While TechCrunch reports that Australia has plans to censor the Internet for its citizens, the UK is keeping up its fight for freedom and justice by being ranked as the worst in Europe for privacy, much of it in the technology realm. Swarms of CCTV camera’s, government incompetence on data, and ID card schemes mean that only Chinese citizens now come under more surveillance. London-based pressure group Privacy International has produced a privacy index. The UK scored three out of five on democratic safeguards, but just one out of five on ID cards and biometrics. The UK joins the US, China, Russia, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand as one of the “endemic surveillance societies”. Privacy-friendly European nations include Greece and Germany. Such fear-inducing research only helps startups in the ID data and privacy realm like Garlik.com, an online privacy firm that monitors your personal information online, and lets you know if there are any problems occurring, like ID theft. However, I’m not sure what they can do about CCTV cameras… or government snooping.

Israeli search technology start-up Hooja has raised $1.5 million from some well known-investors, including Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, and an early investor in Facebook. Hooja, currently in stealth mode, is said to be developing a technology that enables content providers to access personal and social information about users, and the tech is related to text messaging. Thiel has also backed Friendster, LinkedIn and Slide, and manages the hedge fund Clarium Capital.

Update: A comment on TechCrunch suggests that Hooja will be service allowing you to text your opinion of a location, like a bar or cafe, to your Hooja account and check the ratings of others. This is a very similar model to UK startup Rummble.

Bill Thompson, independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet, has spread out his predictions for the Internet. Given that Bill helped to create one of the UK’s first ISPs in the early 90s and has been a reliable commentator on the scene ever since, it’s worth noting his predictions.

• Social networking: He notes that last year he wrote “we are building our lives around the network and the things it makes possible, and 2006 marks the year in which this became a sensible and indeed rather normal thing to do rather than something that marked you out as a geek”. But he notes that Facebook and other similar sites are still not as widespread as you might think.

• Mobile Web: Smartphones are also not yet a mainstream, full-blown ‘mobile web’ proposition. Perhaps the iPhone will change that?

“The iPhone has accelerated the process begun by Symbian, and the rollout of Google’s Android and open source phones like OpenMoko may help, but it will be a few years before the devices are completely freed from reliance on the network.”

• WiFi: “The widespread availability of 3G data cards for laptops on fixed monthly rates could hasten the demise of the pay-per-use services” forcing the operators to do more deals to offer free access like the one between The Cloud and McDonalds. Bill says “I wouldn’t be surprised to see free wireless in Starbucks by the middle of the year.”

• Broadband: Faster broadband services beckon as ISPs try to keep a competitve edge.

• Screens: Better screens, with multi-touch interfaces appearing on bigger devices.

• LBS: More and better location-based services, such as the newest version of Google Maps for mobile, and mashed-up with social networks. (Something I’ve been predicting for a while).

• Web apps: More processing moving away from the user and into the ‘Cloud’, along the lines of Nick Carr’s new book The Big Switch, where he argues that computing power is becoming a utility. However, Bill says “Moving everything onto the network may appeal in the rich countries of the industrialised world but offers little to rural India or sub-Saharan African countries. And there are massive security and data management issues to be solved.” But the potential benefits are “too great to be ignored.”

iubo is a new UK site which is aiming to organise your entire life. That’s a very tall order. The idea is that you input all your data (contacts, photos, bookmarks, calendar, etc) and then iubo lets you search across all that data to create a useful service. iubo calls this ‘your own private Google’ for your stuff. In theory, once all the data is there, you could do a lot of things: project management, contact manager, bookmark manager, keeping track of collectables etc. The site has been co-founded by developer Joe Finnigan and site administration Lynne McCormick (both university students in Scotland).
However, there remains a lot of work to be done to make this site realise its goal. To add just one image I have to input the specific .jpg URL for one photo. This would take a lot of time as I must have thousands of photos by now, some online, some not. There is no hook-in to, say, my Flickr account via Flickr’s API. Again, to input just one contact you have to type in all the details. You can’t upload your VCF file. The same goes for bookmarks – no uploads. So the sparse interface reflects the sparse nature of the service so far.

This would be a harsh review of a service if they weren’t planning more, and it needs to be noted that iubo is still in closed beta and is a side project from two uni students. An email conversation I had with Finnigan confirms that they are in indeed thinking about further collaboration features and importing or exporting data from other sources. I guess we’ll have to wait just a little longer for those.

The revenue model will be some kind of targeted text ad system, which would kick in when user numbers get to some kind of critical mass, plus a pro account service, and an enterprise version. Though my counsel would be to focus on just one of those aspects and making that great. If they could do this, then there is a lot of potential here. Facebook (for example) sucks in a lot of user data but does not really deliver a great deal of value back to the user about that data, and this is going to be a hot space in the new year.

Funnily enough, collaboration and ‘personal search’ systems seem to be a favourite of UK startups at the moment. Phuser recently announced something very similar to iubo, while Nsyght is heading down the search route, and Huddle is focusing on enterprise collaboration. That’s to name just three.

Meanwhile, if you want to track iubo’s developments then sign up via Techcrunch’s exclusive invite code.

Normally this is the time for peace on earth and good will to all people. But not over at the blog belonging to Segala, a Dublin-based company offering “Web accessibility and Mobile Web standards compliance.” Its CEO Paul Walsh (who describes himself as an “Irish Opportunist” on his Twitter page) is a prominent networker in the London and Irish Internet scene, and an often controversial blogger. His latest target is the launch of a new Irish networking group called TechLudd, which was inspired by a recent trip to Silicon Valley by some Irish startups, an initiative dubbed Paddy’s Valley.

There are way many sides to this story, but these are the basics: TechLudd plans to run a regular, possibly monthly meetup. But Walsh argues in a post titled “Why TechLudd should stop before it starts” that another networking group is going to fragment the growing Irish startup and internet sector too much (he calls the idea “half-baked”). He and others (53 comments and counting) argue that Web2Ireland should be the place where the industry hangs out, online and off. However, various voices are either objecting or assenting to being brought into this argument, depending on their perspective.

I don’t have a strong view either way on this fight. But to me an “eco-system” which supports startups usually benefits from diversity and heterogeneity. A homogeneous environment, where there is only one place to network, one event to go to etc, does not seem quite as healthy. On the other hand, if you are in a relatively smaller market like Ireland (in comparison to, say, Silicon Valley), is it too confusing and fragmenting to have lots many organisations trying to run initiatives? And how many is too many? Can only 15 people decide this, as Walsh now proposes? This story appears set to run and run…

Business Week’s Sarah Lacy pens an interesting piece on Europe’s startup climate following her visit to Le Web 3 in Paris a couple of weeks ago. Although relatively fair-minded, it has the faint whiff of disdain. I can imagine her saying “Europe? Pah? Who’d want start there when you can do it all in Silicon Valley?!” And if her fawning interview with Kevin rose at Le Web 3 was anything to go by (a typical question was “Aren’t you like a rock star?”), one wouldn’t expect much more.

Indeed, the article makes the usual mistakes of journalists parachuted into a territory they know little about, and who end up making odd claims unrecognisable to the locals. One of these is the view that Europe’s startup culture differs from Silicon Valley because there is a lack of ‘trickle-down’ economics. The piece claims that “stock options don’t have the same allure in Europe as they do elsewhere” because “employees don’t care as much for them, and entrepreneurs and investors won’t part with them.” This is a claim I’m afraid I don’t recognise at all at the moment. Lacy quotes the figure that “Silicon Valley companies typically set aside 20% of the stock pool for employees, compared with about 5% in Europe,” but gives no source for this information. Therefore, she argues, “successful founders amass a fortune, but little wealth trickles down.”

This is something of an over-simplification. One of the biggest issues is that – unlike Silicon Valley – Europe does not have a 50-year old startup culture. I would put most glib statements about Europe being a slower startup culture not to a lack of trickle-down economic but to something much simpler: a shorter history in the tech business. And yes, there is less of a share-ownership society in Europe, but then there is a greater emphasis on wider society generally. It’s a different mind-set. One must also be wary of viewing Europe through the prism of one centre. Paris is not “Europe” any more than Kiev or London. Each are different.

However, Lacy is correct in saying there are “signs of cultural change” pointing to an improved business climate, Internet penetration, the strength of the euro, the European common market, and the same startup economics as the US (such as small staff and low costs).

She name-checks a few people of note: Janus Friis, co-founder of Kazaa, Skype and Joost, with Niklas Zennstrom. Also Danny and Neil Rimer of Index Ventures who have “led Index to become some of the most successful investors in the emerging Web, backing hot European deals that a few years back even the Silicon Valley elite wouldn’t touch” like Skype, MySQL, Last FM, and others. Tariq Krim, of the “hot” London and Paris-based startup Netvibes is mentioned. As is Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf, co-founder of YL Ventures which has a history of nurturing European startups to successful exit via a sale, often to US firms.

As Leitersdorf explains, “it’s necessary if Europe’s startup culture is going to truly emerge. More mature startup markets take these smallish exits for granted. It’s the backup plan to becoming the next huge public company.” That doesn’t sound like nothing is happening in Europe to me.

Thankfully the article eventually finds a more balanced tone:

“A firm like YL Ventures is also helping to create that class of people who know they don’t have to re-create Skype to get a financial reward for quitting their jobs and following their dream — a whole collection of young, optimistic serial Web entrepreneurs. That’s all Europe has ever really lacked. The money is there, and the U.S. has no lock on smart, educated people.”

Correct.

I realise now that it was remiss of me, mentioning that European startups might want to put out feelers in Silicon Valley, not to also re-emphasise the other point I made in that long post about connecting with the fast-developing East of Europe. My Silicon Valley reference elicited a kind offer offer from Ben Metcalfe to help UK and Irish startups. But what we also need now are some equally handy offers to connect from Eastern European startups who want to connect with the UK, Ireland and other parts of Europe. Why them specifically? Because these are parts of Europe which are still developing a startup eco-system to rival the older networks contained around London, Paris, Berlin etc. So for starters (and I am probably over-stepping my remit here!) I have put up a TechCrunch Facebook group for startups in Europe who want to connect to TechCrunch in Europe (something I will be doing more of in the new year, as I am based in London and a short flight away from the rest of Europe). It’s just a small start, but I’m sure others will create other groups, and there is already an interesting one over at the European & Valley Community.

JPG Magazine is a community-created photography magazine, and one of the themes that will be published in issue 15 is called “Surroundings – Places that mean the most to you”, sponsored by the Samsung G800 mobile. If you submit your photos to JPG, you’ll have the chance to be published in the magazine. Plus TechCrunch UK and CrunchGear are giving away 5 new Samsung G800 camera phones with 3x optical inner zoom and 5 megapixel cameras. The winners will be selected from the top 50 photos submitted. Photos submission guidelines can be found here and all photos must be submitted before December 31st, 2007 to here.

[Update: Please join the TechCrunch Europe Facebook group]

Right after my long post about VCs and startups in Europe, something interesting happened. In the post I advised startups that – while starting-up on Europe offers great opportunities – it’s still smart thinking to put out feelers in Silicon Valley, or at least have some kind of connection.

Not long after we had a comment on the post from entrepreneur, alpha-geek and blogger Ben Metcalfe along the following lines:

“I’m really interested in reaching out to British start-ups that would like a ‘feeler’ in San Francisco/Silicon Valley. At this point I’m really keen to see if I can help the Brits get a leg up over here rather than thinking about business angles at the moment. So if you’re interested please contact me via the contact page on my blog.”

Now this is interesting because while Ben is now a pretty well connected guy out in the Valley now – currently working on MySpace and Seesmic – he started out 18 months ago virtually cold. Don’t be fooled by his vaguely left-field appearance – he’s a smart guy with a lot of experience both at Orange and the BBC. And now he knows what it’s like to be a Brit abroad in the Valley.

It’s probably unfair to highlight this offer with a whole blog post (sorry Ben!), but this seemed like too good to bury under the carpet. And while I’m at it, if you are a Brit out there in the Valley and feel like helping some UK and European startups have a voice out there, get in touch. Perhaps we can help build some kind of useful network out there…

[And I should also add that while TechCrunch UK and Ireland is my chief focus, I also write for TechCrunch.com, which is a useful platform for UK and European startups to be covered on].

Over the last few weeks I have been going around talking to venture capitalists, mainly in London, with a view to trying to get some kind of forward visibility about the technology and startup market next year, especially the role of the VC in all this. A few themes emerged during these conversations, as well as some learning about the VC mindset. (Please note, this is mainly about VC issues, not seed or angel investing, which has different issues I’ll address later).

It seems that the VCs that will be successful going forward in the next year will have to be pretty nimble-footed. A few VC firms are starting to realise they have boards packed with people who don’t contribute anything to the bottom line of the firm and aren’t actually able to keep up with the fast pace of developments in the market today. If you are a startup looking for VC backing, look into who is on the board. If the board has people on it who reflect the right kind of knowledge about the broad issues of entrepreneurship and the tech market then this is a good sign. If it is stuffed with a lot of old suits who did well in the 80s but barely understood Fax machines when they launched, think again. Perhaps that sounds harsh but these are the people your personal VC contact may have to convince about your startup.

In addition VCs without some kind of connection to Silicon Valley – either a business development person or some kind of footprint – are not going to be as appealing as those without. This is not a statement saying that European VCs are bad – It is quite simply a statement of Realpolitik. If you want to know why Silicon Valley remains important to tech startups ask a French entrepreneur who just threw a massive European startup conference, Loic Le Meur. His new startup? Silicon valley-based Seesmic. (Disclosure: TechCrunch’s founder Mike Arrington is an investor).

It is also an acknowledgment that Europe still requires a few more years of great tech VCs (and entrepreneurs for that matter) to come through the system before it quite has the “compost” to create a truly amazing startup culture. [Yes, I know all about Skype being European but let's leave that to one side for a second]. But this point applies less to London-based VCs than it does to continental Europe. Chatting to some frustrated startups in Barcelona and Berlin recently, one still got the impression that VC firms, even in some major European hubs, tend to think not in global, US or broad European terms, but in local terms. Will this startup be big in Catalonia, they might ask? Will we get traction in Greece? The VCs who seem to me to be less constrained by parochialism are in London and Scandinavia (Sweden and Finland specifically – what can I say, they just think that way). That is clearly a totally subjective viewpoint and quite possibly wrong on several counts, and I’m happy to be corrected – but it’s my impression all the same.

Please note at this point that I am on the side of people like Saul Klein and Ryan Carson who are passionate advocates of staying in Europe to do your startup. I agree with them. Quite obviously I think you can startup in the UK and Europe. But it is also smart thinking to put down feelers in Silicon Valley, that’s all I’m saying. I doubt anyone would disagree with that point.

If you are a startup, you will also want to ask questions of a VC firm about the structure of the firm. If you really want to put the wind up them, ask them what their “succession” policy is. Put simply, in the past some VC firms have become top heavy with older management who have yet to leave. The young bucks who know the market are champing at the bit to make smart investments and see their startups through to exit, but without a career path (or succession ) up the ladder they will gravitate toward other firms that offer them this trajectory. If you as a startup encounter a VC that you feel you can work with, just think about whether they will still be there in a year or so to plead your case for more funding.

Another way to make the sweat break out on a VC’s brow is to ask them if they think they are “Tier One” or not. This will either produce a clipped answer (”Yes, of course we are”) or a long winded one (”Well it depends on what you mean by Tier One…”) Either way it’s a useful exercise to get the cut of their jib.

Now, some of the issues VCs are going to be focusing on in the new year relevant to “2.0″ startups are…

Advertising, despite many nay-sayers, is going to be a deeply interesting business model for some time to come. The simply fact is that there remains billions of dollars which have not been spent online, but which economic issues like the credit crunch will start to push online. Why? Because online is measurable, off-line it is not. Exactly the same thing happened in the last nuclear winter after 2001/2, it just wasn’t noticed as much. Two key aspects of online advertising relevant to startups will be video ads. The second will be targeted advertising, particularly niche advertising based on location, but which can be served across a large reach of eyeballs, often via social networks. Yes, I know this sounds like DotCom Bubble talk, but believe me when I say, I have looked into the whites of the eye of these VCs and many are utterly convinced that there remains a deep vein of advertising revenues waiting to be mined by smart startups. And if you don’t believe me just go read Paul Fisher’s blog (he of Advent Venture Partners), which has recently become obsessed with advertising.

A further theme amongst VCs next year will be Eastern Europe. There remains a deep core of technology talent in the former Eastern Bloc nations. Plenty of UK startups have made use of the great developers to be had there, and there are at least three outsourcing Web development companies in Kiev, Ukraine, for starters. And then there is Sofia (Bulgaria), Warsaw (Poland), Prague (Czech Republic), Tallinn (Estonia) etc etc. All of these nations have great people, even if the entrepreneurial culture remains at an early stage. [Note that I have not included Russia in this list. The VCs I talked to consider Russia, with 142 million people, to be its own, inward-looking market. Startups there do not need to build and scale beyond Russia, so the opportunities are different].

But the smart ‘western’ startups are finding ways of working in a pan-European manner. I have lost count of the startups I have met in continental Europe who say things like “Our head offiice is in Copenhagen, but our developers are in Warsaw, our VCs are in London and we have a biz-dev office in San Francisco”. Outside of the US, all of these people are an hour or so away on a plane (remember to carbon offset your flight though!). It is precisely this “Think Europe” attitude which I personally would like to see more UK startups take on board (I will not bother lecturing my Irish friends about this – by and large they already do it). My resolution for next year is to punch the next startup CEO who comes up to me at some event and whines about how he “can’t find any coders in Farringdon”. Get out of London for starters, and find some talent in the rest of the UK, and in Ireland (Dublin and Cork are great). And after that go East my friend, go East. (Yes, I may get punched in turn by UK Geeks who want job security, but I am afraid this is the reality of globalisation. We need to “get with the programme”). In fact, there is probably a startup waiting to be done which actually helps other tech startups who want to go pan-European…

However, if you are based in the UK, then fear not. All European companies and – predictably – all US firms come through London eventually (I will leave the arguments about the London-centric nature of VC-land for another fight) so there remains plenty of opportunity in the UK. In addition to which labour remains most flexible in the UK. Hire someone in some European countries as a full time employee and you might find yourself still paying their wages for a year when they turn out to be crap. Watch out for that.

But, the really cool thing about Europe in the broadest sense is just how much opportunity there is. It remains a deeply complex market for US companies to enter. They tend to get to the UK and then balk at going further. That means European firms have a lot of scope to be smart about building here and following whatever strategy that makes sense. Plenty of European startups have rolled out across Europe only to be acquired by a wealthy US web giant, simply because our American friends – coming from one big market – are unfamiliar with the complexity involved. And let’s not ignore the particular advantage in language UK startups have for facing in the other direction and growing fast in the US first. Always an option.

As far as the talent pool is concerned, there is also room for optimism. We are starting to see second and third time entrepreneurs coming through the eco-system now and the experience is deepening.

But let’s be in no doubt that the era of turning up to an OpenCoffee event in a loud shirt, talking loudly about “Web2″ and your social networking startup for owners of three-legged dogs is pretty much over. The same goes for the guys who have a great idea marketing to Gap year students who want to blog their trip…

Luckily, the real hard-nosed people in this space don’t fall away when times gets tough, and they are about to get tougher.

As Fred Destin, VC with Atlas Ventures, says “brace yourselves for a tough 2008“. His view is that investors have done a lot of deals in the last two years and now what faces them is a period of uncertainty. That means entrepreneurs need to get tough and “make their cash work even harder.” We are not talking about a huge crash or an ‘end to the bubble’ (there never was a financial one, other than of hype), just a harder-edged reality. It’s likely that many startups which won funding at the start of this year will either get real traction in their market or start to run out of funds. Plenty of mergers and acquisitions are predicted in this case.

Destin says startups will need to pay particular attention to their milestones and align themselves with VCs who can hold their nerve when times get tricky. And there will be a lot of emphasis on revenues (as in, do you have any?). If your startup underperforms expect to get your funding starved in favour of better performing startups in the VC’s portfolio. Gulp! But there is a way out: “do fewer things better and buy yourself runway”, Destin says.

I would also tend to agree with Destin about not slamming your VCs if it all goes wrong. Yes, there are some terrible investors out there, but the best VCs know when to call time on a startup and the startup needs to recognise that as well.

But let’s not be too down beat. The great thing about the wider European economy taking a hit next year is that a lot of the chaff will fall away. In the last bubble we called these guys “B2B” entrepreneurs. In other words they go “Back to Banking” because they previously left their safe banking job to join a startup. Their departure creates space for smart people to move in and do something exciting. A little recession is no bad thing for the internet entrepreneur. Less able to fritter their time and money away in the real world, more people arrive online to swell the ranks of the potential audience. Plus office rental gets cheaper. And Europe’s base of angels and investors is likely to grow exponentially, as pointed out by Nic Brisborne of DFJ Esprit.

So to conclude: Tougher conditions, but more “real”. Still loads of opportunity, even still in the right kind of social networking applications (web and mobile) and advertising. Great things to be achieved in a pan-European sense.

So get out more, and start building those connections across Europe…

Amazon is partnering with music community startup SellaBand to offer aspiring young bands a leg up the slippery pole of fame and fortune. Under the deal, SellaBand will have a dedicated music store on Amazon as well as an affiliate sales deal and promotion to the 50 most active reviewers on The Vine, retail website’s reviewers’ programme. Revenues will be shared equally between the artists, Sellaband and the fans.

Germany-based Sellaband, which launched in August 2006, has 6,000 bands and offers a model of free legal distribution of new music by enabling a direct relationship between developing artists and their fans. The site enables fans (”believers”) to buy $10 shares in unsigned bands to fund the professional recording and distribution of an album – including A&R, marketing and publishing. In a phrase, it’s a more overtly music-focused MySpace.

But I bet you’re wondering what Sellaband does with all that cash while the band is waiting to get more fans? In fact, Sellaband is more like a bank, since it makes interest on the money invested in the site’s bands.

So how does it actually work? Fans can listen to tracks for free, but support bands by pledging money. Once the unsigned band has made $50,000 (or 5,000 fans pledging 10 bucks each) they get a professional CD cut. Artists get 1/3 of all advertising revenue from their profile, and 60% of proceeds from eventual album sales. They also get all rights back to their music a year after the album comes out. To date, 11 bands have reached the $50,000 threshold and three have released albums. Furthermore, the idea is that this crowd-sourcing takes away a lot of the risk associated with new music and offers a new way for bands to a) get the big record deal eventually or b) retain control of their future, via rights ownership. To me the smart thing would be to get an album out tour it, retain the rights then start your own download program after a year, a la Radiohead.
Partnering with Amazon gives Sellaband artists greater reach, and Amazon will be adding credits to a band’s account once they reach $30,000 and offering extra promotion for the band once they reach $35,000. SellaBand works with digital distributor The Orchard, one of the suppliers for the iTunes Store, and, under the new deal, through Amazon.

The people behind Sellaband are Pim Betist, Johan Vosmeijer and Dagmar Heijmans. Vosmeijer ran the labels Epic and Columbia for Sony Music in the Benelux region and recently launched Red Ink, a boutique label for SONY BMG. Heijmans is ex-EMI.

More: Previous TechCrunch US coverage.

Six months after leaving Microsoft, BBC future media and technology controller Erik Huggers has blogged on the BBC Internet blog that he actually had to leave Microsoft in order to innovate. Formerly the senior director for Microsoft’s entertainment business (notes PaidContentUK), with responsibility for driving Windows Media adoption amongst European broadcasters, Huggers blogs today:

“I had great success stories but also my share of failures during the Microsoft years. However hard I worked, I was always trying to convince third parties to adopt platform technologies. My true passion is all about using cutting edge digital media technologies to establish new innovative services for consumers. When I realized that, I knew that it was time to move on.”

Oh dear. Can someone please tell the Blue Monster, Microsoft’s unofficial innovation mascot?

Huggers also managed to attract Jon Billings from the Windows Media team to the iPlayer project and former MSN developer Anthony Rose as head of digital media technology at the BBC. But there is a down-side to this brave new world of innovation. He now constantly gets asked why he joined a corporation which has no stock options and where he is effectively a civil servant. Indeed.

Does anyone else think that mobile companies launching home TV services is a boring story? Various news outlets are reporting today that O2 plans to go head-to-head with rival operator Orange and launch its own IPTV service. A UK trial looms after O2 had a “successful” rollout with a 50 channel service to a whopping 70,000 customers in that hotbed of media, the Czech Republic the last year. O2 bought internet provider Be last year, which has a fast IP network and already has deals with media companies including Warner Bros, HBO and Paramount. But there is the small matter of BT, Sky and Virgin Media to contend with as well as Orange. Plus, consider this: O2 has the rights to the national ice hockey league, the Czech Republic’s favourite sport. The chances of it securing quality football rights in the UK against Sky or BT or Virgin? None.

To me, O2 is throwing money away on TV. TV is not a growth market, the Internet and mobile is. So why don’t they throw all of the investment they plan to put into this white elephant into really powering ahead in mobile? They already exclusively sell the greatest mobile Web browser known to mankind, the one inside the iPhone. One way of leveraging this advantage is to start funding startups to create iPhone applications. They could create an amazing eco-system to support the already significant investment they’ve put into the iPhone.

But no, all we’ll get out of O2 next year is another route to TV shows from which we are increasingly switching off. Good move.

• BBC Innovation Labs 2008 has opened its application process to tech companies. The application process will close on 31st January 2008 and the BBC will let you you know if you’ve been successful during February 2008. If you were unable to attend the Labs Launch Days then you may find the filmed presentations helpful before you apply.

• Are you an Irish Internet company? Irish telco Eircom has launched the Web Innovation Fund to promote, mentor and sponsor innovative web applications in the Irish Internet industry. The fund is worth approximately €100k annually and up to four concepts will be selected each year. Applicants are invited to submit concepts across nine key categories. Contact Info Email: innovation[@]eircom.net

• Set your calendars for 17th January 2008 when NW Start Up 2.0, the event for entrepreneurs, investment community and deal makers in England’s North West region. So far they’ve had four successful conferences which attracted many entrepreneurs from around UK and other parts of Europe, such as Ajaz Ahmed of Freeserve, David Ingram of Izimi, Sam Sethi of Blognation, David Terrar of D Squared C, Ivan Pope of Snipperoo, Robert Wakeling of Wadaro, Rhys Jones of Accountis and Anish Kapoor of Yuuguu. It’ll be at KPMG Manchester and doors will be open at 18:15. Entrepreneurs will be lead by Billa Bhandari of Akoura and GoSecure of USA, while Venture capitalists will be lead by Doug Stellman of Yorkshire Fund Managers. Register now and get a discount.

Leading tech commentator Robert Scoble has gone mad for a new video streaming service for mobiles called Qik. It competes with Kyte and Seesmic but unlike those you do not have to wait for the video to be uploaded. Instead it streams the video straight into the site with a 5 second delay. To use it you download and install the client software – in Scoble’s case a Noka N95 – click on the icon and then start streaming video. Once finished the live stream turns to a recorded video. This could be pretty interesting hooked up to a micro-blogging platform like Twitter, as Seesmic currently is.

Qik supposedly allows you to sign up from Europe but although I registered today I have not yet had the confirmation SMS delivered to me. As soon as I get it I will see if it’s possible to use Qik from the UK.

I have always wondered why Seesmic launched on the Web first, using Web cams, when the greater opportunity is possibly via mobile phone. But no doubt it is easier to scale faster via PCs than mobiles, where there is an inherent data cost for the user.

In the UK a startup called Rawflow has been running a Seesmic-like site called Selfcast, a live peer-to-peer streaming service, for over a year now. This is the consumer-facing side of, RawFlow which provides broadcasters and content delivery networks with P2P streaming services. It has investment from Benchmark Capital.

I was told a year ago that Selfcast would have a mobile phone trial for its streaming service. But I haven’t seen anything about it since. Either I have missed it or it never happened. I have put in a call to the company today and will find out more.

In the UK the 3G network operator 3 famously launched with video calling but could never realistically deliver and consumers turned out not to want it. But video streaming from mobiles direct to the Web could well be a killer application, given our inherent fascination with You Tube et al, which bodes well for Qik and other startups like it.

If you are on Facebook, then why not become a “fan” of TechCrunch there at its new fan page. And while you’re at it, check out the new re-vamped CrunchGear.

Google is to add blogs to its Universal Search results, according to Marissa Mayer, the firm’s search products and user experience VP, in eWeek. This is the first media type to be added since Google launched its Universal Search programme in May. Further innovations are planned she said:

“We talked about it as a new playground for our engineers and it’s true. We’re actually developing a bunch of interesting experiments in terms of the interface and what could happen in terms of Universal Search.”

This is great news for bloggers and social media generally, including social media startups. Now some search terms will end up being owned by most genuinely popular sites, many of which are blogs but which don’t currently get a look in on search results. But it’s bad news for a SEOs and already hard-presed brand marketers. I feel so sad for them.

The UK’s Ordnance Survey mapping agency has (almost) come to its senses and announced that it will allow non-profit making organisations and individual developers to display their own data on OS maps for free. The OpenSpace product makes maps available from the 1:1m outline of Great Britain, up to street level (1:10,000). It provides all the necessary functionality to interact with a map such as panning, zooming and adding markers and polygons.

The JavaScript API gives developers free access to OS mapping data for experimentation in web applications. The platform will be in closed alpha from the 14th but they are planning a beta release early in the new year. Until this point, charities and private individuals republishing OS data have been required to negotiate licences if they wanted to stay on the right side of the law. Now they will get it for free. This is great news for lone developers.

However, it is not great news for startups. The OS has “almost” come to its senses because there remains the issue that startups will not be able to create commercial businesses out of this data from the word go. Even though these are businesses from which the government could potentially extract tax revenues, again.

As the Guardian notes, last summer, a report commissioned by the Cabinet Office identified the lack of free data as a barrier to the knowledge economy. The Power of Information review said that “by virtue of their status as individuals or organisations wishing only to experiment, not build final products ready for market, they often do not have the resources to pay for expensive data”. The trouble is, the expensive data looks like it will remain expensive if you want to do a startup with it. Perhaps they think the word “economy” has nothing to do with money?

There is some small hope, however. At the moment the service is for non-commercial experimentation only, but the OS is expecting partners to provide a commercial version of the API in due course. Here’s hoping it will be affordable for startups.

Mobile social network startup Rummble launched a Facebook application today. People still can’t sign up direct from the main site as it remains in closed beta, but by adding the FaceBook application they can. Beta testers can signup when they load the app. This allows them to share their favourite places with friends. The mobile site is at http://m.rummble.com. Why is Rummble doing is this way? Founder Andrew Scott tell me “we’re opening up in a controlled manner”. I’m not sure if that means they don’t have enough server grunt yet or not, but it might be worth checking out. Here’s my previous review of Rummble.

I’m prepping a post about the best tech startups this year. I’ll be dividing it into three categories: UK, Irish and European (as in, continental Europe). The idea is to look at both web and mobile startups which are doing interesting things.

As part of my research I thought I’d ask TechCrunch UK readers for your thoughts. Obviously I’m sure you’ll agree that YOUR startup was quite simply the coolest this year, but it would be more useful (and less sucky) if you suggested a company other than your own…

Ok, let’s hear it. Comments are welcome below.