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Prosper, the people-to-people lending service that launched way back in May 2006, has found itself on a rocky road so far. Last October, Prosper suspended new lending in order to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission to create a secondary marketplace for the loans on its site (the SEC wanted to evaluate whether the company should register as a securities broker, as evidenced later when it formally issued its cease-and-desist letter).

But now Prosper is back despite the fact that the SEC hasn’t yet approved its operations, and while they have respected the requested silence up during the six-month hiatus, they haven’t exactly stalled development of the service.

I’m pleased to report that no one dressed up in coveralls and hats at the TC/CG Helsinki meet-up at A21. The turnout was fantastic – about 100 or so folks at 8pm on a Tuesday – and everyone either worked for Nokia, contracted for Nokia, or sold their children into servitude in Nokia’s diamond mines in the heart of Northern Troll country.

Special thanks to F-Secure, the anti-virus company and the Mothership herself for sponsoring a few hours of drinks. I heard a lot of great pitches – please send me more information when you get settled – and met a lot folks who were quite excited about start-ups and the start-up scene. Special thanks to Ville and the boys at Arctic Startup, the TechCrunch of the Tundra.

Click through for some pictures and look for more information about these great folks in the next few weeks.

Mixx, a Digg-like site that lets users vote to push news stories and other bookmarked content to the home page, is experimenting with an innovative new advertising platform called Mixx Sifter. Frankly, and we’ve written this before with other Mixx features, this is something Digg should have done.

The idea is to get the Mixx community to give direct feedback on advertising. The better ads will get impressions – not based on how much is paid, but simply on how positive the feedback is from users. Last year we’d heard that Digg was thinking of doing something along these lines. Digg founder Kevin Rose refused to speculate on it, though, in a recent interview.

Here’s how Mixx Sifter works – an advertiser uploads five different ads, in virtually any format. Mixx then invites its power users (elite Mixx users who have spent hundreds of hours on the site) to review those ads, rate them and provide direct private feedback. The users get karma points and a chance to win a gift certificate or computer in return. The most popular ad unit is then run on the site.

Center’d, a local activity guide headed by former Yahoo Local GM Jennifer Dulski, is getting a major upgrade today. Alongside a completely revamped homepage, the site is launching a reworked search engine that it says should outperform the keyword searches found on most other local sites.

Center’d has compiled a database of around 1 million entries for various activities, each of which is categorized into a number of intent-based classifications. To do this, the site has spidered through the web analyzing ‘conversations’ taking place around each entry, taking context into account to determine if a review or comment is positive or negative. It then maps out the results in bar graphs, as seen below. Dulski says that this kind of semantic analysis is better than standard keyword search, and it helps eliminate inaccurate matches – for example it would prevent a review that said “this place is not for kids” from appearing under a query for restaurants “for kids”.