So far this year I’ve has run roundtable meetup events for startups in Barcelona, Paris, Prague and coming up we’ll be in Stockholm in 27 May, Berlin on 10 June and throwing a huge summer party in London on 9 July (come meet The Travelling Geeks). But next week I will be putting together a day-long conference in London as a personal project which I think is needed for the eco-system. It’s shaping up to be pretty cool. After-all, over 200 people are already coming and there are only a handful of tickets left. [UPDATE: NOW SOLD OUT - Only tickets to the evening party still available]

Geek ‘n Rolla – the day for European startups old and new to network, learn from each other, meet investors and party – will have a full day of speakers, startup pitches and will also have a dedicated exhibition area. Get your ticket today.

The event will be from 10am, all day at RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects), 66, Portland Place, London, W1B 1AD. Map

Geek ’n Rolla is sponsored by Viadeo one of the largest professional social networks in the world, and supported by UK Trade and Investment, as well as NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. And not only will we be having a great day of fantastic content for tech startups, we are planning the mother of all evening networking parties at one of London’s premier venues, Cafe de Paris kindly sponsored by Winston & Strawn’s Bootlaw.

What’s there left to say? Just this. Are you Old School, or New School?

You see, people ask the question, what’s a real Geek ‘n Rolla? And I tell ‘em: We all like a bit of the good life. Some the money, or the fame.

But a real Geek’n Rolla – wants the lot.

Sponsors

We still have a few sponsorship opportunities and there will be a dedicated exhibition area available for companies to show off their products. If you are interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at the event, please contact Petra Johansson on petra[at]twistedtree.co.uk

Viadeo

Founded in June 2004, Viadeo quickly established itself as the place to be for professional networking in Europe and beyond. Since then, with more than 7 million members (as of January 2009). Follow them on Twitter @viadeo. Viadeo is essential for those who want to:

• Increase their business opportunities (to discover new clients, staff and business partners)
• Enhance their visibility and their online reputation
• Manage and develop their network of professional contacts

Viadeo’s members consist of business owners, entrepreneurs and managers from a diverse range of businesses both start-up and well established. Each day Viadeo attracts more than 10,000 new members; 40,000 new connections are made and over one million profiles are viewed. Based in Paris (head office), Viadeo also has offices and teams in the UK (London), Spain (Madrid and Barcelona), Italy (Milan), China (Beijing), India (New Delhi) and Mexico (Mexico City). The company employs 200 staff worldwide. www.viadeo.com

As part of their sponsorship Viadeo are delighted to offer all delegates the opportunity to be prominently featured around the venue. You are invited to create a profile at www.viadeo.com – the 10 most interesting profiles will be part of a rotating Viadeo display visible to all attending VCs, business angels, journalists & geeks for the duration of the conference. Additionally all delegates signing up to Viadeo prior to April 21 (with the email you used to register with amiando) will be given a 3 month free premium subscription in order to get your European networking kickstarted… To qualify for exposure at the event profiles must be completed by midnight on April 19th via the link/ URL above.

UKTI

UK Trade & Investment is the government organisation that helps UK-based companies succeed in the global economy. We also help overseas companies bring their high quality investment to the UK’s dynamic economy – acknowledged as Europe’s best place from which to succeed in global business.

UK Trade & Investment offers expertise and contacts through its extensive network of specialists in the UK, and in British embassies and other diplomatic offices around the world. We provide companies with the tools they require to be competitive on the world stage. For further information please visit www.uktradeinvest.gov.uk or telephone +44 (0)20 7215 8000.

NESTA

NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. Its mission is to transform the UK’s capacity for innovation. NESTA Investments has the largest portfolios of early-stage businesses in the country and is a leading authority on how to grow new ideas. We have strict investment criteria, and work with companies that have high potential for growth, are at seed or start-up stage, and have the potential to attract syndicated support. When we do invest, we aim to maximise our investment by assigning mentors, part-time managers or specialist support. We also stimulate imaginative solutions to pressing social issues and shape policy to help the UK meet its national innovation challenges.www.nesta.org.uk

After-party sponsor: Bootlaw

Bootlaw is a free boot camp for emerging technology, internet and digital businesses and the professionals working in them who want to learn more about the legal issues they face. Its brought to you by Barry Vitou and Danvers Baillieu the friendly lawyers at Winston & Strawn in London. For more information go to www.bootlaw.com

School for Startups

Geek’n Rolla is also supported by School for Startups. The inspiration of serial entrepreneur and angel investor Doug Richard, School for Startups is the UK’s leading provider of business training for entrepreneurs. Anyone attending Geek’n Rolla may claim a 5% discount on all current School for Startups events – currently 2 in London and 2 in Scotland. Simply go to www.schoolforstartups.co.uk quoting the discount code TECHCRUNCH to qualify for this discount.

See below for our speakers;

Read More

Every quarter UK-based executive search company Calibre One, which works with VC and PE backed tech companies, releases some research into tech investment. Now obviously one has to take this with a pinch of salt – it’s a PR exercise for them after all. However, it’s not in their interest to get the research wrong and it makes for pretty interesting reading. Plus, they have released it to TechCrunch Europe first.

The heads-up on this quarter’s report is essentially this: investment in the “early-stage” technology sector seems to be weathering the global storm better than most. That’s not to say it’s all rosy of course, and their definition would probably be around $500k and upwards. And Europe is not doing that great – like we didn’t already know this?

According to their figures tech investment in the US is slightly up (from $1.28Bn in Q4 2008 to to $1.48Bn in Q1 2009) which may or may not mark the end of the downward trend.

However, while investment levels in $ terms in Europe as a whole kept reasonably stable at $0.76Bn, the number of investments was down over 25% (from 204 in Q4 to 142 in Q1). In other words, European tech investing is way down over concurrent quarters.

The UK especially had a very weak Q1 with only $112M invested compared with $294M the previous quarter.

Government bailouts are reducing cost of investing in exciting growth technology companies, but this would really only apply at the top end of the scale. The average size of investment in the UK, for instance, went down to its lowest level since Q2 2007 – $5.6M. This is a problem we’ve highlighted this week.

Since Europe tends to lag behind the US by 12-18 months, this could mean 2009 will as bad, though there may be some uptick in growth towards the end of the year. It’s pretty much anyone’s call at this point of course.

The Index is downloadable in PDF format from Calibreone.com

I’ve pulled out the raw text about Europe to make it more Google friendly, click more for this

Read More

It’s perhaps of passing curiosity to pure Internet startups, but it’s interesting to note that Belgium-based startup Specle has secured first round funding of £150,000 in an investment lead by Avonmore Developments, which has previously invested in UK Internet startup GroupSpaces. Avonmore is joined by entrepreneur brothers Simon and Dale Murray, with the former joining Specle’s board. Steve Daykin, CFO of 7 Publishing, publishers of Delicious and Sainsbury’s Magazine, also joins the board.

Specle’s “Specle Create” software is aimed at cost savings in the production of advertising for magazines and newspapers. Specifically it works with the Adobe InDesign program to help operators prepare ad layouts to the exact page size and requirements of publications. It uses using Adobe XMP metadata to saves time in production by eliminating the need to gather publication specifications from publishers. It’s already had some success in Belgium with agencies and publishers so the investment with a UK-backer implies it’s launch in other regions. Tom Beckenham is managing director of Specle.

The take-away from this is that if you can create something that saves businesses money, you can likely win investment.

This is a Guest Post by Robin Klein, Partner in The Accelerator Group (TAG), an early stage seed funder of tech startups in the UK and across the rest of Europe. If there is anyone who knows about early stage tech startup funding in Europe, it’s Klein. It chimes in with my post last year that the UK government should make sure any stimulus funds are channeled to into many more startups than proposed, instead of into a lucky few.

Alistair Darling, Lord Drayson – an Open Letter

Dear Lord Drayson,

Put £100,000 into 10,000 startups – not £10m into 100!

There has been a lot of chatter about the Government’s apparent initiative to make £1bn available for innovative early-stage companies.

Apparently, Lord Drayson, the Minister of Science and Innovation in the Department for Universities and Skills is driving this. The BVCA is keen to promote the idea through its influential contacts that this money should be channeled via the large established VC funds.

From where we sit, putting lots more money into the large funds achieves the exact opposite of what I understand the desired the objectives to be.

What is urgently needed in the UK – in order to promote entrepreneurship and encourage innovation – is funding at the very earliest stages.

One of the major drivers for Silicon Valley’s success has been the readily available, quickly raised seed capital. Its not uncommon, even in today’s funding climate to find start-ups funded with $500K in a matter of weeks by angel syndicates led by an agile tech VC.

There is more than enough capital available once companies have proven their technologies, validated the market need and have real momentum. This capital is NOT venture, it is development or growth capital.

The so-called funding gap has never been adequately filled and the growth in size of the leading funds has forced them to move up the food chain and to back relatively fewer pure start-ups.

We have all been wringing our hands at this gap for many years and in the current environment the gap is noticeably widening.

Seed funds are extremely difficult to make work effectively on the classic 2/20 model since it is important that seed funds invest in a large and diverse portfolio (in order to find the winners) while at the same time need to provide a lot of hand-holding to these companies (implying a larger organisation – more partners).

The BVCA’s position is interesting in that it looks at the whole issue from the ‘industry’s perspective’ – you can’t blame them for that – its their job. It’s certainly not being looked at from the entrepreneurs perspective!

We at TAG have had terrific support from some of the large tech VCs but their ability to do many seed fundings is very limited. We need healthy and growing seed capital partners to join us in our quest to find and nurture the next world beaters.

One of the most important and effective vehicles for promoting entrepreneurship in the tech arena in recent years has been Seedcamp [Interest declared: TAG has been an investor in companies promoted by Seedcamp - Editor] – the flood of applicants and the rising quality of these applicants attest to the strength of innovation emanating from Europe.

They are deserving of far greater financial backing.

Robin Klein

Partner, The Accelerator Group (TAG)

PS: TAG is an early stage technology investor with 43 investments currently in its portfolio. We invest actively mainly in the UK but also across Europe and in the US.

[Photo credit]

[Update: See statement from Twitter below] When Twitter ended it’s service sending Text messages to users in August 2008 after a year of throttling the service down, many users cried foul. Free incoming SMS had been available almost since launch and we’d become used to it. But as things go, we moved on. We learned to use Twitter on the mobile Web, then increasingly with new desktop apps like Tweetdeck. Then on March 26 Twitter re-launched the ‘free’ SMS service – but for Vodafone users only – and only for those with a certain subscription package.

But the whole thing is now starting to backfire as users are reporting that there is “no escape” from the service, resulting in a fire-house of texts as Twitter users chatter away incessantly.

It’s interesting that this happened to a much lesser extent back in the day when we used Twitter more as a pared-down status update service. Facebook without all the crap, if you like. Certainly I only remember receiving a few texts a day back in ’06. But since Twitter became a communication and conversation medium, and especially since the noobs arrived at the start of this year, there’s no stopping them.

Not only is the service sending every inane Tweet on SMS – it’s also coming up with errors. An increasing stream of comments coming in to TechCrunch Europe’s recent post on the SMS re-launch show that some Vodafone customers are finding their tweets “”repeated… a million times on Twitter” and other worrying errors.

Of course, there is the possibility that these are just people who don’t know how to adjust who they get SMS from. But here are some of the comments so far.

“radha” – April 10th, 2009

Sigh. Be careful what you wish for… there’s a Vodafone/Twitter glitch. One you sign up there may be no escape from texts from 84666.. I’ve received about 30 despite three calls to Vodafone customer service. V frustrating!
reply

“Ryan Taylor” – April 12th, 2009

I too am experiencing the problems mentioned above, as well as tons of tweets i send being repeated like a million times on twitter
reply

“Ashley” – April 12th, 2009

Be grateful if you aint on Vodafone, I signed up for tweets by text and in the past 24 hours I have received around 200 useless spam txts from Vodafone. It is impossible to stop these, if Vodafone can’t do anything about it I will be changing my mobile provider. ****ing useless so it is. I now have to have my phone on silent constantly, I woke this morning to 54 txt messages from twitter and I don’t have a block function on my phone.

“So frustrated and p***ed off!!”

“Richard” – April 12th, 2009

I have exactly the same problem – phone is becoming impossible to use. The texts all say that I| wont be getting any more texts – an irony if there was one.
reply

“lisa” – April 12th, 2009

this absolutely takes the p*ss i’ve had at least a hundred texts telling me i won’t be getting any more texts, this is so annoying my phone is completely impossible to use now

UPDATE: Twitter says it has now fixed the problem. In a blog post , it said:

Two SMS bugs have been fixed that affected users on specific carriers (including Vodafone in the UK.) First, messages sent to Twitter were being posted multiple times. Second, Twitter did not respond appropriately to commands like OFF and ON.

Both of these problems are now resolved. Apologies for the confusion.

A statement from Vodafone reads:

Customers may still get a large number of text messages just simply because there are loads of tweets flying around so it’s advisable they turn on text alert tweets from certain users, rather than all the people they are following.

Whilst the above is a no-brainer for anyone who’s been using Twitter for a while, it may be useful to advise newcomers who could otherwise become inundated with tweets and subsequently with text messages.

For new users who’d like to set up the SMS service:
* Login to your account
* Select ‘Settings’ then ‘Devices’
* Enter your phone number & check the box saying ‘it’s ok for
Twitter to send me messages’
* Setup your device by texting the unique code to the shortcode
86444
* For each person you are following you can then select if you
receive text updates or not

You can just send ‘OFF’ or ‘STOP’ to 86444 to stop receiving text alerts

To turn notifications on again, just text ‘ON’ to 86444 to start
receiving tweets as normal.

The guys at TweetMinster.co.uk have launched a free Adobe AIR Twitter client that lets users track, follow and engage around UK politics in real time.

Still in beta, the TweetMinster Wire comes with preset groups to allow people to follow and access the Twitter streams of MPs, prospective parliamentary candidates, all major parties, parliament and government departments and those coming out of 10 Downing Street – all literally at the press of a button.

It features an algorithmic secret sauce that captures and tracks relevant conversations around those Twitter streams. People can search and filter conversations by party and politician, and compare the occurrence of topics and trends overtime within a dynamic graph.

It also hooks in The Guardian’s Open Platform API to add context to the stats; by accompanying tracked topics with news, users can see why a topic peaked on a specific day by seeing its references within those days’ articles.

Users can participate within these conversations, tying in to TweetMinster’s aims to foster an active community around UK politics.

Back in March, the TweetMinster chaps posted an insight into “socialness” analysing data gathered around MP-generated content and conversations. At the time, the average MP had 358 followers, followed 96 people and had posted 177 times to Twitter. Of course, things move fast online, which is one of the biggest challenges facing the team when developing the Wire app.

Co-founder Alberto Nardelli says the more complex aspects of development were figuring out how to define relevance, given that what’s current today will be passé tomorrow; and identifying the connectors in conversations, such as political journalists.

The company is punting TweetMinster Wire as a “social Bloomberg for UK politics”, and has a bundle of additional features planned, some of which will be premium services which Nardelli assures me will be as affordable as a magazine subscription.

Among the upcoming features are the addition of other datasets for sentiment analysis, maps to place the online activity and conversations in geographic context, and support for mobile devices. TweetMinster eventually aims to build the Wire up into a Google Trends for Twitter.

The TweetMinster Wire is the latest release in a collection of apps which allow users to get a feel for social media trends in the context of UK politics, such as the Tweetometer which allows you to pitch two political topics against each other to see which is more popular.

TweetMinster was launched as a web service in December 2008, inspired by TweetCongress tracking Twitter usage amongst US Congresspeople and by a tweet conversation between Nardelli and MP Tom Watson. Looking at the progress that TweetMinster’s made since then, I wouldn’t be surprised if TweetCongress comes a-calling at TweetMinster’s door for a few pointers.

The new version of Tweetmeme, effectively the Techmeme-like aggregator for links Tweeted on Twitter, has just gone live today. Sites like this recently started appearing to help people track what is linked to most on Twitter, which is where the real value lies, not in conversations about someone’s lunch.

But so far the results have been mixed. TwitLinks has not solved the the problem and Quotably dead-pooled.

Twitturly looked promising and works in the same way as the others. It aggregates URLs linked in Twitter messages and puts them on the home page based on overall popularity, calculated simply by determining the number of times the URL was in a Twitter message – effectively re-tweets. The more people who link to an item the higher it appears. As time passes the story loses currency and drops in the rankings.

This is also the way Tweetmeme works but a direct comparison of them today shows Tweetmeme is performing better, and is innovating faster.

On today’s TechCrunch story “Who the Hell Is Enrolling in Journalism School Right Now?” Tweetmeme lists this story as being re-tweeted 241 times (at the time of writing). But Twitturly ranks it with only 102 mentions on Twitter. MicroPlaza – another new entrant to the game – lists it as being re-tweeted 257 times. Given that the post has over 200 comments on it alone, it feels like Tweetmeme and MicroPlaza are on the right track. Twitturly’s best feature, the ability to see the Top 100 URLs the people that you follow have tweeted, also appears to be broken, at least for me.

[Twitturly versus Tweetmeme versus Microplaza]

What is clear is that out of these sites Tweetmeme is really gunning for the top prize in these stakes. Out of all these kinds of sites it is actually categorising Tweeted links into defined channels, which makes it much more useful. And it’s adding something smart – launching a bunch of Twitter accounts for these channels, such as Technology.

Also, coming down the pipe next week will be the ability to watch a live stream of news similar to the new FriendFeed, and it’s already launched other services including an API for other services to build upon, widgets, buttons and a mobile version. Certainly I think it’s button distribution (as in Add This to Tweetmeme) has helped its explosive growth – see graph above.

Unlike other services, since many of the URL’s mentioned on Twitter are shortened, Tweetmeme unshortens them to find the original story link and category of content (e.g. video, blog, image). For most developers this is too much of a burden (and Twitter wouldn’t bother) so the fact that Tweetmeme has exposed that data via an API is another point to them.

Tweetmeme even has a business model – unlike the platform from which it’s derived. Its revenue model is based on sponsors simply paying to have their latest tweeted story listed on Tweetmeme. That story is also pushed into the site’s river of news out onto Tweetmeme’s Twitter and RSS feeds. It’s up to ordinary users to re-tweet it or not of course.

7Digital.com is on something of a hot streak; following its partnerships with Spotify and Songbird, the site has partnered with AOL to offer music download integration to Winamp users in 10 European regions, through the ‘Now Playing’ menu.

The service is available across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, Portugal and Ireland. Winamp has 77 million users worldwide.  7digital has a catalogue of more than 6m high quality DRM-free sound and video files in various formats, making it especially appealing to a young, tech-savvy consumer base.

7Digital opened its API platform to developers in 2008, and streaming media applications were quick to capitalise. The company has partnered with a string of high profile record labels, artists, film and TV companies, retail and brand partners.

The company is far from unseating iTunes as the market dominator, but with Winamp now joining the 7Digital camp, not to mention the geektastic followings that Spotify and Songbird inspire, Apple and Amazon will certainly be taking note.

Ok, so I’d just like to thank everyone for their enthusiasm for Geek ‘n Rolla – the day for startups old and new to network, learn from each other, meet investors and party! It looks like you guys are getting so hot under the collar for the event (over 200 are coming already and there are only 50 or so tickets left) that we’re also now adding the opportunity for companies set out their stall in an exhibition area. (Please note this is completely separate from the Pitch Competition, which is run purely on an editorial basis). You might be a startup that wants to mark yourself out from the crowd, or perhaps a service firm like a law firm, recruitment company, technology provider etc. So if you’d like an area to demo your company or set our your stall, whatever it is, then please contact our events manager Petra Johansson (petra[@]twistedtree.co.uk) for an idea about packages.

BraveNewTalent.com, one of the slew of social media enabled graduate recruitment sites to launch this year, has had £102k in finance from RBS under the government’s new Enterprise Finance Guarantee (EFG) scheme that encourages business growth and staff expansion.

Like many social media takes on traditional approaches, BraveNewTalent.com flips the recruitment model, allowing graduate job seekers to interact with employers of choice directly via Facebook, Bebo and MySpace. The company has operations in the UK and India.

The idea is that companies can reduce their recruitment costs and use social networks for recruiting without themselves having to take the plunge and get to grips with the medium. The site is the brainchild of 25 year old Lucian Tarnowski, who in his student years ran Take Heart India, one of the UK’s only entirely student run charities.

Last month he picked up the gong for Global Enterprising Young Brit in the Make Your Mark awards backed by the British Chambers of Commerce, the CBI, the Federation of Small Businesses and the Institute of Directors.

Under the EFG scheme the government guarantees 75% of any loans made, with the bank covering the remaining 25%. It’s open to profitable businesses with an annual turnover of up to £25m, seeking loans from £1k to £1m.

TechCrunch Europe will be hosting a “TechCrunchTalk Nordic” Roundtable event in Stockholm on 27 May. What are we talking about here? An afternoon of presentations, interactive panels, Q&A’s and startup pitches, followed by networking in the evening.

Following on from the TechCrunch Brunch we held in Helsinki in November last year, we’ve been keen to assemble a larger and a greater regional tech startup crowd to share more real hard-core knowledge and experience, as well as facilitate meetings and introductions to investors and key industry players. As in every other region it visits, Techcrunch Europe is setting out to connect people.

TechCrunch Nordic is designed to bring together startups, seasoned entrepreneurs, investors and key industry players in the Nordic and Baltic regions for great networking, TechCrunch style. It will be taking place in the afternoon of Wednesday, May 27th, from 15.00-18.00 followed by networking until around 20.00.

Wnat to speak? For content and speaker suggestions please contact the TechCrunch Europe Editor.

Tickets to the event are a nominal SEK 475 per person (to minimise no-shows) – and can be purchased online here (early-bird discounts are available).

It will be at the Elite Palace Hotel, St Eriksgatan 115, Stockholm, and will focus on the following themes:

- “Minipreneurship” in web development – can a great web service be build on very small foundations?

- Sweden’s association with “big plays” (Skype, Stardoll, Tradedoubler etc) has given it a special place online – can it hold on to that in the future?

- The Nordic countries have a cultural history of gender equality – does that apply to tech as well?

- Do Nordic startups think international/global immediately? How do you launch a product in Europe across many markets?

- Are Nordic startups reaching beyond their borders for investors from other European countries?

- The new Nordic mobile landscape:
• Telcos versus Internet
• With Sweden and Finland, leading players in mobile innovation, what trends are appearing there first?

- Nordic and Baltic inter-change / inter-play:
• Is it a ‘greater regional market’ or are startups just focused on their own immediate home markets?
• Are Nordic VC’s mainly helping local startups or are they looking at the greater region?

A Pitch! Competition will be held for selected startups at the end of the afternoon.

TechCrunchTalk Nordic is sponsored by Bloglovin, helping you keep track of your favourite blogs, and is supported by Swedish Startups, Arctic Startup, and Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship.

Mattias Swenson, co-founder of Bloglovin, and the co-ordinator behind Swedish Startups, says: “The Swedish startup climate is improving and startups are beginning to meet up, sharing knowledge and information. Having said this, we are still a long way off from the thriving eco-system of Silicon Valley, so having a TechCrunchTalk Nordic will act as a dynamic injection into the community.”

We have a few sponsorship opportunities and demo tables available for companies to show off their products. If you are interested in supporting the Stockholm event or any of the other forth-coming events, please contact Petra Johansson of TwistedTree.

If you are a member of the press wanting to cover the Stockholm event or any of the forth-coming events, please contact Rassami Hök Ljungberg of rassami.

If you wish to be on the mailing list for early information about all TechCrunch Europe upcoming events, sign up here.

Our first ever TechCrunch Europe conference for tech startups old and new, Geek ‘n Rolla, will feature a pitch competition from early stage startups. You can be looking for funding, publicity or both. But you need to be a tech startup, less than 3.5 years old, with or without “seed” funding already. The emphasis will be placed on Web and mobile tech startups which can “scale” and perhaps eventually launch internationally intoother markets.

To enter you need to email TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher (er, me), with a one side of A4 text-only pitch, and also include the URL of you company/project/startup etc on CrunchBase(you can add your company onto it if it is not already there). Include: The market “problem” you are solving with your startup, your solution, your competitors, your team, and what you’re looking for (Series A round, etc).

Yesterday we ran a pitch training session (see the end of that post) with 19 startups who have all now honed their pitch to perfection (I hope) and all might (or might not) be in the running for the pitch. So there is already a fair amount of competition. If your startup is selected for the competition, and you have already bought a ticket to the conference, the cost of one ticket will be refunded. No startup with *ever* pay to pitch at a TechCrunch Europe event – all entrants are selected by TechCrunch editorial on merit only.

The deadline to submit your pitch is close of play, Friday this week (April 10).

Geek’n Rolla is sponsored by Viadeo one of the largest professional social networks in the world, and supported by UK Trade and Investment, as well as NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. Not only will we be having a great day of fantastic content for tech startups, we are planning the mother of all networking parties at one of London’s premier venues, Cafe de Paris, kindly sponsored by Bootlaw. So get your ticket today. 200 people (already coming) can’t be wrong…

I don’t cover enterprise applications often, but today Sosius launches something that not only made me sit up and notice, but I could also see scaling into a tool which almost any web application could make use of. Sosius provides online collaboration and group workspaces, but before you close this tab, you need to check out their new visualization application. This is a fascinating tool I’ve seen demonstrated live which allows you to plug in any kind of data and then map it into a fractal map that can be zoomed into – almost to an infinite point, depending on how deep the data goes.

The tool was originally designed to allow businesses to visualize where the pressure and pain points were in their projects. The visualization is colour-coded and reveals patterns, trends and oddities on any
given project which has structured data. So for example, imagine you have a profit and loss spreadsheet which pertains to a multitude of different departments within a complex organisation. Using Sosius , you can upload the document, click on the the visualization tool, and then see problems areas marked out in red, with varying shades all the way out to the areas that are doing well, which are outlined in green. The effect, as it was being demoed to me last week in San Francisco, was startling enough to attract the attention of a health-care company person who promptly handed their card to Andrew Cameron-Webb, CTO and founder of Sosius.

That works in terms of enterprisises. But what about wider web applications? Where it gets interesting is that Sosius has a full open API which anyone can apply to their data. This already allows an interface with spreadsheets on Zoho for instance. So in theory you could – for example – plug in a site’s traffic data and instantly drill down into specific pages that are not performing well and work out why.

Cameron-Webb says the tool was built because their clients started asking for it and so they built it, not unlike the Basecamp story. It launch today for enterprise customers and in May for users of the free version of Sosius aimed at SMEs.

To better illustrate the effect check out this screencast:

It’s one thing to have rock star comedians like Russell Brand on Twitter. Or talk shows hosts like Jonathan Ross. Or perhaps an erudite thinker, writer and presenter like Stephen Fry.

It’s quite another to have the Prime Minister’s wife on Twitter.

Whatever you think of her husband’s government – or, indeed, her husband – Sarah Brown is pretty well regarded by the bulk of UK society, and especially women. So it’s possibly worthy of note that Twitter has not only hit a rich seam of celebrities in the the UK, but is percolating nicely through to people who are highly likely to take the site even more mainstream.

How do I know it’s the real Sarah Brown? In the usual manner, I’ve had it confirmed by a source at Number 10. It’s definitely her either typing the actual tweets or authorising someone to do them on her behalf. “It’s not a spoof” said my well-placed source. Certainly, references to “Michelle and Carla” and phrases like “Back in UK ready to focus on G20 this week. I want to make sure the spouses get the most out of their stay in London” read like she typed them herself.

Right now she has 42 followers (I was number 42). Let’s see how many she has in a week. It will be an interesting test of Twitter’s mainstream adoption in the UK, if nothing else.

Here’s something for all you mobile startups out there possibly relying on advertising as a revenue source. Apparently the global recession is having “little to no effect” on mobile advertisers or user habits, according to BuzzCity. Granted the Singapore-based provider of wireless communities probably has an axe to grind but it does at least have a mobile ad network to base this claim on. Its quarterly Global Mobile Advertising Index for its network covers 200 countries globally.

It shows that in the first three months of 2009, the network delivered 8.5 billion paid advertising banners, an increase of 11% over the previous quarter. The following table shows the top 10 countries by the number of paid advertising banners delivered in each:

1. Indonesia: 4.4 billion (23% growth)
2. India: 842 million (16%)
3. United States: 527 million (38%)
4. South Africa: 428 million (-8 %)
5. Egypt: 162 million (8 % )
6. Romania: 161 million (9 %)
7. China: 130 million ( 67% )
8. Philippines: 125 million (8 %)
9. United Kingdom: 113 million (54 %)
10. Bangladesh: 112 million (-16 %)

As you can see growth was pretty big in China, the United Kingdom and the United States. The UK is in this Top 10 for the first time and joins Romania. Who knows what happened in Bangladesh.

Frankly you can read a lot into these figures – certainly the explosion in mobile services in emerging markets is one – but my take-away from this is that the Mobile Web is just growing bigger and bigger by the hour.

Of course, we know that Twitter names are something of a Wild-West environment right now. Anyone can grab a famous person’s name or brand and there is not much policing going on. After all, it would be almost impossible to police. But until now most thought that rogue accounts, once identified, would simply get shut down or perhaps just shut off and transferred to their rightful owner without too much fuss. But, in what appears to be a new move, Twitter is handing out the personal details of people who register brand names on the micro-blogging service to big companies, without alerting the original registrant or performing any kind of standard due diligence. The move raises huge issues for the site, where Twitter names are increasingly being treated like domain names – but unlike domains there is, thus far, no kind of recourse to any kind of domain resolution system.

Not long after Twitter launched, Stephanie Robesky of Atomico, the venture fund established by the former founders of Skype, registered @Skype while still at the company. But, she says in a blog post yesterday, she forgot about the move, only to be reminded of it after she realised a Twitter employee had handed out her name, email address and contact details to someone at Skype who then contacted her. In an open letter to Twitter yesterday, she blogged:

“This is a violation of my privacy and, quite honestly, probably a big violation of your privacy policies. It is unprofessional of your team to hand out users information regardless of circumstances and this is something that we never would have done at Skype – even if Obama himself couldn’t log in to an account that he says wasn’t even his! I hope that you and your team take privacy more seriously in the future.”

She told me on email: “I registered the Skype Twitter name because I worked at Skype at the time so thought it might have been of use to us at some point. I’m sure I told someone in marketing who ignored me and had no clue at the time what Twitter was. Left Skype last year and forgot that I even had registered the name until yesterday… Glad they don’t have my credit card details.”

A response from a Twitter employee to Robesky betrays a cavalier attitude to ‘Twitter name resolution’, accusing her of violating Twitter’s terms of service, despite clearly having revealed her personal information.

From: XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX
Sent: 07 April 2009 16:31
To: Stephanie Robesky
Subject: Re: Skype name account

Hi Stephanie,

I was informed by a representative of Skype that you had set-up
the account on their behalf but you were no longer an employee
and they did not have access to the account. In such situations we
do release the account to them.

Just curious why you didn’t turn over the keys to your employer before
you left the company? In which case, you’re violating our Terms of
Service by squatting on the user name.

Cheers,
XXXXXXXX

The question for Twitter is whether it has the right to release user information in “special cases” and how it determines that a company gets precedence over a Twitter name, as opposed to an individual.

Earlier this year – in an attempt to get a dialogue going about government policy – I proved how childishly simple it was to register the Twitter name of UK Government Minister. That account was simply shut down. But whether Twitter handed over my details to the government I’ll probably never know.

Babbel – the language learning site emanating from Germany – releases it’s first premium product tomorrow. It’s the first sign of their business model and begins their monetization. I’m told the objective is to establish a “freemium” model with a free basic version and payed premium products on top.

So far the site has around 250,000 registered users since launch in January 2008 and is growing mainly in Europe and North Africa. Babbel offers 5 languages that can be used both as reference and learning languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian and German.

An example of this is the Spanish course it will offer (for German speakers) which will be priced 19 Euro (for a single payment). This has unlimited use for 3 months guaranteed with, crucially, a money-back garantee for 20 days. This single payment model differs from the subscription models of other sites and the idea is to make costs more transparent for the customer. The trouble with language courses is that you can pay through the nose for a lot of courses and then just not use everything. Other aspects of the site are likely to remain free for a while, such as vocabulary trainers, writing exercises and all community features as live chat, message boards, internal mail.

This is the first course to be monetised, but clearly Babbel are testing the water to see what happens with this and how the other courses will fair. When startups monetise they often lose users.

However, co-founder Markus Witte tells me “We’re not switching, premium products are an add-on. The site stays free. We’ll loose nobody.”

Babbel has backing from German investors Kizoo and VC Fonds Berlin, although it’s understood to be less than a million euros.

Members of the Ruby on Rails-driven Babbel teach each other via an Adobe Flash/Flex interface. The shtick behind Babbel is that it has a design inspired by a game console, incorporating user-generated images and human voices into the teaching, like shopping or flirting.

Competitors to Babbel are myriad but many have a differing take on language learning. Mango Languages, which launched in September of 2007, offers ten languages. LiveMocha also features social networking. LingQ, offers vocabulary and grammar drills. Babbel bought FriendsAbroad, while VoxSwap has video services and integrates Skype. And Learn10 puts language practice into a widget.

Rumours had started swirling that Sportingo – the user-generated sports site which is part of a network of two others – was in trouble about a month ago. But nothing much surfaced until today’s announcement that it has now been acquired by TixDaq, a ticket price comparison site. The sale price was is undisclosed, but I doubt it was very high. Sportingo and sister sites Caughtoffside.com and GetSport.tv, a guide to where to watch sports video, together only generated 1 million visits a month according to its owners, which is very low given the category and the fact that Sportingo has been going since September 2006. In October 2007 it only had 550,000 uniques.

Sportingo was modelled as a niche OhMyNews – a fan-generated site of articles, opinions and news which was then edited by Sportingo’s own team of sports journalists. But it has suffered when compared to professional sports sites and, frankly, simpler fan-based communities which don’t try to come across as media sites. CaughtOffside was a UK football blog acquired in 2007. Tixdaq will presumably use the sites as a way to generate affiliate sales of sickets from its ticketing search engine.

Sportingo had $3.2 million investment in 2007 from Ingenious Media Active Capital and was founded by Tal Barnoach (Chairman) and Ze’ev Rozov (CEO).

I predict a further slow death for the sites as I can’t see TixDaq investing in the kind of resources need to get Sportingo and it’s other site off the ground, although GetSport.tv may have some potential in the growing online video market.

Apart form anything else the sites will need to aggregate Sport fans activity on other social sites to really catch the zeitgeist. As an example, iPlatform last year recognised that there was so much activity on Facebook amongst Chelsea fans that it could actually create a business sucking those fans out into Chelsea’s own site. I can see other club sites working this way in the future, bypassing niche football sites – especially if they don’t bother to integrate Facebook Connect or other emerging platforms like Twitter.

At least Tixdaq seems well positioned if it can make more headway in the burgeoning secondary ticket market as a sort of overseeing comparison engine.

Our first ever TechCrunch Europe conference for tech startups old and new, Geek ‘n Rolla, is shaping up pretty nicely, even if I do say so myself. Today I’m going to share with you the amazing profiles of just some of our speakers and panelists. And on Monday we’ll continue with even more profiles of those appearing. Geek’n Rolla is sponsored by Viadeo one of the largest professional social networks in the world, and supported by UK Trade and Investment, as well as NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. And not only will we be having a great day of fantastic content for tech startups, we are planning the mother of all evening networking parties at one of London’s premier venues, Cafe de Paris. Get your ticket today, seriously.

So here are just some of our speakers, and I hope you like the song-titles we’ve attached to their talks. Afterall, it wouldn’t be Geek ‘n Rolla without a little Rock ‘n Roll…

Reshma Sohoni, Seedcamp
Talk: “Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Recession business models for tech startups”
Reshma runs Seedcamp on a day-to-day basis as its CEO. She joined Seedcamp from the Venture team at 3i. Prior to 3i, Reshma spent over 3 years at Vodafone in their Commercial Strategy team, working across the Europe and Japan footprints in marketing strategy and pricing functions. Reshma started her career in the US in investment banking (Broadview) and venture capital (Softbank).

Inma Martinez, Stradbroke Advisors
Talk: “The Final Countdown – Europe: The Good, the Bad and the SuperBaad”
Inma Martinez is one of the world’s leading digital media strategists, described by FORTUNE and TIME as one of Europe’s top talents in Human Factors and Social Engagement through technology. Switching a career in the financial markets at Goldman Sachs and The Institute for Infrastructure Finance, she joined Cable & Wireless in the mid-1990s to form their New Technologies Advisory, specifically focused on the Internet and IP services. Co-founder in 1999 of Escape Velocity, a 3i-funded AI software company in the early days of mobile services and selected by Lehman Brothers as one of the Top 20 Software startups to watch, her work delivering transformational technologies to clients has continued to-date. Leading other technology companies in the UK and Finland, her client work moved towards Executive Advisory and in 2006 she founded Stradbroke Advisors, a digital media and fund raising consultancy working with Venture Capital firms (3i, Index Ventures), large corporations (NOKIA Finland, Blyk, BBC, MTV Networks, HP, IBM) as well as Web 2.0 startups and film and TV production companies. She is also an Advisor to the EU Technology Commission. Working across a wide variety of projects, she considers herlself fortunate and honoured to have been directly involved in the emergence of many of today’s digital technologies (Web 2.0, Mobile, Wifi, Blogs) and to work with some of the best talents in the medium. Her work as industry advisor has also continued, being voted Best Contributor to the Formation of Digital Media Strategy at the 2001 European Leadership Forum, a Fortune 500 CEO and EU Governors summit, and being ranked in 2005 by Red Herring amongst the top 40 most influential women in technology. She speaks and writes in the media about investing in innovation, nurturing leadership, creating closer relationships between companies and their clients via digital environments and transforming “Life-As-We- Know-It” thanks to technology.

Julie Meyer, Ariadne Capital and Entrepreneur Country
Startup Pitch Judge
Julie Meyer has 20 years of investment and advisory experience, helping start-up businesses and industry standards to emerge and establish themselves. As Chief Executive of Ariadne Capital, she has overall general and financial management responsibility for the group which she founded in August 2000. Ariadne is an investment and advisory firm focused on the Software and Services, New Media, Communications and Life Services sectors. Julie is well-known for founding First Tuesday, the largest global network of entrepreneurs, which many credit for igniting the Internet generation in Europe. It was sold for $50 million in cash in and shares in July 2000. Julie has raised hundreds of millions of capital for start-ups in addition to overseeing another $150 million of seed capital found for start-ups through First Tuesday. Named a Global Leader of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum and one of the top 30 most powerful women in Europe according to the Wall Street Journal, Julies mission is to back the best entrepreneurs in Europe with global ambitions. She was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year Award in October 2000 by Ernst & Young U.K.

Doug Richard, School for Startups
Startup Pitch Judge
Having appeared in the first and second series of Dragons’ Den, Doug is the Founder of School for Startups (www.schoolforstartups.co.uk ), Chairman and CEO of Trutap (www.trutap.net), Founder and member of the Cambridge Angels, Chairman of the Conservative Party Small Business Task Force and non-exeuctive director of AlertMe (www.alertme.com), VizWoz (www.vizwoz.com), and BeatsDigital (www.beatsdigital.com) Doug is a successful entrepreneur with 20 years’ experience in the development and leadership of technology and software ventures, both in the US and in the UK. Between 1996 and 2000 he was President and CEO of Micrografx, a US publicly quoted software company. Prior to that he also founded and subsequently sold two other companies: Visual Software and ITAL Computers. Doug holds a BA in Psychology from University of California at Berkeley and a Juris Doctor at the school of Law, University of California at Los Angeles. In 2006 Doug was an Honorary Recipient of The Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion. In 2007, Doug became a fellow of the RSA.

Leisa Reichelt, User experience, Disambiguity
Talk: “Hey now, what you doing – Usability / UX / Call it what you like: What startups most often get wrong and what they should do about it’”
Leisa is a London-based freelance User Experience Consultant who works with companies large and small to gather insight from users and apply findings to design. With a background in Information Architecture she eventually decided that being user centred was more than just thinking about users whilst designing, and now incorporates design research into almost every project for a diverse portfolio of clients ranging from large scale public sector to some of the UKs most recent startups. Leisa is a regular conference speaker and blogs at Disambiguity.com and her regular soap box topics include Agile UX, Collaboration, Ambient Intimacy and Ambient Sociability, and Designing with Communities.

Andy McLoughlin, CEO Huddle
Talk: “The Masterplan – How to hire a team of peers”
Defying his mother’s advice that ‘the internet will never take off’, Andy began tinkering with the web in the mid-nineties before starting his career at Fibernet Group plc as the company’s European webmaster in 2001. In 2003 Andy helped found KnowledgeCenter, a knowledge management consultancy focused on the London insurance market. During his time at the company he provided web content and knowledge management consultancy to a number of prominent global clients including QBE, Benfield, Catlin, Arthur J Gallagher and Montpelier Re. With more than 10 years of industry experience, Andy is an expert in field of online collaboration and is heavily involved in the London start-up community. Andy holds a degree in Economics from the University of Sheffield, but has always regretted not studying something more practical like Computer Science. In his spare time he enjoys fencing and skiing (both rather badly) but excels at sitting in sunny beer gardens discussing films, music and cool stuff he recently saw online.

Ian Hogarth, Co-founder, CEO, Songkick.com
Talk: “We Don’t Need No Education – Geek Tools, A Primer”
Ian got a master’s in machine learning at Cambridge and loves dystopian robot takeover narratives. Seven years ago, Ian realized being a choirboy came with no street cred, so he started DJing hip-hop, funk, drum & bass, and grime. Ian quit his job at Bain & Company, Singapore to start Songkick.

Fred Destin, Atlas Venture
Talk: “Taxman – To VC or not to VC – That is the question”
Fred Destin joined Atlas in 2004 and is a Partner in the technology group. He focuses on software and technology-enabled services and digital media infrastructure and applications. He previously co-managed OM Technology Investments, an IP Services and FinTech focused fund backed by Allianz/Dresdner. He served on the board of a number of companies including SGI-spinoff Kasenna, Xerox PARC-spinoff Inxight, Capital IQ (acquired by S&P) and Rainfinity (acquired by EMC). Previously he was a Venture Manager with Speed Ventures, a seed stage fund backed by Permira and Soros Partners. He was also an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs and has further experience with Zurich Capital Markets and J.P. Morgan. Fred authors a widely read blog at www.freddestin.com, commenting on European innovation and the digital media space. He currently serves on the boards of Atlas portfolio companies Dailymotion, Inspirational Stores, KDS International, NTRglobal, PriceMinister, RealEyes3D, Seatwave, Sporever and Zoopla. He also serves on the board of Seedcamp, which provides mentoring and seed funding to European start-ups. Fred holds a Masters in Financial Engineering from the University of Brussels (Solvay). He is on the Boards of: Dailymotion, Inspirational Stores, KDS International, PriceMinister, RealEyes3D, Seatwave, Sporever, Zoopla

Joe Drumgoole, CTO and Founder at PutPlace.com
Talk: “Hey you, get off of my cloud – Launching your startup on a cloud computing infrastructure”
Joe Drumgoole is a a software industry veteran of 20 years standing who has been using Amazon’s cloud computing environment since it launched in 2006. He has a track record of technology achievement in Irish software companies including CR2, Cape Clear, LeCayla and PutPlace.com. He is a regular speaker at conferences.

Meet MuZoid. She’s a very clever bot created by some even cleverer people; she’s all about killing all humans helping you find more music to love, CDs to buy and gigs to attend, and she does it all through Twitter, naturally.

Twitter users sending a tweet with the name of a band or artist to MuZoid receive a reply in less than 2.5 seconds with a link to a bespoke webpage containing gig listings, a discography, a recommendation of similar artists that the user might like. If MuZoid doesn’t know an artist, she makes a note of it and gets busy learning. Once enough information’s available, she’ll tweet back to the original querant with an update.

The app speaks to peoples’ love of instant gratification; it works with the fact that Twitter is a platform built around real-time messaging, and serves up a slew of aggregated relevant content a sight more zippily than the disparate results a simple Googling would return.

MuZoid’s proud parents, MusicMetric, can be found in London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout‘. The angel-backed startup is in the trends analysis business, using machine learning methods combined with text mining to track trends in the music industry and perform in-depth analysis of music fans’ online preferences. The company is currently working toward rolling out subscription-based analytics and trend forecasting software for the music industry.

In the meantime, they launched MuZoid, who co-founder Greg Mead says was born as a by-product of this process, i.e. large amounts of data such as gigs, genres and releases indexed into the MusicMetric data warehouse. The data is also used to infer similarities between artists, but what sets it apart from Amazon or Last.fm, which use consumer preferences and crowdsourcing respectively, MusicMetric’s inferences are all down to machine learning classification — which means that the information becomes more accurate as more sources of data are found.

It’s a fiendishly clever idea, so it’s probably no surprise that the folks behind it are all, well, wickedly bright. Greg’s background is in physics and computational physics. The other founders are Matthew Jeffery, Marie-Alicia Chang, Jameel Syed and Andrew Walker. Jameel has a PhD and 10 years experience in analytics and text mining for the life sciences industry. Matthew is a computer scientist, Marie-Alicia’s background is in financial software marketing and Andrew is co-owner of creative agency Thin Martian and co-founder of Tweetminster.

MusicMetric plans to release a suite of widgets, social network apps and free public APIs making the data available for people to build their own apps. They’ll also be adding more music stores in the near future, which will allow for price comparisons on albums across the board. There aren’t any standards for music or ecommerce APIs, Greg says, so the more problematic ones (like HMV) will take longer than others.

Developing this technology is a creative journey, and it helps to give the AI more personality if it has a gender.  There’s so much male-dominated language associated with technology that we thought it would make a nice change to anthropomorphise this software bot as female.  If we called it a “cute little guy” that would be way too predictable. The Cylons are cool, I saw one walking the earth down Great Eastern Street the other day, Shoreditch is full of them.