Zopa.com is an interesting yet simple proposition.  It's a website that provides a place for people who want to lend money to meet people who want to borrow it - with no bank in the middle.  This means that everyone gets a better deal in terms of interest rates. 

Dave Nicholson is Zopa's co-founder and business architect and James Akrigg caught up with him at Mix 07 to see what he was doing there and which sessions caught his eye.  It was good to see that Dave was excited about the Silverlight demos and announcement, and like many people is currently trying to see where they can leverage its potential.

It's also worth mentioning that Dave was there to talk and was involved in a session about how to make money using the Live platform, something that Zopa utilises.  Live platform are a collection of APIs that allow you to extend and enhance your own website or web app with the minimum of code and investment in development.  It leverages some of the huge communities of Live Messenger users, Live Spaces users not to mention Live Mail (Hotmail) which run into hundreds of millions.

Zopa currently uses Live Contacts API as a way of easily looking up a user's contacts (with permission of course) but there is lots of potential with all the other services being made available all the time.

Dave also keeps a blog, but since being at Mix it looks like he's been a bit busy with idea generation :-)


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