We’ve had OpenId to make the transport of your ID easier between Web sites. We’ve had initiatives on Data Portability to make it easier for you to move your data around between social networks and other apps. But what we haven’t had yet is a way to allow you to share your location between different platforms. That’s something that a new, largely European-inspired, initiative hopes to address. The alliance, called OSLO (Open Sharing of Location-based Objects) includes many of the players in mobile social networking and location-based social software.

Twelve startups, all of whom serve their users with location-based services, have signed an agreement to enable their combined 30 million users to share location information and interact between networks. Currently users are unable to do so as location-based systems operate in a similar fashion to instant messaging systems like AOL and MSN which don’t work with eachother. So for example, you can set your location on Brightkite for instance, but your friends on Rummble wouldn’t see you – but they would if Brightkite joined the initiative.

While Ronan Higgins, CEO, Locle and Andrew Scott, Founder/CEO, Rummble are acting as spokes people, the other companies in the initiative are: www.aka-aki.com, belysio, Buddycloud, Mobiluck, Moximity, Nulaz, Palringo, Rummble, Service2Media, Skout, Tooio and WAYN.

OSLO has been in discussion with Google and Yahoo! about joining the alliance. Google of course recently launched it’s Latitude product, while Yahoo! has been working on FireEagle.

However, Oslo is not a competitor to Google’s Latitude as they’ve spoken to Google, Yahoo! and Vodafone and, according to Higgins, they all want to get on board.

Some of the theoretical benefits to OSLO are:

- Mobile advertisers would benefit from the combined volumes and an ability to better target their campaigns based on location, improving click through rate, ROI and user satisfaction.

- Connecting to people on other networks gives mobile social networking users a more exciting experience.

- Application builders can create better products on top of shared location information.

- Member companies can focus on differentiation and adding value to users rather than bothering with re-building another location system, which is a commodity anyway. The alternative is a fragmentation of technologies.

However, OSLO says, end user privacy and security remains not just a priority “but a pre-requisite”. So OSLO currently mandates that member companies should be able to query the location of users, as long as that user has opted-in to share their location with other OSLO services.

It will be interesting to see how this initiative develops.

• PutPlace.com spotted that HP-Upline is getting out of the consumer backup business and closing down the Upline service. They are putting together a discount plan for HP-Upline users, but in the meantime you can use the invitation code “joe” to get started with a free plan for three months. Something to do with founder Joe Drumgoole perhaps…

• Comedian David Mitchell is the newest signing for video startup ChannelFlip. David Mitchell’s Soapbox has been the most popular thing on iTunes for the past week, beating out Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross, Ricky Gervais. ChannelFlip served 10,000 video ads in October, 80,000 video ads in December and 500,000 video ads in February. Looks like something interesting in online video is going on then…

• Predictions market Hubdub got 6 out of 6 right in their Oscar predictions. And managed to beat esteemed stats whiz Nate Silver who got a measily 4 out of 6.

• Flirtomatic, the web and mobile social network, is now using Xtract’s Social Links solution, which analyses the social networking behaviours of members.

• Small businesses are missing out on savings and collectively wasting £7billion a year according to Humyo, by relying on traditional server technology and remaining unaware of new technologies. Humyo reckons SMEs could save themselves around £1,200 per year if they were a little more savvy with their IT spending.

• Price comparison site Twenga says it has had a 500% growth for 2008. Talk about a company positioned for the credit crunch.

• Embedded content is now one of the key factors in determining which new mobile handset consumers choose, according to the results of a poll published by GetJar, the independent mobile app store. 69% of respondents said the content provided with a new phone is now more important to their purchase decision than price, design or even touch screen capability. In other words, plenty of phones do the job, but it’s applications and content which are starting to matter more.

• The University of Oxford has been ranked as one of the top 10 university startup communities worldwide by YouNoodle, the online platform for the global entrepreneurial community. The data-driven leaderboard ranked the University of Oxford 6th overall based on data compiled from more than 10,000 startups.

• Mobitsu is a new service-based platform which enables people to make money from their mobile phone by uploading media. Members of Mobitsu can earn up to £1 each and every time an item is downloaded or purchased. I wonder which clips will be most popular…

• WorldTV developed an embeddable player and Facebook widget with ZoomTV and Facebook to power their coverage of the Oscars. The WorldTV/ ZoomTV /Facebook widget ran on the ZoomTV homepage during the Oscars with updated clips and original content for ZoomTV’s 300 million monthly TV viewers in India.

• Chinwag and UK Trade & Investment are organising two conferences to help companies prepare for the future – Digital Business: India and Digital Business: China. These one-day events feature line-ups of experts in their fields designed to bring companies up-to-speed on the opportunities and challenges presented by India & China, including the business environment, as well cultural issues.

• Warsaw-based New Europe Events is running TMT.Ventures’09 Warsaw in March for startups, local and regional VCs and angel investors.

• PlayOTTO.com, a new EU licensed online lottery with social gaming at its heart, has just been launched. Players play with their friends by creating a team and choose their own good cause or charity to benefit from the winnings and ticket sales. Cute. Let’s hope they fair better than Pikum.

UK start-up Imagini has secured a significant $13.5 million in a second round of funding. The additional investment comes from Horizons Ventures, NorthZone Ventures and Atomico. The first round of $5m and came from NorthZone, Atomico, TAG, Brent Hoberman (co-founder of LastMinute.com) and Bill Draper.

Imagini has an interesting technology called VisualDNA which effectively works out people’s personality types by presenting them with picture choices – instead of asking users to log in and type in their profile. The Flash-based quiz is not unlike a game, and can be quite addictive once you get going. The result is that Imagini says online retailers get a 37% uplift from customers after they get profiled. So whether you picked the Grand Torino over the Lamborghini really does say something about you.

You can see the test for yourself via the quiz in Imagini’s consumer-facing site called Youniverse, a sort of personality test-driven social network which we reviewed last year, which has a million uniques a month.

The quiz also makes it easy to distribute through online ad and affiliate networks, and a plug-In that will allow any website publisher to create their own free online quiz. So far clients include MSN, Hotels.com, Pepsi, Lastminute.com, Nectar, Vodafone and the British Army. Some 15 million people have taken the quiz since the company was founded in 2006 and the something like 70% of contributors to the Visual DNA ‘community’ are from the US.

Imaginia was founded by CEO Alex Willcock. Today it also appoints Dermot Halpin, former president of Expedia Europe, as non-executive Chairman and Board Director.

The Government has made a step-change in policy towards open-source IT. In a publication today, Tom Watson MP, Minister for Digital Engagement, has effectively said that open source solutions are going to be given far greater opportunity at government level. That means a number of thiings, not least of which is the opportunity for companies outside the usual coorporate IT structures to pitch for government contracts and also use government data in the open source world.

He says Government will take “further positive action to ensure that Open Source products are fully and fairly considered throughout government IT” and “publish our data in terms of Open Standards” and even more significantly look for “the same degree of flexibility in our commercial relationships with proprietary software suppliers as are inherent in the open source world.” Read: Microsoft et al will be asked for more “flexibility”.

Here’s the statement:

Open Source has been one of the most significant cultural developments in IT and beyond over the last two decades: it has shown that individuals, working together over the Internet, can create products that rival and sometimes beat those of giant corporations; it has shown how giant corporations themselves, and Governments, can become more innovative, more agile and more cost-effective by building on the fruits of community work; and from its IT base the Open Source movement has given leadership to new thinking about intellectual property rights and the availability of information for re–use by others.

This Government has long had the policy, last formally articulated in 2004, that it should seek to use Open Source where it gave the best value for money to the taxpayer in delivering public services. While we have always respected the long-held beliefs of those who think that governments should favour Open Source on principle, we have always taken the view that the main test should be what is best value for the taxpayer.

Over the past five years many government departments have shown that Open Source can be best for the taxpayer – in our web services, in the NHS and in other vital public services.

But we need to increase the pace:

We want to ensure that we continue to use the best possible solutions for public services at the best value for money; and that we pay a fair price for what we have to buy.

We want to share and re-use what the taxpayer has already purchased across the public sector – not just to avoid paying twice, but to reduce risks and to drive common, joined up solutions to the common needs of government.

We want to encourage innovation and innovators – inside Government by encouraging open source thinking, and outside Government by helping to develop a vibrant market.

We want to give leadership to the IT industry and to the wider economy to benefit from the information we generate and the software we develop in Government.

So we consider that the time is now right to build on our record of fairness and achievement and to take further positive action to ensure that Open Source products are fully and fairly considered throughout government IT; to ensure that we specify our requirements and publish our data in terms of Open Standards; and that we seek the same degree of flexibility in our commercial relationships with proprietary software suppliers as are inherent in the open source world.

This open source strategy addresses these key points. It sets out the steps we need to take across Government, and with our IT suppliers, to take advantage of the benefits of open source.

Tom Watson MP
Minister for Digital Engagement

You’ll find more here.

Lord Carter’s Digital Britain interim report made waves earlier this month, and not in a good way. Cory Doctorow roundly thumped it; Charles Leadbetter deconstructed it in the context of what he calls mutual media, reaching the rather damning conclusion in his report (PDF) that Digital Britain can be saved, so long as Lord Carter rethinks his entire approach (not kidding).

This morning Lord Carter gives his first major speech since the report was published; he’ll be joined by Neil Berkett, CEO of Virgin Media; media expert Peter Bazalgette and the discussion is chaired by NESTA’s Jonathan Kestenbaum. None of these luminaries are on Twitter yet (to my knowledge – tell me if they are).

Here we go…

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 8:32 AM:  Not a good start – we’ve just been asked to turn off our phones.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 8:33 AM:  Kestenbaum says that Digital Britain interim report strikes a balance between the importance of users in content and network creation and the difficult economic times we find ourselves in. Has he read the report?

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 8:38 AM: Livestream here.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 8:38 AM: Carter’s up. He has a prepped speech, but will just talk off the cuff.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 8:39 AM: Drawing the distinction between reports to government and reports of government, saying Digital Britain is the latter, because it’s meant to be implemented in the real world for the purpose of making a real change. The goal is to get the people to debate the issues as objectively and analytically as possible. Slating the public nay-saying sentiment that prevails at the moment – I’m thinking he’s read the backlash since the report was first published.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 8:43 AM:  @dominiccampbell points out people can tweet their feedback on the report to @innovationedge

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 8:44 AM: Carter’s going through the list of key focus areas in Digital Britain, starting with infrastructure.Media misunderstands how public policy and private sector markets can work together to create the infrastructure which will drive demand for higher capacity networks.

(Above: A word cloud generated by the Twitter feed during the debate)

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 8:50 AM: Legal protection, online safeguards – third area of interest. Admits is the area where report’s ideas are least formed, and the area on which they could use the most help from industry/users. This aspect is forcing businesses to find new models and new chances.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 8:53 AM: Universal service obligation for broadband is a critical building block – sans this, we could never move to switch off analogue services, such as the broadcasting signal. Other public services must follow, but this can only happen with a base level connectivity for all, which is what they based their 2MB USO connection forecasts on. This is looking ahead to digital public service delivery in future.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 8:57 AM: Moving on to the panel discussion now. Berkett up first. Virgin’s perspective very simple; Digital Britain embraces all the questions, accepts that it’s a complicated issue. Next stage around engagement with public is critical. Important thing is to focus on what we can do now to make it happen.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:00 AM: UK plc needs to demonstrate what next generation access will look like, proving the commercial model without disrupting those who have already invested (Virgin’s spent £13bn on its networks)

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:02 AM: Content must be available for all platforms – doesn’t mean ‘give it away’ for free, though

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:03 AM: We seem to have a reluctance to accept that business models must change to manage and control content to safeguard users and providers.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:05 AM: Peter Bazalgette’s turn. The paradox: vast amount of digital activity with very little revenue.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:06 AM:  USO question – Public utility vs boosting the economy. Which is more important – that everyone has access, or that the networks are boosted in terms of speed and capacity? He thinks the latter is most important now. Has ideas for revenue creation – like product placement on TV, online’s godsend might be behavioural advertising – paying for content with our attention spans and our personal data – but we need to sort out policy around this area.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:09 AM: (OT: Peter Bazalgette’s got the funkiest socks on the panel)

Peter Bazalgette's funky socks

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:09 AM: Exploring the future for IP and content creation should not protect old industry (draws parallels to shipbuilding industry in the past). Cites the example of Tate and British Library creating their own content and distributing by podcast – that’s a classic example of public service broadcasting.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:12 AM: Public money now twice as significant when it’s spent, so it must be spent wisely. Good point from the backchannel: #digitalbritain report makes no mention of software or data – content is more than television shows and music clips #carter

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:14 AM: That’s a wrap – moving on to questions now.Kestenbaum repeats Carter’s comment on the importance of the atmosphere in which the debate is conducted before opening the floor.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:16 AM: Q1. How does government plan to deal with the challenge of anticipating the rate of change of technology? Berkett answers: It’s a phenomenon we all have to live with. Referencing Virgin’s technology, the concept of having fibre closer to fixed line connections is not new, their vision is to have gigabit connectivity in the next 10 years. Technical solutions should be driven by commercial need. Carter answers: Government is trying to do as little forecasting as possible. Citing DAB as an example of one of the few calls on technology choices that government has made. Knows there is an interesting debate ongoing across Europe on 4th gen mobile, UK government feels we should harmonise on spectrum.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:23 AM:  Q2 on digital education in schools. Carter: government isn’t organised in a converged way, agrees that government needs a radical review on digital literacy, says it’s a huge issue and that there is a marker on this subject in the Digital Britain report.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:27 AM: Response from the floor – from Nico don’t see anything in the report about the people’s involvement in Digital Britain.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:29 AM:  Charles Leadbeater asking about service delivery, creative use of new business models and the dividend around entrepreneurial activity. Bazalgette says: it’s already there. Doesn’t think it’s Carter’s job to supplant that. Social dividend is there and developing and will continue to do so. Economic dividend is not there.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:33 AM: Carter’s ready Leadbeater’s paper, thought it was great and asked very good questions. “But when you’re doing what I’m doing, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.” The questions are real and profoundly important, but isn’t sure his report can answer the questions *and* achieve its goals.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:36 AM: Carter: (referencing content delivery platforms like the BBC) In a decade, these will be open source platforms because they’ll have to be.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:39 AM: Berkett: The issue of ‘protection’ needs to be cracked or else the [media] industry’s going to suffer. Bazalgette says there isn’t a single media company who knows what their model will be in 10 years’ time.

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:41 AM: Carter: Britain is naturally good at tech/media stuff – question is, how do we maximise the opportunies?

Tue 24 Feb 09 @ 9:43 AM: Kestenbaum’s final observation: the models and assumptions around the issues have totally broken down, Carter’s rebuilding and rebooting them for the Digital Britain of the future. There isn’t a single theme in public policy now that has as much enthusiasm and optimism around it.

And that’s it. If you’re interested in joining the debate, register your interest at digitalbritain@berr.gsi.gov.uk.

WebMission09, the initiative to take 20 UK and Irish tech startups to Silicon Valley has decided on the 20 companies it will be taking. There are 18 new companies, plus 2 Alumni from WM08 (Huddle and Trampoline Systems). If you want to know what all this is about then check out our previous coverage.

So the companies include:

Cereproc, Concrete-media, Corebridge, Freshnetworks, Replify, Seewhy, Sosius, Tactilecrm. And the rest are:

This week TechFluff TV has “Mike Arrington”, although he looks a little different to when I last saw him… amongst other fluffy news. TechCrunch Europe is a media pimper sponsor of TechFluff.TV. Hell, we just think it’s kinda fun. That is all.

Social travel match engine Gekko has yet to even launch. But it’s seeding it’s emergence with a viral video which leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination.

Gekko’s “Findyourgspots.com” promo says the service will match you with hotels and restaurants based on your profile and like minded people. So far, so similar. There are almost certainly a number of other sites that claim to do the same thing, to a greater or lesser extent.

However, will we actually remember what Gekko does after seeing its ads? I rather doubt it. If they are going to head down this route then they should at least have a version with a guy in it as well, to balance things out, right?

Ever since hot streaming music startup Spotify hired a director of “portable solutions” you just knew they were going to do something cool in mobile. And frankly there is no cooler place to do it right now than on the iPhone.

There have been rumblings of an iPhone app for the service especially on Swedish blogs. Spotify is based in Stockholm. News that they are hiring a Symbian S60 specialist also indicates that Symbian will join the platform.

The rumours are that the iPhone app will initially be available only to premium users, but will offer over-the-air streaming of the entire library, plus access to playlists. The ability to cache playlists will mean you can save tracks and albums temporarily to your iPhone to access when out of range of wifi or a mobile network.

This video demo shows an amazing app which, frankly, could even give the iTunes store a run for it’s money given that it provides instant access to millions of tracks, assuming Apple lets it into the App Store of course.

UPDATE: Someone has removed the video so contact us if you have a copy and we’ll re-post it.

UPDATE II: Thanks to TechDigest for grabbing the video, below.

Funny how recessions concentrate the mind. In just over a year UK startup Skimbit has made the full journey from Web 2.0 era “decision-making tool” with a vague business model about affiliate advertising, to re-engineer as an affiliate aggregator for publishers. Re-launching as Skimlinks, the site now aggregates 11 affiliate networks for clients like Future Publishing and The Daily Mail newspaper. The move means it has now attracted first round investment led by Sussex Place Ventures with participation from UK government body NESTA, The Accelerator Group, and Angels Duncan Jennings (eConversions) and Alex Hoye (Latitude Group). The amount was undisclosed but is understood to be in the vicinity of £700,000.

Skimlinks works by turning normal product links into affiliate links on-the-fly. A line of code populates the entire site including the archives. It then provides access to affiliate programs of over 7,000 international merchants (including the third of merchants that do not support deeplinking) across 16 affiliate networks. In these tough times affiliate marketing can be attractive to publishers but is usually an administrative nightmare and cedes too much control over editorial content. With Skimlinks a publisher can set which links should be affiliate ones or not. The service is currently free to use, and Skimlinks takes a small cut of the commissions earned by the website publisher.

Competitors like the older Dianomi and Chicago-based Science Revenue appear to have more clients, but given they are North America focused, Skimlinks has an opportunity to break out more in the UK and Europe.

Alicia Navarro, founder and CEO, reckons that “consumers no longer rely on advertising to
make their purchasing decisions, instead being driven by reviews and recommendations from both
editorial and user-generated content” – hence why publishers need to create the kind of content that is useful. Who knew?

Popjam is a new ‘social humour’ site which has launched using the Twitter ‘friend/follow’ model of social networking. In fact – but for the images of LOLcats and videos – it is so similar to Twitter in appearance and operation that it could be mistaken for a pure Twitter clone. But what we have here is a kind of Twitter-meets-Digg-meets-b3ta. And the more you think about it, the more it makes sense.

The key is that it is aiming to be universal in appeal and not niche or focussed around one demographic, which sites like College Humour and eBaumsworld effectively are. The thing is, you might hit YouTube or get an email from a friend about a niche-humour site like Icanhascheezburger. But how often do you really think to visit? Usually when some viral is being passed around. It’s PopJam’s aim to effectively ‘sit above’ all of these sources and provide an easy way for people to share and enjoy the best of the web’s funny content through one centralised channel. In aiming to be sit above all these funny links, PopJam aims to ape YouTube’s platform for video model, with ‘a platform for funny’, if that’s conceivable.

PopJam users can post images, videos and links to their profile. Registration is not required to view the content. Is this “rich-media micro-blogging”? Perhaps let’s not get into that thorny issue…

It’s not a huge suprise that they are using the Twitter mechanic. Registered users ‘follow’ other people and are themselves ‘followed’. Already Twitter is growing like a weed because of this opt-out model, as opposed to Facebook’s opt-in. Since the people you follow are generally the best arbiters of the humour that will appeal to you, Popjam has hit on a good model. Meanwhile, expect many more site to start copying Twitter’s follow model…

Popjam users can comment; click the ‘LOL’ button (akin to Digging or ‘Liking’ stuff on FriendFeed); and ‘re-post’ content. It would seem the re-tweeting concept is here to stay. The most re-posted and LOL’d stuff will get put into the PopJam ‘Funny Stuff’ section of the site. Every piece of funny content on PopJam has a permalink page and related content, so virality is in-built.

Since users earn points for posting funny stuff, the site also has a gaming element to it, along the lines of the Karate belt system, ending in ‘PopJam Ninja’ status. There is a leaderboard for this:

As for the Twitter aspect, the site doesn’t yet integrate with Twitter, though that’s ‘in the plan’.

In their favour is a master of the populist hit, co-founder and CEO, Alex Tew, formely the wunder-kid behind The Million Dollar Home page and most recently the Sockandawe smash hit viral game.

The startup is backed by an undisclosed amount of angel funding from lead investor Paul Birch (a co-founder of Bebo with Brother Michael), while Michael Smith (of Mind Candy, Firebox) and Tom Boardman (also Firebox) also participated. In closed, stealth-mode alpha version since August last year, Tew is joined by co-founder and CTO Michael Halls-Moore and lead developer Matt Bennett.

TechCrunchTalk in Barcelona: Panel on Mobile Disruption

TechCrunchTalk Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona: Panel on Mobile Eco-System

TechCrunchTalk Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona: Pitches by Livecliq & Mob4Hire

TechCrunchTalk Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona: Pitches by Hiogi & Dubmenow

Startup pitches: Yoose and Kalerion

TechCrunch is hosting a Roundtable and Meetup at Mobile World Congress today. The live stream is posted above.

“TechCrunchTalk: Mobile 2.0 – Where next?” features an afternoon of panel discussions with mobile startups and the investment community.

2009 promises to be the year many of the predictions made about the rise of mobile may start to come true. Startups in the space are poised to take advantage of affordable mobile Internet access and sophisticated handsets like the iPhone. The question is, can they do it? That’s what TechCrunchTalk will seek to tease out from the assembled entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists that back them.

The topics will focused around a number of themes, including:

- What will be the mobile trends over the coming year?
- What are VC’s looking for?
- Can the power of the operators really be disrupted?
- What value can be created in the mobile world in difficult economic times?

To help us explore these questions we’ll have on hand:

Panel 1

Mobile Disruption

- What are VC’s looking for in mobile?
- Can the power of the operators really be “disrupted”?
- Will the rise of application stores drive innovation?
- How will the new wave of handsets change the game?

Davor Hebel, Fidelity Ventures
Ben Holmes, Index Ventures
Bob Last, SVP Taptu
Ken Johnstone, Co-Founder INQ Mobile

Panel 2

Mobile Eco-system

- What will be the mobile trends over the coming 5 years?
- What value can be created in the mobile world in difficult economic times?
- What kinds of mobile startups going will break through in the next 5 years?
- What will consumers kill for?

Peter Vesterbacka, Founder, Some Bazaar
Marc Rougier, Co-founder, Goojet
Andrew Scott, Founder, Rummble
Jennifer Grenz, VP of Marketing, Shozu

Roundtable Moderator:
Mike Butcher, TechCrunch Europe

The event is currently sponsored by LiveCLIQ Inc.

LiveCLIQ Inc.
LiveCLIQ is a leading provider of 2-way, 3-screen Digital Media Streaming, able to stream network and user media on Mobile, Internet and TV platforms. The Company offers its hosted services to media properties, consumer brands and mobile carriers. LiveCLIQ’s user media site, www.livecliq.net, that enables people to stream live and recorded video from their mobile phones to public and community destinations on the web. LiveCLIQ’s Magellan interface provides a media overlay upon Google Earth in which geo-located media are displayed with user, title and tags enabling contextual media searches. The Company’s founders include product and business leaders from Apple, Microsoft Xbox, Netscape, Motorola and MobiTV. LiveCLIQ is based in San Francisco, California.

Our video streaming partner for the event was Floobs. Floobs Ltd is Helsinki based start-up which is developing Floobs -services for live streaming and a platform for commmunity created LIVE tv-channels. Currently Floobs is funded by local angel investors.

We’ll be holding a series of TechCrunch events in Europe this Spring and Summer, all focused on bringing together and networking the European tech community. If you wish to be on the mailing list for information about all the up-coming events, sign up on our Amiando account here. And there is lots more information here.

Paris
25th February – The day after Seedcamp
Topic: Building the Tech scene in France, scaling across Europe and the world.
Get Tickets

Warsaw
19th March – Central European event for tech startups & VCs
Topic: Re-engineering the Central European tech scene – What’s next?
Get Tickets

London
21st April
Topic: A day-long event for UK & other European startups. More details to follow
Sign up for further info

Stockholm
27th May – Nordic and the Baltic states event for startups and VCs
Topic: Connecting Northern Europe – Where are the strong and weak links?
Sign up for further info

Berlin
10th June – More details to follow
Topic: How does Berlin and Germany become a key node for European Tech?
Sign up for further info

London
9th July – TechCrunch Summer-Party
Topic: Party!
Sign up for further info

I managed to grab a video interview with Travis Katz, international head of MySpace at Mobile World Congress today. In it he talks about MySpace’s announcement of its integration with the new Palm Pre and the new Nokia flagship phones. MySpace will now have integrated apps for all the major phones, including the existing Blackberry and iPhone apps, and it’s the only social network on the Android platform right now.

Katz said mobile traffic to MySpace is exploding at the moment, up to 20m users now, from only 4m a year a go. They are seeing 50% growth in the US, 80% in Europe and 60% in Asia. It’s no surprise then that they view the future of the company as being more and more mobile-based. They’ve had “several Million” downloads of the MySpace iphone app.

I asked him about full streaming of music but while he said they already have streaming video from their WAP site, “music is an obvious extension and we’re talking to carriers about that.”

We also talked about the spilt between native apps and the web, and their desire to bring more advanced services to users of non-smartphones – to which end they re-launched their WAP site this week.

Location based services are an “exciting” opportnity, but user privacy needs to be protected.” Ultimately they see great social aspects to location, but marrying advertising with location is a “hugely powerful opportunity for us”. MySpace is “Focusing a lot of energy on it.”

And what happens after the Google advertising deal ends? Guess what, they “can’t talk about what happens afterwards.”

Lord Davies of Abersoch, Minister of State for Trade & Investment is an ex-banker. That was one of his opening lines to a crowd of about 150 business people at a UK Trade and Investment lunch today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. You would expect then that cutting and running – like a few bankers we could mention – would not be a great move from a Minister three weeks into the job. He declared that “he was here to listen” and get answers about the mobile business – even going to the lengths of asking everyone to email him their suggestions for how UKTI can help British businesses and how it can deliver better services.

He asked the panel several reasonable questions. What will aging consumers want from mobiles? What will happen to payments and to the banking industry with mobile? He is also wondering about auto-translation of messaging. And should the very young be on mobiles? How do developing countries use mobiles to develop trade? All good questions. Perhaps in a global recession, three weeks into a job designed to help British business, the Minister concerned would hang around for the answers.

Unfortunately he left before the panel discussion had had a chance to answer his points.

I checked with the UKTI and a spokesman said “It was a bit unfortunate he had to leave and he should have said why he was leaving, which was actually in his written speech but which he didn’t manage to mention at the end. We are trying to cram his diary to get him to as many events as possible at MWC and he had to rush off to give out an award. If there’s a question you want to put we can get an answer to that next week. He’s quite keen to learn about the industry.”

UPDATE, late 2009:: Since this event we’re happy to point out that Lord Davies has done a much better job after this somewhat false start.

Gighit is a new site offering wiki style content to music lovers and UK music gig goers. It’s designed to recommend bands, reminding users of upcoming gigs and allow access to ticketing. Gighit.com originally launched in 2005, acting as a forerunner to successful sites like iLike and Last FM. You can integrate your Facebook, Last FM, iLike and Twitter, add information you already have on other sites, add location and firends. Gighit is coming out of a Caffeinehit, a web design consultancy.

Business IT Online, the specialist supplier of Web-based services for small businesses, is now including a shop for discounted office supplies among its services. All readers of Techcrunch are invited to benefit from a 10 per cent discount on purchases made today by entering the discount code [TC] on the final payment page.

GoodBaad.com is a new Web app by developer Joel Hughes which lets you vote either Good or “Baad” (geddit?) on (almost) any topic you can think of. You can change your mind as often as you like (only your most recent vote counts). Disqus integration means you can debate the reasons why a topic is good or bad on comments. Competitors might (I stress might) include jyte.com, ask500people.com, planetrate.com, brandindex.co.uk, makefive.com. Although I doubt they will be too troubled as this is a part-time project from the developer.

Simpleweb-online.com is planning a March public beta. The Bristol startup is playing its cards close to its chest but an exec summary I’ve seen says they plan to develop their app to allow digital agencies, designers and developers to manage their own or their clients online services.

Small businesses wishing to set-up a webpresence with e-commerce functionalities now have a new option inthe shape of a new solution from London-based startup WebJam. By combining the ecommerce shop service from Venda (Historical point: emerged from the ashes of Boo.com back in the Cretaceous era) they’ve created a publishing, community and e-commerce site with an easy to use interface at pretty affordable prices (a few dozen pounds a month). The cross-distribution of the respective services will launch by the end of Q1 2009.

Omni-ID, a UK–based provider of passive ultra high frequency RFID technology, raised £10 million in Series C funding from Cody Gate Ventures, which Omni will use to increase manufacturing capacity and speed-up penetration into the Asian market.

ScoreGrid is a South African Based startup launched in beta recently after a year in stealth mode. It has $700,000 in Angel funding to provide live tracking of football (soccer) games using a combination of manual input and home grown software. The data is interpreted using ScoreGrid’s game visualisation tools and broadcast live. What’s the upshot? A “heat map” of football games which let you also see in-depth statistical graphs on how long the ball was possessed by each side, how long it was in each half, as well as visuals of ball movement and events during the game as it is played out. The site currently covers the Barclays English Premier League and the UEFA champion league. The app may be of interested to sports rights owners – like Sky – that could augment their live coverage with data online.

Over Valentines Day, London-based mobile startup Flirtomatic let its users send real presents to each other, aside from the usual virtual flowers they can usually send. Chocolate hearts and a Flirtomatic ‘Panty-rose’, were packed up lovingly by Flirtomatic staff from their Soho office. Mark Curtis, CEO says knickers and roses are two of the most popular pieces of content sent between users (over 130,000 in 2008). So now you know.

One thing I’ve really been looking for in Tweetdeck, my preferred Twitter desktop client, is a way to just write a Tweet to someone, either a direct message or an @ reply. Ideally I’d be able to search for my Twitter pals in the client, either by real name or Twitter user name. However, we are now one step closer to this with the release today of TweetDeck’s handy new feature – username auto-complete. When you start typing an @ or direct message (or typing “@” anywhere in a tweet) the autocomplete window is triggered and Tweetdeck brings up a list of your friends as you type. Here’s a video to explain how it works:

Tweetdeck is pushing out the update to all users shortly but it’s also available here on their blog for manual install or here is the direct download URL. Not that the update has not been extensively tested so installation is at your own risk. If you are unsure then hold off until the next full TweetDeck update.

Feeds and commenting aggregator fav.or.it has closed a new round of funding totaling nearly £500,000. The bulk of that has come from angel investors but £125,000 came from the Finance South East fund, a government-backed fund set up to support startup businesses. The funds will be used to expand the development team and also hire a dedicated marketing and sales force.

fav.or.it has thus far been designed to simplify interaction with news sites and blogs. But it’s now adding a new string to its business model: making it easier for companies to track what people are saying about them on blogs, social networks and Twitter. However, this won’t be brand tracking. Instead, brands would be able to pay for channels that aggregate the conversation around their brand/product and use it to engage with customers. Think of it as a centralised command and control system. Sensibly this moves the site away from the advertising-driven model.

Launched in beta in October 2007 and public from June last year, fav.or.it – founded by CEO Nick Halstead – aggregates content from thousands of blogs and websites and streams them into a network of vertical channels. In this respect it’s not unlike a bunch of Google News Channels but the difference is logged-in users can comment on fav.or.it’s platform and the comments will appear on the original blog.

Halstead has also launched a new property, FeedBroker. This separates some of the functionality into a new site which would allow for licensing feeds external to fav.or.it. Feedbroker lets content owners specify terms under which their content may be used and allows them to take payments on a pay-per-post basis, for instance. In other words, fav.or.it wil share ad revenues with publishers, so it’s not just taking the content and re-publishing it.

The whole new push for fav.or.it should help it to differentiate itself from simple “commenting systems” like CoComment, SezWho, Tangler, Disqus (which now makes use of Fav.or.it’s full API for commenting) and Intense Debate.

Ok, there are lots of cool applications associated with Twitter but one of the coolest I have ever seen is the new one out from Walter Higgins at Sxoop Technologies, makers of the excellent Pixenate imaging app.

How about custom-made T-Shirts which print out a mosaic of images of your Twitter followers or friends? Or even a mug? Or even a shopping bag!

It really doesn’t get more zeitgeisty than that. Enjoy.

InterCall, the world’s largest conferencing provider, is to give each of their 1 million customers an account with Huddle, the UK startup which has built a suite of social collaboration applications. – which were good enough to make it the only non-US partner for LinkedIn recently, alongside the likes of Amazon and Google. Huddle is still running on a $4 million Series A round from 2007 from Eden Ventures, but revenues are coming in at the same time.

InterCall conferencing customers can now schedule phone and web meetings in Huddle and share dial-in details, documents and meeting minutes. In addition, they will benefit from Huddle’s full range of project management and collaboration tools including discussions, whiteboards, tasks and document versioning and audit trail. The deal is a big one for Huddle – InterCall has around 30-40,000 new businesses joining them every month.

It’s interesting to note that Scott Etzler, InterCall’s president says “Many of our customers are already familiar with Huddle from LinkedIn and Facebook.” That indicates thay Huddle is shaping up to be a truly internationally recognised startup – something that doesn’t happen often enough in the UK. Alastair Mitchell, Huddle co-founder and CEO, says the deal is a natural fit and “realises our vision of end-to-end collaboration and social networking for business, in one place.”

Huddle’s main advantage is that teams can collaborate in a secure, VPN-like environment from any computer allowing them to avoid FTP servers and eliminate USBs and CDs. Customers now include Boots, P&G, Barclaycard and UNICEF and a number of UK and US government departments.

This week’s first TechCrunch Europe Job of the Week is for a Ruby/Rails developer for Homeflow is a start-up supplying software and tools to the property sector.

The second is for a Online Marketing Executive at CitySocialising.com.

Remember, it costs only £20 to post *any* kind of advert on the CrunchBoard related to your startup/business, whether it be jobs, searches for office space or requests for new projects.

Every week we publish the Job of the Week here (8,000+ on RSS) and Twitter it to about 7,000+ more people. To apply to have Job of the Week featured, put up a job on the CrunchBoard and contact editorial.