Retrevo calls itself a "matchmaking service," although it's not another place for dating. Rather, the site allows consumers to deal with something that is perhaps tougher than dating - trying to understand consumer electronics products.

As a sign of Retrevo's opportunity, the company has raised $8 million. The investors include Alloy Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners (NVP).

The core of Retrevo is its Product Advisor. Basically, it's an amalgam of things like community reviews, feature comparisons and pricing information. In fact, Retrevo helps you with the best timing for buying a product (for example, if a product has recently launched, it might be smart to hold off for awhile).

Continue reading Retrevo makes consumer electronics kind of easy

Retrevo makes consumer electronics kind of easy originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Lending Club is a spring chicken, having launched its online lending service in late May. To get momentum, the company has leveraged the Facebook platform (which has become increasingly popular). Last week, Lending Club snagged $10.26 million in a first round of venture capital. The investors include Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.

Think of Lending Club as an eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) for borrowers and lenders. That is, if you need some money, you can post a proposal on the site -- and then a variety of lenders will offer money (loans range from $500 to $25,000). Cool, huh? Although, borrowers need a credit score above 640.

Interesting enough, on the Lending Club's blog, there are interviews with the firm's VCs. For example, Canaan Partners' Dan Ciporin says: "The consumer credit market is an absolutely gigantic market and yet paradoxically one of the few sectors that has not yet been completely upended by the internet. I think the Lending Club approach to consumer lending is not only a great disintermediation approach in a large, established market sector, but also through the focus on affinity relationships takes what has been proven to work on the web and applies it uniquely to the lending marketplace."

Then there is Jeff Crowe, who is a general partner at Norwest Venture Partners. In fact, he is a lender on Lending Club. And, so far, his portfolio is yielding about 13%. But, I'm sure he wants to make a lot more from his venture investment in Lending Club.

If you want to check out more venture capital investments, click here.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

Lending Club: Borrowing from Facebook originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sun, 26 Aug 2007 16:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Before starting TimeBridge in May 2005, Yori Nelken interviewed over 300 busy professionals. The main finding: about 70% said that scheduling a meeting takes longer than the length of the meeting itself.

In fact, a busy professional schedules about eight meetings per week. Nelken saw this as an opportunity to build a new company. "I really started the company to make information workers more productive," he said. "I also knew it was important to make sure the solution worked within people's everyday processes and desktop applications."

True, there are many scheduling products on the market. However, they are generally not helpful in finding a time that works for everyone. For example, Microsoft Corporation's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Outlook allows you to send an appointment to a person or a group -- that is, so long as you already know the time. Or, Exchange shows the free/busy information of people -- but only for your company.

Basically, TimeBridge is a one-step scheduler. From Outlook, you create an email that is addressed to participants in a meeting and then click the TimeBridge toolbar button, which brings up a sidebar calendar where you can propose 5 meeting times. "The proposed times are expressed within the email itself," said Nelken. "After selecting the times, organizers send the email. Participants receive an email and click on the link which takes them to the TimeBridge-provisioned online meeting space where they indicate their availability from the choices provided by the organizer. Once everyone has responded, the system automatically confirms the best time and notifies all participants. If the organizer chooses, they can turn off the auto-confirmation and manually select the best time. For the organizer, the tentative times are automatically removed from their calendar, leaving only the confirmed time... And the meeting is scheduled."

Nelken crafted the idea as an entrepreneur-in-resident at Mayfield. "I have long been fascinated by helping people improve their productivity and developing solutions to everyday problems," he said. "Once the idea for TimeBridge came to me, Mayfield was immediately supportive and seeded the idea."

This may be a very interesting company to watch in the future. A few months ago, Mayfield and Norwest Venture Partners invested $6 million in the new company.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and operates InvestorOffering.com.

The next big thing? TimeBridge makes scheduling meetings easier originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 15 Nov 2006 12:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.