I have been speaking with Ian Hayward – MD for Glaxstar - about a Firefox 2 launch party here in London for a few weeks now.  As yet the party venue has not been confirmed, nor sadly the date, due to a few changes in the flight arrangements of the Firefox keynote speakers coming over.

But one thing I can confirm is the venue will be “somewhere cool” in central London (able to hold approx 200 people) and Mozilla are sending across merchandise (T-shirts, mugs, pens etc) to give out on the night!

So why even mention it when the date and venue have not been confirmed!?  Well to help the organisers of this London event, it would be great if you could register your interest on the Firefox party planner site.  Of course if you cannot make it down to London, then there are currently 620 parties across the world being organised and over 5,000 people have already registered their interest in attending one or several of them. I myself will also be heading to Dublin fo their party on the 14th November. Of course you could start your own party and if anyone wants to run one in the Midlands or further North please let me know.
 

Finally who are Glaxstar? They are a Birmingham based developer company who specialise in building Firefox pro-extensions for blue-chip companies. Recently they built Yahoo’s awesome new delicious bookmark replacement which I now use in Firefox 2. Until this extension came along I had forgotten about delicious and the value of tagging.  

Dust off your elevator pitch and line up your backers. Barry Diller of IAC/InterActiveCorp and the online travel company Expedia, wants to buy ventures in the UK, especially in the travel sector.

As The Guardian reports, one potential target could be Cheapflights, the price comparison website which has confirmed it is considering a £200m sale or flotation, but Diller has declined to comment. Other targets might be eBookers or Lastminute.com. Diller did mention that Ask.co.uk has “got lots of ideas and is starting to turn itself around”.

It’s not surprising he is looking at the UK. The formerUK TV Channel 4 boss, Michael Jackson, is programming chief at IAC, which is about to launch a daily online comedy show in association with the Huffington Post, and VeryShortList.com.

He could probably do no worse than look at Dublin-based Web Reservations International, which runs Hostelworld and Hostels.com. As Web2ireland reports it plans to launch a travel search engine next January and gunning for a valuation of $1 billion.

IT Week columnist Tim Anderson claims today that “The semantic web is a long time coming“. What’s the basis of his thesis?

Even though a “truly semantic web would be significantly more powerful than today’s internet, not just for search but for integrating and aggregating data… The lesson of Google is that clever algorithms to improve simple text search have more impact than attempts to introduce semantic mark-up. The limited progress that has been made is in bottom-up movements like tagging, microformats and RSS, a dialect of RDF, rather than in top-down efforts to persuade organisations to publish RDF data.”

He points to the fact that RDF (Resource Description Framework) is not wide-spread and still only being used “more in a specialised form inside enterprises”.

UK businesses have spent £2bn more on R&D this year – over 10% – according to the Department of Trade and Industry. The DTI’s 2006 R&D Scoreboard showed investment is currently £19.2bn compared with the £17bn reported in the 2005 scoreboard. However, put back the champagne, because about two-thirds of this increase is in the banks, insurance, media and retail sectors just disclosing their R&D budgets for the first time. The last one-third of the increase was a 4% rise in R&D spending by the top 800 UK companies. This is lower than the European average of 5.6% and the 30.5% in Taiwan.

I was flicking through the back-pages of TechCrunch UK this afternoon while writing up an interview (of which more later) when I noticed a comment form Azeem Azhar about why Silicon Valley is what it is:

“You run into Paypal/Google/ebay/[name great startup] founders while having drinks with friends in a bar. The pace of conversation, the swapping of ideas, expertise and contacts, is rife. The interconnections are dense.”

Now, from my personal knowledge, back in the early days of the Web in the UK during the mid-90s, the Web was often seen as a new place for advertising (plus ca change). Hence why a lot of Web agencies gravitated towards Soho in London, where a lot of advertising agencies lived. Drop into the Jon Snow or the White Horse and you might well come across the latest combat-trouser-wearing Web agency guru spouting forth on this new thing called “Flash” and how HTML was “so over”.

Gradually, agencies and start-ups proliferated, with many ending up in Farringdon and Hoxton. It was no coincidence that Channel 4’s fictional Nathan Barley (”webmaster, guerrilla filmmaker, screenwriter, DJ and self-facilitating media node”) was set in that area of London (if four years late for the dotcom boom, but then script writers are usually some way behind the curve).

Of course Dublin has for a long time had the Digital Hub, “a community of people – artists, researchers, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs and consumers, all working together to create innovative and successful digital media products and services which support their future” located a ten minute walk from the city centre. Quite why London has never caught onto creating this idea is bizarre.

So my question is where would you say the current tech entrepreneur scene is today? Where the pace of conversation, ideas, expertise, contacts and interconnections is making is a true new hub of innovation? Where is Silicon Street? (Think London, Brighton, Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin, Cork – or anywhere else in the UK or Ireland, let’s keep it free and easy).

And, more importantly, what’s the name of the local pub? Or club, even.

Of course I ask this knowing that the answer is hugely complex. And in fact if Web 2.0 is about anything it’s not about needing to have a geographical link to somewhere, since networking and building connections to create new projects is now as much online as off, if not more so. Perhaps this is a vain question, since every firm now – one hopes – is interested in the web.

Yes there are plenty of events to attend. But events don’t really give you a sense of any geographical zeitgeist right now. And I’d still be interested in our readers’ views.

Vitamin reports that UK-based Idiomag is due for launch. Styled as a personal online magazine which combines ‘glossy RSS’ with tagging, weighting and rating, TechChrunch US reported recently, Idiomag is Angel funded. It’s good to see this kind of approach to media which combines social media with more traditional publishing.

idiomag plans to accept content “via direct input through the content providers administration section and via RSS.” Digital design and music will be the first focus, but the magazine plans to aggregate licensed content from other publishers delivering “an individually personalized magazine to each user”.

Perhaps this is not so heard these days, but what’s different is that this tagged content will be presented via Flash which means microsites and rich-media ads are possible. The business model is to share ad revenue with content providers. Thus Idio provides a user-friendly face to RSS content which monetises RSS more efficiently for the publisher than banners inside feeds.
I can’t say I haven’t seen a Flash magazine before, but it’s interesting to see an independent publisher putting a Flash filter on onto a social media tagging approach.

Today’s tedious PR-release-written-as-news comes from the little known Manchester-based Employment Law Advisory Services (ELAS) which has the Telegraph today reporting that office workers who buy their Christmas presents online from their desks cost £7.25 billion in lost work time.

“For many employers, every hour a member of staff spends looking for Christmas presents online is an hour they should have spent working,” says killjoy Peter Mooney of the ELAS. He advised businesses to set guidelines for the amount of time that staff spend online. I assume the subtext of this is also ‘employ us to sue workers who surf’.

However, what this cod-research suggests is that the market for improving both a pure-play retail search engine and adding smarter tagging and search-based RSS feeds to a site could a) improve its sales because customers would find things faster and more efficiently and b) create a more productive workforce who don’t need to spend so much of their employers time surfing after-all.

A more logical approach by employers would not be to “set guidelines for the amount of time that staff spend online” but instead recognise that they are going to do it, then give them a list of the best and quickest sites to go to for online shopping, thus saving hours on Google. And let’s not even go into how employees usually end up having smarter ideas about business when they can roam unimpeded.

A snapshot look at Kelkoo and Pricerunner suggests that Web 2.0 principles haven’t penetrated that deeply into the price comparison market on this side of the pond. Ok, both sites feature user-generated revues, but neither allow you to pull an RSS feed out based on a search term which one might be able to plug into a Google/Yahoo/Pageflakes start page.

So who wants to kick off the best and fastest places to find what you need this Christmas, a la Web 2.0?

A great New York Times article (also run in the Herald Tribune) published today details many of the reasons London is surpassing New York as the world’s financial capital. Among the key factors cited are London’s more diverse labour market, problems getting people into the U.S. and the stricter regulatory regime in the U.S. epitomized by the infamous Sarbanes-Oxley law.

Of particular interest for TechCrunch UK readers, however, is the fact that London has already surpassed New York in terms of IPOs. According to the article, this year, through September $33.6 billion (US) was raised in London compared to $26.5 billion (US) raised in New York and London is predicted to beat New York again in 2007.

To promote the launch of mobileYouth06 – part two, Wireless World Forum and the mobileYouth06 team holding their first ever virtual mobileYouth networking event in the popular youth hangout – the UK branch of Habbo Hotel!

Helen Keegan the organiser of Swedish Beers and Innovation, the host of several carnival of mobilists and founder of beep marketing has been blogging about this event and it seems she will be “virtually” attending.

on Friday, I’ve been invited to join the w2forum networking event. But it’s not just any old networking bash, it’s a virtual one, being held in Habbo Hotel. If you’d like to join the virtual networking bash, find out about the new Mobile Youth report and ask the writers and analysts any questions you might have about mobile youth, then come join us. All you have to do is sign up to Habbo Hotel (it’s free), log in on Friday between 2pm and 4pm BST and look for the guest room “mobileYouth”. Jan and his colleagues Savka and Nick will be there and hopefully a few other (virtual) grown-ups wanting to talk about things mobile and things youth.

In the meantime, you might want to listen to the latest podcast from the W2forum team.

Having never attended a virtual event I think I might try and join this one just to understand the dynamics of a virtual event and to see if it is less or more successful than one in the real world. So far it has three bonus points, my travel expenses, commuting time and entry fees are zero.

Date: Friday 27th October

Time: 14:00-16:00 BST

Venue: Habbo Hotel UK – search for the “mobileYouth networking” guest room

Cost: Free (virtual refreshments will be provided!)

Recently I wrote about the need for RSS to evolve, primarily to start giving back value to the commercial RSS Publishers and to further simplify the RSS experience for non-technical readers, which I feel is vital if the size of the RSS market is to grow beyond just the technically minded minority (us) who are just fine and dandy with our desktop “rivers of news” style RSS aggregators.

Well one UK company Zebtab™ recently developed a branded desktop RSS aggregator for content owners that supports both advertising and feedback usage statistics, whilst at the same time remaining simple enough for the non-technical mass market users to consume RSS just like an online magazine.

The Zebtab beta client is an application that you download once and it launches on your desktop (not in a browser – see above). When not in use it hides itself out of the way on the right hand side of the desktop with only a small tab remaining visible. The Zebtab client automatically reappears when new RSS updates are recieved. The client I downloaded comes preconfigured with a number of branded “content channels” which are organised into tabs, such as those from Maxim and Chelsea FC.I can imagine non-technical web users really liking ZebTab because the terms RSS, Aggregator and XML are never used and yet they still have content pushed to them. Speaking with Zebtab’s founders a few weeks back, prior to this launch, it was clear that they will be adding a number of new content partners in the coming weeks and improving the look and feel of the client to match the content brands.

In manys ways, this jargon free aspect is part of the reason why Skinkers Desktop Newsagent has been so successful to date.

One of the hardest things to do in the UK is to raise seed capital to get your new startup idea going. If you want to raise £1m+ it’s probably easier to find VC’s who are prepared to invest in you. Philip Wilkinson of Crowdstorm (nee Kelkoo UK) recently blog’d about this equity gap.

“It was noted that the UK has a distinct lack of visibility with so called Angel Networks (smaller amounts of investments from £20k – £400k from successful entrepreneurs) in order to help businesses scale up and get investment ready for these VC networks. Without this, a business is often caught in what is known as the “equity gap” where they don’t have enough money to grow and at the same time they can’t get the money because they are not big enough!”

Like Philip I wholeheartedly agree with the diffcultiy in raising these amounts from personal experience but in doing a quick search (I can’t say Google anymore – see why here) for this post, it was not hard to find a variety of Angel Networks:

• British Business Angels
• Xenos - Welsh angel Network
• GLE - London Business Angels
• Go Big Network

Angelpitch is a new start-up hoping to bring these two parties (angel networks and technology entrepreneurs) closer to each other by creating a video conferencing matching service.

“We found the hardest area to find appropriate investment was in the six figure segment which seemed to be really fragmented, so we decided to develop the Angelpitch service to address that area.”. – Paul Christian (CEO)

If you’re interested in becoming an Angel in this network, please email them a brief resume. Alternatively if you are an Entrepreneur who wants to get on the list early (before the submission site is built) you can email them a two page Executive Summary and they will review these and start the ball rolling.

Will Angelpitch work? I am not sure just yet as the $150 fee feels like a barrier to me but I would love to see a YouTube like video site where entrepreneurs pitch their business and Angels watch to find companies and entrepreneurs they like.

There is something very schizophrenic about the way the TV world and the Web world are both converging and diverging.

Reuters is reporting that the founders of Skype plan to launch advertising-supported Internet television shortly. Code-named Venice, the project will “bring quality TV programmes for free to consumers” said Skype co-founder Janus Friis. Presumably this will be another P2P clients, along the lines of Skype and Kazaa.

It sounds like this will not be ‘user-generated TV’ though since Friis said “We don’t want any more lawsuits”. In other words, we don’t want to take heat from rights holders who have had their TV shows mashed-up or just the good bites simply uploaded to the service as on YouTube. I tae his point but – as we all know – it’s what people have done to TV on YouTube which has made it so interesting – not just regurgitated TV.

What I’d like to know is, is “Venice” being developed by hackers in Estonia, as Skype was…? Perhaps some of our Estonian readers can tell us.

Meanwhile – coming from the other end of the spectrum – TV broadcasters are trying desperately to catch up with UGC, even as the ex-Skype guys are trying to reproduce it online.

At the same as the Venice story is breaking, here in the UK Mint Digital is making hay both with its Bloombox.tv platform which is designed to allow broadcasters and advertisers to tap into the user-generated content movement with flash video, and now with Islandoo.com which The Independent is breathlessly describing as ‘an internet phenomenon to rival the social networking site MySpace. The FT quotes David Alberts, chairman of ad agency Grey London who says they make get the users – who all want to be on reality TV show Shipwrecked “to make their own Nokia ad or their own Clover ad.”

Now this sounds either like a sick joke from yet another marketing person who knows nothing, or a very clever idea, I haven’t quite decided yet.

Of late there has been a lot of interest in virtual web worlds such as Habbo Hotel, WarCraft and Second Life, well now you can add a new name to this list Perplex City which combines the real world with the virtual world to create an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) .

Today Mind Candy, the UK based developers behind the ARG (Alternative Reality Game) Perplex City, announced they had raised $7 million from Accel Partners and existing investor Index Ventures and NewMedia Spark to fund a major expansion of new products to be announced in early 2007 including the development of its second major puzzle brand aimed at a younger demographic.

An ARG is a form of mystery or treasure hunt that blends real world events, websites, text messages, TV, print and a wide range of other media to create an immersive gaming experience. Mind Candy’s signature game, Perplex City, is a combination of a story, a game, and a real-life treasure hunt that revolves around the search for a missing treasure, a valuable artefact, the Receda Cube, which has been stolen from Perplex City and buried somewhere on Earth. The Perplex City Academy has launched a worldwide hunt for the Cube, using puzzle cards to gather interest and spread clues. They’ve also put up a very real reward of £100,000/$200,000.

The game has proved most popular with 16 to 30 year olds and currently has tens of thousands of players from 92 different countries around the world. The investigation into the theft is still unfolding. Clues and information have been hidden in newspapers, websites, magazines, sky-writing, music CDs, phone calls, SMS messages, live events, videos, puzzles and games all over the planet. “Find out who stole the Cube and you’ll be one step closer to locating it and claiming the six-figure prize!” To join the hunt, click here.

The second season of the game will be launching in early 2007 and there are currently a wide-range of new Perplex City products in development including books, video games and mobile content.

Michael Smith, CEO of Mind Candy, said: “Our first game, Perplex City, has generated several million dollars in revenue and tapped into the rapidly growing popularity of both puzzles and Alternate Reality Games. Now we plan to take that to a new level by evolving our products to appeal to a larger, more mainstream audience.”

Bruce Golden, General Partner at Accel Partners said; “We believe that Mind Candy is a pioneer in developing new forms of entertainment that combine some of the best attributes of the internet with the strengths of traditional board games, puzzles, and treasure hunts. Mind Candy’s initial success at establishing a passionate community of participants in Perplex City, combined with their ambitious plans to build a global brand for consumers interested in this new form of entertainment, represents a very exciting investment opportunity for us.“

Mind Candy was founded in 2003 by Michael Smith (CEO) with original backing from Tom Teichman, NewMedia Spark, John Hegarty, Saul Klein and Robin Klein. On a personal note I am very pleased for Michael who I have had the pleasure to meet on several occasions at a variety of London networking events. He previously co-founded the very successful online retailer Firebox.com in 1998 and besides doing all of this still finds time to be one half of the driving force behind the London entrepreneurial networking event – Second Chance Tuesday.

I had the good fortune to be invited by NMK to put together a half-day seminar on the phenomena of the new 3D worlds of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) and Virtual Worlds (the main one being Second Life of course).

Had I not been chairing it I would have been able to take better notes, and I will try to put something up soon about it. However, as usual there were some great bloggers in the audience and among them Alan Patrick has done a very thorough write up. We also had PaidContent and almost legendary Adam Reuters there.

For myself I would say a standout development I picked out of the discussion – and there were many – was the eventual merging of Social Software networks like MySpace with Second Life.

The most notable example of this – (and possibly the first) – is the ability of users in Playahead to be able to flip their profile into a Second Life avatar with all their preferences and networks intact. That, to me, is potentially very revolutionary, and I don’t use that word lightly. Imagine if people flip their MyPSace profile or even their LinkedIn or Blog into Second Life? Since Linden Labs is about to make the whole thing an open source project – while retaining control of the crucial namespace facility – we may well be able to all do this in the not too distant future.

Web 2.0 Ireland (very much worth a look) has a useful, if bald, profile of Segala, a “certificate authority in Web accessibility and mobile standards compliance”. So that’s nice. However, Segal seems to be working on a personalised mobile search engine called Search Thresher. If someone wants to give me the inside story, get in touch via the usual channels.

I think it was only towards the end of last year that Simon Grice’s etribes-backed panel and networking event started, but it quickly became one of the handful of good places to go and “talk Web 2.0″ in London. It’s no coincidence I guess that etribes relaunched soon after mashup got going. The next mashup event is on 13th December (Wednesday), in central London.

The last event was in September – which about 180 senior execs registered for – focused on ‘Digital Lifestyle Aggregators’, a long-winded phrase but a useful acronym invented to describe the user-generated content and community focus of the likes of MySpace etc. Indeed, etribes is itself a pretender to the DLA crown – and they have as good a shot at it as anything, especially in the more “consumer friendly” market.

The mashup event in December, dubbed Advertising 2.0 will, as the blurb says, explore “how the online advertising, lead generation and marketing sector is rapidly evolving and adapting to new technologies and media (including high bandwidth video and audio).” In particular it’ll look at the ‘viral’ effect endemic to social networks.

As Simon says: “the impact of the Internet and Web2.0 services on marketing represents probably the biggest single shift in the way products and services are ‘advertised’ and it’s taking place right now.” And who would disagree?

Meanwhile Library House is organising “MediaTech 2.006: who is walking the walk?”, a one day event on November 30 at the Imax Theatre, London. The contact for it is research@libraryhouse.net (and registrants through mashup should put the code MID06 in the Fax line of the online payment/registration form).

(If there seems to be demand, I may do some live blogging from one or both of these events, depending on the circumstances).

I am really pleased to announce that Mike Butcher is joining me on TechCrunch UK & Ireland to be the new editor. For anyone who has read this blog for the last 10 weeks, you will know that I am an empassioned technologist and entrepreneur but I am not and never have been a professional journalist. Together I believe Mike and I will be able to better meet the demands of the TechCrunch UK community which is certainly growing very vigorously right now.

I will however continue to post regularly but I will also be able to focus more of my time on the other aspects of getting Techcrunch UK up and running – i.e events and 3rd party relationships.

If you need to contact either Mike or myself regarding your companies (re)launch, product release or a new event then please don’t hesitate to contact either of us, using the our repective details on the TechCrunch UK about page.

Mike’s brief bio:

“In 1994 I started writing about the business of web sites for Newspaper Focus magazine. In 1996 I joined New Media Age, then a newsletter, and in 1998 took over as editor, re-launching it from a 14 page title into a full-blown magazine. In 2000 I helped launch the US-owned Industry Standard magazine in London. In the media slump of 2001 I went freelance. I’ve since written for The Financial Times,The TimesThe Irish Times, The GuardianBroadcastMarketing WeekNew Media AgeMobile Content NewsPaid ContentMedia Week and The New Statesman among others. I’ve also launched or relanched web sites for Media Week, UK Press Gazette, NMA, and Netimperative or consulted on others.

I also wrote the E-Business Briefing newsletter for E-Consultancy for over two years. I was voted ‘One of the 100 Innovators of the UK Internet Decade’ in October, 2004 by e-consultancy.com and GfK NOP,the fourth-largest custom research business in the world. Over the last ten years I’ve talked about media, technology, the Internet and mobiles on BBC News and radio, Sky News, Channel 4, GMTV, CNBC and Bloomberg, as well as writing and producing a short documentary about broadband in Hong Kong and Asia. Current projects include journalism and professional blogging[Editor's note: like here!], speaking at, chairing or organising events about digital media and Web 2.0, podcasting and working with media companies.”

The World Wide Web Consortium today announced they have forged an important link between the Semantic Web and the Microformats communities of which anyone reading this blog will know I have a great deal of interest.

With “Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages“, or GRDDL (pronounced “griddle”), software can automatically extract information from structured Web pages to make it part of the Semantic Web.

Those accustomed to expressing structured data with microformats in XHTML can thus increase the value of their existing data by porting it to the Semantic Web, at very low cost using GRDDL.

As promised I have taken on board the feedback from my last post on this subject and looked into the various ideas around maintaining a TechCrunch UK calendar of events. The easiest was to create a Wiki here on TechCrunch UK but it also meant everyone had to come to this site in order to update their information about their event which seemed a little drachonian to me. Of course people could simply email me their event information and I could post it, as I have been doing in the past but this is both time consuming and rather tedious – only because I like to post them as an hcalendar microformat.

The next option was to place a Google Calendar button on this blog which would allow people subscribe to a TechCrunch Google calendar. Although I have made this calendar universally shared for “everyone” to read, the problem is it once again forces people to add their events to this calendar and furthermore I would still need to manually provide various event organisers with “contributor” rights to the calendar.

Ian Forrester kindly created a Google calendar called “London Social Events” based on this shared principal and made a dozen of people running regular events in London “contributors” but this list is by no means comprehensive, so once again it would become beholden on someone i.e me to update the contributor list on a regular basis.

Therefore I finally decided the best option for TechCrunch UK was to use Upcoming.org as many of the people running events already had listed them there and it meant anyone else wanting to create a new event could do so freely without the need for me to intervene.

So what I have personally done is subscribe to a number of events listed in the UK and this list now appears on the right hand side of this blog for now. I am playing with a Wordpress plugin that will allow “My Upcoming Events” page to appear in full here on TechCrunch UK. In the meantime you can also choose to subscribe to “my upcoming events” list if that is easier. I also like Upcoming.org because all the events created are microformats which will prove very useful shortly.

Furthermore I have created a TechCrunch UK group that you might like to join? I know there is already a very active London Geeks group which I have joined but I felt that TechCrunch should be representative of the entire UK and so decided to create a TechCrunch group for everyone. Therefore if you are creating an new event, you might like to also send a group notification to this new TechCrunch group? I wonder if I can nest groups within TechCrunch UK?

Finally may I also ask, if you are creating a new event and would like TechCrunch UK to cover it here, could you to use add the tag “TCUK” as this makes it quicker and easier for me to find your event. The other good thing I found about using Upcoming.org is that you can also add any of the events created to your chosen personal calendar – Google, Outlook, My Yahoo, ical (Apple) etc. and add a map using either Yahoo or Google maps.

I hope this works and that it helps everyone? All feedback greatly appreciated.

Zopa, the peer-to-peer borrowing and lending exchange, has just (re)launched its website. The most interesting change is the new system of visualisation for members using custom avatars which seems very Habbohotel to me.

Try it out for yourself on their home page. Click on the “I’D LIKE TO MEET” filter and select your options. The site then highlights and circles those users who fit your chosen criteria. You can then click on any of the people in the circle to find out more about them. The potential and possibilities for this user interface within a social networking sites certainly intrigues me the most.

The relaunch of the site, created by Poke London, has coincided with the company’s launch in the US as well as it having now over 100,000 members in the UK since its original launch in March last year, making it officially “Bigger than Basildon” which was the quote made infamous by John Lennon when describing The Beatles.

James Alexander, co-founder and COO of Zopa said: “Attracting more than 100,000 members in just 18 months is a sign that this new idea has captured the public’s imagination and is tapping into their desire to find a better deal by cutting out the banks and their excessive profits. Our members also tell us how much they like borrowing from real people – not faceless institutions with ‘computers that say no.’ And those lending like to help others while also getting much better returns on their money. The ability to see who is borrowing their money and for what purpose is a very popular aspect of the Zopa experience for lenders.”

To mark the occasion, Zopa’s 100,000th member was given 100,000 pence and all Zopa members have been invited to enter a competition in which they can win limited edition ‘Bigger than Basildon’ T-shirts, mugs and badges. But behind the light-hearted fun is a much more significant fact that Zopa’s rapid growth is proving that the concept of person-to-person borrowing and lending is indeed taking off.

Mr 100,000 himself, going by the username Zopalender99, said: “I first heard about Zopa from the popular website moneyexpert.com, the main appeal being the flexibility and the new (to me) way of ‘investing’. Zopa offers an interesting and fun way to invest, and so far I have found the website very straightforward to use. I intend to use the £1000 I have just won for future lending with Zopa, and will probably re-lend the interest received. I intend to stay with Zopa for the foreseeable future and will certainly recommend it to friends.”

[sad note: taken from the Zopa Blog dated 17th Oct.]

“It is with enormous sadness and regret that I write these words on behalf of everyone at Zopa. Richard Duvall, our co-founder and CEO quietly passed away early on Monday morning, with his family by his side, after a short battle with cancer. We send our heartfelt condolences to his family.”