The other day I came across a new peer-to-peer renting platform namely Zilok that just publicly launched. This is a platform that you simply can rent anything. In first glance, based on its founding concept, it’s could be a totally constructive or devastating idea. On a constructive side, an user can save money on the things she want or need, by just renting instead of buying those kind of things. On the other side, who going to buy all new things if they have the choice of renting those online, and this might not help to boost the economy.

However, the co-founder and CEO of Zilok, Gary Cige has a different perspective, “Inspired by conservation and green movements in Europe, Zilok is the fun way to tackle over-consumption while expanding everyone’s access to the things they want and need—whether that is a scooter or Wii, a ratchet set or a tuxedo”. He said Zilok was about a movement, a green movement, where this platform provides opportunities for users to make money in a green way.

To rent a product on Zilok, an user can enter the query on the products she was looking for, and where she stay. And from the search results, select one of the items showed with confirmation of the request. Next pickup the item locally and pay the owner directly, it’s done. Since the search result will also built-in with the Google Maps service, an user can roughly know how far she can get the items through the renting system from the place she resides in.

Zilok is a San-Francisco startup, went live in public beta in November 2007 in the US, France and Belgium, and in Spring 2008 in the Netherlands and in the UK. Below is the brief introduction of Zilok in a video format. Enjoy.

LimeBits is a Web app that let users create powerful Website in an easy manner. Currently, it is still in Alpha, as this mean LimeBits will probably improve its functional specifications in favor of building a real screen to their end users. For users who sign-up to the site, they’re given a free 1GB space for data and Webpages. Since the purpose of LimeBits is to share the site, you’re allowed to mix a lot of cool features onto your site and share it to the online community of LimeBits.

The general thinking of LimeBits is that an user can get the whole copy of others’ sites since the site owners allowed to share their sites. While this sound like an illusion of agreement, but from the LimeBits demo, The Scrapbook, you can get a scoop of its concept. As stated in their blog, LimeBits mentioned, “LimeBits makes it possible for you to share your whole site - static pages and dynamic page-generating programs. If you share your site on LimeBits, I can get my own fully-functioning copy of your entire site, including dynamics.”

In technological setting, LimeBits aimed to be a new framework for Website creation, whether it is designed for novice beginners or Web developers. It makes use of JavaScript to run all the interactive yet dynamic programs, while take advantage of the WebDAV server for storage and retrieval. And thus, by using LimeBits, Website authors can drop a dynamic wiki, forum, database, office suite, or any other app into their Webpages, simply via static links, ultimately without the need for traditional server applications. The beauty is that they simply need to drop a Javascript code module into an HTML page via SCRIPT tags, and there is no requirement of programming language mastery skill. Meanwhile, you can read the road map of LimeBits by clicking here.

LimeBits is a project in the Lime Group, home to such companies as Lime Wire, Lime Brokerage, and Tower Research.

It’s become more and more common for Internet users to download softwares, ebooks, or movies through the torrent clients. Now a new Web application called Torrent2exe provides an alternative way for users to download any torrent files without the requirement of a torrent client installed.

To illustrate how to use this Torrent2exe, I use it to download an ebook. Just copy the URL of the torrent file, and then tick “Normal size, no additional download will be required.” You’re going to download the torrent file you want to your computer in an exe file format. After downloaded the exe file, click on it will then go through another downloading process, this will output the file whether it is the ebook in pdf or software in zip format that you want in the first place.

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One of the Internet startup that I admired its ideas has launched in Japan. This startup was namely as Zopa, originally established in the UK with vast experience especially in the Internet banking industry. With now the expand to Japan market by launching the Zopa Japan site, Zopa completes its presence in three continents that are North America (US), Europe (UK & Italy) and Asia. Zopa was indeed a P2P lending platform, in particular it was a social lending platform that allowed users concerning a lender and a borrower to deal with each other without having to go through the bank services. Of this business model, Zopa has experienced exponential growth since its first inception on 7 March 2005, and now there are more than 20 P2P lenders around the globe.

Zopa has a solid base in the UK alone, amounted to 190,000 members and they are confidently targeted to the second largest Internet market, i.e. Japan now. As part of its Japan plan, the startup has named Internet financial services veteran Takeshi Yoneda as chairman and Tatsuya Kuboi as CEO.

Lately Mininova, one of the leading BitTorrent trackers added a new service called Content Distribution. It allow premium publishers to share their content on the site, only if the publishers own the accounts on Mininova. How different the content from this service compared with some other content you can found on other torrent sites? The publishers must own the content, in other word they they produced the content and legally want to distribute the content for free through the Mininova site.

Building the Content Distribution Service in Mininova means finding a fresh approach of running a torrent site. As more and more content available on these torrent sites are originally uploaded by producers themselves, they might change the perception of users by saying BitTorrent can also used as an acceptable means to deliver user-generated content.

Napster has launched a new music platform that allowed its users listen to the music without downloading any software. It is their latest version, i.e. version 4.0, a subscription-based service that works on not only Windows, but Linux and Mac platform via Internet Explorer and Firefox browser. With this version 4.0, subscribers that pay $9.95 to $15 per month can now access to the Napster music library comprised of 5 million songs whenever and wherever they have access to the Web. Furthermore, subscribers will also be allowed to access any saved tracks, albums, or playlists. They can rip and burn CDs, as well as transfer tracks to their compatible portable devices, albeit that they required to download the Napster software that currently only works on Windows platform. What sets Napster apart is the new improvement made on its latest music platform, such as Napster automix, i.e. a new music discovery tool, pre-programmed playlists, a Flash-based Napster Mini Player and the availability of exclusive content.

The released of version 4.0 sees Napster evolved from a desktop music application to a Web-based music platform. Currently, Napster claimed it has approx. 770,000 users globally.

Israeli business daily Globes is reporting that RayV has raised $8 million in a second round financing. Venture capitalist in this round is Accel Partners. Currently, RayV operates in a stealth mode. Not much information has been offered on their site, but they definitely working on the next big thing in TV industry and they seek to develop the world’s first “Virtual TV Network,” that enable users to watch the TV in an P2P environment.

RayV is based in Tel Aviv, Israel and has office in New York. Established in January 2006 and its co-founders are Omer Luzzatti, Ron Zuckerman, and Oleg Levy. They currently have 15 employees.

One of the popular P2P sites eDonkey has been shut down, the moment after the District Court in Hamburg, Germany ruled that its server must be taken offline for as long as the range of music files offered for download via the server contains illegal files. As I visited the eDonkey2000 Network just now, it stated “Respect the music, download legally,” sound like the music industry has scored another victory in this week.

eDonkey was first released in September 2000 and prior to this closed down, the users of eDonkey has reached over one and a half million worldwide.