Previously, we have written about Kiva, the P2P micro finance system that is all the rage now.

The prosper.com system works like a reverse auction. A borrower posts a listing for the amount that they’re interested in borrowing, the time that they need the money for, and the maximum interest rate that they are willing to pay.

Lenders bid the amount that they’re willing to lend along with the interest rate. At the end of the auction the lowest bids are accepted and combined into a single loan.

The point to note is that the lender is not really lending the money. The borrower is actually getting the loan from prosper.com. In turn Prosper is selling the loanto the lender.

The prosper.com site charges only when funding is closed. Fees for the borrower range from 1% to 3% of the loan (or $25, whichever is greater) depending upon the riskiness of the loan. On the lender’s side, there is a 0% to 1% loan origination fee depending upon the credit worthiness of the borrower.

While the trend of micro-financing is pretty small for now, in time the banks will wake up and start to notice. Banks have long enjoyed having captive clients to whom they have extended personal loans, lines of credit and a host of other financial services. They’re not going to be happy to see novice lenders cut into their main business.

Lenders on the prosper.com site are even allowed to set up their own loan portfolios depending upon the amount of risk they are willing to take, with loans ranging from Conservative (estimated return of 7%) to the highly aggressive loan (which nets 10%). All of a sudden individual investors are beginning to look like institutions where they’re able to decide whether they want to be Wellsfargo or Washington Mutual.

Next time a person tells me that I don’t need a digital camera with more than 6-10 mega pixel resolution, I am going to hit him/her on the head with the sharp corner of my camera (my potential targets here, here and all over).

People who say that you don’t need more than 6 Mega pixel resolution in your camera are the same people who proclaimed “64K computer memory should be enough for anybody”.

These myopic folks miss the basic point of why one takes pictures. One does not take pictures to print out 3×4 prints from the local drug store; one takes pictures to preserve the memory, capture the moment for ever.

When people are running away from their burning house, what do they grab first? their old pictures! It is one of the most precious possession in people’s lives. Why would you want the most precious thing in your life to be of a mediocre quality?

When I click the shutter on my camera, I want to capture at least what my eyes can see. Apparently, if you converted the resolution of what an eye can perceive in to mega pixel, it turns out that an eye can see at 576 Mega pixel. So, I want my camera to be at least 576MP camera; is that too much to ask?

When I look out, I see in stereo; with full depth - is it too much to expect that my camera does the same?

I want to take pictures for the unknown technology that will be available to me in 20 years, not for the 3×4 print that can be printed now! Even today, there are methods that can take a regular print and create a 3D scene out of it. God know where this technology will be in 20 years. And when that technology is available, do I want a digital picture taken at resolution of 5MP or 500MP?

Even the displays are getting bolder and sharper. In 20 years, there may be life like displays, and on that display, would you like to use a picture taken with 5MP or 500MP resolution? When you recreate that precious moment in holographic 3D, which image do you think will show the details?

The main mistake these so called “experts” make, is that they believe that the only thing that can and will be done with a digital image, is to print it! A digital image is nothing but a piece of digital data; you can do a lot with it and when you are manipulating data, it is better to have as much original data as possible! It is not about being able to crop the image, it is about preserving most available data for future technology and processing advances.

If I can’t afford to buy 576MP camera or I can’t handle a multi lens camera, that is a different story; just don’t patronize me and tell me that I don’t need anything beyond 6MP camera.

Here is an example of a gigpixel image; see how much you can capture.

You can also visit the gogapxl image gallery.

<Rant complete> We now return you to our regularly scheduled program.

Qloud’s application embedded in social networks such as Friendster and Facebook, allows users to download unlimited amounts of free music.  Furthermore, members can discover and share music with each other. Qloud has been funded by Steve Case and several well-known music industry veterans.

Buzznet is a multimedia social network where users generate content around their favorite singers and bands.  In the social network, members, photos and videos get "buzzed" (rated) and rise up the popularity charts. The site gets about 4 million visitors a month and carries content submitted by a million users.

Qloud’s MyMusic application on Facebook has 1.8 million users. The offerings of the two sites are clearly complementary ,and cater to the teen and twenty-something demographic.

Buzznet is rumored to be raising a further $25 million in funding, according to PaidContent, on top of the $6 million in Series B raised last year.

Constant contact is a provider of direct marketing e-mail software. We were a bit surprised when the company filed for its IPO in July of last year. The very first day the company’s stock rose to over $30 a share, well above the initial pricing of $16 per share, putting its market cap at $200 million with 67 million shares sold. This was one of the hot tech IPOs to watch in 2007. Since then the stock has fallen to $14 per share.

Recently Constant Contact registered to sell 4.2 million shares from current stockholders.  Ironically, the stock is being sold to pay the expenses for the offering! 658,620 additional shares are expected to be floated this time around. It appears that insiders are selling after the expiration of the lock-up period.

So what happened to Constant Contact? Back in February of this year Kris Tuttle of Seeking Alpha had predicted that  after the end of the lockup period, prices would come down to a more realistic $10 to $12 per share. Some of the reasons he had were:

1.The  earning expectations for the company are much higher than would be expected of a SAAS company.

2. Customer acquisition costs are pretty high.

3. The e-mail marketing game is very crowded an expectation of 40 month customer lifetime is not realistic

4. The expectation of return on invested capital is low.

Looks like that prediction was on the money!

Bill Gates is down at number three, giving up the number one spot to his good buddy Warren Buffett , at $62 billion - with a 6x surge in net worth since last year, thanks to flying shares of Berkshire Hathaway. The number two spot now belongs to Carlos Slim Helu of the Mexican wireless telephone company, America Movil.

Interestingly, the Ambani family of the Indian company the Reliance group might have come in first on the richest list with a combined worth of $85 billion, except that the warring Ambani brothers Mukesh and Anil split up their fortune and showed up in fifth and sixth positions respectively, with individual net worths of $43B and $42B.

And how about the youngest self made billionaire? Yes, you guessed it - it is 23 year old Facebook genius Mark Zukerberg who is worth $1.5 billion. Of course this number is based upon Microsoft paying $240 million last October for  a 1.6% stake in the company, which pegged Facebook’s value at a whopping 15 billion. Not many believe this huge valuation, and the story going around is that Microsoft paid up not necessarily because it believes that the company is worth as much, but more to keep out those who might be thinking about taking over all of Facebook!

While on unnamed suitors for Facebook, Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin made the top of the Forbes thirtysomething list with $19 billion apiece.

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The latest in its cache of outsourced products and services is a new API that is designed for its "Fulfillment by Amazon" pack and ship service that was introduced in 2006.

This is how it works.  A business physically ships its inventory to Amazon to store.  When a product is sold, the seller notifies Amazon where the product gets packaged and shipped to the customer.  This is clearly a win-win strategy.  The small-business owner outsources his warehousing and shipping (and some cost, of course) while Amazon gets a client into their ecosystem where they can cross sell everything from pay-per-click advertising to its storefront related services.

According to Amazon handling fees start at $0.50 per item plus $0.40 per pound with a storage fee of $0.45 per cubic feet per month and saves sellers the time and money needed to store, pick, pack, ship and provide customer service for the products sold online.

The new Fulfillment by Amazon API allows businesses to automate the order processing through Amazon. Order labeling, shipping and tracking and can now be followed with minimal  human intervention.

Given that there are few high-profile hedge funds and private equity funds that have imploded in a big way -including a few of those which were playing in mortgage backed securities.  Many are viewing this as a necessary correction, and just desserts for funds that are not playing by the rules (wasn’t the whole idea behind hedge funds to be "hedged" in down markets?). But there are a large number of hedge funds that have not only survived the downturn of the market in the last quarter, but have generated positive returns.

By and large the amount of capital in the market is growing, but the distribution of the money is the big open question.

Venture capitalists raised 34.7 billion in funds in 2007, the highest amount raised since 2001 which was 38.8 billion according to Thomson financial and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).

So is all of that money going?  As of last year, not a whole lot found its way into the pockets of entrepreneurs!

According to the Los Angeles Times, the VC investment into local companies fell to $689 million in the fourth quarter of 2007 compared to the $921 million during the same period in 2006. However the number of deals actually went up indicating that investors might be making smaller bets and waiting for the market to shakeout.

The New York Post (Private Equity Is Exploding) reports that the private equity boom in 2006 - 2007 is continuing through the early part of 2008.  Despite a few spectacular flameouts, PE firms are continuing to raise tens of billions of dollars.  Even with pension funds scaling back their investments, money has continued to flow in from foreign wealth funds.

For now much of the money in alternative investment funds seems to be sitting in the sidelines waiting out the crazy market dance.

As the gurus of Wall Street would say — "staying in cash is a perfectly acceptable market strategy".  So the current wait-and-see-attitude where funds are not deploying all of their capital, might simply be a legitimate defensive position, and not the doom and gloom scenario that it is  sometimes made out to be.

I had my simple and complex ways of adding value to a rubber band. But despite my involvement in the “Talk Like a Physicist” campaign, I did not think about using a rubber band to demonstrate a physics concept!

My favorite entry was the Artweb 2.0

However, the most educational and enlightening example was that of “failure”.

Which taught them “Fail early - fail fast!” and just because you build it, people won’t necessarily come.

Here is BIL un-conference.

BIL is…

an open, self-organizing, emergent, and anarchic science and technology conference.

Nobody is in charge.
If you want to come, just show up.
If you have an idea to spread, start talking.
If someone is saying something interesting, stop and listen.

What do you need to bring to the un-conference?

Things to bring…
A camp chair. Who knows where you’ll end up having a session. Bring your own folding chair, like this one.
A laptop.
A cell phone.
A camcorder (if you have one).
A power strip.

Funny thing is that I might actually attend the Bil2009 conference. Why? because despite its inefficiency and despite its unfocused organization, it has potential and it offers a soapbox that is interesting. Moreover, I keep thinking that a couple of un-conferences that I attended did not have a “critical mass” of people, so Bil2009 might be a part of the continued experience of exploring the un-conference format.

I don’t like un-conferences very much but I dislike regular rigid conferences even more! So see you at BIL2009. TED and BIL are coordinated so BIL happens just after the TED.

Well the project is out!  It is called the World Wide telescope and is an interactive tapestry that is stitched together with data from the Hubble and several terrestrial telescopes.  During a demo at the conference, the project leaders Roy Gould from the Harvard Center for astrophysics and Curtis Wong from Microsoft, showed how users can zoom in on objects in the night sky, and look at incredibly detailed pictures as well as access information regarding the object from the web.

As with all good applications, the software has social networking woven into it.  Anybody can design a virtual tour of their favorite part of the universe and share it with their friends.

The TED conference brings together thinkers from around the world and let them present their ideas in 18 minutes, at the conference. The big Ted prize (given to 3 people every year) is $100,000 cash plus the "granting of one wish to change the world". Winners get to unveil their wish at the award ceremony at the conference.

This year’s TED prize winners are:

Cosmologist Neil Turok, who has worked on the cosmic ray background in the universe, and its implications on the big bang theory.

Author Dave Eggers who has written the critically acclaimed "A heartbreaking work of staggering genius"

Former nun, comparative religion expert and author of "The spiral staircase", Karen Armstrong.