Influx

Although the first Internet revolution transformed stock trading, giving rise to online giants like E-Trade, the second participation driven revolution has yet to create any transformative plays or players, but there a couple of companies poised to emerge on the scene.

Zopa is a UK-based company with 60,000 members that will launch this summer in California. It will face competition from Prosper, a US-based outfit.

Both companies have in excess of $20 million from VC finding.

The idea of these entities is to offer lenders better rates of interest than certificates of deposit and give borrowers lower rates than commercial institutions.

The companies make money from fees and play the role of infrastructure and security providers.

Zopa has plans to market its offering to online communities. This could be the correct approach, given that communities share interests and a certain level of self-policing occurs in these forums.

However, both these companies really need to partner with key Internet players- Google, My Space and Yahoo, only then can they provide the trust and re-assurance that these radical concepts require.