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March 19, 2007
Hot Betas: Latengo.com, Boober.nl, And eLolly
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It's beta season in Europe. A couple of startups are cloning Zopa - to one degree or another - in the Netherlands i'ts Boober.nl and in Germany it's eLolly. And over in Germany self-financed Latengo.com (beta) has launched a "digital life" platform to make it easy for users and special interest groups to share, trade, and look at each other's digital stuff.
More below the jump.
We established Latengo because of a problem. We wanted to know: which person in my entire social network has a special item. It is easy to explain this when using a DVD. I want to see that movie Terminal with Tom Hanks. But I don’t really wanna buy it. So we needed a website where we can find out „who of my friends owns „Terminal““. If I find someone I can easily ask him if he can get me that movie. I can discuss that movie with him or other people and so on… there are serveral possibilities to use Latengo. E.g. DVDs, Books, Youtube Videos, Links.. etc.
The startup, founded in September 06, launched in November. The founders, Ortwin and Dieter Kartmann, Thorsten Buss and Dirk Rudolf, are coming out of the of ePayment, online community, and software development sectors. Self-financed, the startup employs all but one of the founders work full-time at Latengo. Their site has signed up about 10,000 users.
Quite a few users - how did you do it so quickly?
We engaged some people to support us in the development of the community. Plus it's a cool website and offers a lot of interessting features to attract people to use it and participate in the planning.
Plans are afoot for international expansion. If it takes off in Germany, the founders will look enable international growth some outside financing.
Boober.nl
Our Dutch language skills are virtually zero, but we have enough to see that Boober.nl has launched a person to person loan exchange, much along the same lines of the pioneer of this fairly new category Zopa, which is now backed by Benchmark Capital and other Euro VCs. Boober does a credit check on borrowers with Experian and INTRUM JUSTITIA. It also distributes the loans over several borrowers. Boober takes a fee from the lender and the borrower, and charges for the credit check, according to the Prosper Group News blog.
Part of its publicity approach seems to be taking a poke at ABN Amro bank
eLolly.de
This one claims €5M in loans on offer. It's out of Germany. It does the matchmaking, but we don't see any information that it also does the credit-worthiness checks that Zopa does. That's an important and crtical difference.
Posted on March 19, 2007 05:27 AM | Posted to Early stage | Permalink
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