Prosper.com, a popular peer-to-peer lending marketplace in the U.S., has received a $1 million infusion from Nigel Morris, co-founder of Capital One, via his venture capital firm QED Investors. This brings the company’s total funding to over $41 million from Accel Partners, DAG Ventures, Fidelity Ventures and Benchmark Capital, among other investors.

Prosper pioneered the idea of concept of people-to-people lending in the U.S with its launch in 2006. Unfortunately, the startup hit a rough patch last year when the SEC stopped all lending on the platform because the company didn’t register as a seller of securities. With the new climate of heightened regulatory oversight in light of the financial meltdown, the SEC is being more judicious about overseeing financial institutions.

We’ve confirmed with Adobe that the company is cutting 9 percent of its workforce, or 680 employees. Adobe filed an 8-K with the SEC today reporting the layoffs. Earlier today we heard multiple reports that layoffs were taking place at Adobe. There are also Tweets about the layoffs on Twitter. Last December, Adobe laid off 600 workers (or 8 percent of its staff) due to the recession.

A spokesperson for Adobe told us in a statement that “Adobe is restructuring its business to align costs with its fiscal 2010 operating plan and budget, the company’s three-year strategic priorities and the realities of the business environment, as well as to ensure its ability to continue investing in long-term growth opportunities.” In addition, after Adobe acquired Omniture, the company reduced Omniture’s workforce by 9 percent. According to today’s filing, the restructuring will cost Adobe between $65 and $71 million.

We’ve written a lot about Yahoo Meme, Yahoo’s new microblogging platform that resembles Twitter. A few weeks Yahoo launched an API for Meme and also shed some light on where social media site is being used; which seems to be mainly outside the U.S. According to Yahoo, Meme is gaining a following in Brazil, China, the Philippines, India and Turkey. Yahoo initially rolled out Meme in Portuguese, then Spanish and then English. Today, Yahoo is rolling out a native version of Meme in Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia. he Republic of Indonesia, which comprises over 17,500 islands, is the fourth most populous country in the world.

With the translation, Meme is actually spelled as “Mim” on the site, but it appears to have much of the same functionality as the other versions of the site. Yahoo meme lets users post their own content (including text, photos, videos, links and more) and repost the content of others with one-click publishing, allows users to follow other Meme users (via one-way connections, no friend authorization is required) and comment on their posts. Meme’s content limits are higher than Twitter’s—the limit is 2,000 characters.

Netherlands-based Startup Tom’s Planner is launching their dead-simple web-based project management and planning system lets users create and visualize an online planning schedule. The application is meant to be used by a broad spectrum of consumers, from project managers, event and wedding planners to busy soccer moms or personal assistants.

Tom’s Planner lets you create color-coded project plans and schedules, share them anyone in a team or groups, embed project schedules, and export to Microsoft Project. To help users get started, Tom’s Planner provides project planning templates for website designers, construction projects, event and wedding planners, vacation home rentals and personnel schedules. And users can save their projects to their hard drives instead of storing the file in the cloud.

Alice.com, the retail platform for household goods, has closed a $6 million Series B round of funding from private investors, bringing the startup’s total funding up to over $10 million. We previously scooped the startup’s $4 million infusion (which was part of this round) in September. Alice.com raised $4.3 million in Series A funding from Kengonsa Capital Partners and DaneVest Capital in November of 2008.

Launched in June, Alice.com is an retail platform for consumer packaged goods manufacturers, like Procter & Gamble, to sell directly to consumers instead of going through retail channels like Target or Wal-Mart. On the consumer side, Alice.com lets users create a profile of their household (i.e. how many adults, kids, babies) and then the site will keep track of items and reminds users with emails when they are running low and need to reorder. Each shipment is bundled together in a single ‘Alice’ box, delivered directly to the consumer’s door, with no shipping costs.

We recently wrote about data storage and syncing site SugarSync’s move to attract more small businesses, and today, another syncing service, Syncplicity, is following suit. The startup is launching a Syncplicity Business Edition that provides centralized file management, automated backup, synchronization, sharing and collaboration for business users.

Similar to SugarSync, Box.net or Dropbox, Syncplicity is used to store, share, backup and synchronize files from your computer to the cloud. Syncplicity also offers an open platform that integrates well with web applications. The platform enables developers to extend their web applications directly to the desktop, creating seamless interaction between online applications and files stored locally on the desktop. For example, you can associate any text document directly with Google Docs, Scribd and Zoho.

Professional social network LinkedIn has long had a feature that lets users update their status on their profile. But it’s plainly obvious that LinkedIn users don’t nearly use the status feature for mass communication as frequently as they use Twitter or Facebook for the same purpose. In fact, I surveyed a sampling of LinkedIn users who avidly use the site for networking but never update their status on their profile. Many didn’t even know that LinkedIn had a status update feature. Starting tonight, LinkedIn will integrate with Twitter, letting users sync their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to broadcast LinkedIn status updates on Twitter and vice versa in real-time. So how does this work?

LinkedIn will now allow you to update your status on your LinkedIn profile and then share the message automatically to Twitter. To enable to enable the cross posting feature, you just need to click the new Twitter box under your Network Updates box on the homepage and sync with your Twitter account (via oAuth).

Here’s an interesting factoid. Panera Bread, the national bakery and cafe chain, has blocked all Bit.ly links from users who happen to be using Panera’s free WiFi. In a tweet to user who was inquiring about the issue, Panera’s official Twitter handle responded that the coffee shops have “blocked b/c link is hidden & can’t determine content. Want to keep a friendly-family environment for all.” Hmm.

It appears that Panera has also blocked many of the other popular URL shorteners as well. It’s true that a short URL obscures the target address and present opportunities for spammers, but many URL shorteners offer previews of the longer links or content to mitigate the chance of accessing a site you don’t want to visit.

Discovery Communications is deepening its investment in online content with the launch of science and technology new site DiscoveryNews. Discovery is also launching a companion iPhone app, which costs $0.99 on the App Store.

Discovery News was previously a feature within Discovery Channel’s website. The standalone site will which focus on a variety of news relating in the Earth, Space, Tech, Animals, Dinosaurs, Archaeology, Human and History categories. The platform will include breaking news as well as in-depth features on sci-tech topics. The site will also feature regular contributions from HowStuffWorks.com, which Discovery acquired in 2007. Discovery previously acquired environmentally focused blog TreeHugger.com.

As a blackberry user, I generally feel a little left out of of the location-based apps world. FourSquare only provides a mobile site for BlackBerry users (but has an Android app). BrightKite has an innovative BlackBerry app, but it’s not nearly as feature-rich as its sister iPhone app. Today, location-based social network Loopt is making a major upgrade to its BlackBerry app.

The new version of the app has one significant feature that even trumps the iPhone app: background location updating. So even when the app isn’t running, your location will be updated in real-time in the background. Loopt’s new app also pulls in local content about restaurants, bars and events from Zagat, Citysearch and the Loopt community, creating a local search engine within the app.And you can rate places you visit as well from the app.

Transactional advertising network provider Adgregate Markets, a finalist at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference is launching ShopCloud, a platform for building portable shopping carts and other e-commerce applications.

ShopCloud’s platform lets developers build a variety of applications around e-commerce, including distributed shopping carts, lead generation forms, polls and surveys, and social media apps. The platform also promises security and the ability to build and run secure transactional applications even in non-secure content pages.

There are many sites that show trending links across the web including TweetMeme, Topsy, and Bit.ly. Recently launched splurb is now in the mix with its site that shows the most popular links that are trending on social media sites. splurb currently indexes Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, TweetMeme, Yahoo Buzz and Fark.

Splurb tallies the number of votes from the various sites and number of sources that list links. The more sources that cite a link, the larger the story appears on splurb. To get listed, a link must be popular on at least two social websites.

Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer was recently profiled in a Vogue Magazine article that offered a in-depth glimpse into the exec’s lifestyle, loves, career and fashion preferences. Now, Mayer has been named as one of Glamour Magazine’s 2009 Women of the Year. Joining Mayer on the list are a variety of female powerhouses and icons including Maya Angelou, First Lady Michelle Obama, Susan Rice, Euna Lee and Laura Ling.

Mayer has been frequently profiled in business and technology publications over the years, but it’s also nice to see her achievements highlighted in magazines like Vogue and Glamour. The brainy Stanford-grad has been able to set an example for young women everywhere. As one of Google’s early hires, she’s now helping to lead product design for one of the world’s most innovative companies. And she’s only 34. What’s not to love about a successful and geeky coder who also loves to wear Oscar de la Renta, Chanel and Armani?

More good news for Indian entrepreneurs! Infosys co-founder and chairman N. R. Narayana Murthy’s new VC firm, now called Catamaran Venture Fund, just added a whole lot more money to its coffers. A few weeks ago, we reported that Murthy was turning to “the dark side” after selling a large amount of company shares in order to set up a venture capital firm. To set up the fund, Murthy reportedly sold 800,000 shares, or 0.13 percent of the company, its total value converting to $38.7 million, more or less.

It appears that Murthy’s wife, Sudha Murthy, who reportedly put up the seed funding for Infosys Technologies at its founding 30 years ago, has sold 2 million shares worth of her Infosys stock, worth roughly $91 million dollars. And Sudha sold 22 percent of her personal holding to fund her husband’s new VC fund.

Zillow, a popular real-estate listings site, recently tweaked the pricing model in its marketplace for mortgages, angering many of the lenders who pay Zillow for customer leads. A few weeks ago, the site announced that it will be introducing a new pricing model for these leads to lenders.

Zillow’s mortgage marketplace, which launched in 2008, lets borrowers submit loan requests for mortgages and then review quotes provided by lenders. Basically, lenders will be able to submit any number of loan quotes for free, but will be required to pay Zillow a “market-priced fee” when any borrowers contact them regarding their quotes. When a contact is made, the lender will be charged a market-priced fee.

Twitter has just activated the retweet button a a small number of accounts, according to a blog post. The new retweet functionality was originally announced back in August. Below, you’ll find a picture of what it was slated to look like when it was previewed back in September. (We haven’t actually seen this latest implementation yet, but feel free to send us screen shots if you are one of the lucky ones who has the retweet button activated.)

As we’ve written in the past, Twitter has been tweaking this new functionality for a while, making a pretty significant change to the API prior to launch. Previously, Twitter was requiring third party developers to check whether a tweet has already come in or not in any users’ stream to see if they should collapse it under the new retweet structure. Now, Twitter has built its own mechanism to check for those duplicate tweets into the API. This will ensure that only the first tweet is shown and the retweets go under it automatically.

Online real estate broker Redfin is revamping its website to add recent data and photos of recent home sales as well as links to blog discussions of a listing. The Seattle-based startup, which is profitable, represents buyers and sellers in home real estate transactions for far less than the industry rates that take 5%-6% of the sale price of a home and split it between buy and sell brokers. On the buy side they reimburse 50% of the fee they receive back to the buyer. On the sell side they charge a $5,000 – $7,000 flat fee. The normal broker fees on a million dollar house are up to $60,000, so the savings for the consumer can be significant.

With the addition of 9.6 million photos for 1.4 million recent property sales, the total amount of data and photos stored by Redfin has increased by 340%, empowering consumers with more information about the homes they are considering buying. With the upgrade, Redfin users can access sales information of properties within 15 minutes of the property’s being taken off the market, including the photos used to sell the property, and information about the properties’ amenities. Redfin mashes this info up with public records, giving the prospective home buyer greater insight into the history of a property.

Last week Google launched the Music Onebox — a special new music search product that lets users stream songs in their entirety for free. Today, Yahoo Video is answering by improving its music video search offering. When you search for a song or artists, Yahoo will extract music videos of the most popular songs and albums for that artists or band. It appears that most of the songs are pulled from YouTube, Last.fm and other music sites.

So a search for U2 on Yahoo Video will show a list of the band’s albums, such as The Joshua Tree, and the music videos for popular songs, such as “Beautiful Day.” When you click on an album, you’ll see the music videos for all of the songs on the album. If you click on an album or song, it will show videos for the album or song in an overlay page.

More expansion news from Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute. The startup incubator is steadily expanding. It recently opened up an outpost in Seattle, and now is expanding to New York. “New York City needs a kick in the pants,” says Ressi.

The Winter New York City Semester will be led by Razorfish co-founder Craig Kanarick. Mentors for the program will include Munjal Shah, Patrick Keane, Max Hoat and others. You can apply here.

Searching retail sites can be frustrating at times. While many retailers try to present product search in a visually appealing way, search can often be slow or difficult to refine. Tonight, Google is making a huge play in retail space with the launch of Commerce Search, a hosted enterprise search product to power online retail stores and e-commerce websites.

Google offers a general hosted search product that is used by organizations that want to add customized Google search functionality to their websites. Google is now entering the vertical space, by the first tailor-made enterprise product, with retail optimized space. There are four key components to thew new search offering for retailers:

Popular online event site Eventbrite has raised $6.5 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. The company has confirmed the funding, and says Sequoia Capital is the new investor. Sequoia partner Roelof Botha joins the board of directors. Both Roelof and Sequoia backed Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz’s previous startup, Xoom.

This brings the event site’s total funding to over $8 million. Previous big-name investors include Bebo co-founder Michael Birch, Jeff Clavier, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, and Flixster co-founder Saran Chari.

Eventbrite provides online event management and ticketing services for any type of event. Eventbrite is free if your event is free. If you sell tickets to your event, Eventbrite collects 2.5% of the ticket price plus $0.99 per ticket sold.

There are plenty of companies out there that specialize in bringing websites to mobile devices by creating optimized sites, such as MoFuse, Jagag, ByteMobile, and many more. But with the fast growth of web use and apps in the mobile space, there’s definitely room for more startups. Moovweb is entering this space with its offering, which helps brands create customized mobile sites for smartphones as well as develop mobile apps.

Moovweb launched earlier this year with a $700,000 investment led by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, with other angel investors participating. The startup focuses on helping brands and companies determine whether to create a mobile site or an app or both. Moovweb’s technology promises to create highly optimized sites and retain as much functionality of a brand’s site as possible. And where browsers are more limited, Moovweb will downgrade the experience.

Business intelligence is a service that is crucial to both big and small companies. Indicee is a startup that that helps users easily combine data from their business applications and generate reports using Indicee’s cloud-based service. It essentially wants to bring bring reporting and analysis to the “masses” with a cost-effective solution to mashup business data.

Indicee also just completed a $6 million Series A round from Granite Ventures and Yaletown Ventures. Indicee’s technology taps into data from business applications and content from productivity software such as Excel, and others and automatically builds reports and analysis for this data in the cloud. Users can ask business questions in plain English, which Indicee then responds with reports and visualizations that are produced from on-demand from data uploaded to the cloud.

ThoughtWorks Studios, a software development startup, is launching a new version of its project management tool, Mingle, and is rolling out integration with Google Wave.

Mingle has been upgraded to feature a communications platform within the application, called “Murmurs.” A mix of an IM and Twitter-like microblogging format, Murmurs allows anyone involved in a software project to have online conversations that are associated with a specific Mingle project.

SwingVine, a site that lets you see what content is trending on the web, is adding real-time functionality. SwingVine aggregates data and news from across the web, analyzes the volume of online buzz and the reputation of various sources, evaluates user interactions on the site itself, and other information to surface the the most popular and noteworthy content on the web. It’s a hybrid of an aggregator of information on pop culture and news and an analytics site that actually measures what people are looking for on the web.

Adding the ability to see trends and buzz on the web in real-time makes complete sense for SwingVine. The startup determines trends based on factors such as volume, recency, and growth rate of web news, sales data, critic reviews, onsite pageviews, clicks, and other data points around topics. Swingvine is also launching a Facebook app to mine and aggregate trends from your existing Facebook friends, incorporating social results into your trends. You can connect SwngVine with Facebook via Facebook Connect.