With only 8 million people, Austria is not exactly a large country in Europe and until recently the country’s Web/Tech Scene has been correspondingly small. However, it’s getting there. A number of startups have turned up in recent Seedcamps in Berlin and Ljubjana, Slovenia and in fact three Austrian start ups were chosen as finalists in the former city. Years ago this would have been pretty unlikely. With the rise of VCs, government funds and enthusiast entrpreneurs, the Austrian tech scene seems to be experiencing some sort of renaissance.

When looking at Austrian Start-ups there haven’t been any noteworthy exits or internationally viable business the last few years, apart from Austrian Founders who decided to either start their business beyond the Alps (i.e. Last.fm, Martin Stiksel, Co-Founder) or even beyond the Atlantic Ocean (i.e. Jajah, by Roman Scharf & Daniel Mattes). This was most likely due to a lack of infrastructure and a certain “entrpreneurial spirit” within the country.

Highly qualified students, both coming from a business and technical side, decided to go into larger corporations, devoting their work force to Clients or – as indicated above – moving somewhere else. Furthermore the VC industry, especially eary stage funds, had not been established yet. Of course there had and have been several private equity firms and VCs, however none of them had a clearly Web-focused strategy, let alone a portfolio.

Now times seem to be changing – thankfully. There is an active Social Media scene, nationwide Barcamps, Open Coffee Clubs or Mobile Mondays; Entrepreneurs are sprouting around the Country and although being in the midst of a macroeconomic crisis governmental funds such as “Departure” are providing several million dollars for “creative industries”. These developments led to the recent Berlin Seedcamp where Platogo, MendMyPC and Vooch were among it’s finalists.

PLATOGO

Platogo provides a sophisticated platform for flash game developers. While in-browser games such as Quake Live seem to be really kicking off in the next few years, for small development teams and game companies it’s incredibly difficult to build sustainable and large online games, let alone managing revenues or marketing. Platogo wants to change that by being a gaming social net itself and serving an API that lets devs build their own products on top. Revenues are then shared between Platogo and the respective gaming company.

VOOCH

With the rise of mobile devices and it’s endless possibilites, especially the iPhone, couponing services are striving to find their way in and onto the Web. Similar in some respects to Yoose, Vooch enables business to distribute coupons via mobile devices. The service has started in Beta and is now offering a very limited and Austrian focused portfolio of vouchers. The app acts as a managing tool for both companies offering vouchers and users that are able to edit their particular field of interests and location where vouchers can be redeemed. The success of Vooch will be highly dependent on how quickly they are able to acquire business to fill their database of potential vouchers.

MENDMYPC

If you are working in the Web/Tech Scene one of your mates will always ask you for advice when he or she has technical issues with the PC (most likely it’s a PC, not a Mac). That’s where MendMyPc comes into play. Users can create tickets describing their PC problems. This will then slip into an open marketplace where technicians can post their bids. The concept is nothing new and problem solving via genre-related crowd-sourcing has often been proven to work in a variety of other work areas. The website itself looks rather Web 1.0, but hopefully there’l be a re-vamped version soon. Other than that their business model is absolutely clear (commision-per-transcation based) and the demand for such a service is – as most of you probably know – probably rather strong.

If you’re living in Germany, you may have heard of Plagiarius, a jokey, negative awards event. The awards are “given to those companies that the jury has found guilty of making ‘the most flagrant’ design imitations.” Looking through this year’s winners, you’ll find a trolley, a door handle, a watering can, amongst others. Of course, but for these awards, most people in Germany would rarely notice fakes.

However, the County Court in Cologne, Germany did something many did not expect. They ruled against Facebook and in favor of StudiVZ, the successful German site that many say had copied the old Facebook design down to the last detail. The only differences are logo, language and color (red instead of blue). It turned out that the Court didn’t have a problem with that. As TechCrunch’s own Serkan Toto wrote this week:

The court argues that it can’t identify any unfair practices, mainly due to the fact that StudiVZ isn’t trying to trick users into thinking they are actually on Facebook. Another factor in favor of the German site: When StudiVZ went live in Germany in November 2005, Facebook was virtually unknown in that country.

The court’s own press release states:

The similarities could also be based on the fact that the founders of StudiVZ knew the plaintiff’s website and copied it, or asked someone to copy it using the publicly accessible information in the internet.
[My translation]

StudiVZ CEO Markus Berger-de León explains:

In the design of websites, standards have evolved in many areas. How to design the navigation, and which functions belong to a social network, is almost an industrial standard today.
[My translation]

However, the courts judgement is not the end.

[Breaking] The StudiVS / Facebook battle is set to continue, as the verdict is not yet legally binding. Facebook has today said they may file an appeal at the Higher Regional Court in Cologne. They have three weeks to do so.

During the appellate proceedings, only new evidence may presented, if it could not have been presented before. But that’s a problem for Facebook as in the prevous trial the court had refused to order a code review due to a lack of evidence and assumptions that were not deemed concrete enough. Facebook wanted to compare the underlying php files to back their accusation that StudiVZ stole their code.

So can it really be legal to copy a whole user interface? This is an interesting question as it more or less affects the so-called German copycat industry., an accusation which has grown over the last few years – although is, to be fair, starting to fade. As the TechCrunch Berlin event recently heard, there is a new movement to start innovating.

[Guest post by Dominik Mayer, @dominikmayer]

It’s pretty obvious that wherever you are in the world, you’re usually looking for the best bar, hotel, venue you can get for your money. And all the information is out there now, especially on live streams like Twitter. The problem is searching it and finding it. So if you could somehow match tweets to actual venues you could also use that data to rate the venue itself.

The other thing you could do would be to create trust around the actual users who submitted the information. That could form into a network of users who trusted eachother’s recommendations. There was an early implementation of this in the UK some time ago called Buzzspotr, but it never got beyond the Alpha stage and fizzled out.

Now, mobile startup Rummble is trying to crack this nut with a non-core product which just might actually super-charge their existing recommendations service.

Tremors is their new Twitter app which does the following: it attempts to match tweets to venues, based on a combination of fuzzy word matching, the general location the tweet came from and then a rough estimation of whether the Tweet was positive or negative about the venue. It’s not perfect but, of course, it will improve as more people use it. Right now it works in London, New York and Austin, Texas (the SXSW venue). These are a natural fit as they are likely to have a critical mass of Twitter users – San Francisco isn’t long now.

It’s not totally intuitive yet, and it needs more Tweets about venues – but that’s why we’re telling you about it on TechCrunch, so we can see if this thing will fly.

But already it will tell you where are the “Tweetiest” places in London. Earlier today it was Jimmy Choo’s shop on New Bond Street. Which either suggests there are some very well-heeled Twitterers out there, or that women love to tell you about what they like and don’t like, much more than men. Or have I read that wrong?

You don’t need a Rummble account to use Tremors, but if you login with your Twitter account (or you can use an existing Rummble account) Tremors will start to follow you and start to build a trust network for you, so in theory you can soon see who else on Twitter you share the same tastes and recommendations with.

Our apologies for this brief intermission in our coverage, but perhaps you can help. TechCrunch Europe is looking for office space in London. Above is a picture of an ideal-sized space we saw recently. It was in the “Silicon Roundabout” area, in the same building as a bunch of tech startups, but someone else took it. As you can see it’s a large space, and the reason we’re interested in this size is because we could hold medium-sized events in it. We’re even looking at the possibility of sub-letting some desks to startups, but nothing is set is stone yet. For now we’re just rattling around London looking at spaces and figuring it all out. Please get in touch if you know any friendly landlords, lettings agents etc with property near Old St, Hoxton, Liverpool St, the West End (ok, we can dream), Southwark/Waterloo, London Bridge or Kings Cross. We’re looking at a blank canvas space which basically has heat and light and not much else (ok, maybe a toilet). We don’t want fancy managed offices. We’re looking for the biggest, cheapest, best located place we can find – especially one where you could have seated events with a projector, as per the photo above. We don’t even need chairs or desks right now, seriously. Just broadband! Contact here.

On the evening of The Europas itself we will be holding quick-fire pitch competition for a handful of startups. To be considered for the pitch competition you need to email TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher, with a one side of A4 text-only pitch, and also include the URL of your 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 (Seed funding, Angel funding, Series A round, etc). There is no fee to pitch, as is our policy. Deadline for entry is June 26.

Two things you can say about Italians: that they’ve been eating their heart out for not pushing a Series A team to the Champions League’s final in Rome, and that they go mad about mobile phones. Italy has 88.58 million subscribers in total – that’s an eye-watering 152.4% penetration rate, one of the highest in Europe. And 3G traffic has been rising considerably with all the main mobile carriers spending plenty on infrastructure.

However, smartphones are struggling to become a preferred device for the mobile web: the iPhone and Blackberry are being kept average users by prohibitive pricing, even though it’s possible to get a (pricey) 3G iPhone in Italy unlocked without a two year contract. Android-powered HTC phones have yet to make much impact, having only hit the market just a few months ago. On top of that, there seems to be a lack of mobile-optimized content, except for Facebook.

In this scenario Yahoo! Italy has launched its mobile search and rich content platform, with a new interface that groups a search tool, a social aggregator and a live news feed. The product was launched yesterday in Milan by Charles Sword, head of mobile advertising Yahoo! Europe, together with Lorenzo Montagna, head of Yahoo! Italy.

Yahoo! Mobile had been launched before in other countries around the globe, but this time it’s going to face an unusual market growing at unusual speed.

It’s hard to say if this is going to be a real milestone in Italy’s path to the mobile web, considering that the operators’ market is anything but dynamic. One thing is for sure: Yahoo! Mobile won’t be useful to those Italians still looking for an answer to that uncomfortable soccer question.

[Guest post by Marco Pezzano, @marcopez]

Perhaps stung by the fact they were never offered – or perhaps just didn’t offer enough money? – the UK MPs expenses story which the Telegraph has made so much hay with, The Guardian is taking a different tack. Parliament has now released all of the expenses online, so the Guardian has released an application to pick through the expenses using crowd sourcing.

Users can dig through the 700,000 documents of MPs’ expenses to identify individual claims, or documents they think merit further investigation. Duck houses anyone?

You can work through your own MP’s expenses, or just hit the button below to start reviewing anything. About 1,000 have been reviewed already. Here’s the pitch:

We hope that many hands can make light work of the thousands of documents released by Parliament in relation to MPs’ expenses. We, and others – perhaps you? – are using these tools to review each document, decide whether it contains interesting information, and extract the key facts.

Some pages will be covering letters, or claim forms for office stationery. But somewhere in here is the receipt for a duck island. And who knows what else may turn up. If you find something which you think needs further attention, simply hit the button marked “investigate this!” and we’ll take a closer look.

Examples of things to look out for: food bills, repeated claims for less than £250 (the limit for claims not backed up by a receipt), and rejected claims.

There’s a prize for anyone who finds “iPhone application” on a receipt. Ok, just joking…

A few people are asking me about the categories for The Europas and although most people have it right, a few need clarification. In all cases we are looking for companies from Europe primarily, but also the Middle East and Africa (effectively “EMEA”). The word “Startup” in this instance is defined as a company that has been in existence for less than three years and has taken less than three rounds of funding. So here are the definitions:

Best European Web Application Or Service
This has to be a tech company based in Europe that has produce an application service we all like and use in Europe.

Best Design
This category could apply to a really well designed site or application in terms of architecture, or it might be front-end, look and feel.

Best Bootstrapped Startup (less than 3 years old)
When we say Boostrapped we mean a startup that does not have formal investment funding, so “unfunded”.

Best in Social Innovation
This is the one people are getting confused about. This does not mean best social media site or best viral widget or something. We mean “Best Social Innovation which benefits Society” – so something which has actually changed the world for the better. We will change the name of the category to make this clearer.

Best Enterprise Startup
This applies to companies aimed at corporates or the enterprise.

Best Cleantech/Environmental Startup
This applies to any tech company making the world greener.

Best Hardware / Real World Gadget
As much as we’d like to put the iPhone here we can’t, it’s made in the US – and they can win their own awards. So let’s find a piece of hardware we really like in Europe!

Best Entertainment Application or Service
This could apply to an online or mobile game or perhaps something that is a “Time-sink” or attention grabber.

Best Mobile Startup
This is self explanatory.

Best Mobile Application
This is self explanatory.

Best Startup Founder
This is a person you think is one of the best founders you’ve witnessed. I’m sure you know some!

Best New Startup in 2008/9
This applies from Summer 2008 to Summer 2009

Best European Investor of the Year (VC or Angel fund)
This is a person you think is one of the best investments houses you’ve come across, like a VC firm or an Angel Network.

Best Investor Personality
This is a person you think is one of the best investors you’ve met. Someone who really helps entrepreneurs in Europe.

Best Overall Winner
This can’t be entered directly. This category will be won by the entrant in one or more of the other categories which The Europas Advisory Board feels reflects the best Europe has to offer in the tech industry.

SpinVox, the voice to text messaging provider, is rolling out across 12 more countries in Telefónica’s network across Latin America. The move follows the October 2008 launch with Telefónica’s Movistar Chile.

The countries include Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela, as well as Vivo, Telefónica’s joint venture with Portugal Telecom in Brazil.

Currently SpinVox is the only speech to text service in the world available in six languages – Spanish, English, French, German, Portuguese and Italian. But although it does have competitors (of a sort) such as Jott, PhoneTag, and TwitterFone, none have signed so many big mobile network deals.

Interestingly, Spinvox recently released an API which is getting lots of traction. Quick VoicePro is an iPhone app which converts your voice notes to text using the API, but “a stream of new applications” are expected to launch over the coming months in different mobile platforms. Registrations for the SpinVox API now over 520 and the API now works in English, French, Spanish and German.

Out of the competitors, Seattle based Jott offers a service that lets users speak messages; those can be sent to themselves or others as transcribed emails or voice messages.

PhoneTag is a voice to text service which converts voicemail into text messages and then sends them directly to your mobile phone or email. It has deals with networks including AT&T, Alltell, Sprint, Skype, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Virgin.

Skydeck is a similar service but actually uses SpinVox for the text conversion.

TwitterFone is free service that lets you update your Twitter feed using your voice, powered by dial2do. OK, it’s only 140 charcters conversion, but hey, who’s counting.

Preparations for The Europas – The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 – are coming together. I really hope you have July 9 booked in your diary, and you got your tickets and your hotel and flight booked (if needed). Remember also that you can check out, and book hotels through our hotel search partner HotelMap (which is a pretty cool rendering of hotels in London).

The Europas will be the first Europe-wide awards ceremony for technology innovation, honouring the best tech companies and startups across the web and mobile scene from across the continent of Europe. The first tranche of tickets are now on sale.

Plenty of people want to nominate their company for the awards, so we’re going to tell you how. Here’s the order you need to follow:

1. Make sure your company is in CrunchBase, with all fields filled in, as well as key staff, like CEO etc. Don’t forget you logo and your picture! And make sure your address, and especially your country HQ/base are filled in. We are using CrunchBase as a basis for our research into potential nominees.

2. We’ll shortly release a list of companies in each of the 15 categories which you can vote on. We want you to vote on those, but in the comments on the posts those will appear on, you’ll also be able to give us feedback on the nominees, and make any additions if we’ve missed anyone. Europe is a big place, and there are a lot of companies to cover.

3. This is not essential, however, you can also email the TechCrunch Europe Editor, Mike Butcher, and nominate your company, or a person, in one of the 15 categories below. Please make begin the subject line with “Europas Nomination”.

4. Here are our categories again:

Best European Web Application Or Service
Best Design
Best Bootstrapped Startup (less than 3 years old)
Best Social Innovation (which benefits society)
Best Enterprise Startup
Best Cleantech/Environmental Startup
Best Hardware / Real World Gadget
Best Entertainment Application or Service
Best Mobile Startup
Best Mobile Application
Best Startup Founder
Best New Startup in 2008/9
Best European Investor of the Year (VC or Angel fund)
Best Investor Personality
Best Overall Winner

5. Here again is all the details you need on how all this will operate. Like I said, we will be releasing the list on nominees to vote on shortly. After that we will produce a list of the final nominees in each category – then all you need to do is come to the awards and find out who won (oh and party with the cream of Europe’s tech scene, of course).

The Awards Ceremony will take place in London from 6pm Thursday, July 9, at Delfina. It’s in one of London’s coolest parts of town with 300 places going for the attending audience. This is not a formal “black tie” event. It’s an event to celebrate! But we’ll be encouraging you to “dress to impress” and show off your startup somehow in a cool, fun way.

On the evening itself we will be joined by some of the great and good from the European startups scene. Check out who is coming already, and you will notice a number of familiar faces from the European startup and VC scene. Many will be handing out awards to the winners. Just a handful are below, and include:

Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo
Stefan Glaenzer, co-founder of Last.FM
Sarah Lacy, author & TechCrunch editor
Tariq Krim, founder of Netvibes

We’ll also have some startup pitches (see here for how to pitch) sponsored by UK Trade & Investment (UKTI).

So, the key details are:

Get you ticket.

Opportunity to Sponsor awards : Please contact Petra Johansson petra(at)twistedtree.co.uk for further details.

Press/Media enquiries:Please contact Rassami Hok Ljungberg on rassami(at)rassami.com

Editorial/Awards/Programme: Editorial queries related to the awards, the programme and the pitch competition should be directed to Mike Butcher, Editor, TechCrunch Europe.

You may have heard of a new URL-shortening service on the block called Good.ly. It’s a product spun out Skimlinks, an affiliate links aggregator we’ve covered extensively before. The connection is that Good.ly is linked to affiliate schemes which then generate cash for charities.

If you use Good.ly to make a product recommendation on Twitter (it’s also at @good_ly) and people click on and then buy what you suggested, Good.ly gives 55% of any earned referral fees to one of its nominated charities. So far the Dogs Trust, Crisis and ChildVoice International are signed up, but about 100 others have applied. The other 45% is used to run the service and continue marketing it.

Yesterday Good.ly donated 100% of all profits to charity as part of the #CharityTuesday trend on Twitter, so it’s obviously possible. Perhaps they should consider reducing their percentage as the service gets traction?

Good.ly shortened links are run through Skimlinks, and turned into an affiliate link where possible. Skilmlinks has 8,000 retailers so there’s a fair chance they’ll have a suitable product.

They’re also trying to get onto Seesmic Desktop, and you can vote for them here.

London-based social “game shows” startup Amuso has launched its live multiplayer, micropayment-based trivia game platform with Bebo, and UK national free-paper Metro. Is this the first deal to be done for a between a social networking company and a newspaper business? No. But it’s one of the first in the UK. Amuso is also understood to be “in advanced talks” with three other UK newspaper houses, three magazine publishing houses, two major UK TV networks and another social networking site.

Amuso’s Trivia Star game invites up to five players to pitch their trivia knowledge against each other. A countdown begins as soon as two players arrive in the Trivia Star ‘lobby’ during which time other contestants can join the session before it automatically starts. Each session consists of 10 multiple choice questions where players compete to be the first to answer correctly.

Bebeo has it running live now here and Metro here.

Contestants can play the free version of Trivia Star, or put money in the pot that they can potentially win via SMS or PayPal. The pot then that funds cash prizes for the winners. Partners obviously take a commission. The games are connected to Amuso’s multiplayer server that pools users across multiple sites so there is always a steady flow of players ready to stake £1 for the thrill of beating opponents and winning the cash prize. Because it is skills-based, Trivia Star is not considered gambling by law and hence does not require a license to deploy in the UK or in most international markets.

Metro.co.uk claims 9 million page impressions and 1.25 million users a minth, while Bebo claims 9 million users.

With newspaper and magazine circulations declining, micropayment solutions like Trivia Star have the potential to engage what audiences they have online and monetise them.

In November last year Amuso, partnered with the Miss World beauty contest to offer a social network centered around the Miss World competitors, allowing users to send them messages, view photos, read about their interests, and vote on their favorite candidate.

Amuso.com is developed out of Barcelona but is now HQ’d in London office and is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners.

Tweetdeck has released a new version, with the big statement of becoming “a new browser for the real-time Web,” according to founder Iain Dodsworth. He’s also launching TweetDeck for the iPhone (just as soon as Apple approves it in the app store, apparently soon). You can flick through columns a little like changing screens in Safari on the iPhone. This will sync with your desktop version, as predicted by TechCrunch Europe back in January.

Digg co-founder Kevin Rose has got hold of a beta version of the app.

The new version of TweetDeck for the desktop Syncs with the iPhone in the background, talking to a new Tweetdeck server. Yes, you now get a separate Tweetdeck account to save allyour settings. So when you fire up the iPhone version it will simply pull all your latest settings auto-uploaded from your desktop version. In other words Tweetdeck is becoming a cloudbased platform in its own right. This will likely set it apart from competitors like Tweetie.

TweetDeck will also now support multiple accounts for Twitter and – a big boon for me – unlimited columns. These were previously limited to 10.

TweetDeck is also not competitng with another UK startup Zensify. Because now it will show trends among the people you follow, something Zensify has been displaying on the iphone via tag clouds. Dodsworth blogs about the other features in a long post here.

It looks like Amazon, which now owns just under a third of Lovefilm in the UK (and merged it with its UK and German DVD rental businesses last year), and the remaining shareholders consisting of Arts Alliance Media, Index Ventures, Balderton Capital, DFJ Esprit and company management all want a “liquidity event”. In others words, they probably want to sell LoveFilm. It’s clear Netflix in the US would be a natural fit, as hinted in the FT.

A spokesperson told has told PaidContent: “We can confirm Lovefilm has received approaches and the board is considering options on on behalf of the group and its shareholders.” Investment bank Jeffries has been appointed on the deal.

And although the word is that “discussions are focusing on new investors acquiring a majority stake rather than a full buy-out of existing shareholders” to be honest it’s a moot point – it’s anything that would give the existing shareholders the “liquidity event” they almost certainly desire.

Vooices is a new API project from Paul Rawlings and Paul Kinlan. Why is that interesting? Well, these guys made Twe2, the attempt to bring back SMS to Twitters in the UK, which subsequently fell foul of its SMS partner . No matter – they are on to better things. And these things are quite interesting.

Vooices allows anyone to develop games with voice interaction over a phone line. An example is the very simple game they developed called Wordz where you dial a phone number and read out the colour of the word. The game, via Flash, recognises if you are right or wrong and adds or subtracts points accordingly. It’s actually pretty fun.

So, Vooices is ultimately an Open API that existing game and content developers could hook into existing and new games. What can you build with Vooices? Apart from controlling something like a game, you could have multiplayer games. As they postulate, “imagine 100s of people dialling into a vooice game in London that is hosted on a screen in Kings Cross”. Yes, the mind boggles. With advertising, Vooices could give users control a game for a video advert such as “what’s your favourite flavour of crisps” and count votes. Vooices also knows the location of the speaker via the phone and could send an MMS voucher or an SMS message with a discount code. There are of course other ideas: Secure Login with voice prints; Paid Content; Voting Lines; you name it.

More intrigingly is the Maps application they have mocked up. This supports most Google Mapping commands and uses the latest version of the Vooices API. The effect of being able to tell the map to Zoom In or Zoom Out or “North”, is really very, very cool.

But perhaps the most interesting application for Vooices is their Voiceboo Verify site. This uses the Vooices API to authorise Twitter Accounts using a persons voice – and then gets the community to vote on whether its really them.

Here’s how it works:

1. You can verify a Twitter account via VooiceBoo by sending the Twitter user a VooiceBoo Verification Link to their twitter account.

2. When clicking the link, the user is presented with a verification page in which they have to log into using their Twitter Details, which uses the now secure oAuth.

3. Once logged in, the user is then presented with a phone number to dial (US or UK), a personal keycode to enter and a phrase to say after dialling the number.

4. The phrase that has been said on the call is then saved against the user’s account and the community then votes on VooiceBoo whether the phone recording sounds like the person in question, giving confidence to the profile.

5. Once a certain level of confidence is reached for the account, VooiceBoo then takes the account background from Twitter and adds a VooiceBoo Verify Seal Automatically to the background image and allows the user to push it back to Twitter.

So, in a stroke Vooices and voicebooverify could well save Twitter a lot of time and money verifying accounts of celebrities. Imagine everyone being able to vote on whether it really is Britney Spears on her account?

This week’s TechCrunch Europe Job of the Week is for a Web Designer with Diary.com.

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

Every week we publish the Job of the Week here (9,000+ on RSS) and Twitter it to about 13,000+ more people. To apply to have Job of the Week featured, put up a job on the CrunchBoard and contact editorial.

Help European startups by carrying our CrunchBoard widget on your site.

Hunch, the new startup from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, has launched and it’s beguilingly fun. After filling out 42 questions ranging from “Have you sky dived” to “Do you like it when the cabin crew cracks jokes on airplanes?” I was presented with a number of things I might be interested in (I chose which film directors I should watch: Tim Burton). I was hooked enough to fill out the profile page (you can get answers without logging in) and at this point it becomes clear: Hunch is a social network where the social object is sharing questions (and thus answers) which might be relevant to you. The more questions you answer the more your profile page become relevant to you. And you can of course share those questions around with a widget.

I can see also that with the release of their API, Hunch+Twitter would be an awesome combination, and I assume they are building it. If not, someone else should. It will also benefit from Microsoft’s positioning of Bing as an answer engine – useful PR for Hunch.

It’s a shame that the UK’s own decision making engine, Njoyed – now officially deadpooled (last post on it was 5 months ago) – couldn’t get it’s act together. But Hunch could spell good news for Imagini – the UK startup which has perfected a system for profiling users through asking them questions about images, and which has $13.5m in funding. I can certainly see them doing a deal at some point.

There is of course a big issue about how private your data will be on this system. It’s a glib answer but I trust Fake, creator of Flickr, on this one. But it’s a subject that will be continually asked of them.