Lot's going on, with DEMO unfolding in Phoenix, and then tidbits falling between cracks...

Pleo says hi --Here's the Mercury News update (free registration) on the new Silicon Valley start-up by the Furby creator we mentioned first here. Read all about Pleo, the new animal that that is going to have organic movement, "so that it seems to move and behave like something real," according to Ugobe's chief executive, Bob Christopher.

Social lending -- Chris Larsen, co-founder and former chief executive of E-LOAN has launched San Francisco-based Prosper, an online marketplace to help people borrow money at their own rates. It has a competitor, Zopa, though Silicon Valley venture firm Benchmark is nicely hedged as...

an investor in both companies. (Scoop by Michael Arrington)

Individual borrowers say how much they need to borrow (up to $25,000) and the maximum interest rate they will pay. Interested lenders say how much they want to lend, and at what rate. Prosper takes the lowest price lenders and groups them into a loan.

Interactive and Internet TV redux -- Mountain View's Kasenna, which delivers video over the Internet, has raised $11 million in a fifth round of funding. Intel led the round, according to this piece by VentureWire (subscription required). The company, once a division of Silicon Graphics, launched independently in 2000, and has swallowed a $59 million so far. If you think that amount is stomach-churning, take a look at ICTV, another player in the TV space, which has raised something like $185 million since 1990, much of it funded by by founder Gary Lauder -- scion to the Estee Lauder fortune, and according to alarm:clock, is not even a strong contender.

Google allying with car companies -- Volkswagen is working on a vehicle that features Google's satellite mapping software to give drivers a bird's eye view of the road ahead. (Via). Meanwhile, Fiat has a nice little game going on where it is letting you guess where on Google's satellite map it has hidden its Ferrari 360 Experience and three Fiat Sedicis in the snows under Turin by the Winter Olympics. .

Web 2.0 Matrix -- Here's a nice little matrix of all the Web 2.0 mashups out there, in case you're bewildered by all the offerings.

More ways to dabble with video --Mary Hodder's new video sharing start-up, Dabble, is being talked about. We chatted with her several weeks too. We'll just point to Om's mention. We seem to recall her saying there will also be a video editing function on top of all the goodies Om talks about.

In less than six months, Hodder has put together a nice little service which will allow users to bookmark videos from different video services in one place. I would like to call them videomarks. I have known that Mary has been working on her new start-up for six months, and raised angel funding from the likes of Evan "Odeo" Williams and Mark Pincus.

New way to stream music from PC to home stereo -- New York Times (subscription required) has the skinny on latest Squeezebox from Silicon Valley company Slim Devices.

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