UK video startup Mydeo has created a bespoke video sharing service for the giant US retailer Best Buy. Best Buy Video Sharing is a subscription-based service for users to upload their personal videos for storing, sharing on web sites and blogs. The service will be merchandised online and in Best Buy’s retail stores. Best Buy will also take a minority, equity stake in Mydeo, though the amount has not been disclosed.

Unlike many other video sharing services, the service will allow the user to choose who can view their home videos, and, being subscription-based, won’t display ads. Base plans start at $6.97 for 100 minutes of video hosting and video lengths up to 30 minutes each. Customers can chose premium plans for extended video lengths, additional video storage capacity, and other sharing features.

Cary Marsh, CEO and Founder of Mydeo says the service will allow users to “show their high quality videos to friends and family, without exposing their personal movies on public sites, without advertising, or giving away any distribution rights.”

Mydeo originally started in 2005 from a small South West London office with local government grants, but it has since won private investment and become Microsoft’s first European ‘Movie Maker’ hosting partner.

I hear from property search engine Nestoria that it is to launch a new feature via its API that allows developers to access metadata about the database. The upshot of this is that you’ll be able to check out what the average prices are for 1,2,3 or 4 bedroom flats and houses etc for all areas in the UK and Spain (the other market Nestoria operates in). Do the other property sites ofer this data via an API in the UK? Not that I’m aware of (though I’m happy to be corrected). Nestoria has a database of 450,000 properties in the UK and around 700,000 properties in the Spain. Right now Nestoria just shows the current prices averages, but over time this data will be saved in order to provide users with historical trends. It makes sense for other property sites, like Extate (which recently announced funding) to launch APIs, because it’s distribution, right? I can’t see this being a Nestoria-only thing forever, by any means.

Zopa, still (it would appear) the world’s first peer to peer online lending service, has launched Zopa Listings, allowing individual borrowers to post their own specific requests for loans for individual lenders to review and then bid against.

Zopa already has a Markets product where lenders meet borrowers. The new Zopa Listings (to be found here) allows individuals to ‘pitch’ online for the loan they want, giving details of what they are borrowing for, the interest rate they are seeking and their own personal circumstances. Lenders then choose between these individual borrowers and bid, eBay-like, to lend to them, offering an amount and the interest rate they are prepared to lend at. A listing can include photographs and (eventually) a video. When the listing closes, if the full loan amount has been achieved and the borrower is happy, it will go ahead at the aggregate interest rate of all the offers. If the amount is not achieved, the process stops there, although the borrower will have the chance to re-list. Lenders can bid with a lower interest rate offer to any listing that has yet to close, even if the loan amount is fully covered – keeping the competitive process live until the very last moment.

Zopa hopes that the bidding process will create competition amongst lenders to offer the best rates they can, creating a more efficient loans market. Charges for the new service will be the same as the existing Zopa Markets – successful borrowers pay 0.5% of the value of the loan and lenders will pay 0.5% of the value of their loans per year, as an annual charge to Zopa. There are no other charges.

This ‘Social Lending’ approach is likely to appeal to the Facebook generation, used to seeing these kinds of pathetic cries for attention… sorry, I mean witty requests for cash. The key thing here is that borrowers get to tell their own personal story in all its glory, tugging at the heart-strings of potential lenders. Heard of irrational exuberance? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

“New nursery needed for little tike” already has 3 offers for its £4,000 loan (since when did a lick of paint for the spare room cost that much?), while the “New internet venture seeks financial help” listing has had two offers (at a 7.4% rate) for its £2,000 loan request. I don’t hold out much hope for its chances.

However, I do quite like the personal touch in all this. Plus, Zopa plans to keep it from getting too silly (e.g. Mid-life crisis journo wants a Harley’). All would-be borrowers who want to post a listing will be vetted to ensure they are “credit-worthy, prime market borrowers.” This will help to protect Zopa lenders. And Zopa, presumably.

Giles Andrews, managing director of Zopa UK says: “Social Lending can be a better alternative for people seeking to borrow, or to find a more attractive return on money they have saved. Zopa Listings adds new levels of individuality, personal control and choice, extending the appeal of this innovative alternative to the banks even further.”

There may be something in this. We are constantly told by ‘marketing experts’ that we’ll eventually be trusting our social network above all else, so mashing this up with a lending system could well be the way of the future. It can’t be worse than the Northern Rock debacle…

Corporate P2P Web broadcast firm Skinkers has inked a £8m ($16m) funding deal today from venture firms Acacia Capital, Spark Ventures and from Skinkers’ own management team. The cash will be used to further push and develop its peer-to-peer broadcasting system LiveStation and its news alerts services. This is the second-round of funding for the London-based firm which launched desktop alert services for news organisations and large corporations several years before RSS was widely adopted.

Its LiveStation technology was acquired from Microsoft as part of a “technology for equity” deal in June last year. Livestation is designed specifically to deliver uninterrupted live TV to large audiences at reduced costs using P2P. Skinkers plans to launch a trial with several UK and international broadcasters soon. Customers so far include Virgin Atlantic, the London Stock Exchange, the BBC, The Guardian and CNN.

• Trabber (a contraction of travel + grabber, apparently) is a new search engine that searches across the main online flight providers, compares all the flight offers and shows the final prices of the flights. It’s pitching itself at travelsupermarket.com and kayak.co.uk, but it doesn’t feel like a totally finished service just yet.

• WatZatSong (geddit?) allows you to upload an MP3 of you humming a song, the artist and name of which you can’t remember. (Think that game in Never Mind the Buzzcocks translated online). The WatZatSong community then listens to your pathetic warblings and tells you what the song is. Since launching in May in English (it launched in 2006 in French first), it has had a success rate close to 90%. That’s a lot of humming. You can also build your own music quiz (from your mp3s or from the samples that have been named previously on WatZatSong) and then export it to your blog or send it to your friends. Yes, you too can download people humming!

• Quintura, a visual-based search engine backed by Mangrove Capital Partners, has launched some new features including a Halloween-related search cloud specifically designed for the upcoming holiday; a hot news search cloud; and the ability to embed a search cloud to your blog.

• Brightbox, the a new UK-based first Ruby on Rails focused hosting service, has launched with an offer to reduce the complex process of Ruby on Rails deployment to just a few simple steps. Each Brightbox server comes with dedicated (but burstable) RAM and CPU resources, an optimised Ubuntu OS, preinstalled Ruby on Rails stack as well as access to a managed MySQL database cluster.

• FeedMorf is a simple new site that lets you turn a feed (RSS or a podcast etc) into something else. So, for instance, you can turn an RSS feed into an HTML page. It will also translate a podcast into one of a selection of playlists for use in other media players. Creator Ollie Parsley has even turned the WMV feed for the Diggnation podcast into a file playable by Windows Media Player. Check it out.

• Pierre Chappaz, a Kelkoo co-founder and former Netvibes co-CEO, has launched a competition for startups. The team that sends in the best two minute video pitch of their idea will get financed. The deadline is Nov 23. Only one problem – you’ll need to be able to read French to understand his criteria which he’s posted on his blog. [via]

Alenty, a French provider of web 2.0 marketing tools, has won a funding round of 370,000Euros from unnamed private angel investors in the UK and France. Co-founded by two experts of Internet audience measurement, formerly at NetValue and NetRatings, Alenty develops tools to optimise sites, automatically detecting the most important and influential members of a community (blog, online magazine, forum etc.) Their Who’s Hot product then analyses their behavior. I haven’t had time to go into the fundamentals of the service, but basically you put a line of code onto your site and it generates a widget similar to MyBlogLog. This ranks your readers in terms on influence. Think MyBlogLog meets Google Analytics meets Am I Hot or Not. Alenty is currently targeting professional blogs and media sites where you can comment. There’s more coverage today on TechCrunch France (in French).

UPDATED: See below for the details following the announcement…

The finer details of the long-awaited Skype phone announcement from mobile operator Three break this morning, but quite a lot is known already about the deal which the network hopes will revive its flagging fortunes.

The phone will offer free international calls over the handset between Skype users, but won’t allow them to make calls to non-Skype members using Skype out, according to The Sunday Times. Still, Three clearly hopes that by directly attacking the punishing roaming charges of the other operators it will win enough market share to stop a third of its customers leaving every year. Last year the UK arm of Three lost £464m, an ‘improvement’ on the £1.4 billion in 2005. Part of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa, Three has 4.1m customers but 1m have dumped their SIM cards for other operators.

As predicted, the Three Skype phone will have a specific button above the keypad to activate Skype. It looks like Three will not charge extra for Skype so long as the customer has a contract or tops up their prepay account regularly. The Guardian thinks the the phone will feature a 2MB camera and MP3 player as well as video playback, which is pretty safe predication. And assuming the Skype software operates like a normal PC account, it should be possible to use it to get “pushed” RSS feeds to it using something like Zaptxt. That might be useful… if outside the mainstream market the phone is aimed at.

Three has been offering Skype for a while, on its X-Series range, though the calls are routed via normal cellular lines initially. But it looks like the new handset will place a full VOIP call, which suggests Skype has been very busy boosting the robustness of the mobile software.

Skype is said to have 246m accounts globally, but only about 70m use it regularly, which is in part why owner eBay recently admitted it had overpaid for the business, and wrote off $1.4 billion.

Britain has an estimated 2.5 million Skype users, so in theory if Three can switch a good percentage of those users to its service then it’ll win a bit of market share. A bit. But it’s unlikely to rocket it out of fifth position in the the UK market.

Updated:

As predicted above, the details announced today confirmed that Three and Skype are launching the “Skypephone” this year in the UK, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Macau and Sweden. Skype to Skype calls
will always be free as long as the caller is on contract or their pay as you go credit is topped up monthly. In the UK, the handset will be £49.99 to buy on a PAYG tariff or free on a contract for a minimum of £12 / month including 100 minutes and texts.

The handset was developed by Skype and 3 in partnership with Qualcomm, using Qualcomm’s BREW platform to enable Skype to work with core handset features such as address book and messaging. The phone appears in stores this Friday and is available for pre-order in the UK from today. You can create a Skype account from the handset.

The 3 Skypephone is light weight, slim and has a decent screen. The user interface is easy to use. Being onthe Three network means the phone is a 3G device and also packs a 2-megapixel camera, mp3 player, streams video and comes in black or white, with blue or pink trim.

Nsyght is a tiny startup from West London tackling the big problem of search relevancy. What does that mean? It means it wants to take your bookmarks and social network and use that to create more relevant search results. No mean feat and the public alpha of the site has that slight Web 2.0 sniff of ‘great feature, but not company’ about it. However, it’s early days and it’s a laudable idea to try and improve search results by leveraging the collective power of humans who have already filtered lots of data through their social bookmarks. But unlike Mahalo, nsyght doesn’t need to employ 100 out of work actors in Los Angeles.
Nsyght users either perform searches via the community-focused index, or sign up for an account and start inputting what sites they trust. The theory goes that over time, as a user expands their social network and bookmarks, they will have a totally custom-built search index specific to them.

The site features ‘Social Network Portability’ (xfn+hcard) support, so users can import their profile and friends data from digg, last.fm, twitter, and pownce. Users can also export their existing bookmarks from del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, as well as sync their Nsyght bookmarks back to a del.icio.us account.

Founder Geoffrey McCaleb says he is aiming at early adopters first. So for instance, a search on iPhone does not return the apple.com/iphone result, but links to Technorati, iphone hacks and a news blog about the iPhone. You can feel that geek social network at work, humming away in the background.

nsyght is a really interesting project. I just wonder if a certain company called Google isn’t going to offer something quite similar when it finally decides to take on Facebook and offer a ‘filter results via X’ feature. Then again, there might be all sorts of ways nsyght could benefit from the growing eco-system around social search.

BarCamp Leeds hits the city 17 Nov. You’ll also find info on Facebook and Upcoming. Registration is now open and it’s free to attend.

Proposed Sessions so far:

• Intelligent human-computer interfaces and their possibilities
• Launching BT BizBox a small business CRM solution in 5 weeks
• SEO Site Clinic
• Why big companies are missing a trick by ignoring social media
• Ladybank Company of Distillers – building a real co-creation business
• Unleashing social media and technology for the good of local communities
• From Zero to Game in 30 Minutes
• From a Mobile Telephone to a Computer
• Paradigm shift in business document interactivity
• Drupal
• Conquering Time and Space – A survivors guide to distributed dev team management

You’ll also note that there is a session entitled “From start-up to £67m in 10 years”. This is not a joke – it’s being run by Lee Strafford, former CEO & Co-Founder at PlusNet, who is now planning to launch an incubator for startups. Worth checking out.

Songkick, a music events tracker, has launched offering a number of services, including a Kayak-style search engine for concert tickets. The site is aggregating tickets from 10 primary and secondary ticket vendors in the US and UK, no mean feat. The service allows users to install a Media player plugin (for iTunes, Winamp and WMP) which automatically tracks artists in your music library and suggests when they are on tour. Songkick’s Ian Hogarth tells me that their average beta user was tracking 200 artists, 30 of which were touring at any one time. You can also add or delete artists manually.

For revenues Songkick has ‘Bandsense’ a kind of AdSense for mp3 blogs. Mp3 blogs are now a common way for fans to discover new music, covering every genre imaginable and allowing you to easily sample the music. Bandsense allows mp3 bloggers to automatically tell their readers about relevant tours in their area. Any time an artist is mentioned that is on tour, Bandsense automatically creates a link to the artist page on songkick so the reader can find out more. Songkick also has a built recommendation engine to recommend bands based on reviews and your own tastes.

The site is deceptively easy to use and almost too sparse in its simplicity. Links to ticket sites worked fine, but I haven’t had a chance to try out the media player plugin yet. I found adding bands to my profile was very intuitive and the system was smart enough to suggest similar bands. I’m not sure how much revenue Bandsense is going to earn – so perhaps the affiliate links to ticket vendors is going to be the better money spinner.

Chuck a stone into the UK startup scene at the moment and the chances of you hitting an entrepreneur peddling a site which allows people to share and rate things – anything in fact – in a local area, are pretty damn high. Let’s look at one list: Welovelocal, Revmap, Wehanghere, FridayCities, Qype, Tipped and TrustedPlaces. And I’m sure I have missed a few others.

Admittedly not all of these sites have significant funding. Some are little more than Google Map mashups just ticking over on a server. But it’s quite clear that not all will survive, and the US market, which is further down this road, is providing an early view of what might happen next.

In the US right now there is a shake-out happening amongst sites which allow people to create local reviews. Judy’s Book is shutting down operations. Other players have fallen in the last year, including Zipingo, while Insider Pages was sold for a tiny profit to CitySearch. One of the few remaining, and doing OK, is Yelp, despite fierce competition from Yahoo! and Google.

So does the shakeout in the US provide an indication of where the UK is headed? Suddenly the US market seems to have worked out that local reviews might have something to do with the mobile phone. Whrrl is a new, principally mobile, service that allows users to aggregate information as they visit different places. Reviews based on location are filtered based on ratings via the accompanying social network. Some commentators are calling it ‘Yelp plus Twitter’.

A wiki format in Whrrl enables users to write reviews, add photos etc. But the key with Whrrl is that you can filter your searches based on your trusted network before expanding the search outside that network. This Facebook-like approach means users have a lot of control over the information they publish and make visible to their network. Client software on the phone is supported on about 10 handsets for the AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile networks. Whrrl’s parent company, Pelago, has raised $7.4 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Jeff Bezos and Trilogy Equity Partners.

Over here in the UK Rummble, founded by Andrew Scott, is doing something similar, but with a twist. Currently in closed beta and privately funded, Rummble could be the Whrrrl for the UK.

You build your social network on Rummble with a basic relationship (i.e. friend, relation or business) but then apply tags to that. Rummble has an algorithm which works out which reviews by users in your network to trust, based on your behaviour and relationship to them. Three years in development and re-launched from its former incarnation as Playtxt, Rummble is hoping its functionality between web and mobile – and ultimately GPS-enabled mobiles – will give it the edge when some consumers tire of networks which don’t intelligently filter results or deliver a decent experience to the mobile.

Rummble still needs to be proven once out of private beta. I doubt we’ll be dumping Twitter for microblogging, or sites like Trusted Places, for local reviews, just yet. But the more I have looked into Rummble the more I have noticed several types of services incorporated into it, from Socialight and Loopt to location services like Plazes. There is a lot more to this service than meets the eye at first, and it’s emphasis on mobile is definitely the right instinct.

Serial UK entrepreneur Michael Smith took the wrapper off his new startup, Moshi Monsters at Virtual Worlds Forum today in London. The world goes into private beta in a couple of weeks.

Essentially, Moshi Monsters is Tamagotchi meets Facebook for 7-12 year olds, but with education thrown in. Your Moshi Monster is basically an educational tool in the shape of fully animated little monster. The monster lives on a far off world with lots of other monsters and reports back to you every day on what adventures he/she has been getting up to. Each day it sends you puzzles you have to solve and the better you do the more in-game credits you earn. But where Tamagotchi was just about feeding the pet, Moshi is about keeping your pet happy and well by learning stuff. There’ll be an in-game economy, casual games, forums, a social network, a room to decorate and lots of other elements. Moshi has also built a behavioral engine that tracks how well you’ve been looking after your pet and then develops its personality accordingly.

The business model is classic ‘Fremium’ with a basic service offered for free but primary revenues coming from premium products, not unlike Club Penguin which has 700,000 paying subscribers out of 12m registered users. Virtual worlds for kids are a really hot area at the moment – Neopets has had 40m pets adopted, and there have been 70m Tamagotchis sold to date.

Why is MoshiMonsters avoiding running advertising? The simple fact is that – certainly in the UK and I think globally – even as advertisers are being squeezed out of traditional broadcast channels by legislators worried about junk food advertising to kids etc, they are turning up online. But a child’s online experience can be controlled in a far greater way than TV. Parents are more likely to dig out their credit card for something they feel is safe and not abusing their kids with ads for burgers and soda drinks.

The company behind it all is Michael Smith’s Mindcandy, an online games developer which to date is best known for developing a reasonably successful Alternative Reality Game called Perplex City – which itself will be re-launched next year. Smith kicked off his career during the first boom with men’s e-tailer Firebox. Mind Candy has backing from Index Capital and Spark Ventures.

Habbo has announced it now has 80 million created avatars inside its virtual world. Finland-based Sulake Corporation launched Habbo in 2000 and it remains something of a Virtual World 1.0 aimed at teenagers. But it has since grown into 31 country sites across five continents. About 75,000 members join each day with each user spending 32 minutes per site visit, says Sulake.

Founded by CEO Sampo Karjalainen and CTO Aapo Kyrölä initially as a non-commercial project, the site has done well to become a vehicle for youth brands to market digital gifts inside the system. But here’s a reality check – Habbo may have had 80 million avatars created inside it but it only gets 6m unique users a month, according to Nielsen Netratings.

Shareholders in Sulake include Taivas Group, Elisa Group, 3i Group plc, and Benchmark Capital followed by Movida Group (in Japan). Sulake released the figures at the The Virtual World Forum, the first European conference on virtual worlds, running in London this week.

Habbo has long since been overtaken however as a leader in its field however and there is now an explosion of interest in virtual worlds.

Techdigest is doing some live blogging from VWF today and has a nice run-down of the alternatives so far including:
• MTV’s Virtual Worlds The Hills, Pimp My Ride, and The Real World
• vSide is aimed squarely at music fans, with over 50 in-world radio stations, 600,000 streaming songs, and bands playing virtual gigs in various venues
• Whyville is aimed at children but avoids 3D in favour of a history and educational focus
• Entropia Universe is pat virtual world, part MMORPG with micropayments and virtual banks
• Zwinktopia is a cartoonish virtual world where you dress up your character with new clothes and accessories
• Club Penguin is aimed at young kids bought by Disney for $350 million in August this year
• Weblo is a place where you buy property and assets
• PlayStation Home is Sony’s attempt to bring virtual worlds onto the console
• There predates Second Life and now runs has deals with music companies, but also sells it technology to the US military

What is it with the British Police? Suddenly they seem to be channelling the RIAA and Hollywood’s militant tendency. Various news outlets are reporting that the world’s largest BitTorrent site specialising in pre-release music has been shut down today after raids by British and Dutch police. OiNK has 180,000 members and released more than 60 major albums this year, often weeks ahead of their official release date.

The raids were co-ordinated by Interpol, the site has been closed and a 24-year old man from Middlesborough arrested. Well, it makes a change from arresting 26 year old men from Cheltenham, as they did earlier this week to TV-Links.co.uk. They do say a change is as good as a holiday.

Apparently the arrests follow a two-year investigation by UK industry bodies the BPI and International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers (IFPI), the equivalent of the US-based RIAA and MPAA, from whom we have the statement that “OiNK… was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not hold the rights to and posted it online.”

It’s an ironic move given that all the music in question will no doubt appear online again somewhere else, but it also heralds a new approach from the IFPI, which now seems to be going after ‘the pushers’ instead of ‘the druggies’ (with apologies to any Amsterdam readers).

Why? Because O’Reilly Radar reports that the IFPI is proposing allowing unrestricted downloads of music over peer-to-peer networks in exchange for a monthly fee to be charged to all ISP users. That means the whole DRM debate would effectively be over, and music would perhaps not be free, but near as damn as makes no odds.

So can we stop arresting SysAdmins now please and go after people with the knives and guns instead?

It’s interesting that UK-based Videojug, the ‘how to’ video website, has attracted the likes of Nancy Cruickshank, the high-profile head of Hearst Digital, to become its global chief executive. Videojug founder Dan Thompson will move into the chairman’s seat. Videojug has 30,000 ‘How to’ and ‘Ask the Experts’ video clips, which it shares with media partners such as MSN and Virgin Media. It won £15m in private equity funding in May and officially launched in the US in June.

Cruickshank is a UK web veteran. She launched Conde Naste’s online operations in the mid-90s, later going on to greater feats, including seeing Boots joint venture Handbag.com through to a sale to NatMags, the UK arm of Hearst, after a six-year stint. She has been Hearst Digital MD for the last 12 months, but appears to have caught the startup bug again. In the 90s she co-founded ‘moving house’ website Smove, which was sold to Norwich Union in 2000 (and no longer exists). In an email to me she said Videojug was a “global opportunity” and had a “great team with track record”.

Let’s hope so. There are an increasing number of ‘How to’ video sites.

In the summer Israel-based internet company, E-learning Knowledge Solutions, launched SuTree, a video aggregation service where users can add and categorise instructional videos from across the web, providing a directory of video that would often be buried on the host sites.

5min is another ‘instructional video’ Israeli startup similar to YouTube, where content is hosted on the site and is user submitted. Video creators can add a storyboard to uploaded videos to help others better understand the content. To aid learning video on 5min can be played in slow motion or frame by frame, and the inline player supports zooming in and out for a more up close experience. Let’s see Videojug do that.

Videojug’s main revenue stream currently is advertising. The pitch is that when people use VideoJug they are most often asking “how do I do X”, which creates a opportunity for advertisers to answer the “what do I need?” and “where can I get it?” questions. This pre-qualifies the audience for MPUs, post-roll video advertisements and bespoke sponsorships.

However, I didn’t find many ads on the site and – in the UK at least – is still a very early market. It may be that Videojug fairs better with its B2B play of syndicating content to existing media owners than relying on advertising. But the jury is still out.

When two former C-level executives leave a monolith like Getty Images it’s a fair bet that they will go and create something smaller, faster moving and a lot less hide-bound by the restraints of picture royalties.

And sure enough that’s exactly what happened. Founded and funded by ex-Getty Images CFO Lawrence Gould and former Getty Images director of e-commerce, Tom Donnelly, ImagePick is a new startup which allows you to buy and own the rights to royalty free images so you can use them as much as you like for your marketing, websites, you name it. And the idea is not to provide royalty free pictures which are basically crap, as is the case normally. ImagePick has a team of editors who look at images prior to their being added to the database. It’s already got providers of royalty free images signed up, including Corbis, Jupiterimages, Blend, Rubberball and Westend61.

I like the Google-like interface and the big results page of thumbnails. Its also easy to add images to a ‘pasteboard’ and build up a selection for later purchase. It’s not for anyone however. ‘Web resolution’ images start at around £55.

Is this a Web 2.0 site? Probably not. No social networking, no widgets! But that’s not quite the issue. The implementation is pretty good and it does what it says on the tin. Plus, every image is tagged with the visual elements of the picture, I assume by editors. Adding tagging by users would be a smart move. I also think they should consider adding freely available PR/press photos – that would seed the market and help create more of a destination site for consumers as well as professionals.

Event News: People are decorating their social profiles with widgets and that’s created a market, whether you call them MySpace widgets or Facebook applications. Widgets had a boom of interest earlier in the year but have since been slightly overshadowed by the rise of Facebook. However, they haven’t gone away and the concept looks set for plenty of growth next year as they become carriers of marketing, brand and advertising messages into most social networks. It’s fair to say that pretty much every social network worth its salt is poised to follow Facebook’s lead and build a widget/application platform by the end of next year. That will create a huge potential market.

That’s why it interesting that Widgety Goodness, the first European conference on web widgets, kicks off on Thursday December 6th at the Corn Exchange, Brighton. Speakers include Tariq Krim (founder Netvibes), Russell Davies (OpenIntelligenceAgency) and Ivan Pope (founder Snipperoo) and a host of others. Bloggers can apply for a blogger pass to the event, and as well as early bird discounts you can get a special TechCrunch discount. Plus they will be ‘eating their own dog food’ – if I can put it that way – by running a live social network throughout the event.

TechCrunch UK will also be hosting an after-event drinks party. If you would like to be a sponsor partner please get in contact.

EU News: Tablefinder, a startup aimed at aggregating the world’s online bookable restaurants, has signed a partner agreement with the UK’s TopTable, the largest restaurant booker in Europe. The deal gives Tablefinder access to all of the TopTable restaurants including the first restaurants to be added from New York. Currently Tablefinder is limited to restaurants in Sweden. In September Tablefinder, one of the six winners at the recent London SeedCamp incubator event, launched a beta service with one of the two main global restaurant booking systems, Livebookings Network. The rest the rest of the world’s restaurant tables are booked via the OpenTable system. Tablefinder, which is in an open beta, aims eventually to add a social networking element to table booking, providing suggestions about where to dine, and tracking where your friends dine.

These deals are going to be important to Tablefinder prior to a proper consumer launch, as the site itself right now is not offering what I would call a full-blown service by any stretch.

EU News: Wakoopa (site), the Dutch startup which tracks your use of desktop applications and wraps that in a social network, is about to launch a service supporting the iPhone. Just as it allows Windows and Mac users to track the applications they use and get updates, the same will be done for iPhone apps.

The new iPhone service is basically the Apple webapps directory, but adds a lot of other stuff, including an iPhone friendly interface at i.wakoopa.com. Every software page indicates how many people are using the app and who, which makes it generally more useful than Apple’s site. The list of applications is also available at wakoopa.com/iphone.

Wakoopa users can share their preferences with friends, write reviews of their favorite application, and download new ones. The company is backed by a fund of the three biggest media companies in the Netherlands (Ilse, IDG, Telegraaf) and launched back in May this year.

Back at the launch TechCrunch was wondering if the Wakoopa tracker might end up being bundled with some software freebies but that still appears not to be the case. Surely this is missing an opportunity to allow software firms to better target potential users with useful software and updates, based on their preferences? Or am I missing something?

Gurgle, a social network for parents launches today as a joint venture between retailer Mothercare and MediaBurn, an agency specialising in social networking sites.

The site aims to bring together expert information together with social networking tools for parents and parents-to-be. At launch i is offering about 1,000 articles, 52 exclusively commissioned tutorial videos and a number of baby and pregnancy tools. Parents register then Gurgle offers each member a personalised site with relevant articles, videos, groups, people, chat and answers based on each member’s location and the stage of their child’s development. The site’s social functionality can be tailored so mums can talk to their peers in their local area, or to others at the same stage of their pregnancy or child’s development.

That’s all very well, but although Mothercare seems to think it has stumbled upon the fact that new parents desire an online community, it’s entering the game a little late. Despite it’s Web 1.0 appearance Mumsnet is still the one to beat in this area, not to mention the plethora of other long-in-the tooth sites in the UK around this area. Gurgle is going to have to work hard to bring anything new, and if the brand is smothered all over the site like a cheap suit parents will smell a rat and click away.