ITV.com is leaping aboard the social media bandwagon to encourage realtime interaction around this afternoon’s FA Cup final between Everton and Chelsea FCs. The broadcaster has integrated updates from Twitter and our old friends AudioBoo in an FA Cup Buzz microsite.

The site uses Twitterfall to keep track of tweets about the match, with an added enhancement; a tool developed by thruSITES will track which of the players are generating the most chatter on Twitter at any given moment, with sliders for each player showing who’s the most talked about.

Fans will also be able to share their armchair commentary (and really bad jokes) using AudioBoo, a service which is rapidly becoming a darling of the mainstream media for making it so easy to transform an audience from passive consumers to active participants.

After the match, fans will be able to scrub along a timeline in the thruSITES buzz tracker to see which players caused most response at crucial moments – a sort of crowdsourced, visual post-match highlights package which, from the other perspective, will give the clubs a direct tap into public sentiment around their players.

A viewers’ backchannel is not a new thing – just watch the hashtags trend when Britain’s Got Talent or The Apprentice is on. However, this is possibly the first time a British broadcaster has attempted to integrate the backchannel into its online coverage. It’ll be interesting to see if any cross-channel promotion will be in place, i.e. if the TV commentators will direct viewers to contribute to the FA Cup Buzz site.

Dominic Cameron, MD of ITV.com, says that if the FA Cup Buzz experiment is a success, the broadcaster will be looking for more “new and interesting ways” to engage football fans.

Meanwhile, if all this engagement isn’t enough to slake your ADD-driven thirst for social media sports apps to distract you from the match, you can play along with Football3s, a realtime fantasy football game developed by Mint Digital, which also integrates with Twitter, Facebook and Chatzy.

Enjoy the match!

UK startup Imagini has launched the private beta version of its VisualDNA Shops widget to help monetise blogs and websites through a unique take on affiliate sales. The widget adds personalised product recommendations to any site, and immediately starts generating detailed demographic, psychographic and behavioural analytics of its visitors.

It does this using the company’s VisualDNA concept; working out people’s personality types based on the pictures they choose. Imagini draws the data from its consumer facing personality test site, Youniverse, which has profiled more than 15 million people since 2006.

VisualDNA Shop presents visitors with a few visual questions, and delivers real-time product recommendations from Amazon.com based on their responses. At the moment this means visitors can choose from mobile phones, digital cameras and gadgets. The company plans to include a broader range of products from sites like eBay and Shopping.com in the near future.

Imagini secured $13.5m in funding in February this year, a chunk of which no doubt went to getting Stephen Fry to explain the VisualDNA concept (doing a rather succinct job, too):

Anyone can try the concept with a free, limited VisualDNA Shop. There’s a Pro version for $2.99 a month which comes with  advanced analytics that tell site owners what their audience is like — coining titles like ‘funster’, ‘gamer’ and ‘active adventurer’ — and what appeals to them.

With the Pro version, site owners can make their own suggestions for new products to be advertised to different types of shopper, and show visitors other sites visited by people with similar preferences.

If you want to try it out, TechCrunch Europe has 50 access codes to give away using the invitation code ‘techcruncheuropevisualdnashop’.

Spotify, the streaming music service which is gradually gathering a large fan-base in Europe, has been plotting a mobile version. It recently hired a head of mobile and the speculation was that it would come out with an iPhone app first after releasing a teaser video. But today it’s released video of an Android app it’s being demoing to people at Google I/O.

The Android app is still very much a work in progress and subject to minor changes, but it gives a pretty good overview of their thinking. The demo highlights a number of features including playback, playlists, offline synch and music search.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet – the service has yet to launch in North America, although I’m about to send some lucky TechCrunch writers some preview codes we’ve gotten hold of – Spotify is a lightweight iTunes-like application for Windows and Mac that lets you search, browse and stream a deep collection of music. Tracks are streamed via a encrypted P2P technology. The free service is ad-financed, hence a general comparison with Last.fm, but it’s primary service is subscription based. It works like a fully-playable iTunes store, creating playlists is easy and some bill it as an alternative to file-sharing, hence why it’s managed to sign so many music labels.

Spotify has raised a large round of funding so far, €15.3m from VCs Northzone Venture Partners and Creandum. It launched in the UK in February after building a big following in Sweden, it’s country of origin.

UPDATE: Please see after the jump for the archived video at the end of this post.

The TechCrunch Europe Roundtable event in Stockholm today (live video streamed below and on @TCEurope on Twitter, official hashtag is #tcen) will feature an afternoon of panel discussions and presentations followed by startup pitches and a great networking reception. TechCrunchTalk Nordic will be exploring the Nordic and Baltic tech scene – which produced amazing companies like Skype and, more recently, Spotify (not to mention the likes of Ericsson, Nokia and many other huge tech companies). Check out our full schedule and speakers here. We’ll be covering several topics such as the interchange between Nordic and Baltic startups, VC investment in the region, and the next wave of innovations that will come from this area.

TechCrunchTalk Nordic is sponsored by Bloglovin and Sunstone Capital. Our event partners include: ArcticStartup, Swedish Startups, The Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship and Scandinavian Web Developer Conference 2009 . Our streaming video partner is Bambuser.

Our live streaming video will appear below shortly (from 3pm Stockholm time, 2pm London, 9am New York and 6am San Francisco):

TechCrunchTalk Nordic is sponsored by:

Bloglovin’

Bloglovin‘ helps you to keep track of your favorite blogs. We notify our members every time one of their favourite blogs have written something new.

Founded by an international team with more than 200 years of combined entrepreneurial, operational and investment experience, Sunstone Capital A/S is a leading Nordic venture capital investor headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. With over €400 million in funds under management, Sunstone Capital focuses on developing and expanding early-stage Technology and Life Science companies with potential to achieve global success in their markets. www.sunstonecapital.com

TechCrunchTalk Nordic media and event partners include:

ArcticStartup

ArcticStartup held its 6th pan-regional event taking place in Stockholm on 2nd April. The evening’s theme was startups and the future of mobile. Event’s high level panelists included Morris Packer of the Bonnier Group, Teemu Kurppa of Huikea (Formerly Jaiku/Google) and Gustav Söderström of Spotify. ArcticEvenings bring entrepreneurs together across the arctic region to discuss new ideas, experiences, challenges and developments and above all share knowledge and make those important connections in the Nordic and Baltic startup community. You can find out all about the event here http://www.arcticstartup.com/arcticevening-2nd-of-april-stockholm-sweden/

Swedish Startups

Swedish Startups is Sweden’s biggest community for Swedish web-entrepreneurs, developers and VC’s. We make it easier for you to keep track of events and connect with people who can help your company forward.

SSES – The Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship

The Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship (SSES) is a joint initiative between the Royal Institute of Technology, the Stockholm School of Economics, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm University and the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. Uniting five of the region’s top academic institutions in a unique partnership, SSES acts as a catalyst for creativity, co-operation and knowledge-sharing. We offer students at all five universities accredited academic courses, training and activities in applied entrepreneurship.

Streaming Video Partner: Bambuser offers a service that gives its users the opportunity to stream live video from a mobile phone or web-cam using 3G or WiFi network. The simplicity of the application and the unlimited mobility gives you the opportunity to instantly share your experience with your viewers and interact and communicate through the web- to-mobile chat. Share the world, Live and Mobile with Bambuser, visit www.bambuser.com. Bambuser is drawing comparisons to mobile videocasting service Qik. The major difference is the lower latency that bambuser offers due to different technical approaches. Another difference between the services is that Bambuser offers streaming both from your computer and mobile, while Qik only allows streaming from the mobile.

Scandinavian Web Developer Conference 2009 held at Kista Science Towerin Stockholm on 25 May 2009.

Read More

Videoplaza, effectively an adserver for online video, has signed a deal with four of Denmark largest print publishers. Many of these sites concerned have served web video for some time – Denmark generally was an early proponent of broadband networks so the population is highly wired-up. But the news is significant because few online media owners have done much in the way of more sophisticated online video advertising like pre-roll and overlays.

The publishers involved are Berlingske Media, Ekstra Bladet, Jyllands Posten and Børsen. At the same time four major advertisers in the region, De Gule Sider, Nordisk Film, Nykredit and Nordic airline SAS are joinging the project. The publishers will use Videoplaza’s Monetizer product to manage, serve and track the ads for an initial three month long project.

The move has come after Videoplaza decided to look further abroad than its home market of Sweden towards Norway, Finland and Denmark. In Denmark they found that media owners and agencies were a less sophisticated market in terms of online video (though not much else I dare say).

Videoplaza’s CEO is Sorosh Tavakoli, who is one of the panellist at TechCrunchTalk Stockholm today.

Zensify is a new lifestreaming iPhone app which lets you update, discover and track pictures, videos and comments across multiple social networks. Other apps have tried to do similar things. But what sets Zensify apart is that it shows the user trends within your social graph in the form of a tag cloud of key words. In other words it brings a lot more intelligence to your social graph. Suddenly, you can see a big trending topic amongst people you follow. I’ve been wanting something similar for a while and I’m not alone. David Winer recently Tweeted: “Wouldn’t it be cool if “trending topics” were localized to the people who are followed by the people you follow.” Well Zensify does this.

And it doesn’t just do it across Twitter. It does it also does it across updates from Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, Photobucket and 12seconds. For that reason it is my new favourite app, bar none, and it’s available for free from the app store here.

Zensify is also reminiscent of some desktop apps in that it allows you to view all your social networks in one timeline, and update Twitter and Facebook at the same time. You can upload and share mobile photos, and share content from all those networks directly back into to Twitter. You can also set up and save regular search terms across your social graph. The app will also play videos from YouTube and 12seconds.

The first version of Zensify is called “Zensify Preview”, so this is not the full app just yet. Even so it’s still pretty awesome.

For instance, this morning I could see that among the people I am following (which is pretty much all the startups CEOs across Europe) that, just amongst my Twitter friends, people were talking a lot about “funding”. Each time I click a topic it takes me deeper into who is talking about that topic.

Plus the search facilities on the app are pretty good as well, allowing you to search across Twitter, videos, Facebook, and many other content types.

However, one drawback comes not from the app itself but from the fact that many people have linked their Twitter account with Facebook, so you get their status updates twice. There’s been a general trend away from doing this and Zenify, and other apps like it, will probably accelerate this as people realise how much it pollutes the stream.

Zensify is seed funded by Ipex Capital, PA Consulting Group’s venture arm and co-founded by Bastian Lehmann. So far they have 11 staff in total.

The development roadmap includes integrating public content from various sources, more social networks and web services like Google Reader, and opening up the platform for other developers. The full launch is planned for June.

How can e-commerce continue to grow? This guest post by Jamie Murray Wells, founder and Executive Chairman of Glasses Direct, looks at the next wave coming round the corner.

Latest figures show UK ecommerce sales continue to buck the financial doom-and-gloom. There was an overall 14% increase in the year to April 2009. E-commerce certainly looks like the Noah’s Ark of retail during the recession: those companies that have a strong online consumer proposition get a ticket to ride out the storm, and those that don’t, may drown.

There is a lot of he growth in the clothing, footwear and accessories category in particular. According to Forrester, in those categories online sales represented 2-4% in 2003, and now represent over 10% and in some cases, over 15% of the total category.

Where the sale of more ‘generic’ products such as books, DVDs and travel can be seen as something of a first wave of ecommerce, understanding how consumers want to buy high-touch, cosmetic products online such as expensive jewellery, fitted garments and for us, eyewear, could represent something of a second wave of e-commerce.

For companies involved in this second wave of ecommerce, it is not as simple as relying on the old cornerstones of price, range, convenience to attract customers. Our peer group face significant consumer purchase barriers to do with try-on, fit, and product education, that one-by-one, need to be identified and addressed, through continued technological innovation and great customer service, in order to pursued customers to make purchase decisions in our favour over the high street.

A number of interesting businesses ride this new wave of e-commerce innovation shotgun with us:

Blue Nile, is an online jeweller that offers a completely new level of service online, changing diamond shoppers’ habits. They offer enormous amounts of information on the diamonds that they sell, specialist experts on-call, and a massive focus on education to teach you about what you should think about when buying a diamond – far more than you could get in a high street store. The technology on their site allows you to see what different carat diamonds would look like on your finger. This matched with the traditional advantages of shopping online – a massive selection, reasonable pricing and convenience, has meant their business has been a runaway success.

Everyone knows ASOS, which has developed some really strong online celebrity and brand engagement. Suggestions for product ranges and tips from other consumers’ purchases, beautifully shot imagery and the ability to zoom in to inspect every detail complete the picture for the ASOS shopper of high-touch products.

At Glasses Direct [interest declared] we help our customers find their ideal glasses with our Virtual Mirror, which allows people to virtually try on glasses while they’re browsing. We want people to use the resulting images to get other people’s opinions on their looks. ‘Do I look good in this’ becomes a question you can ask your community, not just one shopping companion or the store assistant. Retailers like us are looking at ground-breaking ways to visualise products online, especially when the products face higher than average barriers to sale.

And then there’s Zappos, who use customer service to create a ‘personal emotional connection’ with their customers – something that helps it overcome barriers to buying shoes online, drives loyalty and therefore repeat purchase, and helps them sell over a $1b of shoes every year online.

The second wave of ecommerce isn’t about necessarily unique or high technologies, but how we, as retailers of the fitted or fashion product, can fashion practical online solutions to each of our own consumer bases’ needs. I believe that in years to come it is likely that every retailer will be able to offer price, range and convenience like Amazon, and so the real competition will be around the customer experience and the customer service. We’re just ahead of the curve by prioritising these now. This is why, as I said in a blog post after a visit to the company, Zappos, who calls itself ‘a service company that happens to sell shoes’, it will probably in time, replace Amazon as the e-commerce ‘gold standard’.

Now that the first group of second wave companies has proved that the public, investors and the city all buy in to the prospects of companies dealing thin the high-touch, entrepreneurs should be scrutinising the high street for possibilities. Most of the obvious e-commerce first wave opportunities may well have been seized, but there are many second wave opportunities still out there. Look around and anything that says ‘tailor made’ on, is not sacred to the high street anymore.

UPDATE: This event has now been canceled, but please keep in contact with the Mobile 2.0 organisers for alternative arrangements.

The Mobile 2.0 Europe conference is coming up in June and it’s shaping up to be pretty cool. Experts and thought leaders from all aspects of the mobile ecosystem will be descending on Barcelona, and TechCrunch will be descending on it too in the shape of myself and Robin Wauters. Having been last year I can attest that this event is one of the few to really bring together some of the coolest mobile startups in Europe. The Mobile 2.0 Europe conference will be on Friday, June 19, 2009 at the Espacio Esade Forum, with the Mobile 2.0 Europe Developer Day the day before. There is also a Startup Demo Launch pad.

So it’s our pleasure to also be hosting the official TechCrunch Mobile 2.0 party after the event on Friday and after the speaker’s dinner. We are pre-releasing the first 100 tickets here (there is a small ticket fee to prevent no-shows). We are also looking for sponsors of the party, who will obviously be branded at the event and in posts about it. Please email our events organiser petra(at)twistedtree.co.uk.

The U.K. High Court today ruled in favor of eBay, claiming that the company can’t be held legally accountable for the sale of counterfeit L’Oreal fragrances and creams on its online auction site in the U.K. The ruling follows similar decisions by Belgian and French courts, which have ruled in eBay’s favor in three of the five cases L’Oreal brought in 2007 against the company.

This is fantastic news for counterfeiters, who can now keep on duping customers into buying fake L’Oreal cosmetics through the popular web service.

In all seriousness, I think this is a logical ruling, in the sense that eBay is and has always been merely a facilitator of trade and can hardly be expected to verify the authenticity of each and every product that goes up for sale on its auction website. It has in the past taken a lot of steps to do its part in fighting online crime, and recent rulings in European courts fortunately reflect that.

In a statement, Richard Ambrose, Head of Trust & Safety for eBay, reiterated that “cooperation and dialogue is what is needed, not litigation”.

Hear, hear.

Social shopping startup Boxedup has been acquired by super-affiliate Venturian Media in an all share deal, terms were undisclosed. Venturian said it would now integrate its existing portfolio of product comparison and shopping sites into Boxedup.

Four year old Venturian has about £60m in sales with offices in the UK, Australia and India. It plans to blend boxeup’s social media platform with its affiliate revenue model as an independent unit to create services for retailers and brands.

Boxedup was launched in July 2007 by Chris Osborne and Jeremy Baines. Osborne will stays on board to lead the next phase, with the aim to build a database of consumer “purchasing intent”. They will be integrating Google’s FriendConnect and Facebook Connect, among other social systems. He told me that prior to the sale he had been looking for another round of funding, but a conversation with Venturian turned into an acquisiton. The team consists of seven people, all virtually located. The company raised an Angel round in Mid 08.

The site is effecitively a product platform designed to help people organise online shopping. Similarly to ThisNext, it allows you to bookmark products you are thinking about buying, but gets a revenue share when someone buys something its users have bookmarked tracking. Other sites like Kaboodle, StyleHive, and Wists provide similar platforms for people to recommend goods sold elsewhere. Another, Rasba, serves as a storefront for retailers and a social network for shoppers, where, if someone buys something from a user’s tracking list they get a commission – a model Boxedup could possibly adopt.

Kaboodle, which never launched in the UK or Europe, was bought by Hearst Interactive Media for between $30 – $40 million, all cash, although that was the heady era of 2007.

The site recently launched new bookmarklets, a Facebook application and Flash widgets.

[Note: See updates below] Why would someone create a Twitter account for a UK MP which was fake, say the next general is “in weeks”, but then delete the account? Was it a real account or a fake one created out of mischief? Just such questions are buzzing through Twitter right now because an account which looked very much like it was the official one for Nick Brown MP (@nickbrownmp) tweeted, in reply to Austin Mitchell, this morning:

Shortly after that the account was deleted.

Luckily there is Twitter search, plus plenty of people have been watching and the observant @andrewgerrard grabbed the image above.

If this is “real” – and the fact that the account has now been deleted suggest it is – then Nick Brown, known to be close to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, knows that there will be a UK general election this Summer. And he just sent a Tweet which was meant to be a private direct message. Stay tuned, this story is breaking…

(Hat tip to AlbertoNardelli and Tweetminster for the tip)

Update 1: Ironically enough I had to go offline to speak at the Media 140 conference in London this afternoon and have not been able to get back on this story (which I am now doing). So, Sky News’ Political blogger Cheryl Smith appears to have called Nick Brown’s office and they say the @nickbrownmp was fake.

Uber-video reporter Hermione Way (of TechFluff TV fame) stumbled on something interesting today. Yahoo! appears to be running a PR push in London for Flickr called Brilliant Spots. She duly Twitpic’d the pavement based advert from her iPhone. The site mentioned leads to a place which is really about Flickr. What’s wrong with this picture? Yahoo wants everyone to use MMS, a terrible, costly old system pimped mercilessly by mobile phone operators.

But of course, right now the iPhone does not support native MMS and it’s a fair bet that the super users of camera phones right now are iPhone users, posting to Twitpic and other related image services. In addition, sending an MMS picture of something you just find a bit “brilliant” from a normal phone costs *real money* – unlike using up the flat-rate data on an iPhone. Of course, people can use others handsets, like a Nokia, but even then there is no direct call from Yahoo to “post to Flickr” which plenty of people would recognise.

Does anyone else think Yahoo! is “fiddling while Rome burns”? Yes, they’ve been reaching out to the developer community through Hack Days and the like in London. Yes, they are working hard on Yahoo Boss and Search Monkey. But, as TechCrunch US point out, they are seriously losing the plot over search and realtime/streams – which is pretty much what everyone is talking about right now, including Google.

Tell us your thoughts below.

There are not many startups that set out to save peoples lives – unless you count the generic use of things like Twitter to get the word out fast about an earthquake or some other life-threatening event. But then again there aren’t that many aiming for the extreme niche of mountain rescue teams. But Decisions For Heroes, which just launched, is aiming to do just that, and it just goes to show how far the application of social data to a problem can reach.

Cliff rescue climber Robin Blandford – who also happens to be a former executive with Reuters’ new media operation – created DFH after volunteering on rescue operations with the Irish Coast Guard. He’s created the service to address three common challenges for these life-savers: equipment, communication logistics and paperwork/data. So Decisions For Heroes monitors key metrics for these rescue teams like “response readiness”, team availability (since so many of these teams are staffed by volunteers), qualifications and experience.

With a laptop and internet connection, teams can record the details of their rescue operations and training exercises. The software then automatically performs analytical charting, draws heatmaps, and benchmarks reports to outline the teams areas of strength, weakness, and expertise.

DFH then links up all these disparate, global rescue teams, which all share the same kinds of needs, to share data and perform paperless reporting between teams, in a way that they’ve never done before.

The site is based on a 40 Euro a month basic package for rescue teams, going up to an ‘all you can eat’ scenario which so far is unpriced. Think of it as BaseCamp for danger. DFH originally came through the Seedcamp European startups programme.

Eventually the system is designed to generate statistics, observe patterns, educate potential casualties, and ultimately reduce accidents. And who could ask more than that.

Mobile content provider AQA 63336 (whose name makes me think of that new emergency services number) has launched AQA2U, a commercial micro-publishing platform which lets UK users micro-blog for money.

It works like this: you sign up as a publisher via the AQA website. Once approved, you set up topics ending in 2U which your ‘fans and followers’ subscribe to by texting that topic to 63336, at the cost of 98p.

Thereafter, any time you feel like you have something of value to share, you publish it from your phone or online, and your subscribers receive it as a text — at cost to them of 25p per aphorism, observation or other nugget of information. The maximum a user will be charged is £3.50 per month.

Larry Page and Eric Schmidt from Google did a double header interview from the Google Zeitgeist conference just outside of London today. But the real question on our lips was what is Google going to do about the astounding buzz around realtime search and Twitter?

During a press conference I asked the question of of of Google’s executives, and the answer came back that “the kind of innovation like what Twitter is doing and what we’re doing is increasing search speed, relevance , freshness and comprehensiveness. Other companies will come up with solutions of course.”

Not a great answer.

Luckily, Loic Le Meur is also here and put Larry on the spot on stage, and captured:

“I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime.”

See, Larry actually came up with the idea first.

AudioBoo chat with Google’s VP of Engineering in Europe:

Well we have over 100 people coming to the TechCrunch Europe Roundtable event in Stockholm, TechCrunchTalk Nordic, on May 27, but there are still a few tickets left. I’m really looking forward to an afternoon of panel discussions and presentations followed by startup pitches and a great networking reception. And we’ve just confirmed our latest speaker line-up which includes: Natasha F Saxberg, serial entrepreneur from Denmark; Jüri Kaljundi from Estonia’s nagi.ee; Northzone Ventures‘ Pär-Jörgen Pärsson; Scandinavian investor maven Angel Gambino; and Sweden’s “IT-person of the year”, Stina Ehrensvärd from Yubico. And that’s just for starters.

There will be plenty more from the startup, Angel and VC communities at the event, including some fresh-faced startups pitching us their ideas. Please get your ticket here while you still can.

We’ll be covering such topics as:

• “Minipreneurship”
• The inter-change between Nordic startups and the Baltic startups
• The focus for Nordic VC’s
• Do Nordic and Baltic startups think global immediately?
• With the Nordics a leading mobile region, what innovations will come from it next?

Where: Elite Palace Hotel, St Eriksgatan 115, Stockholm
When: May 27, 3pm to 8pm.
Who: Panelists so far below and there are more to be announced.
What: Speakers, panels and pitches.

Pitches: To pitch your startup at TechCrunchTalk Nordic you need to email TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher 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, name your potential competitors, your team, and what you’re looking for (Series A round, etc).

And who have we got to discuss these issues? Here is our schedule so far:

3pm: Tea/Coffee

3.18pm: Introduction by Mike Butcher, TechCrunch Europe

3.20pm: Speed Speech: The Baltic scene for Startups, by Jüri Kaljundi

Jüri Kaljundi is co-founder of Nagi nagi.ee and CV-Online, member of the board of Connect Estonia, organiser of OpenCoffee Tallinn. Connect Estonia is a non-profit which connects investors and startups across Sweden, Norway and Denmark in addition to Estonia.

3.35pm: Startups Panel

Måns Adler: “Chaos-Pilot” and Founder of Bambuser, which is revolutionizing mobile media and leading the way in the frontiers of mobile video streaming.

Ted Valentin: Founder of Sushikartan.se and numerous others. Valentin works to develop “simple and useful” web sites.

Mattias Swenson: Bloglovin co-founder and one of the driving forces behind Swedish Startups.

Natasha F Saxberg: This Danish entrepreneur has a long list of achievements. A Web entrepreneur with a proclivity for innovation and social technology converted into organizational behavior, she is a Partner at Webcom ApS and Founder of Mentory.com. She is also affiliated with Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies and blogs here.

Mark Kofman is an enterpreneur, the co-founder and CEO of Programeter, a business intelligence company targeting software development managers. Prior to Programeter, mr. Kofman has been working in national and international software development projects ran by leading Estonian and Russian ICT companies and co-founded mobile services startup MOBi.

4.15pm: Tea/Coffee break

4.35pm: Speed Speech: “An overview of the startup eco-system in the Nordic region”

Northzone Ventures: Pär-Jörgen Pärsson from the VC firm Northzone Ventures will give an overview of the startup eco-system in the Nordic region. Pär-Jörgen joined Northzone in April 2003, bringing another fifteen years of strategic analysis, creativity and entrepreneurship onboard. Pär-Jörgen has been active in Venture Capital and Private Equity since 1994, starting out with buy-outs in the consumer goods sectors, backing companies such as Falcon Breweries, subsequently sold to Carlsberg, and Candelia which was sold to Cloetta Fazer. During this period he also privately acquired Falkeskog Delikatesser, a distressed seafood producer, which he managed through a successful turn-around process. During 1998 to 2001 he built Cell Ventures, an early stage technology venture capital company to one of the hot European Internet investors with portfolio companies such as Pricerunner and Tradera. Cell Ventures in 2000 was sold to a publicly listed UK Investment Company for SEK 1.2 Billion.

4.50pm: Investment Panel – Trends in startups and funding

Anders Fredriksson: Co-founder of Tablefinder and Rmindr. Winner of Seedcamp London and uber-networker.

Angel Gambino: London-based Gambino is an entrepreneur and investor who has a wide range of experience working with innovative businesses that are developing and initiating high quality digital entertainment and those that aim to create social good. She currently holds a number of directorships and is on the boards of several companies including Mubito, a Scandinavian D2C music platform; Pulse Films, a music and factual entertainment production company and youmeo, a B2B2C social media aggregator among others.

Stina Ehrensvärd: CEO and founder of Yubico, she is an ward winning IT-innovator and product designer with a high creative drive. Former Founder and VP Marketing of “paper computer” company Cypak, Ehrensvärd has in the past been awarded Sweden’s most prestigious IT-prize – The Golden Mouse – in the category “IT-person of the year”. The prize honors those Swedish entrepreneurs, developers, users and others who have made greatest contributions to advance and promote IT.

Sorosh Tavakoli is founder and CEO of Videoplaza who helps premium media publishers monetise their online video through its ad server for video. The Stockholm based company, founded in late 2007, has now clients in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the UK. Videoplaza is backed by Creandum and private investors.

Pär-Jörgen Pärsson

5.30pm: 3 minute pitches from 5 startups

(Pitching companies to be confirmed)

6pm – 8pm: Informal networking over drinks

TechCrunchTalk Nordic is sponsored by:

Bloglovin’

Bloglovin‘ helps you to keep track of your favorite blogs. We notify our members every time one of their favourite blogs have written something new.

Founded by an international team with more than 200 years of combined entrepreneurial, operational and investment experience, Sunstone Capital A/S is a leading Nordic venture capital investor headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. With over €400 million in funds under management, Sunstone Capital focuses on developing and expanding early-stage Technology and Life Science companies with potential to achieve global success in their markets. www.sunstonecapital.com

TechCrunchTalk Nordic media and event partners include:

ArcticStartup

ArcticStartup held its 6th pan-regional event taking place in Stockholm on 2nd April. The evening’s theme was startups and the future of mobile. Event’s high level panelists included Morris Packer of the Bonnier Group, Teemu Kurppa of Huikea (Formerly Jaiku/Google) and Gustav Söderström of Spotify. ArcticEvenings bring entrepreneurs together across the arctic region to discuss new ideas, experiences, challenges and developments and above all share knowledge and make those important connections in the Nordic and Baltic startup community. You can find out all about the event here http://www.arcticstartup.com/arcticevening-2nd-of-april-stockholm-sweden/

Swedish Startups

Swedish Startups is Sweden’s biggest community for Swedish web-entrepreneurs, developers and VC’s. We make it easier for you to keep track of events and connect with people who can help your company forward.

SSES – The Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship

The Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship (SSES) is a joint initiative between the Royal Institute of Technology, the Stockholm School of Economics, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm University and the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. Uniting five of the region’s top academic institutions in a unique partnership, SSES acts as a catalyst for creativity, co-operation and knowledge-sharing. We offer students at all five universities accredited academic courses, training and activities in applied entrepreneurship.

Streaming Video Partner: Bambuser offers a service that gives its users the opportunity to stream live video from a mobile phone or web-cam using 3G or WiFi network. The simplicity of the application and the unlimited mobility gives you the opportunity to instantly share your experience with your viewers and interact and communicate through the web- to-mobile chat. Share the world, Live and Mobile with Bambuser, visit www.bambuser.com. Bambuser is drawing comparisons to mobile videocasting service Qik. The major difference is the lower latency that bambuser offers due to different technical approaches. Another difference between the services is that Bambuser offers streaming both from your computer and mobile, while Qik only allows streaming from the mobile.

Scandinavian Web Developer Conference 2009 held at Kista Science Towerin Stockholm on 25 May 2009.

Dear reader, TechCrunch owes you an apology. We thought the “104-Year-Old joins Twitter” story last week was Digg bait created by the media. It turns out it was all just old fashioned re-hashed PR. But at least we are apologising – unlike the many news outlets that ran with this manufactured story.

To explain…

On May 15 two UK newspapers ran the story about 104 year old woman “Ivy Bean” / @ivybean104 joining Twitter. Both The Daily Telegraph and The Sun ran with the story, which was followed up and “celebrated” by The Next Web blog.

What none of these stories told you, however, was that poor old Ivy had not joined Twitter just because it was suddenly the talk of the old peoples home. No. She joined because home PC maintenance company Geek Squad signed her up, propped her up for a photo opportunity and press-released the hell out of it. And frankly I hope they paid her, or at least donated to her favourite charity because this is one of the most self-serving, cynical PR stunts I can remember.

And to prove it, here’s the pictures all the news outlets ran (when they all have the same picture, it’s a sure sign it’s a press release). Is that a Geek Squad guy just behind her head?:

And here’s the incriminating Twitpic, clearly taken by Geek Squad of their man Martin Dix, hovering behind Ivy, having just signed her in to Twitter and presumably explained the service. (Dix also blogs for Geek Squad). It was even taken on Ivy’s own Twitpic account and frankly I seriously doubt she knew what was going on.

Note also that her first ever Tweet is clearly related to the PR shenanigans going on around her:

“I’m enjoying Twitter for the first time and having my photo taken.”

Now, she Tweeted that Tweet at “10:02 AM May 14th from web”. That’s important, because this was only one day before the story went live on the Sun, and Telegraph site at 8:20am May 15. In other words, cynical Geek Squad had already targeted Ivy as being the oldest person they could find and convince to go on Twitter. The fact it was a day before the story went live speaks volumes.

Ivy also Tweeted:

“I’m on Twitter! Come and follow my feed at IvyBean104.”

Since when did a 104 year old suddenly start using words like “feed”?

In fact, only The Sun newspaper actually indicated that this might all be PR-nonsense cooked up by Geek Squad, referring to its “Silver Surfers’ Day” campaign to “encourage more elderly people to get online”. Classic PR-guff.

However, TechCrunch’s (and here’s our apology) MG Seigler decided this whole thing was a ruse to get The Telegraph onto Digg. And admittedly, The Telegraph has been gaining a reputation for using Digg quite substantially lately. It gets a lot of traffic from social sites, and the UK press has a sneaking suspicion Tele sub editors have all taken courses in headline writing for Digg.

However, we’re happy to point out that the story wasn’t just cooked up by the Telegraph to get onto Digg – but lots of journalists and bloggers fell for Geek Squad’s PR.

Compounding the issue however is The Next Web which seems to think TechCrunch’s non-scoop was itself an attempt to get on Digg – and predictibly did a post on it in a slightly bizarre tirade. Clearly, The Next Web did not realise it was a Geek Squad press release the first time round and still hasn’t. They sign off their story with “This is clearly not a completely fabricated story.” Instead it attacks TechCrunch for not celebrating the fact a 104 year old is on Twitter, a story which “made people smile”.

Come again? Since when were independent bloggers supposed to just celebrate things – instead of getting the facts right?

My view is that WHERE stories come from is at least as important as what they are about. I hope we can all learn from this episode. In the race to feverishly post about Twitter, sometimes the facts are starting to get lost in the hype.

Oh, and to complete this ridiculous circle, feel free to Digg this post.

Update: As commenters below point out, Ivy was two years ago signed up to Facebook by her care home to be the “oldest person on Facebook”, presumably after they were incensed that a 97-year old French youngster had laid claim to the title. I look forward to the day Ivy is signed up by Digg as their “oldest user” and to her actually getting something out of being used in this way, simply because of her age.

Update II: A few people have inferred that I think @ivybean104 is actually fake – that she’s not tweeting herself. Frankly unless someone videos her doing it it’s going to be hard to absolutely verify, though her Tweetstream (e.g. “just had my tea now its a game of dominos with my friends”) looks plausible. What is slightly odd however is the fact she is following 94 people, many of whom, like @barclayjen in Columbia, SC, (Geek Squad was the first account she followed btw) she is unlikely to know personally. Unless 104 year olds are a lot more socially networked than I previously thought…

It would appear that Twitter, aside from helping to spread panic about Swine Flu, is creating all sorts of issues in countries which are probably still coming to terms with the impact of social media – and there are plenty of them these days, let’s face it.

Now a Guatemalan Twitter user has been arrested and accused of causing “Financial Panic”, because he encouraged followers to withdraw their funds from a bank in the country.

Jean Anleu (@jeanfer) suggested in a tweet that: “The first action people should take is to remove cash from Banrural, and break the banks of corrupt people.”

Evidently Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom has been accused of links to drug traffickers and of siphoning Banrural funds for his wife’s “phantom” projects.

London-based user-generated picture agency startup Demotix is carrying pictures of him being arrested by police for causing a storm with his tweet, which is currently being re-tweeted hundreds of times in Guatemala, and is probably poised to make the hastag escandalogt start to trend (which apparently means Guatemala Scandal according to a commenter below). The arrest also lead to a newspaper cottoning on to the Twitter angle, below.