Nexx p2p lending for New Zealand (to be launched).

 Excerpt from site:

 Nexx will be New Zealand's online marketplace for social lending. We'll allow people to lend and borrow directly with each other, without greedy banks and unpredictable finance companies in the middle.

In other words, Nexx will revolutionise finance in New Zealand.

What would you do with $10,000 towards your business idea?

The UpDown plans to single out the members whose imaginary portfolios show the best performance and use their strategies to manage a real stock fund seeded by Swiss angel investor Joachim Schoss.

Revenues from the fund will be used to operate the company and reward the top performers.

What's OPTIMAES?

OPTIMAES is an Open Project To Investigate Money And Economic Systems.

It consists of two things :

• agent based computer simulations to experiment with different economic systems
• this wiki which documents the experiments and the discussions around them

Why?

We wanted to help build a better world, and this seemed something we could do about it.

Building a better world is a political and contentious project. And it started to look to us as if economics (in the broadest sense), was the first key (of several) to unlock it. What you believe the economic facts to be will influence your political position. (Though for some people it maybe vice versa.) And understanding how economic systems work is a good way to start making some that work better. In particular, we were intrigued by Ideas That Were Being Advocated; by some feminists, ecologists and critics of globalization; for alternative economic systems such as InterestFreeMoney and GiftEconomies.

Although these sounded plausible (or at least interesting) we felt they could be tested. It's hard to get a pet country or community to experiment with, but as one of us was a programmer with some free time, we decided the next best thing was to do it in computer simulation. At least this would help us personally to get a handle on the issues. (We have enough hacker genes to conjecture that the best way to understand something is to build it; we also have holistic genes that doubt the conjecture; but genes don't fight, they collaborate.) Furthermore, other people might find it informative. And if these experiments did show some advantage in the alternative systems, that would be a good way to get them taken more seriously.

How does it work?

We're not claiming any kind of expertise here. This is a project that's born of our own ignorance of mainstream economics. But what we'd like, and think is possible, is to do some research openly, and to try to apply the collective intelligence of the internet to investigating this stuff. A smart-mob may just have the edge over current expertise. That's why this project is open for anyone to get involved with.

If you want to help out, an easy and valuable thing is to criticise. (See WeNeedYourCriticism) We know so little, that almost any intelligent comment you can make is going to be useful. And hopefully you can find an appropriate place to put the criticism on this wiki.

Another thing you can do is come up with new questions. Probably there are things you've always wondered about. Or deeply held economic / political beliefs you'd like to see demonstrated properly. After looking at the way this model works, you may be able to see how it can be adapted to answer your own questions. The code is freely available for you (under the GnuGeneralPublicLicense) to take and work from. Unlike some open source projects, we don't have a problem with forking into custom versions. If you develop your own project out of this, we can link to each other to get a conversation going.

You can also take existing experiments people have created and run them on your machine with a new parameter set. This isn't a SETI@Home type project which is about borrowing your processor time. Unless you want it to be. In which case it's easy. There's a tutorial called How To Do Real Useful Science In Just Five Minutes which shows you how to do that. It's also a good intro to the project in general.

Finally, if you know stuff that we don't, once again add it to this wiki. Links to other thinkers in this area are always welcomed.

Who are you again?

See PeopleBehindThis

And Remember

The results from these simulations are always provisional. If you think that they confirm your political position, remember that tomorrow, someone may come along with a refinement that shows things to be different. (See the DialogueOfModels)

This site is a investor social network that seems to base its portofolio data from stockalicious. It allows users to share their investments strategy, connect in groups, friends. You can post videos about trading and the markets. It seems to be quite small and recent.

Excerpt from site

Welcome to Pertuity

At Pertuity, we believe that your financial life should be uncluttered and straight forward. Not spread thin, complicated, or uncertain. That’s why we give you access to unbiased financial tools and options and make the most useful financial information transparent and available to you – the consumer.

Why are we doing this? Because we are a band of consumers just like you! We recognize that we can achieve so much more than we currently are, with our hard earned money. Above and beyond the need for high quality service from our financial providers, we’ve grappled with some tough questions like:

• How do we make our dollars work harder to increase and maximize the return on our investments?
• How do we obtain the best possible interest rates?
• How do we access credible, fully transparent bank and credit card information?

We launched Pertuity with these thoughts in mind, and invite you to browse our site, learn more, and take the first step towards realizing your financial potential.

Read up on our blogs and visit our expert advice section for the latest thinking on financial matters. Try out our Dare to Compare_SM widget for first-time insights. Make Pertuity your preferred portal to make your money work for you.

Remember to check back with us regularly, as we gear up towards our launch in early 2008; when we will bring to market a disruptive set of  products that will uncomplicate your life, simplify your money and free your dreams.

excerpt from site

Know where
your money goes!

Effortlessly track and visualize your spending.
Visualize those dreadful credit card statements in
exciting new ways.

This studio investigates the effects of digitalization on architectural typology and the contemporary city. In our first year 2006/07, we examine the changes of one particular typology: the architecture of banking. We question the fundamental concept of what a bank is today, and develop architectural strategies for its potential futures.