enough microdonations to blow Rachel’s $200 goal out of the water? She has $15 at this very moment. If ten percent of my Twitter followers donate $5 each, she’d come close to trippling her goal. If influencers retweeted this request – what would happen then?

So, let’s start this little experiment and see if the concept of social capital works for something like fundraising through microdonations: Click here to go to Rachel’s fundraising page, and click here to see clickthru stats from Bit.ly.

Needless to say, cancer patients, doctors, researchers, Rachel, and I would all appreciate any retweets, reposts, or link love you care to give!

Jolie O’Dell is a designer, writer, and consultant based in Richmond, Virginia.

The new answers site (seen below) provides a way to ask questions in a very simple way. NASDAQ is featuring the answers site on the main site which should help drive visitors and usage. It appears you can earn points for answering questions which can then be redeemed for big stuffed animals (ha). Founder Wayne Mulligan has posted his thoughts about the launch. Wayne notes that more partnerships are in the works. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed although there are a number of ads on the answers site.

SmartyPig

SmartyPig offers a social savings site and almost reminds me of the Christmas Club accounts at my old bank when I was a little kid. The idea behind SmartyPig is to help you save a little each period to help you get to the goal and purchase the product you are interested in. Say you want to buy a new iPod, you can set it up so SmartyPig takes $15 each week and then the system alerts you when you’ve reached the needed $299 for the iPod. They also pay interest on your account balance and say that the money is FDIC insured. Interestingly they quote the interest rate as just over 3% which is way higher than most offerings today. They also offer bonuses if you buy the item via one of their partners including Amazon and Home Depot.

The mobile application offers the basic monitoring functionality and also the ability to drop in additional monies into your account. The example SmartyPig uses is that you decide to go get a double frap lattee with a shot of mocha. Instead of the double you go for a single and save $3.00 and drop that into your SmartyPig account. I like this concept because it can help you reach your goals quicker and maybe help to change your thinking. The SmartyPig mobile app works on a variety of devices including the iPhone, iPod Touch, Android G1 and the upcoming Palm Pre.

Coovents

We reviewed NYC-based Coovents when they launched. Coovents provides a listing of happy hour locations in NYC which you can access on their website or via their text messaging service. Today they have announced the launch of an iPhone application.

The iPhone application allows you to find based on where you are currently located. This is pretty neat – so imagine you just finished a three-hour meeting with your vc and they decided not to give you the additional $5 million you need to keep going. You want a beverage bad…you whip out your iPhone, load up the Coovents app and find out that right around the corner you can get two-for-one Buds.

Note: I provided Coovents with a couple subscriptions from my startup for a giveaway they ran.

Renaud Laplanche, CEO and Founder of Lending Club said regarding the launch, "Now investors have more choice for their retirement accounts beyond traditional asset classes."

EntrustCAMA will serve as the administrator for the accounts. Check out the full press release which includes links about the program. Clearly there are a lot of pros and cons about using your retirement account in this manner and the best advice I could give you is to speak to someone who fully understands the retirement account market and can guide you and your monies.

Lending Club has also announced Pamela Kramer as the company’s first CMO. Pamela has spent the last two decades in the online financial space.

Interestingly enough, p2p lending news caught a twitter message from LucHardy, president of Sagax, a venture capital firm. The message, posted on Tuesday, noted the funding amount but was quickly deleted.

p2p lending news has another post that is well worth reading which has a lengthy breakdown of the loans that Lending Club is currently funding. Lots of charts and graphs along with their analysis on the lending. They note that 24% of the loans Lending Club makes come from them versus the p2p community. I can’t comment on this as it’s not my area of expertise but the information came from the SEC filings that Lending Club is required to make.

Check out all of our social lending coverage including our interview with Renaud.

Colin Henderson describes the SpringBoard launch an application suite. Colin spoke with Wesabe CEO Marc Hedlunch regarding the launch. Marc noted that every transaction makes Wesabe smarter. If that’s the case, any partnerships with banks will make Wesabe brilliant.

Basically the banks and credit unions can either tie into Wesabe using their APIs or the full personal finance site similar to the Telegraph implementation I noted above. The service could be a great value add for the smaller independent banks which appear to still be doing well financially and could help these banks compete with the larger national banks with a better suite of services.

Last month competitor Geezeo launched a white-label service, Geezeo Spectrum.

Geezeo co-founder Peter Glyman tells me that the white-label offering was core to their strategy since the beginning and the time is right as they have been receiving more and more inquiries about the service. This actually is a good time for Geezeo to reach out to the financial institutions. The banks are trying to keep their costs down but provide enough unique services to keep their customers. This white label option will remove the need to build a similar suite of tools in-house and eliminate the maintenance costs as well.

Back in November Geezeo launched their financial marketplace and just about a year ago they received an investment from TheStreet.com.

Online financial management application Wesabe has launched a new feature they call the "Cutback tool".  The company explains how the service works, "The Cutback Tool looks for trends in your monthly spending, and flags recurring items on your account transaction page. Next, you’re asked if you’d like to cut back on these items, and are shown the resulting annual savings." They even include a list of phone numbers you will need to call to cancel a specific service.

They note that several of their members have already found areas where they can cutback and also noticed charges that they didn’t realize were recurring.

It looks like a great way for Geezeo to earn additional revenue based on the affiliate revenue earned from users who clickthrough the marketplace. Geezeo co-founder Peter Glyman tells me that they are looking to widgetize the marketplace and those who embed the widget.

Telegraph self-reported 22.9 million unique visitors in September 2008. It will be interesting to see how UK residents take to the idea of sharing their bank information/passwords with an external source and one that is based outside the UK. Wesabe allows their customers to upload files as well which does not require bank passwords to be shared. Most of the other new online banking services do not support this option and require bank passwords to be shared.

In any event this looks like a huge win for Wesabe as it should provide good visibility for their service in another large country outside the U.S.

During this time Prosper will not accept any new loans but will continue to service the loans that have already been completed. Lending Club just completed this process which took about six months to complete.

I’ve also received some loan numbers from Lending Club on the 10-day period since the quiet period completion. They have signed up 1,072 new lenders and in total have transferred just under $2 million to their Lending Club account. These numbers are higher than before the quiet period began earlier this year.

If you are new to social lending, our three-part social lending series will get you up-to-speed.

Lending Club notes that the average interest rates for a person with good credit will be 12%. They are also launching LendingMatch which provides lenders with loan information to create a well diversified portfolio. Loans becomes notes registered with the SEC and Lending Club is also launching a secondary P2P loan market.

Lending Club is pushing the concept of "people lending to people" — this concept online is called social lending or social finance. To-date Lending Club has originated more than 2,000 loans with a value of over $19 million.

With the current economic situation, will more people turn to P2P lending if denied by their bank or financial institution. Something tells me that today’s announcement from Lending Club comes at the perfect time. Check out my interview with Lending Club CEO Renaud Laplanche.

Loanio CEO and Founder Michael Solomon notes, "only around
10% of borrowers on p2p lending sites wind up getting a loan." Loanio is attempting to help people with no credit and poor credit by attached a co-borrower to the loan. Loanio charges an origination fee to borrowers and a service fee to lenders.

Loanio’s suggested interest rates range from a max of 7-14% for A credit through 22%+ for E credit.

Loanio also offers a service to borrowers named "Platinum Verification Service". By paying a fee to Loanio, they will verify self-reported data which can help with the a lender’s assessment. One interesting note from the Loanio Web site, "all loans are originated by Loanio and then sold to website lenders who are legally considered the loan purchasers."

Check out our 3-part social lending overview and our coverage of p2p social lenders Lending Club, Prosper and Zopa.

Streetread

The Streetread mobile app displays the latest news about a stock plus a quote and chart. You can jump to the full stories along with a tie into Google for news.

I think the app would be even stronger if you could set one-click home screen buttons on the iPhone directly to a stock in Streetread. There’s a mobile demo if you want to play with the mobile version before using it on your mobile.

Streetread was founded by Mike Stefanello. Mike is working solo and bootstrapping the project. Here are a few examples of the mobile application: