It will cost £12 billion, be run by private companies and track every move you make on the internet, every call, text message and every transaction. Yes, this is the UK government proposal to manage and run a communications database that will make Chinese attempts to control and monitor its citizens look like “light touch” regulation.

The only difference with one-party states like China (ok, so apart from the summary trials and executions) is that the government claims that it will not look at the content on our every electronic interaction, but merely at the points of entry. The “pings”, if you like, to use a geek term.

Of course, this is incorrect. By building up a database about our movements – our morning rituals of checking emails, visiting web sites, buying online – this will build up a pattern. This in itself is “content”. This will create a pattern of recognition about our movements. Plus how long would it be before they start to argue that they need to see the content as well? Curiously, because so few people in China – relatively speaking – are online and/or using credit cards, China will look pretty free compared to our electronically driven society.

I could write a 1,000 more words more on this subject. For now the scale of the project beggars belief. From a government which has presided over countless numbers of security breaches, including a missing CD containing every child’s name and address in the UK, it is an amazing act of hubris. Plus, it comes in the wake proposals by the Ministry of Truth (Ok, so the Department of Culture, Media and Sport) to regulate content. So now we are watched as we go online, and the content we view is to be rated and standardised. Welcome to Britain in the 21st Century.

The more salient point to note for TechCrunch readers is that the impact on British online business will be significant. At a time when one of the few areas of growth in the economy is the digital sector, the UK government wants to look over the shoulder of the consumer when they go online. Will this make them feel safer, or preyed upon? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Demotix, a new startup coming out of London, is taking a pretty interesting approach to reinventing the newswire and with the wave of news coming out of the Israel/Palestinian conflict right now it is coming into its own. If you ever wanted to know what life and death was like on the ground in the middle of a war, this is it.

The idea is simple: anyone can shoot video or photos at a news event like a protest and upload the content to the site. The site only takes photos right now but text and video are due soon. Everyone who uses Demotix will keep the copyright and the right to remove the images from the website. The non-exclusive images will be sold for anywhere from between $150- $3,000, and videos will be sold by $500-$1,000/minute. Demotix shares 50 percent of the revenue from each sale with the person who contributed the content. Demotix has six-full time staff members and six full-time interns. The site has launched in Beta but in the next fortnight launches a full version, along with an Arabic version.

Founded by Jonathan Tepper and CEO Turi Munthe, the latter is a former journalist who realised that with old media declining in revenues the consequent impact on on-the-spot reporting and investigative journalism is huge. In its place has come what he calls Churnism – re-publishing AP or Reuters-like wire stories and pulling journalists out of the world’s hot-spots because they are just too expensive to run. In 2007, there were only 141 U.S. foreign correspondents in print and broadcast media, and there are currently only four newspapers that maintain foreign bureaus (The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the LA Times). In the UK, The Independent is in the process of cutting more than 60% of its staff, including 60 reporters.

Demotix doesn’t need to maintain a global network of staff reporters and its contributors get paid when it does. However, with many potential contributors living under repressive regimes, Demotix goes to some lengths to protect identities. Metadata inside photographs about the time of day or event or the owner are removed before the image is uploaded to the site. And the site uses a Tor system to scramble IP addresses from where photos are uploaded.

But the history of “UGC photo agencies” is patchy. Kyle MacRae founded a similar UGC picture agency in 2005 called Scoopt after realising that CNN’s coverage of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami had largely consisted of photographs or videos by people caught up in those horrific events. It also sold pictures direct to newspapers and magazines, splitting the fee 50/50 with the photographer. However the site ran out of steam, largely because the idea was pretty ahead of its time. Camera phones are only now common place in global hotspots. The site was bought by Getty Images last year and MacRae left to pursue other ventures. There are now other similar UGC photo agency sites. For instance, Yahoo runs You Witness News in partnership with Reuters.

However, Demotix might now get traction because the core technology – better cameraphones – is now commonplace.

And the content is pretty raw as you can see from this kind of imagery (warning NSFW) from Gaza, and above.

Munthe, an English-French-Swedish raised in London, has also worked at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. His research into the radicalization of terrorism lead him to believe that the aggressive approach, such as sanctions and bombs, doesn’t work. He thinks the “civil society approach”, where populations are allowed to vent their frustration via media, works better and takes “the lid off the pressure cooker.” Who knows if social media can actually help, but the idea that the suffering of your community can be communicated to the world may be of some consolation, however limited.

The site’s name, Demotix, is derived from the word ‘demotic‘, meaning ‘of the people’, a description coined by the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC to describe the form of writing used and most easily understood by the man in the Alexandrian street in 196 BC.

Update: As a commenter below points out there is also a French start-up called CitizenSide (formerly Scooplive).

Update II: This post caused a lot of controversy because in its original form it showed some very graphic pictures from the Israel/Palestinian conflict happening at the moment. Something you’d expect when a war was happening. Unfortunately the detail of the post was lost in the debate about the appropriateness of the imagery, plus I was accused of favouring one side over another. This was profoundly not the intention, but it was clear I had stumbled unwittingly into a political area because the post largely carried pictures of Palestinians under siege and no pictures of Israelis under rocket attacks. Unfortunately this was not done to favour one side – I simply couldn’t find any of the latter kinds of pictures on the site, simply because no Israelis had uploaded any at that time. This is clearly a failing of a picture agency which relies purely on user-generated content, in that it leaves it to “the crowd” to gather the footage – and the crowd is not usually out to be balanced. I’ve now removed the imagery, other than the original, to illustrate the piece.

As an after-thought to this weekend’s story about the UK’s Culture Secretary desire to regulate Web site content, compel sites to remove offensive material and strengthening Britain’s iron-fist libel laws online, I decided to claim his Twitter account.

Now, of course he could claim any other account and call it his own, but he won’t be able to get the name he is known by (”Andy Burnham”) because it’s in the hot little hands of a UK blogger who has the intention of educating him about the ways of the Internet – since he doesn’t seem to have quite picked up some of the essential truths that have been around since long before he became Culture Secretary.

However, the People’s Popular Front For Teaching Andy Burnham About The Internet (or “PPFFTABATI” for short) is not a violent group. We seek merely to re-educate the Minister in question.

As such, I will be using the account to follow some of the Web’s leading commentators in the UK, so that when he does want it back, it will be pre-packaged with people who can direct message him a few salient thoughts about the Web, at least before he makes policy on the hoof.

All suggestions about what to do with the account – until he notices it’s gone and asks politely for it back – are welcome in the comments below.

Update: Twitter nixed that account but we had @AndyBurnhamMP in reserve. Ready when you are Andy.

In the US tech scene you have weekend “bitchmemes”. In the UK, there is a kind of equivalent known as “government minister opens mouth and inserts foot”. This weekend it was the turn of Andy Burnham, the secretary of state for the Department of Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS), and as such supposed to take an interest in the Internet. Unfortunately his weekend interview with a newspaper betrayed the simple fact that he knows nothing at all about the internet. Nothing.

Burnham gave an interview to the Daily Telegraph newspaper saying that the UK government is considering “the need for “child safe” websites – registered with cinema-style age warnings – to curb access to offensive or damaging online material.” There would also be “child-safe” internet services run by ISPs and the “option” of introducing age ratings for websites. “This is an area that is really now coming into full focus,” he said. He said some content, such as clips of beheadings, was unacceptable and new standards of decency were needed. He also plans to negotiate with the US on drawing up international rules for English language websites.

Burnham also mooted other safeguards including “compelling websites such as YouTube and Facebook to remove offensive material within a specified time after they have been alerted to it, and changing Britain’s libel laws to make it cheaper for people to sue publishers if they have been defamed online.”

Let’s deal with the main point first.

Ratings for websites are insane. One minute you have a site showing pink rabbits. The next minute one page of it, buried in millions, could display porn. Films don’t change once they’ve left the cutting room – web sites do. Furthermore, Web sites even have difficulty making allowance for browser compatibility let alone content ratings.

And there is of course the small issue that you can’t regulate content on servers held on other countries. That is unless you are a one party state like Saudi Arabia, nearby Qatar or China. Even there they have problems. And of course, a government saying that it has the matter of Internet content in hand means parents would become reassured that their children are safe to surf the web unsupervised. Not a good idea.

And with the economy collapsing, and the tech sector one of the few showing any signs of having some slim chance of weathering the storm, the last thing we need are government regulations slowing everything down.

Regarding making it easier to sue online. Yes, well, Britain’s libel laws are bad enough as it it is. They are based on Victorian concepts of public reputation and the onus is always on the writer/publisher, not the person being written about. This is the reverse of US law, hence why libel tourists like Hollywood actors like to sue on British courts, not American ones. Add the internet to this heady mix and you have a pretty scary recipe, especially if it gets easier to sue.

At least there is some sense inside government. Tom Watson, of the Cabinet Office, has invited views about Burnham’s comments on his personal blog – so far he has 78 comments – and he will forward the comments to Burnham. Needless to say most of the comments aren’t exactly supportive of Burnham’s ideas.

However, there are legitimate concerns to be addressed, such as those of parents. But there are obvious, existing solutions: desktop ‘net nanny’ software is commonly available. Then there is the small fact that THEY ARE PARENTS AND MAY JUST POSSIBLY BE EXPECTED TO BE IN CHARGE OF THEIR KIDS.

But more seriously, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created PICS some time ago. The Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) enables labels (metadata) to be associated with Internet content. It was originally designed to help parents and teachers control what children access on the Internet, but it also facilitates other uses for labels, including code signing and privacy. However, a quick perusal of the site show that it is in a bad way, and has largely proved too slow to cope with fast moving nature of the Web today.

But the final solution to rating Web content is actually probably going to be an opportunity for a startup. So for example, sign up to Walt Disney Content Label Scheme? Or one run by the BBC? Or Playboy even.

In the meantime, I have kidnapped Andy Burnham’s name on Twitter (more useful than his lame site), until such time as he’s prepared to sit down and listen to some real feedback about his ideas. Then he can have it back.

I think it’s fair to say that the last couple of years have been pretty interesting. Perhaps the least controversial thing to say is that now with Twitter and Facebook and the passive, hyper-connectedness services like them bring, there sometimes seems no point in ‘actively’ wishing anyone anything. We already know what’s going on. But that would, to borrow a phrase, be rather “Bah, Humbug!” So here’s a Merry Christmas from me and TechCrunch Europe!

My thanks go to all the advertising partners and sponsors of our events in the past year, and of course to you our beloved readers and all the active participants in the tech scene that make it as amazing as it is. I particularly want to thank Petra Johansson (twitter) and Rassami Hok Ljungberg (twitter) for their hard work on TechCrunch events this year. Watch out for more around Europe next year! (And BTW, we’re taking a few days off now, naturally).

And as a postscript to our most recent event, we donated part of our ticket sales to this project to provide Freeplay radios to orphaned child heads of households in Rwanda. Given the time of year, I’d encourage you to donate.

Social travel site HereOrThere, backed by Hugo Burge (the internet entrepreneur involved in Cheapflights), has now been running for a year and three months. What has it achieved? Just 681 members.

Granted it now has 84,833 places listed alongside, 1,241 travel blogs (sounds like two blogs per member?) but I daresay they expected more. The figures are published at the bottom of the site.

The site was in private beta for three months prior to launch in Sept 07. You read and write reviews of places you plan to visit.

Backed by Howzat Media LLP, the early stage dotcom investment fund which Burge runs with partner David Soskin, HereOrThere is not doing great in US traffic either, as you can see from the graph below.

HereOrThere is in a crowded space, which in the UK is dominated by WAYN. I’ll update this post when I get some comment back from the site.

UPDATE:

Borge responds in the comments below: “This site was a personal project where I dropped the ball long ago. I had plans for it that did not come to fruition (which included a potential fusion of cash from HOWZAT), so I have just been letting it lie to see if anything evolved whilst I focussed on bigger fish. You win some; you lose some.”

As the famous phrase goes: I liked the product so much, I bought the company. Ok, well it’s not quite the same, but I’m happy to say that TechCrunch Europe is – as of today – a media sponsor of TechFluff.TV, the weekly dose of video news and views from the UK tech scene. Check out today’s new episode here, or watch it below. If you want to be a proper, commercial sponsor of the show, email hello@techfluff.tv.

TrustedPlaces, one of the UK’s earliest ’social’ local review startups, has admitted that they were in speculative sales talks until recently. I confirmed with co-founder Walid Al Saqqaf who said that they were unexpectedly approached two months ago by an interested party looking to acquire the site.

As a result of this interest he said he and co-founder Sokratis Papafloratos decided to start a process “to see who else was interested.”

However, after several negotiations they have decided to put these talks on the back-burner and keep going until they are cash flow positive.

Al Saqqaf told me the sale process had turned out to be “a distraction” now that the “growth in revenue is reflecting the growth in trafffic.” He says the company is projected to be cash flow positive by the second quarter next year, and said they were in a good position funding-wise. So far the site gets its revenues from brand advertising, sales to local businesses via a sales agent, a sales service tool for businesses, and bookings made via Top Table. TrustedPlaces members can review restaurants, bars, hotels, cafes and share information and profiles.

TrustedPlaces must be confident about their position if they turned down a sale offer, or perhaps their original backers think they would get a better price for the startup once it is in a better cash position. In May 2006, the startup won £500,000 venture backing from HOWZAT Media, the investment fund started by Cheapflights’ David Soskin and Hugo Burge.

Meanwhile Qype has rocketed ahead of most of the Yelp-like sites in Europe and the UK. Perhaps it now wants to hoover up the rest of the market with an acquisiton spree? In September it secured an additional €8 million funding.

Update: Qype founder Tweets “no shopping spree from qype.”

After a couple of episodes, it’s becoming clear that Techfluff.TV is in many respects the UK’s answer to Pop17 and RocketBoom. Every week TechFluff delves into the world of web-celebrities and tech startups, particularly the London scene right now, but increasingly across Europe (if the Le Web video is anything to go by). What’s fun about TechFluff is that it doesn’t take the industry too seriously (hence “fluff”, referring to the lighter side of things – honest). And host Hermoine Way has the hutspa “chutzpah” to go up to any Web player and ask them anything – including asking Michael Arrington where he’d like a Gaping Void cartoon drawn. The show comes out every week and is definitely worth catching. The second episode features an interview with TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher (me) and the latest one features our esteemed editor at Le Web. Let’s hope it goes daily some time. And while we’re on the lighter side, check out Paul Carr, increasingly the UK’s tech satirist.

A huge thanks to Finnish streaming video startup Floobs for coming along to record our TechCrunchTalk panel discussions in London last week. Due to us angering the WiFi Gods at Le Web, they took their revenge and prevented us from doing some live video streaming from the event. However, we present for you 13 minutes of edited video highlights, after the jump.

And if that’s not enough for you, then check out the pictures above, courtesy of Benjamin Ellis which include some bizarre figure dressed as Santa who turned up to officiate at the now signature TechCrunch UK Air Guitar Contest, which was eventually won by Angela Shoosmith. There may even be some video somewhere… It takes all sorts at these events you know…

Read More

If you really are dumb enough to send real cardboard Christmas cards (I’m still trying to convince my family not to), then shame on you. Bad! Meanwhile for the rest of us, try a video card with Skype. You pick a card, record your own greeting and send it.

There’s a Facebook app and there’s also a standalone Skype version which lets you send messages to people who don’t use Facebook. In the standalone version, people can also embed their video messages on their blogs, as below.

The ever resourceful Techlightenment designed and built the app and We Are Social are doing the pimping… sorry “outreach program”.

Merry Christmas,
Happy Holidays,
Have a good one!

During this year’s Le Web conference in Paris I was asked to speak about the European startup scene. Now, I’m not really a PowerPoint kind’ve guy (as you’ll see in the video), but I wanted to show that although what happened in 2007 was a boom for startups and exits, it was also a boom in innovation. The wave of new companies it produced has diversified into a range of sectors that will be with us for years: Cloud Computing, Online Entertainment, Niche Social Networks – you name it. And that has meant that the European startup scene is as diverse as ever. Europeans are increasingly shying away from the “clone” tag and using the interesting hurdles of a diverse market to produce robust businesses.

Bizarrely this can be an advantage. There is a reason many US businesses hit a brick wall when they enter Europe – its complexity. They are used to a big, single market. The best European companies use this diversity to their advantage. If big US companies, grown fat on their large home market, are forced to buy the European player because they can’t break in, who is the winner here?

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

Let’s also remember that “Europe” now includes Poland and the Czech Republic – places with increasingly sophisticated economies, and increasingly entrepreneurial. Then there is “Old Europe” (UK, France, Germany). Despite the recession the UK is a dynamic and flexible economy where it is probably easiest to hire and fire in Europe. Just watch the UK produce startups in this down economy – it will happen. Yes, in France it still costs 10,000 Euros and 6 months of red tape to start a company. But you will STILL find some amazing startups like Liligo.com or Vente Privee. In Germany there is a healthy startup scene, especially in Berlin, but taxes remain high. In Athens – despite the amazing weather and easy-going cafe culture – I found entrepreneurs like George Tziralis doing AskMarkets.com which was spun out of his PHD research.

You must remember that increasingly, as European graduates leave university only to find withered economies (especially in Southern Europe), that they will find themselves either staying in academia and spinning out new web projects or launching outright themselves. Yes, some of it will be out of desperation. Out of a desire to break through some of the older, stultifying social boundaries that exist in some European countries. Yes, in Europe we are fans of cynicism, and sophisticated, dry, black humour! But that does not mean a new generation of entrepreneur won’t start breaking through. This down economy is certain to lead to it.

For instance, in Rome I found Angel/Entrepreneurs like Gianluca Dettori of dpixel trying their damndest to get a startup scene going, resorting to throwing their own conference (TechGarage). In Istanbul I found blogger Arda Kutsal or Webrazzi writing about the Web 2.0 scene in Turkey – and there are more Turkish connections inside Silicon Valley than you might think.

In Berlin, we had a meetup involving over 30 startups and 300 people. In Dublin about 150 people turned out for a TechCrunch event – I got to see startups like Locle and Toddle. Even Barcelona, famous for it’s partying and bars, has an increasingly international startups scene, pooling talent from inside and outside Spain, attracted as they are by the lifestyle and the weather. Nuroa is one example. Even pristine, pretty, Zurich has startups like Wuala and Amazee creating a hub of activity. Over in Amsterdam, eBuddy and others are creating as aggressive a startup scene as I’ve seen anywhere. It is worth mentioning that after my speech (only 10 minutes long) I had people come up to me saying how surprised they were to find out that there were startups as far away as Istanbul.

It is absolutely the case that many Europeans choose to move to Silicon Valley. Let us also remember that there are many amazing entrepreneurs in Europe who CHOOSE to stay in Europe, despite the tax, scepticism from their peers, you name it, because they want to live here. This is where there roots are, their families. You think they care that much about the nay-sayers? Entrepreneurs anywhere aren’t like that – as much in Europe as anywhere else. But in the future we will need more of our own Internet heroes. We need people like George and Arda, all the way up to Nicholas Zennstrom, founder of Skype and Joost, to be on stage at Le Web (he wasn’t this year for some reason) and at other conferences around Europe.

Yes, we do enjoy a good lunch (er, who doesn’t?), but everywhere I went in Europe, the startups I met would take me to their office, have coffee and chat. Nobody ever said lets have a long lunch. In Zurich I grabbed a sandwich with a CEO. In Istanbul a Turkish coffee, appropriately.

The historical context here also needs addressing. Silicon Valley is a classic “cluster” and has had 50 years to develop. It was also born out of the innovations that came during and after the war, and its close association with the military industrial complex.

In Europe, left weakend in the years post-1945 , our “Silicon Valley” never really developed outside of universities and science parks attached to majors cities. Only in recent years, with a new generation, have we created a Silicon Valley “state of mind” and whatever peers we can gather around us in our city.

Yes, there are very large US tech companies acquiring European companies. The accident of birth that is the “scale” and single market that the US has helps it a great deal in this regard. And let’s remember that the Internet took off first in the US, while their free local calls environment enabled people to stay online for whole days, well before Europeans had cheap access. Europe has had barely 10 years so far, if you count the last bubble, to get used to this.

These are not excuses. They are merely important historical contexts.

But on the upside there are few things in Europe’s favour. While the America government refuses to educate its citizens properly outside of the private sector, Europeans have enviable state school systems. The recession will make our economies weaker but our governments are increasingly looking to support small startup businesses as the engines or innovation, as evidence by recent offical recommendations to the UK government. While the US government bails out failing industries, European governments continue to hand out grants to startup businesses on “main street”.

Let’s also not forget that Europe is a highly mobile-oriented tech scene. As much as we all love the iPhone, it won’t end up being be the only player, and anyone who says so is naive.

And things are changing – because, guess what? Things like social networks are bringing together companies. It’s now easier than ever to find other entrepreneurs in Europe, whether it be via Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, or even the excellent the Polish Twitter, Blip. You just have to look.

Just after this week’s TechCrunchTalk event we had pitch competition involving a range of startups from the UK, Germany and even Iceland. Hermoine Way from NewsPepper and TechFluff.tv was there to capture the action (apart from Socialibrium.com which has gone AWOL, but here are the slides):

CardCode (UK)

Rendezviewonline (Iceland)

Jupidi Date-Coach (Germany) jupidi.de

Quick.tv (UK)

BookingBug (UK)

Worldeka (UK)

Soundcloud (Germany)

TechCrunch UK’s “The Tech Factor” Roundup

When Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher launched his Blahgirls project at Techcrunch 50 this year, one of the first things investor Ron Conway said on the judging panel was that the idea would tap into the emerging billion dollar market for branded content. Media plays like Blahgirls aren’t normally so well received in the tech community, but now UK startup t5m has today re-launched in order to tap into the same market. But it will do so by setting up a global network of bureaus to produce and syndicating short-form interactive 3-5 minute HD video, built around brands and distributed via its own custom-built video player.

Right now the portal site is mainly a showcase but next February it will re-launch with personalisation, social networking, shopping, competitions and new video contributors. It’s being built on a customised version of the open-source WordPress platform called WordPress Multi-User, developed with Automattic, the company behind the WordPress open source blogging platform. The site now features 300 hours of HD content, 100 in-depth profiles and over 20 events.

More videos like this on www.t5m.com

The move is a full-blown re-vamp for t5m which launched in December last year as a “socially-conscious online TV network” with investment from Lastminute.com co-founder Brent Hoberman, Reuters Greenhouse Fund founder John Taysom and Mexx clothes company founder Rattan Chadha. The founder and CEO Charlie Muirhead, a serial UK entrepreneur behind Orchestream, acquired by MetaSolv in 2003.

T5M initially focused on offering charities such as Nelson Mandela’s 46664 their own dedicated t5m video channel. However, that strategy has clearly been switched for celebs and start-studded events. t5m will now even book the ‘talent’ and presenters for these videos.

T5M launched first in 2007 with Microsoft’s Silverlight Flash competitor but after poor results – few people actually have Silverlight installed – they now offer that alongside the ubiquitous Flash format. Encoding is done in H264 and outputed to Flash and Silverlight. The video player is sharable and will distribute it in HD format, as well as on other platforms like YouTube. In February the video player will be interactive.

Most of the video is of famous personalities, and backstage interviews at celeb-studded events in the UK like the Brits, but t5m plans to launch a global network of bureaus to produce the content. They’ll also create custom hosted video sites for partners and clients.

So far clients have included Samsung Electronics Europe among others. So in other words funding will be from client revenues, especially events. In fact the company says it is nearly profitable already, although a funding round may be in the offing as the there is IP in the platform and player.

T5M will probably benefit from the uptick of budgets towards online as brands with advertising budgets increasingly find that consumers are flipping through their TV ads because of the proliferation of PVRs. Web video therefore has three main advantages for brand advertisers: viewers can’t skip the ads, the brand appears either side of the video and, important in Europe, most online video remains unregulated by broadcast watchdogs.

It’s an interesting move. The tradional TV world contains production companies which rarely own rights or syndicate. T5M will combine both models.

In the wake of YouTube fully embracing HD video online video aggregator WorldTV hopes to take advantage by turning all embedded online video into a, linear, TV-like experience. The end-game is to funnel all this web video towards the next generation of Browser-enabled, WIFI-capable TV sets. To that end Ireland-based WorldTV has added a new EPG feature and hit 100,000 channels.

The new EPG feature has arisen after users suggested it and allows viewers to browse other channels while watching an existing channel, and to browse the videos within a channel, something not previously possible. Future updates will allow users to pick and choose which channels appear in the EPG on their channel, in effect allowing anyone to create their own TV network of channels. The experience is much closer to a TV one and that’s important.

In some sense WorldTV is going up against other user-generated video sites like YouTube, Magnify.net and Kyte.tv. But the difference is that this has been built from the ground-up to actually work on a TV. Alx Klive, Founder and CEO says they are now aiming head-long at an open platform for TV sets.

Next year TVs will start to appear with WiFi built in, and almost certainly simple Linux-based operating systems. Significantly, the Opera browser is the only browser company to exhibit at all the major TV trade shows. While other video sites are concentrating on clips, WorldTV is going for a more linear, TV-like experience that will ultimately work on gaming consoles or simple TV set browsers.

There are clearly people who like it. The service now has about 100,000 channels created by 70,000 users in 190 countries and has about 600k uniques per month. Users don’t upload video to WorldTV – they add it from Google video, YouTube, Metacafe, Myspace or AOL.

WorldTV recently added an advertising platform where revenues are shared with users. That, and the fact that the site has reduced staff to 5 and cut burn rate by 50% means they are now in month of breaking even, they say.

That’s just as well. A fund-raising exercise this year has drawn a blank – largely due to the downturn – so the site is still boostrapping and aiming to run on revenues for longer.

Songkick, the London-based concert listings site that allows music fans to track bands, tour dates and buy tickets, has raised a $4m million Series A round lead by Index Ventures. Their previous total raised was $1.02m from Y Combinator, SoftTech VC and The Accelerator Group.

The investment betrays a strategy Index has of investing in entertainment-oriented startups, including Listen.com (Real Networks), Last.fm (CBS) and Viagogo (secondary ticketing market) as entertainment is usually something people delve into during downturns. Live music is also one of the few areas of defensibility in the music industry.

Saul Klein of Index will join the board of Songkick. Songkick is currently available in 5 countries and the investment will be used to expand the platform and launch new products.

UK startup TrueKnowledge, a question/answer platform, has launched Quizbot – a consumer-facing front-end which will allow users to ask questions and get answers. It’s able to answer questions via the Web, Twitter or SMS. The service will compete with other Q&A platforms which tend to be human-powered like Texperts and 118118.

Quizbot surfaced a couple of weeks ago on Twitter, but the service goes live officially now. The Twitter functionality works well as the questions tend to be shorter, so questions about things like time zone questions, geography questions, famous people, etc. work quite well. The Web version is here. You can text a question (preceded by the word quizbot) to 82820. Texts cost 15p each.

Now, the issue with with these Q&A platforms is that they usually require some form of human intervention like a call-centre type operation.

I asked Quizbot: What is the weather in London?

It’s reply was: “I understood your question but I don’t know the answer. You can add the answer by signing up to True Knowledge”

I asked Texperts.com (an older Q&A startup) and 118118.com the same question and both came back with London’s weather forecast correctly.

However, Quizbot’s reply was immediate, free on the web and 15p on text. Texperts and 118118 required me to confirm first via text, then the reply came over 5 minutes later. Plus they, along with AQA 63336 cost around a pound to interrogate.

So what Quizbot needs to do now is to get more questions. As founder William Tunstall-Pedoe admits: “Getting people’s feedback on the questions and seeing the questions asked is very valuable and helps the system improve.”

But TrueKnowledge really should get the Quizbot.com URL if it’s serious about using this as a consumer front end. Right now it’s owned by a company that makes Quiz and Gameshow controllers.

This might be an early public demo of the platform rather than a core product “intended to be a bit of fun that shows off some of what our question answering platform can do without forcing users to apply for an account,” says Tunstall-Pedoe. But all this marketing for a brand that might be dumped later on will get wasted, which is time few can afford right now. If I were them I’d go register Qwizbot.com or similar.

But Quizbot/True Knowledge still impresses in other ways. If you ask it “How old is True Knowledge?” it comes back with “the age 3 years and 4 months old.”

Shout’Em , a sort of white-label microblogging platform that lets anyone create their own Twitter clone, has secured 350,000 Euros of seed capital from the Bicro seed fund in Croatia. Shout’Em launched publicly at Le Web last week and at the moment hosts about 1000 networks. The investment will be used to develop native applications for the Apple iPhone, Windows Mobile and Android platforms. They’ll also offer cheaper premium package prices. Shout’Em networks can be used as intranets or microblog communities. Parent company Five minutes Ltd. from Croatia is a software developer behind local photo sharing site Pticica and social networking community Trosjed. Bicro is a goverment founded 30 million Euro seed fund to support innovation and technology advacement there. Congrats guys.

Alex Tew, the Uk entrepreneur most famous for creating the Million Dollar Home Page, has stumbled on another hit, almost by accident. Tew is currently working on PopJam, currently in stealth mode, but came up with a viral game to promote the site’s launch in the new year. The smartly named SockAndAwe lets you throw a shoe at President Bush, referring his recent escapade at a press conference in Iraq. However, the game itself is now proving to be a smash hit in its own right.

The site has now been featured on Reuters, AFP and many other mainstream sites.

Today the site got half a million unique users only two days after launch. Now Tew has put the game up for sale on eBay as a further promotion. Bidding starts at £100 GBP.

Of course, the eBay listing will simply add fuel to the PR fire. It’s certainly a novel way to raise financing for a startup.

Here is the information from the eBay listing:

SockandAwe.com has gone viral on a massive, global scale. Here are some visitor stats (at time of writing, 9:02pm UK time, 17th Dec)

- 1,161,825 Absolute Unique Visitors since launch on 15th Dec
- 1,680,465 Pageviews since launch on 15th Dec
- 823,906 Unique Visitors so far today alone (17th Dec)
- 9,533 sources and mediums of traffic (that’s a lot of inbound links!)

Oh, and in the game itself: over 21 million virtual shoes have successfully hit president Bush’s face so far!

UPDATE: Entrepreneur Brendan McLoughlin has bought the game for £5215 on ebay.

UK-based mobile “social search” engine startup Taptu has secured £6.45m ($9.86m) in Series B funding from existing investors 3i and Sofinnova. The company has also appointed Andreas Bernstrom as its new COO to grow the company commercially and work on monetizing search engine. Bernstrom was previously COO at Internet marketing company TradeDoubler. He joins founder and CEO Steves Ives, former founder of Trigenix, which was acquired by Qualcomm in 2004.

The company claims about 1 mobile million searches a day, which is peanuts compared to Google and Yahoo.

Taptu’s mobile search engine allows search results to be shared with friends via email and text messaging. It also has the ability to allow results to be shared with friends via email, mobile-to-mobile and Twitter. In January 2008, they launched an API to allow 3rd party sites to tailor results to users. The first partner to use this was Moblr, a site which allows you to view videos uploaded to the site directly on your mobile.

Mobile search is often touted as the next big thing in search, so clearly Taptu’s backers are confident that it will play a key role in this going forward.