Startup MVNO Blyk, which provides a cheap mobile service to young people in return for sending them “targetted” ad messages, has launched a media shop designed for advertisers and agencies to source information from. So far there are campaign results from brands including Penguin, COI, L’Oreal, Boots and Brylcreem. Ad campaign briefs can also be sent directly from the site.

However, there remains some questions about the service which launched in September last year.

Rumours circulated a while back that teenagers were switching off the messaging from advertisers. However, I have made some enquiries from people who ought to know and the opposite would appear to be the case. Apparently the 16-24 year olds which Blyk restricts the service to are lapping up the free airtime they get in exchange for ads.

One source says: “Stories like this are hilarious and made up by people who don’t know what the hell is going on in new media. Blyk is more powerful than anyone realises. Blyk isnt going to shoot down any negative press as it is often no bad thing people take their eye off the ball.”

I also hear that Blyk has been successful enough for it to start preparing to roll out to several more countries from its European base.

If all this is true, then Blyk may be onto more than many critics first thought – that targetted advertising via mobile is not as annoying as it might sounds, especially to a media-savvy youth audience.

Brussels-based social media tracking startup Attentio, has received a 600,00 Euro investment from five new private shareholders well known in Norwegian business circles, along with further investment from existing shareholders. The round takes Attentio’s pot to a total of 1.5 million Euros raised since 2006. Attentio’s goal is to monitor blogs, forums, networks, YouTube and building tools that can analyse the content.

The new board now includes Ole Jorgen Fredriksen (ex. Co-Chairman of NASDAQ-listed InFocus and ex. CEO of ASK/Proxima) and Bjorn Haugland (founder of Confirmit, the stock listed provider of market research software). Other board members are chairman Per Siljubergsasen (founder of Attentio and one of the founders of Kelkoo, acquired by Yahoo), Jarl Fronth a Norwegian Lawyer and professional Board member, Benoit DeBecker marketing director of Cytec and Simon McDermott (ex. Cisco and Intel and founder of Attentio).

Clients include Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Lexus and a number of agencies. Recently, similar US service Umbria was acquired and TNS bought Cymfony.

The Attentio Brand Dashboard (SaaS) is mainly sold through advertising and PR agencies, but I’ve been trying out the impressive blog trend search engine Trendpedia and been pleasantly suprised at its power to map key words and phrases. It has the makings of an interesting web app. Here’s a search for TechCrunch – the results allow you to roll-over the graph and see what highs and lows the search term hit at that time. Very cool.

The Next Web blog – normally great – has had a slight crisis of confidence and attacked TechCrunch UK’s report on the demise of Naked. Blogger David Petherick says they had all the facts about Naked a month ago but chose not to delve into why the firm had cashflow problems or make “a dramatic, and possibly premature, pronouncement of death” because this would not have been a “helpful” approach.

This is kind’ve an odd post.

They say they had close contact with Naked, which quite clearly went into formal administration in early May. Yet they didn’t report it when they were legally able to do so.

On the one hand I understand their motives. Maybe they wanted to give Naked some breathing space to find new backers? They were clearly close to the company. David Petherick of The Next Web commented on the story: “I have had a personal interest in this project since meeting with Naked at StartupCamp in London in March, and Next Web staff have used the beautiful beta version of Naked, and I personally find it very useful.”

But as anyone knows, you can’t sit on a story forever. Sooner or later it will come out. Besides, if the company is any good, then reporting that it has gone into administration is not going to spook a proper new investor. It may even help find them a new one. And there’s an obligation to inform the reader here.

Interestingly, The Next Web also seems to think that the story’s reference to Bonnier’s divource proceedings freezing his assets and stopping further funding to Naked was “salacious”. Actually I think it’s rather relevant. Bonnier was – by all accounts – the sole backer of the enterprise. If his ability to pump more cash into the company was stopped then we need to know why. Furthermore, the allegation wasn’t made by me – it was made by his co-founder Tom Vandendooren and COO, not some junior employee.

Nor did I “selectively unearth” anything about Bonnier. As anyone who Googles this guy will know, there is a very long list of ventures he’s been involved in. It is a fact he was investigated, and cleared of any involvement, in an insider-dealing scam in the 1990s. It is a fact that in 2004 he was fined £290,000 for abuse of the financial markets, but was later able to return in 2006 as a CEO. It’s up to readers to decide if these facts are relevant to the story or not. It is also a fact that I called him and asked him to comment on the story and to date he has not called me back.

Meanwhile, as is often the case, the comments which flood in on any story are often at least as interesting as the story itself. And this has been the case with TechCrunch’s story on Naked. So let’s take a look at what people are saying – all the below have been extracted from the comments and can be read in full here.

• Was Naked’s application any good?

- Naked looked similar to Pownce, but it’s web-only status stopped it from going further.

- “I took part in some focus group testing of Naked during their alpha phase and all of our group were pretty certain within 10 minutes of using the app that it wouldn’t be a success. It was effectively a very poor implementation of Facebook walls (with group support) mashed with some lifestreaming (which I seem to remember was unimplemented at that stage). It was shocking to see quite how wrong they had got the user experience”

- “My understanding of ‘getting naked’ was that tooth extraction was preferable and certainly less painful.”

- (Gordon Candelin): “Not all the money was spent on premium web companies – I designed the beta site of Naked (which has been rather poorly implemented) and haven’t received a penny, nor am I likely to. While working with the Naked team I felt that were some very practical issues with user interface which unfortunately weren’t being addressed. They would have done better perhaps with a smaller dev team and a full time designer/UI expert to help inform the structure.”

• Were they over-staffed?

- “If it is employees then surely they would get down to the core few who will go with the idea and surely the other stuff can be bootstrapped?!”

- “Spending cash on 12 employees and two excellent but premium-rate web agencies at such an early stage doesn’t make sense to me.”

- “They 1) hired too many staff… 2) they used services from expensive agencies and web studios, and 3) rent an office in London known to be the most expensive place in the world.”

• Why did Naked fail?

- “Not getting enough first round funding. Then falling behind schedule technically…Followed by a lower than expected appetite for further investment”

- “Their CEO overestimated his abilities to acquire funding in time.”

The Hospital private members club in London is not the first place you might look for a new kind of web model. It’s a private members club, afterall. This sort of thing does not scale in the same way that, say, a web app might. Every new member must be vetted by hand. Problem.

However, increasingly you see that VCs are quite interested in sites that makes things happen in the real world, not just online. An easy example of this is the amount of investment that went into dating sites a few years ago. More recently Twitter has lead to real-world meetups being organised, as people realise that the kinds of conversations they have via Twitter show that have something in common.

Interestingly, a European VC has been blogging about this very effect. Paul Jozefak, with Neuhaus Partners.com in Hamburg has written extensively about this subject. In particular:

I’ve been astonished at how quickly the merger of the online and offline world has taken place. I blogged a while back about how social communities online need to pull their people together in the real world. Well, I’ve been living this phenomenon for a while without really comprehending it. I’ve actually already met a bunch of people via Twitter who simply happened to be in the same place as I. It’s been a great experience and I made friends with at least five pretty cool people if not more. I have also been realizing how common it’s now to hear a couple openly admit that they met via online dating. At dinner last night a business acquaintance practically was a poster child. He met his partner via FriendScout24 and they are already awaiting their second child. He couldn’t be more positive and open about it. Only a couple years back you wouldn’t dare admit you were dating online. I bet now every third or fourth couple gets together this way. This is why I am so optimistic about the mash-ups happening right now in the online world to facilitate real world interaction be it for fun, for business, or for love. Add location based services to Twitter with a bit of Facebook thrown in as well as FriendScout or Match.com, put it on the mobile and we’re rockin’. There is still so much which can be done here and I look forward to all the opportunities out there. Just think how powerful a platform could emerge if someone truly cracks this nut!

So the question is, how do social networks become truly useful?

Now, I don’t think that The Hospital is going to necessarily take this issue to the edge.

However, how they plan to go about it is interesting, according to the Club’s David Marrinan-Hayes who oversaw the new network. They are starting as social network for members, which anyone can apply to join online. Why is it interesting? Because a) it fits strategically into their business, b) it creates a launchpad for them to scale in the real world, wherever they find potential members and c) it could eventually scale if the network they created started vetting the members themselves.

Here’s how they’ll do it.

They’ve built an internal social network for members which will be opened up for anyone to join, so long as they meet the criteria of membership. The site recently came out of closed beta. A few other private members clubs have social networks: The Core Club in New York and Adam Street in London. But these are closed networks. The Hospital plans something different.

They will allow anyone to register on their site. Anyone. That’s a big leap for a private members club.

Obviously where it doesn’t scale is that each new registrant will have to be vetted by a human being. They have to go through applications to see if the person is suitable. It’s Mahalo (the human powered search engine) for members clubs.

But what this will do is act as an early warning signal about where the club should set up a site next. So for instance, they plan to set up a new club in Berlin. One way of crowd-sourcing new members is to see how many members they get registering online. That will then feed into the plans for the new club (how it operates, who it targets etc).

They plan to do this – open the electronic clubs first before the real-world ones – for other sites like New York or Shang Hai. If they got a lot of people registering in Singapore, that may mean they start a new location there.

This really works. Even before a club has opened, members could start to socially network online before meeting face to face. The social capital that is built is therefore much stronger. One of The Hospital’s niche’s is aimed at freelancers – if they can collaborate via the site, that’s a win for both sides.

The building blocks of the network are there. Right now the social network is relatively basic, but if the Club is smart, they could really leverage this into something pretty good. RSS, Multilingual supprt, Group functionality, are all planned, as well as “Hospital TV”.

Meanwhile they are launching something called “Hospital Cub 100″ a multi industry listing of key players for each city they’ll be in, starting with London.

The real world and virtual world mashup is a great model. The question is, which sites out there could flip in the other direction, into the “real”?

Moo, which recently moved offices in London, has a new roof (see above), which doubles as a terrace. Lucky them!

So in the spirit of other more minor items of interest, here’s a roundup of smaller items from a bunch of UK and Irish startups, in no particular order:

• Zebtab has a new channel, iwantoneofthose (IWOOT), the internet gadget retailer.

• The Filter has launched some new features for its beta testers including new profile pages, instant playlists now for Windows and personalized RSS feeds.

• Mobile games community Playoo is working on improving the game selection process, which powers the Game Stream, to give users more control over it, and to provide better results out of the box.

• Businessitonline has ‘retired‘ many of the popup windows that are used to add or modify entries in the system (such as calendar entries, contacts, receipts, payments and contact history).

• Rummble was featured by Ariadne Capital, the London based Investment and Advisory Firm, as part of their look at WebMission.

• Fav.or.it has a few ideas about how to fix Twitter and is off to a few events.

• Howardbaines, which created AltertThingy, think “the reasons suggested behind Twitter’s problems reflect wider issues.”

• Following their recent funding, Cloudmade have moved offices and a bunch of new people have joined (see above).

• Ireland-based World TV has been tweaking its interface with a few other improvements: “It’s slicker, it’s more compact, it has a new blue progress bar which we think looks smarter…”

• Slicethepie has hit the 1 million reviews mark since launching, less than a year ago. The millionth review was of the track ‘Coming Home’ by Laura Stevenson.

• Stealthmode startup Snagsta went to NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference rcently and was impressed by Gordon Brown’s jaw and found a “list of habits that help you spot Bad Managers & Entrepreneurs”.

• Dublin’s PutPlace compiled a big spreadsheet that records, among other things, how much free storage space each online service offers. For the record, PutPlace offers 2 GB for free.

• Polldaddy re-started its RSS feeds and it should run a lot smoother from here on in.

• Real estate search engine Nestoria added Team Association listings, from their property portal Teamprop.

• Huddle have been making Smoked turkey & coleslaw cholla rolls. Mmmnnnn… Oh and are were hiring. (CrunchBoard anyone?)

• WebJam has been adding a few new smaller features for users.

Tariq Krim, founder and CEO of Paris-based Netvibes, is stepping down work on a “new project.” He remains on the board of the company and as a non-executive strategic adviser. Netvibes COO Freddy Mini takes over as CEO.

Krim says his work transfering Netvibes “from a personal start page into a widget platform,” is done, but it’s clear that the huge competition in the widget and start ‘page space’ from Google and Yahoo will have had an effect on this move. To compete, Netvibes will no move its platform to open source and mobile compatibility, with the APIs and tools available tomorrow at Netvibes.org.

I think the mobile strategy for Netvibes is interesting. As it happens, Goojet, another Paris- based startup currently in closed beat, has a mobile widgets platform. Goojet has been doing well on the European startup competition scene, consistently winning against strong competition.

UPDATE: The backchannel to this story is starting to roll in and it doesn’t read all that good. Feedback so far is that:

1. VCs are pissed with Netvibe’s inability to find a revenue model
2. VCs want to sell the company, Tariq doesn’t. The VCs won so Krim left
3. Tariq is bored with a company that is a bit stuck in limbo

Another well placed source says: “I think we will see a second division sale in the near future (like Pageflakes).”

Will going open source be too late? Maybe. One of the problems is that Netvibes has literally lost it’s vibe. In some respects, losing a charismatic leader like Krim, who creates great press, is a real problem – not that press is everything of course.

(Update 31/5/08): TechCrunch’s Nik Cubrilovic has now taken up this baton and run with it: Google To Launch Large Scale Geo-Services

————

Is Google poised to release an API for geo-location, based on it’s magical My Location feature in Google Maps for mobile? Could be.

Something called the “Geolocation API” has appeared on this list for Google Gears code. And code for geo-location has appeared here.

The “GeolocationAPI” is described thus: “Provides the geolocation of a device running a Gears-enabled web browser.” Here it is in the specific code for Gears.

Now I’m no expert but inside this code are a number of references to “cell_towers”, “cell_id”, and “wifi_towers”. Further down there are fascinating definitions of the terms, such as “timing_advance: Represents the distance from the cell tower. Each unit is roughly 550 meters.”

In other words, it looks like Google is going to allow third party developers to make use of its geolocation API.

That would be a significant move, and one which would throw a number of mobile operators into disarray, since location is one of the few golden eggs they have left, as the world moves to VOIP and data.

I asked Google (in the UK) to comment. A spokesperson said “We think location is an important aspect of mobile applications, and we’ve been thrilled with the usefulness of My Location in Google Maps for mobile, but we have nothing to announce at this time.”

So there’s no official word on the move but this discussion on a w3.org list, lodged today, says: “Google would like to volunteer some resources to work on a specification to provide a Geolocation API for the Web platform.” This may or may not be related.

Now, I’m not sure if the API is live or working right now, or if it’s just lying latent in the code for implementation later. It may well be the latter.

Naked, a UK-based social messaging startup, has entered administration and the assets of the company are to be liquidated. Sources say the company ran out of money at end of April and an administrator was appointed in May to wind up the company, which went into liquidation last Friday. All 12 employees were made redundant at the beginning of May. Begbies Traynor has been appointed the administrator (they can be contacted here).

The news is tragic timing – the site was launched in February with private beta testers but was only just poised to release a full public beta at the start of next month. We will now probably never know what Naked was capable of.

What happened?

Naked’s stated aim was to give users a better way to communicate with people they really care about, more freely, in private. Tools included were status-updates, private messages and group messages – a sort of combination of Twitter and e-mail, aimed at a more mainstream audience (if that’s possible, now that Twitter is getting bigger).

Naked demo’d its application at the Mashup Innovate on April 1st. (Anyone got any video or record of that?)

But on May 7 they emailed their own private beta users saying:

Our start-up has run out of cash. Just weeks before opening up the service more broadly and igniting the buzz… However, we haven’t given up the faith. We will need to regroup, see who’s still on board, and work out a way forward. In the meantime we’ll do everything possible to keep the service going. We’ll update you when we have more news.

Co-founder and engineer James Salmon (who is now looking for a new role) had also been blogging about Get Naked and on May 7 blogged the following:

Naked update…
Naked has had a tough few days – we’ve run out of cash and are facing some very disappointing consequences. And all this comes at a time when we were literally a few weeks short of opening up the service as a full Private Beta. I’m therefore exploring all options to see what can we can do. No-one ever said start-ups were easy

On Tuesday this week, official Naked blogger “Biff”, wrote a final post, A Line In The Sand:

It’s been quiet on here of late. The reason being that I am no longer Naked Community Voice. There may also, very soon, be no more Naked. It’s gutting getting so close to something you’ve worked intensely hard for, and then losing that to forces beyond your control. To put it painly, Naked ran out of cash. Liquidation has started. There may be a possibility of Naked carrying on, but I don’t think I will be a part of that. But then again, who knows.

Why and how did Get Naked come to this point?

One source told me that the company was too reliant on CEO and main backer Robert Bonnier as sole investor and he was unable to secure additional funding from external sources within the time frame needed to keep the company afloat (about three to six months).

Who is Robert Bonnier?

Robert Bonnier was CEO of Get Naked. I called him at midday today for comment on his mobile, he said he’d call me back but so far he has not returned my call as of 3.30pm.

Bonnier was one of the stars of the first dotcom boom.

The Dutch-born entrepreneur who started and exited Scoot.com was also once a financier for the Swiss Bank Corporation in the mid-1990s. He was investigated, and cleared of any involvement, in an insider-dealing scam during that time. At the height of the dotcom boom his stake in Scoot was worth more than £150m. But in 2001 this stake was seized to repay Scoot’s debts and Scoot eventually fell on hard times. In 2006 Bonnier ended a five-year exile from the financial markets (in 2004 he was fined £290,000 for market abuse) to become chief executive and the largest shareholder of £130m Aim-listed cash shell Future Internet Technologies.

Who is Tom Vandendooren?

Vandendooren – Brussels-based technology marketer by background – was COO of Naked and says he was the originator of the ideas behind Naked. Speaking to me via Skype today he said Naked started out as a “unified messaging client with a key focus on mobile”, along the lines of Nimbuzz. But the complexity of developing a Java client for the many hundreds of mobile handsets proved to much, so the strategy was switched to “creating a messaging environment to open up to close circle of friends they care about.

Development work started in September of 2007 on Ruby. The implementation and execution was more web based with messaging from email and mobile”.

They got to an alpha in early January and finally a private beta version end of February, early March. But by then they had run out of cash. He says: “Naked was funded entirely privately via the investor Robert Bonnier”

The “idea was to go from private funded to public beta then start a formal external financing round. But because of a very personal issue with Robert, who was going through a nasty divorce which came out of the blue, his assets were frozen in that process and we were forced late in the process to reach out to external funding sources. Given the time frame we were unsuccessful. We were left with only a few weeks but had to honour staff and costs.”

Did Naked fail because they ran out of cash or because the application was no good?

It looks like the application never really got a chance.

Vandendooren told me that the feedback they got from investors was that it was either too early or too late for them to come in to a financing round. It was too early for some, in that although the application could be demonstrated, there was too little validation from user numbers, as it was till in private beta: “They wanted us to go through public testing first for a few months.”

For other investors it was too late “because this was a second version and we had already put in significant amounts of cash and it was therefore too late to seed as an angel round. So it was an in-between stage for external investors.”

But Vandendooren says “I haven’t come across anything that does what Naked does. We were very much at the intersection of microblogging, messaging, and social networking. Crossing in the middle is the compartmentalisation of social lives and exchnages. Being open to share intimate things based on relationships and context.”

Is there a buyer?

Right now, there does not appear to be a buyer.

Vandendooren would like to re-start Naked some how, possibly out of Belgium, but he acknowledges he has “no more rights to the assests than anyone else.” He says he would not plan to work with Bonnier on any re-started version of Naked.

User experience agency Clearleft had worked on some design for Naked, and New Bamboo had worked on the platform, though its doubtful either of these players will be interested in taking on Naked’s assets.

One former employee tells me:

Naked was a good idea but a bad brand (the constant conflict with porn). They are trying to sell the IP/code but there is so much competition these days and even open-source projects that do a similar thing. Maybe someone in the adult industry would be interested in the domain name.

What about the application?

What appears to be the case – from what I understand about a beta that was never shown to me – is that the application “had legs”, especially give that the general trend in social messaging and networks is towards contextualising and adding privacy controls. But we may now never know.

What’s left now?

All that is left of Naked now is the old site, the blog, and some Flickr photos. The office in St. John’s Square, Clerkenwell, London has been vacated.

Update: The former development team can be contacted here, though luckily many are already sitting on job offers.

I’ve managed to twist the arm of the organisers of the upcoming Being Digital conference, and those nice people at Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials who are sponsors, to add another delegate place for me to give away. So I’m happy to announce that I’ve selected Phreadz to demo at the event, while a delegate place each will go to Qajack and Ki-Work, who both took the trouble to do an innovative video pitch. Apologies to those who didn’t make it, but there’s always a next time, plus TCUK readers can still get a hefty discount on a delegate place with this link and there is a discount offer of a £500 price to demo companies if you quote “TCUKDEMO” when you apply. If I manage to squeeze any more freebies out of the organisers, you’ll be the first to know.

Here are some of the more interesting video pitches on the original call for entries blogs post, starting with our winners (see after the jump).

Read More

UnLtdWorld, the niche social network aimed at social entrepreneurs, is adding a few new features. Among them, the Research Lab feature (which maps social entrepreneurship) now enables members to visualise a breakdown of all statistical data around a specific location and relevant to their personal network. The site will also be releasing a series of APIs to generate mashups with the data.

UnLtdWorld is fresh from being one of three startups singled out as winners at Startup2.eu. It’s supported by UnLtd — the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs – and was designed and developed by Curverider on their Elgg platform.

But there is one thing I think UnLtdWorld keeps missing in its pitch, and it’s something completely in contrast to their – very worthy – aims. It’s this: if you are going to enable people in socially deprived parts of world to improve the lot of their fellow man, there is one sector that ought to be very interested in either acquiring or taking a stake in this site: property developers.

Think about it. Say you managed to enable some selfless youth worker in London’s East End to get local kids to leave knife-weilding gangs and get back to school? What happens next? The area’s reputation improves and, at some point, property values rise.

Clearly I am going to Hell for thinking a platform for worthy causes could be owned by rapacious property developers. Oh well.

Phreadz is a new UK-based social multimedia conversation network of video, audio and photo blogging created via the desktop or from mobile devices. Currently in closed, invite-only Alpha (or “alfalfa” as the site prefers to call it) Phreadz is similar to Seesmic, the video conversations platform, but with Phreadz you can also automatically cross-post the multimedia to your blogs (Blogger, WP, TypePad, Livejournal) as well as images to a Flickr account, videos to a blip.tv account (and potentially a remote ftp location). It also works on mobile, posting videos with Flash Lite. Phreadz was built in entirety by “Kosso”, a British developer/entrepreneur.

At it’s simplest you just record a video post using a webcam and your web browser, then view replies from the community and keep track of the conversations by viewing the replies in a threaded / forum view or as simple lists. Phreadz has a main ‘lobby’ area (’the public timeline’) and also special ‘channels’ dedicated to a particular topic subject or ’show’.

You can bookmark any post or reply to let you jump back into the conversation in your own time. Replies can be subscribed to via RSS. It will also automatically encode recorded Flash to MPEG4 (and other formats) or MP3 for iTunes/podcasts. This is likely to be a ‘pro’ feature when Phreadz comes out of Alpha.

You can also send it photos, audio or video via email from you mobile phone (Nokia N95 or iPhone); send a link to your post via Twitter; receive notification of replies to your posts via email or Twitter Direct Message. And there are several other features and an API is in the works.

The key idea behind Phreadz is the ‘threaded view’ of content, be it video, images, text, audio or links and the desktop or mobile publishing and sharing.

Conversations are available as ‘channels’ for specific topics, brands or shows (in which a deal would be made with the brand for full customisation and delivery/hosting). A demo page has done this with the Indiana Jones movie launch – which, funnily enough – Seesmic participated in recently…

Soon to come is a private messaging feature for users who ‘follow’ eachother as well as private channels which could be a set up buy companies specifically for market research: for example, if a company wanted to interview customers and watch their reactions to questions about a product or service.

Kosso says Phreadz originated from an idea he had some time ago to deliver multimedia from the desktop or a mobile, and more recently as a way to communicate with his fiancee in Australia while he was in London. As an ex-BBC Online guy, Kosso previously built ‘moblogging’ system for the BBC News site’s coverage of CeBit in 2004. More recently he has worked for Podcast.com.

How is it funded? It’s one of the more originally-backed startups I’ve heard of. Kosso is bootstrapping Phreadz with the proceeds from a blogging system he built for users of the Second Life virtual world.

I personally like the interface to Phreadz a little more than Seesmic and there are more pointers to navigate the system. The channels aspect also makes the site more potentially interesting as a platform for media companies. Is it a Seesmic clone? Maybe, but it also appears to offer a lot more features than Seesmic right now. But until it comes out of closed Alpha its hard to know what reaction it will get.

Here are the pictures I took at the TechCrunch Barcelona Meetup this week (and some more). Thanks to everyone who came and thanks also to our sponsors, Nuroa and High Growth Partners (see below).

This is part of my TechCrunch Euro tour this summer to meet startups. Prior to the meetup I was a judge at Startup2.eu, a European tech startups competition where Zilok (France), UnLtdWorld (UK), and iFoods (Ireland) won out in a strong field of contenders. If your company would like to sponsor a TechCrunch meetup, and be promoted on TechCrunch as a sponsor, or if you’d like me to come to your own event, then please contact me.

Huge thanks to the TechCrunch Barcelona Meetup Sponsors:

nuroa is a property search engine operates in Spain and Germany. Users can find property ads from disparate websites in one location, where they can also review supplemental information such as video guides, relevant background information on neighborhoods, real estate blogs, etc. It’s run by migoa (Goa Internet Services), a Barcelona-based start-up founded by Gary Stewart and Oriol Blasco. Current angel investors include Albert Armengol (founder of eConozco, a Spanish business networking site later acquired by Xing), Dennis Bemmann (co-founder of StudiVZ, Germany’s largest social networking site, which was sold to Holtzbrinck Ventures for upwards of €50 million) and Didac Giribets (a local Catalan investor). The Company is in the process of closing its Series A round. Migoa has been consistently regarded as one of Europe’s most innovative companies in conferences such as Innovate Europe, Red Herring and Essential Web. The team’s 18 employees hail from 11 different countries.

Highgrowth Partners is an independent financial company that invests in innovative companies with growth potential and offers them support, advice and guidance. Founded in 2001, the Barcelona-based company seeks to invest between €0,3 and €3 million per portfolio company. Past investments include Archivel Farma, Baolab Microsystems, Futurlink, NTR Global, Solostocks and VozTelecom. Complementing the company’s venture capital activity, Highgrowth also places its experience in finance at the disposal of its clients, providing advice on key matters such as the purchase and sale of companies, feasibility studies for investment projects, diagnoses of the most suitable financial structures, design and management of financing schemes for investment projects.

Update: TCUK readers can get tickets at the reduced price of £250 with this link.

Being Digital is a conference on Jun 10 which will look at seven digital themes as well as running a startup competition with yours truly. Tickets cost £325 each but TechCrunch UK has one delegate ticket to give away to the best video comment left below this post.

It might be funny, clever, inspiring, cynical, you name it. Perhaps you’d like to comment on a recent TechCrunch story? Or lambast me? You decide.

But if you can’t come up with anything but still want to bring your startup to the event, then I have 1 (one) free demo place (£895 full value) going as well.

But you’re also going to also have to leave a video comment. Am I evil? Maybe. But it will be good practice for the video pitches they plan to run at the event. (Judges decision is final, etc)

For those of you with money (and keeping your dignity intact) there is a discount offer of a £500 price to demo companies if you quote “TCUKDEMO” when you apply. The demo area is sponsored by Sun who I think have some goodies for the winner.

Lastly, following a huge debate about the lack of women speakers at the event (typical quote: “Looks like a great event but was it really only possible to get 2 women speakers out of a total of 36? “), I am informed that the organisers are “working hard to ensure a more gender balanced programme” and “would be very happy to hear from TCUK readers with suggestions.”

So there you have it.

I’m trying to get around Europe this summer to meet startups. Tomorrow I am at Startup2.eu, a new competition for European tech startups. I’ll be on the jury during the day and in the evening we’re throwing a TechCrunch meetup on the cool terrace bar of local boutique hotel Granados 83. There are a growing number of startups in Barcelona, attracted by the lifestyle and the more reasonable office rents, as well as an international talent pool. If you would like to sponsor the event, and be promoted on TechCrunch as a sponsor, then please contact me ASAP.

To come along you need to register for a free ticket so we know how many people are coming. All the information you need is here.

And I’m delighted to say we have two key sponsors already, listed below. (Nuroa has been very helpful booking the venue):

nuroa is a property search engine operates in Spain and Germany. Users can find property ads from disparate websites in one location, where they can also review supplemental information such as video guides, relevant background information on neighborhoods, real estate blogs, etc. It’s run by migoa (Goa Internet Services), a Barcelona-based start-up founded by Gary Stewart and Oriol Blasco. Current angel investors include Albert Armengol (founder of eConozco, a Spanish business networking site later acquired by Xing), Dennis Bemmann (co-founder of StudiVZ, Germany’s largest social networking site, which was sold to Holtzbrinck Ventures for upwards of €50 million) and Didac Giribets (a local Catalan investor). The Company is in the process of closing its Series A round. Migoa has been consistently regarded as one of Europe’s most innovative companies in conferences such as Innovate Europe, Red Herring and Essential Web. The team’s 18 employees hail from 11 different countries.

Highgrowth Partners is an independent financial company that invests in innovative companies with growth potential and offers them support, advice and guidance. Founded in 2001, the Barcelona-based company seeks to invest between €0,3 and €3 million per portfolio company. Past investments include Archivel Farma, Baolab Microsystems, Futurlink, NTR Global, Solostocks and VozTelecom. Complementing the company’s venture capital activity, Highgrowth also places its experience in finance at the disposal of its clients, providing advice on key matters such as the purchase and sale of companies, feasibility studies for investment projects, diagnoses of the most suitable financial structures, design and management of financing schemes for investment projects.

The BBC’s SoundIndex, currently in beta, lists the top 1,000 artists based on discussions crawled from Bebo, Last.fm, Google Groups, iTunes, MySpace and YouTube. The top five bands according to SoundIndex right now are Coldplay, Rihanna, The Ting Tings, Duffy and Mariah Carey, but the index is refreshed every six hours and you can also drill down to more long tail content by creating a profile. Here are the Top Ten artists for a 27-39 year old male who likes Electronica and Indie music, with Ladytron topping that particular chart.

The more blog mentions, comments, plays, downloads and profile views an artist or track has, the higher up the Sound Index they are. So, the Sound Index is a music buzz index controlled entirely by the public. You can also limit it to one source like Last.fm. It’s similar to Songkick’s “Battle Of The Bands,” but Songkick uses different data, so the results are different again.

The muscle behind this is IBM’s Semantic Super Computing and the UK’s NovaRising and the project was devised by BBC Switch, BBC’s new teen service delivering content to 12 to 17-year-olds across multiple platforms, TV, Radio 1 and online.

So what what needs to happen now is that the BBC needs to release some of this data, perhaps on a platform, so that UK startups like Songkick can incorporate it into their service. But I guess they are safe – the commercial partners may not like that – so the BBC proves once more why Google was not built here. Trebles all round!

Update, 4 June: I now learn that the whole edifice will be shut down in July as it was only a beta test.

MinuteBox is a new site which bills itself as a market place for people to buy and sell short snippets of advice. It’s a full-on social network with all the usual features as well as in-built video chat. You put up your problem, “experts” bid on your request, users choose their advisor and buy their advice for as little at 50 pence per hour minute. It even has a billing and rating systems (which didn’t work for me I might add).

At least that’s the theory. In reality I think this site has about a snowflake’s chance in the white hot cauldron of a collapsing star, and it’ll probably be overwhelmed by porn merchants faster than you can say “charge for online video.” Assuming they find it.

Luckily there is a silver lining. It’s great frame for a site that might work, where the business model was rather more focused. At least the relatively light-weight RecommendBox has an angle (recommendations). MinuteBox is about as targeted as a jam sandwich. It reminds me of Horses Mouth, but even there they have never gone so far as to say their mentors could ever charge for their “wisdomocracy” (excuse me while I puke).

But founder Josh Liu appears to be young and cleary smart (recent MBA from Imperial college) so I think someone should snap him and his site up ASAP and set it to work on some other problem that’s a bit easier to address than solving the entire world’s problems a minute at a time. Sorry Josh – have another go mate.

UPDATE: I’m happy to acknowledge that there may be more to this that meets the eye, though I personally remain sceptical. Buyers can set their price higher than 50p per hour (or anything) so in theory there is a market mechanism to make this site work. Josh tells me there are other sites in this space include LivePerson, BitWine, and Wengo. BitWine recently started going to partners while Wengo is going for a pay-per-call expert network. I think I am just more of a fan of mobile “find an answer to this problem” than I am of online, because online people tend to search more often than consult experts.

This week new UK-based book social network BookRabbit sets out with a slightly different take on socialising online around books. BookRabbit is aimed at the ‘heavy’ book buyer (someone who buys more than four books a year).

People will find books they’ll like through their social network, but interestingly they will be able to tag up pictures of their bookshelves with a Flash-based application which lets them explore visually instead of via text. A little like Last.FM’s Audio Scrobbler software or Songkick’s artist profiler, BookRabbit’s “Automatic Bookcase” technology scans uploaded photos of bookcases against the ISBN database to populate a user’s profile and allow them to share tastes more easily. Initially the classifications will be monitored and regulated by BookRabbit, with the aim of reaching a ’self monitoring’ Wiki model in due course.

Lastly, it will aim at the long tail of independent book retailers and allow users to buy direct through these small traders or via BookRabbit. This generates business for the 2,700 IBRs in the UK. BookRabbit will also aim at these book enthusiasts by aiming at the ‘head of the tail’ with cheaper prices for the first 100,000 titles on Amazon.

Additional features on the BookRabbit website includes video interviews with 1,000 authors, book reviews and recommendations by publishers and authors, the ability to buy all books in a series and a sort of wiki interface for customers to add and edit new or missing books directly to the catalogue.

BookRabbit has also teamed up with ICUE to allow consumers to preview and buy the latest books on their mobiles. ICUE provides the first chapter of books directly to the mobile phones of consumers who have interacted with poster advertising. So you text ‘geri’ to 64888 to read an extract from Geri Halliwell’s new book Ugenia Lavender – assuming you’d want to.

BookRabbit has a good interface and I see no reason why it won’t have a fighting chance as a niche social network.

Over in Los Angeles, Goodreads, a social network focused on book lovers, managed to get to 650,000 registered users, near profitability and even a found of financing in their first year since launch. And LibraryThing was partially acquired in 2006 year by ABEbooks. Then there is Amazon-backed Shelfari and others. In the UK there is also StoryCode which launched way back in 2005 but hasn’t been heard of much since.

BookRabbit is trying to crack the main problem with book sites: they don’t passively monitor what you are reading. All you need to do with Last.FM is listen to music, but how can BookRabbit know what you are reading at any one time without you laboriously uploading a picture of your book-case?

Perhaps their software is one answer but I can’t help think there needs to be a lot more mobile phone aspects to this, not just the deal with ICUE. Hash Twitter-tagging of “#reading” perhaps.

Qype, the European reviews and ratings network in the UK, France and Germany, has launched an iPhone version unoriginally called “iQype”. If you’re reading this on a iPhone or iPod Touch it’s here.

Now, iPhone users can browse the 6,000 cities Qype has listed and the 200,000 user-generated reviews of bars, restaurants, cafes etc. That’s nice. But this is a startup with significant inventment from VC houses Advent Venture Partners and Partech International. Little old Trusted Paces in the UK, launched their iPhone version in November last year.

What would be more interesting would be to leverage Qype’s social network on the iPhone. They tell me messaging internally between Qype users will be added at some point and also the ability to send places to your friends via email, and possibly sms. There is limited profile support now. But why they didn’t go for broke on this now I don’t know because last time I looked there were few social networks spread across Europe in quite the same way. This is a great opportunity for Qype but the functionality is not there yet. Admittedly, TrustedPlaces has not done any more with their iPhone app either.

Secondly, Qype needs to make it more location aware about users. You can type where you are, like TottenhamCourt Road or you can use the iPhone’s location-finding ability to plot a route to the listed venue. That’s almost close to what a mobile social app might do – but perhaps they might be able to add a status bar to people’s profiles allowing them to set their location. That would create a mobile social network for the iPhone much closer to the ideal that Techcrunch has been talking about for a while.

UK-based Glubble, a free parental-control add-on for Firefox, has secured a $3 million funding round from existing angel investors to continue the development of its product, which also allows a family circle to link up via Firefox to decide what they can see online. Morten Lund, one of the first investors in Skype, is one of those existing angels. Founded in 2006 by Ian Hayward, Glubble had early support from Firefox users keen to have some kind of parental control on the open-source browser. The full software suite has been downloaded about 100,000 times. A premium service which will be available later in the year.

As I wrote over on TechCrunch.com, I’ll be heading out to the rest of Europe over the next few weeks, looking for and writing about the startups I meet along the way. Not quite Down and Out in Paris and London, but it should certainly be interesting. But I don’t want to forget my home turf! So if you are interested in helping me co-organise a TechCrunch meetup event in the UK (with sponsors of course), then get in contact. Here’s what we are doing in Berlin, for example, with the help of a partner who arranged the venue and wrangled sponsors.