RouteNote is a music distribution startup in the UK which offers unsigned or independent artists from anywhere the ability to get their music distributed to a bunch of online stores. Artists upload tracks to the RouteNote catalogue and select partnered retail outlets that they wish their music to be available through (e.g. Napster, Snocap, Samsung Mobile). There are no sign up fees and the bands keep all rights which are non-exclusive to Routenote. That means it differs from Tunecore (as there are no signup fees) or The Orchard (which takes a cut of revenue). Instead it monetises by taking a small percentage of sales. The percentages vary I gather.

I think this model generally works – unsigned or independent labels don’t want to pay money up front with no guarantees of selling anything, but they do want a route to market. Interestingly, Routenote offers bands access to places like the iTunes store which doesn’t deal with individuals or small record labels.

This is classic middle man stuff – they are an intermediary. The site differs from the likes of 7digital, which is more a download store which offers artists a storefront to sell direct to punters. The trouble is, just like a blog, people still need to be able to find you.

So they distribute to stores including iTunes, emusic, Limewire, Audio Lunchbox and Imeem among others. The latest store is Amazon MP3. Since their launch three months ago, they now have 440 artists and 1250 tracks online. Artists have the option of choosing which individual stores they want to participate with. They also film bands in their recording studios in Cornwall. The team of five is backed by angel funding.

Given that we are now in a major economic down-cycle (to put it mildly), raising money for a startup is likely to get a lot harder. But the broad consensus I am picking up on is that private seed investors will become more important for early stage startups. Why? Because if your are an individual with a pot of cash, you are not going to look to the stock market to bring you high returns any more. So there is an argument to say that you could, instead, put it into a potentially high-growth tech startup. You just have to find that company. The other issue is that VC firms will be more interested in later stage companies, plus drive valuations lower, and cherry-picking the startups they want to work with. So Angels will be more important in this current market.

To that end, I am starting a regular feature, called “Send me an Angel”. This will profile Angel investors in the tech space and ask them a set of questions about their approach to investing. I won’t be publishing their contact details as a rule, unless they are happy for this to happen. Why? Because these people are being generous enough to lay out for you their investment strategy. They don’t want to get spammed. However, I guess if you can find them the rest is up to you…

Our first Angel is Michael Smith, founder of Firebox.com and CEO of MindCandy

Official Bio:
In his early twenties Michael co-founded the online retailer, firebox.com. The first product firebox designed was The Shot Glass Chess Set, an unusual fusion of chess and alcohol. The bizarre game became an instant best-seller and stimulated the rapid growth of the company. firebox.com recently featured in 13th place on the Sunday Times Fast Track list of fastest growing companies in Britain. Not content with this business success, Michael launched Mind Candy in 2003, a developer on online reality games. Their first project Perplex City began soon after. Perplex City was a hit right up to February 2007 when the lost ‘cube’ was finally found. Michael is now taking Mind Candy in a completely different direction in the form of monsters! The new groundbreaking website allows children to adopt a pet monster on-line and learn and interact with other Moshi Monster owners.

1. What range of investments will you make in a startup? £50-100K? £100-200K, etc?

Sub £50k

2. What sectors will you definitely invest in right now? E,g, Consumer or Enterprise etc?

Consumer internet is where i’ve made all my investments to date. Anything I’d personally use is a big plus.

3. What sectors will you definitely not invest in right now?

Anything I don’t understand or am not excited by.

4. Outside of investment, what “value add” do do you think you bring to a young company or early stage team, e.g. is it you expertise, network, what?

Experience from a decade of running different web businesses and a strong US and UK network.

5. What combination of elements do you look for in the companies you choose to invest in? For instance do you look for people who have a sense of fun, and/or a great team, or an idea relevant to your own experience? What?

All my investments to date have been in friend’s businesses. I like investing in people I know, respect and trust. I don’t have time to review pitches from people I’ve never met before.

6. Do participate in syndicates/networks or in a round with bigger VCs, or do you “go at it alone”?

No preference.

7. How long do you foresee investing in a company for? 2 years? 5 years? What?

No set timescales

8. How has the current financial crisis affected your investment outlook? What’s your “runway” these days? (Runway is the length of time before the cash runs out before revenue kicks in to a startup).

Not changed things dramatically for me. Still very bullish on the web. Still believe there are huge opportunities out there. Deals are being priced a little more realistically now.

9. What level of involvement are you most comfortable being solicited for?

Very, very minimal. Am extremely busy with day job at Mind Candy so definitely not looking for board seats or deep involvement

10. What’s the “The Perfect Pitch” for you?

Someone I know pitching me on a business that I get instantly and could see my self personally using.

If instant messaging, and now mobile IM is a commodity market, then UK-based mobile startup Trutap has decided to try and become the aggregator of choice for the mainstream consumer. The TechCrunch40 finalist from 2007 now supports a host of IM protocols, accessible from within a slick Java interface. However it’s in a race with startups like Mig33, Nimbuzz, eBuddy, Palringo and MXit.

Trutap now supports MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ Facebook Chat, Google Talk, Rediff Bol and Jabber. But the list will be joined, in the next few weeks by MySpace, Gadu-Gadu, LiveJournal IM, Bonjour, Groupwise, IRC, XMPP, Sametime and Zephyr. As well as IM, Trutap offers free group messaging, as well as the ability to posting content to Blogger, Typepad and Photobucket. The additional IM services are alredy available within the current application, so there’s no need for users to upgrade their application. Ultimately, that will be more IM services than any other mobile application in the world, Trutap claims.

Trutap’s Java based app, which has 250,000 users so far, is really aimed at the feature-phone market, not smartphones, and in particular the massive mobile markets associated with emerging countries like Brazil and Russia. While the world seems in love with the iPhone, the reality is that the biggest mobile applications market remains Java.

Competitors include Fring, which recently launched an iPhone app and opened an API to developers, but Trutap also competes on different levels with startups like Mig33, Nimbuzz and MXit in South Africa. But Trutap has been smart to stay away from VOIP, which means they can deal more easily with operators and get the application pre-loaded onto handsets where possible. This also applies to eBuddy which requires no download and lives in the Cloud. On the iPhone Palringo has made a lot of traction and recently launched location-based services.

Mig33, by contrast, mixes up VoIP – anathema to most operators – with plugs into social networking and IM services, as does Nimbuzz. And while Nimbuzz has a rather heavy application download at around 1MB, Trutap’s comes in at less than 400k.

Stockholm -based Stardoll emerged from a simple Geocities page in the early part of the century, to “Paperdoll Heaven” in 2004. As Stardoll it took $4 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures in February 2006, and $6 million in a B Series round lead by none other than Sequoiain June the same year. Now it’s about to enter the Middle East after seeing growing traffic there.

It’s signed a partnership with Maktoob (an internet services company in the Middle East similar to TOM in China). Somewhere along the line Stardoll, which is essentially aimed at young girls (teens and “tweens”) dressing up dolls online, started to appeal girls in the Middle East. This is a region better known for women who wear the all-encompassing “hijab”. Clearly they are enjoying expressing themselves in a virtual manner, given that their real-world options are – broadly speaking – somewhat more limited than women in the West.

Maktoob is launching an all-new Arabic-language version of Stardoll today at the Dubai World Game Expo, available at stardoll.maktoob.com. The site is also available in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and United Arab Emirates.

Stardoll has about 20 million users worldwide an claims to have 8 million unique visitors every month – 94% of whom are teen and tween girls. Most users are girls between the age of 10 to 17 and online safety is a huge consideration. Stardoll adds a layer of anonymity to all accounts. Users can never reveal personal information such as their real name or city of origin on their pages. Joining the site for the first time, you start with 25 “star dollars” that can be used to buy accessories for each virtual doll. Accessories range from 1 – 35 star dollars with users able to buy additional star dollars at a rate set by the site.

And Stardoll appears to be going OK in the West too. Earlier this month Elle magazine struck a media partnership with Stardoll launch an e-magazine targeting style-conscious young women. Stardoll Magazine, which will offer personal style tips, exclusive videos and live chats with “notable fashion designers”.

Below are the latest jobs and classfied ads on CrunchBoard. Every week we showcase the top ads from the board to TechCrunch UK readers. Here’s the CrunchBoard UK RSS feed and you can subscribe to the email newsletter here. Post your ad up today for the limited special offer of £20 per ad.

Senior Web Developer London

Social Media/ Web 2.0 leader seeks Technical Delivery personalities!!

Search Engine Marketing Manager London

COO/CFO for Music/Tech Company London

Contract or Perm .Net C# Web Developer Required (No Agencies), South London

Technology Consulting Gerson Lehrman Group London

It’s cold and dark in November, especially in Finland. But you can’t keep a good Finn down! That’s why Slush is going to be a cool new event for tech startups showcasing all the major Finnish Internet era success stories from F-secure to Jaiku, from Habbo Hotel to MySQL, along with all the latest Finnish startups. TechCrunch UK is partnering with Slush, and we’ll be throwing a breakfast brunch event for 100 start-ups, entrepreneurs, investors and key industry players the day after the Slush conference, so you’ll be able to come along and network over some great Helsinki coffee. If you’re a Scandinavian or Baltic startup, then this should be an event right up your street. It will be on Tuesday, 25th Nov, 09:30am to 01:00pm.

We’ll kick off “TechCrunch Brunch @ Slush” with a panel on the startup economy in the region chaired by TEchCrunch UK editor Mike Butcher, followed by plenty of networking over brunch. The event is run in association with Slush and ArcticStartup and is sponsored by Muxlim.

Please see our registration page for more details

TechCrunch UK will be hosting TechCrunch Brunch @ Slush, an event organised by TwistedTree in association with rassami PR.

If you would like information on the Platinum, Gold, Silver or Bronze sponsor packages please contact Petra.Johansson[@]btinternet.com.

Platinum sponsor:

Muxlim is the world’s largest Muslim online community with users from over 190 countries across the world. The site is the official Finland nominee to the World Summit Awards 2009, for the “e-Inclusion & Participation” category.

Event partner:

ArcticStartup, founded in 2007, is the leading weblog reviewing and reporting on internet and mobile software startups and growth entrepreneurship from the Nordic and Baltic countries.

LinkedIn has today launched its OpenSocial applications platform and one of the first providers will be UK collaboration and project management startup Huddle.net. In fact, it is the only European company on the applications provider list.

Huddle Workspaces will be a bespoke application inside LinkedIn’s service with all the key functionality of its main service. In a nutshell you can create a Huddle workgroup from within Linkedin, and vice versa, if you create a project inside Huddle’s system you can link it to you LinkedIn account later on.

When you install the application on your LinkedIn account (you can do it here) Huddle creates a workspace for you so you can start uploading or creating files, have discussions and invite your LinkedIn connections to collaborate on a project. If you’re an existing Huddle user then you can link your account to LinkedIn and see all of your existing workspaces within the Linkedin app. This is essentially a cut-down version of the main Huddle application, designed to fit within Linkedin’s platform.

The move should be good for adoption of the platform – LinkedIn’s 30 million users are largely business people who will now be exposed to Huddle’s services. As TechCrunch reports, launch available applications include a trip application from TripIt, presentations from SlideShare and Google Presentations, blog feeds from WordPress and Six Apart, file storage and collaboration from Box.net, online workspaces from Huddle, and a Reading List app from Amazon that will allow users to share the books they are reading. LinkedIn is also offering a few homebrewed apps, including a tracking application that monitors for a company’s mentions on Twitter and a Poll app.

Significantly, Huddle is understood to have begun negotiations to go onto LinkedIN’s platform when they were on the Web Mission trip earlier this year, thus proving the validity and importance of such trips. That should shut up some of those negative critics who thought nothing would come of the project.

This is not set on stone as it really depends on finding the right kind of person. If I don’t find them then there’s no vacancy. But anyway: I’m looking for an intern for TCUK. Someone curious (ok, very curious) about Web/Mobile tech startups, possibly (probably!) already blogging and willing to take direction. Ideally located in London. Also there is some database work to be done in terms of plugging in info about European startups into our database, called CrunchBase. It’s about 1, maybe 2, hours work a day, 5 days a week, but those 1-2 hours could probably be at any time of the day. Would probably suit a student studying startups… maybe. It helps if the person is comfortable working virtually via IM, Twitter, SMS etc, but there will be the occasional ‘real world’ meeting. Internship to last for a fortnight initially, maybe longer. In return this person gets to understand the UK and European tech startups scene better and will get some promotion on TCUK. Please email mike [at] mbites.com with your ‘pitch’ for why you should do this. Thanks.

Back in July I got a little tired of the perennial problem that hampers the development of startup eco-systems in the UK and Europe: The lack of definable geographic clusters where startups can congregate. This is not just a “nice to have”. Silicon Valley became a big deal – admittedly after decades – because people there were largely in tech. They met eachother and started things together. In the UK there have been lots of regional initiatives. But few centre on London because it’s usually considered big enough to take care of itself. However, without re-running all the arguments in that post, this view ignores the fact that London is now a huge trading hub for US investors and tech companies to meet UK and European companies. That’s something a ‘tech hub’ (however defined) in London could take advantage of.

So I wondered out loud about starting a debate on exactly where the “TechHub” was, or should be, in London. We had lots of comments on the post (69) and clearly it turned out to be an issue worth discussing.

A day later, unknown to me without any fore-warning, the meme about Silicon Roundabout broke in the press and talk of a “TechHub” now seemed rather a “top down”, imposed concept. Clearly there was a large organic hub (check out the map of startups there) forming in the Old Street / Kings Cross / Shoreditch / Farringdon borders areas. This makes a lot of sense. The office property is cheaper, many engineers/developers live in these areas, plus it has great transport links to Heathrow and the Eurostar.

Frankly, I forgot about it after that. Who needs someone banging on about socially engineering a cluster when one is actually forming? Just sit back and watch it grow.

However, clearly a few more people were interested in the idea. We’ve now had the emergence (or should I say branding?) of Digital Riverside (just South of the Thames) here’s a full map of startups in the area. Huddle is doing it’s part in London Bridge, with some hotdesks supported by Sun Startup Essentials, now housing Veedow, Rummble, TheCareerMole, Seedcamp winners’ Basekit and UberVU plus a Sun Startup Essential hotdesk recently used by BookingBug. The rest of the area has Xero.com, Reevoo, Truphone, SmithBayes, Masabi, Wigadoo, Globant, Parkatmyhouse, Headshift, Admoda and Periscopix. Moo is building an little eco-system of its own in its voluminous offices right on the Old St roundabout, and is surrounded by even more companies than that.

And there are a few more slightly engineered meetups/areas forming: Silicon West, “Soho Valley/OpenSoho” and perhaps a few more attempts will appear.

King’s Cross also recently got a new an interesting venue in the form of The Hub which looks like a it might be a nice venue for co-working as it is a kind of mashup of a “member’s club, an innovation agency, a serviced office and a think-tank” (a tad reminiscent of Place perhaps…).

But the most interesting development was that I started getting contacted by people interested in the property angle.

Perhaps this is to be expected, but unlike most property entreprenuers they actually seemed to genuinely be into the like the idea of a TechHub.

Paul “Fletch” Christian, a genuine tech entrepreneur and founder of the Liveaps startup, has thus sought out an actual 5 storey building which could house around 175 people – including meeting rooms/cafe, roof garden etc. He blogs about it here (btw the building in question is not the one in the video on that post). He is looking for feedback about whether to go ahead with the idea or not so I encourage you to email him if this sounds interesting to you.

Meanwhile a chap called Peter Storey who runs a serviced office business down in Bow in an old garment factory enthusiastically threw up a blog called Techlondon.org and has even suggested surrounding the project with “a network of mentors, angels, etc who understand very early stage tech”. He too is looking for interested parties and companies to join up and make presentations to the LDA , NESTA, etc. Here’s his email.

So there you have it – a run-down of just some of the activity surrounding the idea of clustering tech companies in London. Let’s hope these efforts blossom. Bloom, even.

London-based Playfish – which we speculated at one point was doing very well out of its social games on Facebook – has raised a whopping $17 million series B round led by Accel Partners and Index Ventures. This confirms the growing view that VCs will start to put more money into their strongest performing portfolio companies than into riskier early stage startups. Kevin Comolli, from Accel Partners and Ben Holmes from Index Ventures, will both join its board of directors. The company will now expand with four international offices and onto other platforms outside of Facebook. TechCrunch has more detail here.

Playfish now has over 10 million monthly active users on Facebook (around 1.5 million daily) and two billion monthly minutes of play time in under a year.

CEO Kristian Segerstrale is a big proponent of casual games and told me last month:

Social gaming is a very hyped area currently and there will be challenges ahead for sure, but I think the fundamentally new gaming behaviours we’re creating today will make a profound impact on the $50Bn games industry over time. And it’s that more than today’s numbers is what makes me excited about it all.

The TechWeb/O’Reilly Web 2 Expo Europe event in Berlin last week saw some Silicon Valley stallwarts come together with Europe’s Web 2.0 crowd. They were joined by a bunch of startups all trying to get some exposure to a swathe of VCs who flew in to work the halls and walk disinterestedly passed the Expo booths. This year the event was much better located and in a hugely better venue (by Alexanderplatz, the heart of the old East Berlin and near Mitte where many tech companies now reside). It was also somewhat smaller compared to last year, which made for a better event overall.

But the best buzz of the event – at least for startups – was generated most by the antics of the less formal opening day when startups came to a well-organised “Pitchcamp” to work on their pitches and showcase themselves to potential partners, investors and the press. The 12 judges assembled to be as blunt as possible about the startups were a pretty experienced bunch.

In case you hadn’t heard, many European startups don’t get a lot of opportunity for to pitch themselves, and believe me, the majority need the practice. (That’s why TechCrunch UK has been organising such events itself in the UK and around Europe). Straight after Pitchcamp was O’Reilly more “official” Startup Ignite event where six startups pitched their wares before three judges (including moi). This followed the format of judges “tweeting” their feedback in a notional 140 character Twitter. The format kind’ve worked, until my own feedback started sounding more like bad, short-form poetry… Here’s the whole 44 minute video of the session.:

But back in Pitchamp, the startups were ranked by judges. The winner ended up being Wuala, which we’ve written about extensively. In second place was Youcalc. And – can you believe it – there was a three-way tie for third place which went to Amazee, Plista and SofaTutor.

Here’s a run-down of the startups across the two events, in alphabetical order.

aka-aki
Covered here, is the Berlin-based and soon-to-launch UK mobile social network, with a mobile java app which tracks you around as you interact in the real world with other members. The app enables mobile networking via Bluetooth and there is control via privacy settings, such as transmiting that you are single only to other singles . In the UK a number of startups are trying to crack this MoSoSo (mobile social software) nut such as Weglu, BuddyPing, TruTap, Next2Friends as well as Zyb and Eccosphere elsewhere. But no-one else has done what Aka-Aki has done – make the app hook into multiple platforms from Bluetooth, to GPS, to WiFi. Definitely one to watch.

Amazee
Combine Facebook Causes pages with Basecamp and the ability to take PayPal and credit card donations, and what do you get? Zurich-based startup Amazee. As well as taking donations, projects can also sell banner ad space on their home pages and the revenues are shared between the project and Amazee. The site is headquartered in Zurich and has an office in San Francisco. Amazee camp is a free offer to organisations for 6 months. Our review is here.

Buzzmedia
Buzzmedia’s Pavel Neuman, a Czech startup guy with Czech blog Buzzmedia had a tough time. He didn’t impress too much without slides, a demo, or an eloquent pitch, but he was saved by seed investment giant Yossi Vardi defending his idea to the assembled crowd. “I’ve known this guy since he was 7! He’s great!”. Unfortunately, few people know what he actually pitched, still. I asked him to email me a pitch. I’m still waiting. [Update: I found a Czech run-down of his pitch, translated: "Paul in his speech a bit lost and jerky. It wants to sell advertising on blogs and a European offer of the media, I understand only because I know and that I gave my blog like this is available." I think only Yossi can save him now].

Doodle
Doodle is a free web app which helps finding suitable dates for group events, like an appointment, a conference call, a family reunion, etc. It’s been around for a while but is now growing at about 20pc a month and is now doing an API. I’ve been using it for a year or so personally and it works very well. Zurich based.

Floobs
Floobs, is an upcoming company from Finland, which allows users to create live internet and mobile TV channels for broadcasting live, or prerecorded shows. The service is currently in beta and is designed to be integrated into existing social networking services for lifestreaming. Right now it doesn’t have a lot to distinguish itself from other similar services and it would have been nice if they’d uploaded some footage from Web 2 Expo for starters if that’s their USP.

iDesktop.tv
I wrote about it in 2007 and it has come a long way. It’s a great way of creating custom players for YouTube videos with some 15 different players and playlist types and 300 options to customise. It’ll give a more professional look to your videos that can be created in 10 mins. Here are some examples. These guys are basically still students, so they’ve achieved a lot just bootstrapping, but it still looks more like a feature application than a real company at this stage.

Netzsprecher
Two guys with a system to allow people to use their voice to integrate voice enabled, VOIP-driven features into communities, blogs and other websites. Plenty more like them, but the team is strong enough with VOIP expertise. This is not a million miles away from Spinvox’s social approach except it use VOIP.

Plista
Plista – a TechCrunch 50 Demo-pit company – is a widget, API integration or browser plug-in which recommends content to users as they browse. No site cooperation is needed. Sounds too simple right? It follows what you like and don’t across sites. Plista’s Greasemonkey script places a ratings box on each element of a site and rates it to your preferences. The recommendation engine works across sites, so it’ll recommend content on one site based on what you told it about content you liked on another. Right now there is no Plista social network, but the idea is to launch a portal later on. The Webware blog thought it was “MyBlogLog meets Sphere, with a dash of Matchmine”. That puts it in competition with sites with other ratings systems, like Amazon, but it’s advantage is it works across these sites. Interestingly Plista hasn’t taken venture money yet and may not need it as it devotes part of its team to consulting while working on the project. Overall, if Plista can get user traction, it’s going to look very good, because it will effectively create a kind of ad-network based on recommendations.

SnipClip
SnipClip is interesting. It takes content and turns it into a game which you can then monetise – quite a trend at the moment. Their war-cry is “Paid content is back!”, for the reason being that content owners aren’t getting much money from their digital assets (then again, some content owners maybe spend too much creating it). So if people won’t pay for content online, but they are getting more addicted to social gaming then that’s an opportunity for media providers to provide content in the form of a game. SnipClip turns content into “digital collectables” which users then collect as part of a game. Here’s their demo, in Silverlight, alas.

SofaTutor
Given that the average student can pay as much as 150 euros a month for private tutoring (that’s a 2 billion Euro market), Sofatutor is designed to bring that teaching online and disrupt that market with an offering which costs 10 euros a month. Competitors like Tutor.com or TutorVista screen tutors for cheap lessons but Sofatutor instead will make, solicit and filter quality white-board style video from users to explian subjects using in-house editors. Video makers will get a cut of the revenue – a smart model. Instructional video sites like 5Min and VideoJug rely on advertising, but Sofatutor will go for a subscription fee model and aim at 6.5 million 15-year-old plus students in Germany.

SoundCloud
We like Soudcloud. This German startup that launched in October allows artists to upload a file once and easily distribute it to whomever they’d like. It’s really aimed at industry professionals, including artists, music labels, and producers and it really is done very, very well. Artists get profiles and a music widget for their tracks which allows them to open up their tracks to comments from outside visitors. Crucially, artists can specify how much control their users will have over their content. It may be hard to drag true sound technicians away from their mixing desks but there is a very long tail of music people who are going to love these tools. At the Startup Ignite event I said SoundCloud was “Cloud computing becomes a rock star, gets drunk, sleeps with a groupie and throws a TV out of the hotel window.” I meant it.

Stupeflix
We’ve covered Stupeflix since their emergence in June and Seedcamp win in September, but this is essentially like Animoto but without the wait. Stupeflix automatically generates professional looking videos out of pictures, music and videos. So a real estate agent could convert all their video for distribution onto all socials platforms. And unlike Animoto they are developing the API before the site and intend to integrate the payment system within the API, as Amazon does with its web services.

TripShake
TripShake is service for travelers where users can ask questions and receive useful information from other users to help them plan their trips. The idea is to turn it into a personal travel agent, taking the traveler through choosing and buying a trip using semantic tech. Revenues would come from transactions, affiliates, professional accounts for travel agents. Tripshake is based in London but is being developed in Italy – great to see an Italian startup for a change.

Wuala
We’ve covered Wuala a lot in the past. This is social online storage – think an encrypted BitTorrent meets a storage service. We like. After eschewing venture for a while, they are now looking for a VC round.

Youcalc
Youcalc is a “smart” widget which produces Interactive charts that “bring data to life”. It’s a widget gallery, a widget creation tool, and a community of widget users and widget developers. Think “YouTube meets graphs” – which is a pretty killer niche if you could get traction.

Txtr
Apart from the rather “add an R to end of the domain” brand, txtr looks like a really interesting platform for a niche market: Me. I love text and deal with it all of the time, and most peole don’t give it the respect it deserves. Instead they format it, bold it and generally warp it. Me, I just like plain text. So I’m excited about the possibilities. Txtr will be a “platform for connected reading”, letting you follow what your friends read, storing your private notes, and allowing allows mobile access to your text (the bit I most like) such as books, documents, news etc. Wizpac Ltd is the company behind txtr, was founded in early 2008 by a group of serial entrepreneurs and book enthusiasts, including Andreas Steinhauser and Frank Rieger, who developed what is now Nokia Maps. However, looking at the app itself it still needs work in terms of giving a few pointers about how to make it work for you best. It has lot of potential however and I am looking forward to the iPhone app in December. If they can make a “cloud” version of DevonThink with an iPhone app that syncs the text then I will be a happy man.

As a footnote, TechCrunch UK also ran an impromtu pitch at the Expo, the podcast of which is here and it featured:

Zootool – collect and share you favourite images form the Web.

Cellity – Low-cost telephone calls and text messages via free software for low-end mobile phones.

Babbel – Language learning site profiled here.

Mloovi – profiled here.

Tribax – Create your own white-labelled social network.

LearnitLists – A widget for a learning a new word everyday from your chosen language

PassPack – the online password manager

What’s a good strategy when about 1,000 developers and startups converge on one point? Throw a Techcrunch party of course. So it was with some relish that we threw an end of conference networking event for startups following the Web 2.0 Expo Europe O’Reilly / TechWeb conference in Berlin. We decided to call it LateCrunch, opened up tickets and over 300 people turned up. Result!

But, there was method to this madness. If European startups are going to weather the coming nuclear winter they are going to need eachother, for support, advice and connections. That’s a harder environment to create when the European tech scene is so spread out. So we did our best to network everyone to death – even to the point of subjecting them to an Air Guitar competition (see the evidence in the pictures and movie below – Berliners really know to to play Air Guitar! Our winner won an iPod Shuffle and we also raffled an iPod Nano). There are lots more pitctures of Facebook, such as Pavel Neuman’s Buzzboot collection.

Held in the HomeBase Lounge, LateCrunch was graciously given the status as the official Web 2.0 Expo Euro After-Party, and generously sponsored by the following companies. A huge thanks to our sponsors!

Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services, providing Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), and Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Aventiv
Aventiv created NomaDesk, the world’s first virtual fileserver for nomadic businesses.

Blurb
Blurb is a creative publishing platform which enables every blogger, artist, marketer, photographer, traveler, entrepreneur and poet to create and sell their own book.

Gimahhot
Gimahhot is Amazon Marketplace with bargaining. Users can either buy at the merchants’ offer prices or they can also enter a price that they would buy the certain product for.

Plista
Plista, a user-centric personalization and recommendation network that works across multiple websites. It allows enhancing online experience by recommending more relevant content, products and advertising in real-time. It works as a widget, per API integration or browser plug-in. plista delivers on-site as well as cross-site recommendations. It allows the publishers to monetize websites, promote items and target customers individually.

Quidco
Quidco is an online shopping collective where members earn cashback on their purchases and connect with other like-minded consumers.

Rummble
Rummble makes it easier to find people and places nearby that you will like. It works anywhere – you can use it at home or on the move via your mobile.

Sun Microsystems
Exclusively for startups, the fee-free Sun Startup Essentials program offers deep discounts on industry leading systems and storage products, massively scalable Web hosting services, plus free training and technical advice. Build your business on an infrastructure that scales right along with your success. Sun Startup Essentials Programme is now expanding across Europe, if you are a startup and want to build your business to scale now, then sign up here today.

Winston & Strawn
Winston & Strawn is an international law firm with over 950 attorneys in the across the USA as well as in London, Paris, Geneva and Moscow.

zanox
zanox is a leading company for performance-based online marketing and provides a global platform for efficiently marketing products and services on the Internet. zanox offers global solutions for efficient commercialisation of products and services in the Internet for advertiser and supports publisher in achieving sales out of their traffic.

Zendesk
Zendesk provides on-demand Web 2.0 help desk solutions. Using turnkey SaaS delivery, Zendesk deploys in minutes and provides a complete support community portal that lets customers communicate directly with the internal help desk. 500 customers from all over the world already use Zendesk. Love your help desk!

Last week we reported that Next2Friends had come out with what appeared to be the first application for the BlackBerry Curve and Pearl handsets to stream live video to the Web, in a similar fashion to early players like Qik, Flixwagon, and Kyte. That’s pretty interesting because till now the BlackBerry has been a bit like the PC guy in those Mac ads – a little dorky, without those cool new web apps.

So far mobile video streaming has been largely relegated to Symbian S60, Windows Mobile and jailbroken iPhones. [Update: It's worth noting that Qik now supports the Motorola Q Series phones, a J2ME platform which is pretty mainstream 5 months ago, as well as several mass market SE and Nokia handsets]. Now the startup has also come up with a streaming video app for the new BlackBerry Bold smartphone which may drag Crackberry users away from their email for once. Video is streamed live to the user’s account which has links and embeds. Next2Friends also supports Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG and Samsung.

However, outside of the Blackberry market, it’s going to be more interesting when they release their application for the Motorola Razr next Monday. The Razr is one if the biggest selling phones in the US, and was a hot seller for a while in Europe. If video streaming hits those lower-end phones then the whole concept will seriously mainstream the activity far quicker than creating an app for high end phones.

I ran an informal “TechCrunch Pitch!” event at Web 2.0 Expo Europe, Berlin 2008 this week. Each startup gets a minute to pitch their idea and then the crowd decides who won. I recorded it as a 25 minute podcast, below. My apologies for the sound quality. I will get this right one day… The winner of the pitch was… You’ll have to listen to find out. Ah, ok, it was Babbel and Cellity came second (as voted by the assembled crowd).

Featuring pitches from:
Zootool
Cellity
Babbel
TripShake
Mloovi
Tribax
LearnitLists
PassPack
CreativeExpert

And now here’s the video from Christian Payne (aka @Documentally):

Berlin’s startup scene was rocked today when one of it’s premier companies lost its CEO in apparent management putsch. studiVZ, the Facebppk-like social network which was bought by publishing group and investor Holtzbrinck for $112m after only two years, said goodbye to CEO Marcus Riecke in a tellingly curt statement. He will be replaced by Vice President of Sales Dr. Clemens Riedl (Google translation):

Change of Management at studiVZ Ltd.

Stuttgart (AP) – The publishing group Georg von Holtzbrinck following changes in its subsidiaries studiVZ Ltd. [would like it to be] known: Marcus Riecke, CEO of studiVZ Ltd., is leaving the company at his own request with immediate effect.

In addition to his duties as Vice President of Sales, Dr. Clemens Riedl took over the task of studiVZ Ltd CEO. Dr. Riedl was in August this year as a long-time manager of Holtzbrinck Tagesspiegel to studiVZ Ltd.

“We thank Marcus Riecke for his very successful work in studiVZ Ltd. And its contribution to the development of the company,” said Dr. Jochen Gutbrod, Deputy CEO of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, and for online business.

My sources tell me that Riecke’s departure is related to an internal war the company is having between those who want to throw in the towel and offer to sell to Facebook, which with 800,000 users severely lags behind studiVZ’s 10m, and those who want to tough it out for the foreseable future.

Facebook is currently trying to gain more users by engineering a grass-roots marketing campaign but will have trouble denting studiVZ’s lead.

Can an e-commerce company scale like a web app? The answer, as we all know, is no. However, given that Amazon ’scaled’ by creating a market for items which could fit through a letterbox, a UK company plans to do the same – this time with food, specifically healthy food like nuts and dried berries.

Graze is a new UK startup created by Graham Bosher, ex of LoveFilm, who decided he wanted to eat better in the office but was working in a location which made this near impossible. As he happened to be responsible for LoveFilm’s delivery platform (1 million+ postal transactions a week) he put two and two together and Graze was born. The LoveFilm connection is strong. The three non-execs on the board are William Reeve (LoveFilm/Screenselect Founder), Simon Morris (LoveFilm’s Marketing Director), Mark Livingstone (LoveFilm’s ex CEO). Backers including Saul & Robin Klein of TAG and Arts Alliance Ventures.

The idea is that Graze makes it easier for people to eat healthily at work and combine this with value (useful in these credit-crunch times). They delivery a full letter-box-sized box of healthy food (nuts, berries, dried fruit etc) straight to a desk for less than an empty box (the delivery charge) of an online supermarket. Graze launched 3 weeks ago and – they say – it’s spreading virally in offices throughout the country.

Graze of course is limited by the need for a warehouse. But if it can be as efficient as Amazon’s then I guess the idea can ’scale’ to whatever that can take.

Update: Here’s a video from a recent customer…

Muslim social network Muxlim.com, live since late 2006, is planning to launch a Muslim-oriented virtual world not unlike Second Life. The idea is that something tailored to the Muslim world would be allowed through the IP-blocks of countries like United Arab Emirates which currently stops access to virtual worlds and online games considered unsuitable or offensive to Muslim culture. The virtual world is said to launch in 4-6 weeks and will “allow the opportunity to wear a hijab, and go to prayer rooms.” Muxlim itself is your standard social network offering community features, blogs and video sharing. The revenue model will be VIP accounts, virtual gifts, virtual furniture/clothes, themes/styles, profile applications, advertising, branded communities and physical merchandise like t-shirts.

Although there are well over one billion people who identify themselves as Muslim, I see this site as appealing primarily to slightly more ‘westernised’ Muslim world. In the UK alone there are over three million Muslims with an estimated £21 billion annual spending power (with a fair proportion of this oil-related money Ok I concede that in fact, in the UK, most Muslims are not from the Middle East).

Ashar Saeed, vice-president of Muxlim.com reckons that by setting up a Muslim virtual world they’ll be able to attract sponsorship from the likes of brands like Coca-Cola, which already advertise in other online worlds. Launched in December 2006 in Finland, the site 1.5m unique monthly visitors and is backed by Finnish and Swedish money, sepcifically Swedish VC Rite Internet Ventures (also backer of Nebula, the largest Finnish hosting provider and Nyheter24.se, the Swedish online tabloid).

Qwitter is an interesting new Twitter app. It basically sends you an email telling you when someone unfollows you on Twitter and includes your last twitter update in that message. Whether they unfollow you for that last tweet or not, who knows, but it may have some relation to why someone unfollowed you.

The site is up and down right now as it seems to have got a lot of interest, for obvious reasons. As Ireland-based co-developer Eoghan McCabe says, this “changes the game for Twitter-based relationships”. Now, you can’t secretly unfollow friends or associates anymore. If someone unfollows you, you’ll know and you’ll be able to ask them why. That means it may break up a few twitter friendships. Then again, it may even improve a few. At least you’ll be able to ask someone why they unfollowed you. Maybe people will will learn to use Twitter in a smarter way?

Below are the latest jobs and classfied ads on CrunchBoard. Every Friday we showcase the top ads from the board to TechCrunch UK readers. Here’s the CrunchBoard UK RSS feed and you can subscribe to the email newsletter here. Post your ad up today for the limited special offer of £20 per ad.

Contract or Perm .Net C# Web Developer Required (No Agencies), South London

Technology Consulting Gerson Lehrman Group London

Product Manager Huddle.net London (London Bridge)

Web Developer Huddle.net London (London Bridge)

QA and Test Automation Engineer Huddle.net London

Wanted: Somewhere to crash in Berlin for Web 2.0 Expo 21-23rd October

E-Commerce Software Developer Actinic Software LImited

Search Engine Optimisation Executive latitudegroup.com

Marketing Manager Optimor Oxford Internet

Lead PHP / Python Developer (seniority not required)

There are a bunch of live video streaming apps for mobiles now: Qik, Flixwagon, Kyte and more. But till now the BlackBerry has been the unloved guy in the grey sit, sitting in the corner, unable to join the party. Qik is on Symbian S60, Windows Mobile and jailbroken iPhones. The others tend to be Symbian apps. But now the business guys can join the fun as UK-startup Next2Friends now has an app running for the BlackBerry Curve and Pearl handsets. The company already supports Symbian S40 and S60 devices as well as Windows Mobile 6 handhelds, so that’s something they can hold over the others for now. An iPhone app can’t be far away.

To get it you sign up to the Next2Friends site, download the app to your ‘Berry, then live stream video to you Next2Friends site account. The videos can also be shared to social networks like Facebook.

I covered Next2Friends more extensively back in January when they released a bunch of mobile apps tied to their online service. One of which is the “Tag & Meet” Bluetooth social networking application which looks interesting – though is largely un-monetisable and relies on others having the app, as is usually the problem with mobile socnets.