Banks have betrayed my confidence, and I'm afraid that I'm not the only one. Why not to use internet to avoid such an annoying intermediation?

P2P lending is here and it's not new. It works and has a lot of advantages:

• I know where my money goes.
• I have full access to my finances and 24h per day.
• It's possible to get high investment rates, even higher than working with banks.
• It's an ethical way of lending money, sustainable and not less safe than using banks. A right diversification and a reliable system of credit ratings would be good practices.

US is where some web sites of p2p lending are operating successfully, like Prosper. In UK, Zopa is getting more and more popular. Other countries like Spain are starting to discover this kind of moving the money, e.g. Comunitae.

It's not easy to avoid all intermediations when we talk about money so these sites offers, mainly, support to rank the borrowers and loans management for an affordable fee.

A project can be a good solution for a problem but if it has no financial support it will disappear. This happens specially in the world of software.

I would like to talk about one of the most famous open source web browsers currently, Firefox.

It comes from a hard battle against Internet Explorer. After many years fighting it seems that FF is gaining more and more supporters. In deed, FF got money from Google for long time to remain in the battlefield.

But now Google has changed his mind launching his own browser, open source and crossplatform too. This implies that Chromium (or Chrome is the close version) is a direct competitor of FF.

The money now will go to improve Chromium instead of FF. I hope this won't stop FF from being the good alternative it is.

This week, after knowing some of the Oracle's plans about Sun's products, this situation could be spread to projects like Virtualbox or Netbeans. The game is the same, just the players change.