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March 23, 2007
More Zopa Clones For Germany Smava and One2Money
The spreading of the Zopa clones has likely been hindered by regulatory and infrastructure issues, but it's catching on now. We mentioned Boober.nl last week, and this week we read about One2Money and Smava in Exciting Commerce blog.
We were talking to James Alexander the UK CEO of Zopa and co-founder on the phone a few weeks ago about the importance of being first. Is there such a thing as first mover advantage anymore?
He replied in the affirmative, and talked about the founders' experience at Egg, how it helped with starting up Zopa, and how lessons learned in the early days taught them what to avoid.
Alexander noted that credit checks and "a few other kinds checks" are critical, and that the first wave of borrowers are not necessarily the most desirable ones. He didn't give other examples on the record, why should he help the competition avoid expensive mistakes, afterall.
The German ecommerce blog says that the Smava crew counts the co-founder of Datango Alexander Artope (see our recent post about Datango below) is working on Smava, along with Bernd Hades (formerly of Econa), Jörg Rheinboldt (formerly of eBay), Eckart Vierkant (Ex-ECC) and Sebastian Rieschel (formerly of Jamba)."
It has a famous angel investor, Stefan Glänzer (who invested in last.fm - among other startups - and was a co-founder of Ricardo.de).
One2Money counts as at least one of its backers Patrio Plus, a shareholding company, whose portfolio currently includes 10tacle Studios (which recently floated), Pintango, and Happybet. It will be working with an unnamed German bank.
Neither of the startup teams have launched their services yet, so there's we are not linking today.
Read -Zopa Raises $12.9M More And Hires New CEO (alarm:clock)
Read- HPV chooses Datango (a:c euro)
Read - Smava Weiterer Social Lending... (exciting commerce)
Posted on March 23, 2007 11:05 AM | Posted to Online services | Permalink
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