Google Italy’s country manager, Massimiliano Magrini has reportedly resigned and now plans to start a venture capital fund and a “startup incubator” (although these seem quite different). Magrini is probably in a position to financially – he started up Google in Italy in way back in 2002 after working at Altavista. And apparently he’s not doing it alone: he’s joined by 20 other players in the Italian tech scene.

He told Italian based blog Startups.eu: “I will develop in Italy what venture capitalists are already doing in the USA. The timing and the place is right. I’m getting great feedback from the financial community. I will create a real new Silicon Valley in Milan”.

For those of you not familiar with the Italian Internet scene, this is fighting talk.

There are almost literally no VCs in Italy, and what investors there are tend to to be Angels or corporate investors only interested in e-commerce startups which hit revenues almost from the word go. Web 2.0 style startups are almost completely non-existent there. CrunchBase lists only a handful of companies, although of course that’s probably not definitive.

So for a new VC to launch in Italy is highly significant. Clearly, it really is a good time to startup.

One of the few other cheerleaders of tech startups there is Milan-based VC dpixel, headed up by serial entrepreneur Gianluca Dettori. He started the TechGarage event for the first time last year.

ShoZu’s CEO Mark Bole is a departing and chairman Chris Wade is taking on both roles at the London-based company. It’s not been long. Wade, a veteran technology executive and entrepreneur, has only been chairman since 2008. However Bole did lead Shozu for almost 5 years, so is now off to “seek a fresh challenge” he says.

He leaves the company in decent health – Shozu closed a new funding round earlier this year – and he remains a significant shareholder in the company.

ShoZu has made the successful transition to an app store centric model. However, where it goes from here it’s hard to say. Plenty of other apps do what it does now – uploading photos and content to multiple sites – although it remains the daddy in terms of the sheer numbers of services you can use it for.

During the freak UK snow conditions this year, enterprising developer Ben Marsh coded the #uksnow Twitter/Google maps mashup. You simply Tweeted the first half of your postcode and a score out of 10 for the local snow cover e.g.”#uksnow E1 4/10″ and the map showed where the snow was falling. Simple really.

Now Vodafone have contracted Ben to do something similar, this time for their ad campaign around roaming charges, called ukhols Map. People Tweet their postcode, age, sex and where they are going on holiday, and tag it with #ukhols. This then gives us a map of where the Brits are heading for vacation. Which is quite handy really, because now we know where to avoid bumping into binge-drinking Brits.

Then again, if UK Twitter users are now the chattering classes, perhaps this is representative of the elite? In which case the map still may come in handy.

What is on Stephan Uhrenbacher’s mind? The founder of Qype, which some describe as the European Yelp, has moved into a back-seat role and has new plans up his sleeves – but he’s playing hard to get. He was on a Techcrunch Berlin panel this week and conspirationally mentioned to me that he had three new business ideas. However, it remains to be seen what these ideas are. His personal blog post this week hinted at it however.

He’s dismissed becoming a VC or an Angel, but instead he is looking for founders to launch new business ideas his Upspring vehicle has had. These will “make life easier for everyone, make markets more efficient and disrupt the status quo; or help reduce emissions.”

He’s steering clear of dating and gambling and “none of the concepts is a clone of something that works somewhere else, so there is considerable risk involved, but also ample opportunity.”

He says the founders will “get reasonable shares to make them real entrepreneurs. Upspring will provide ideas, know how, infrastructure and seed funding.”

So far Uhrenbacher isn’t saying anything more about these new businesses. I wonder what they could be…?

Lycos, the long forgotten search engine and portal (remember them?), has regained the rights to use the trademarked brand names “Lycos” and “Hotbot” inside Europe. Previously Lycos Europe was a Bertelsmann-Telefonica owned entitiy which operated under license in Europe. Lycos Europe paid $5.2 million in 2007 for this arrangement in fact. But at its AGM on May 31 it ruled that it would to sell the license back to the US Lycos. Still with me?

Jungwook Lim, CEO of Lycos Inc in the US (a subsidiary of Korean Internet giant Daum Communications), says they plan to “revitalize and strengthen our search businesses within Europe…” with, says Edward Noel, General Manager of Search and Business Development “locally targeted content verticals.” Of course, most Europeans have long forgotten Lycos – although it still has small traction in Germany.

But no-one seems to have noticed a small matter. Google is powering their search engine these days. So quite what Lycos thinks it can bring to the party remains a mystery.

The BBC is getting into truly real-time interactive web apps with a new open source framework called Hemlock, developed by London-based Mint Digital, and available as of today.

The Beeb’s Children’s Department has licensed the technology to develop a peer-to-peer card trading game based on its hugely popular mixed reality show BAMZOOKi, which is sort of like Robot Wars meets Knightmare. This (slightly dated) video should elucidate:

Adam Khwaja, a producer working across BBC interactive and multiplatform projects with a particular interest in user experience, says the appeal comes from the casual approach to gameplay that Hemlock allows; being able to dive straight into a realtime multiplayer game without having to register or face a steep learning curve. The kids love it, apparently.

Mint developed Hemlock to solve a problem they had in developing Football3s, an interactive fantasy football game designed to be played in real-time alongside actual football matches. The problem is that most real-time interactive web experiences are not real-time at all. It’s all simulated, with the front-end site constantly polling the back-end database for changes to the data. Or as one of the Mint team says on the Hemlock blog, “the web’s current top notch technology is like an impatient and really annoying child“.

For apps that attract thousands of users, all this interaction becomes very processor-heavy and the application itself is subject to high latency, which  the user experiences as a sluggish or unresponsive app. Hemlock’s approach is to combine Flash and XMPP, the protocol that powers presence notification and real-time communication.

It works in a similar way to push email; Hemlock registers a client with the server to receive messages. The server then notifies the client when there is a new message — no polling required. It also means that multiple users can interact with the same data in real-time.

The framework paves the way for web applications of a different calibre, making it easier for developers to get started on building cool apps without having to worry about the low-level foundation stuff. Hemlock was soft-launched last week and received with excitement by the web development community.

The potential for commercial applications is vast. Game play is obviously a winner; think how much fun Lexulous or any other Facebook app could be if you were playing in real-time, rather than taking asynchronous turns. There’s also a market in educational software, with the potential for collaborative canvases to get students working together. I’m pretty sure the digital marketing agencies will pick up on it as well, as the next level of viral marketing.

Yesterday we held the TechCrunch Berlin roundtable meetup and explored some of the themes driving the tech scene here. Lukasz Gadowski, founder of the Team Europe investors and the serial entrepreneur behind Speadshirt, StudiVZ and others in Germany, spoke on “Competing with US players”. As is often the case with Gadowski, he threw the cat amongst the pigeons with a passionate speech, exhorting his fellow countrymen to start to link science and technology to business much more closely. What he said also revealed a lot about the attitudes to tech startups and business in general in Germany.

Gadowski said Europe is on the periphery of Internet Entrepreneurship while the US is in the centre. Why is that? Are Europeans “dumb and un-innovative”? No. We have great scientists, great institutes and a high performance business culture – “North of France ” he added cheekily.

However, despite this there still remains the issue of “Copy-Cat” startups. So why does the US dominate tech? He nailed it down to four reasons.

Demographics: The US is one large market speaking one language, while Europe is a collection of smaller markets.

Learning Curve: US consumers where online earlier and move quickly with the times, as does their tech sector. They also have large numbers of business people with a highly developed ecosystem. Being ahead of the learning curve means they see problems sooner, and you can‘t innovate without being able to see the problems first. That also means you can execute faster.

Clusters: The US also has a relatively centralized area (Silicon Valley) for tech and there is a culture of openness and support. This contrasts with some companies in Europe who operate under “1000% Confidential and Stealth mode” all the time.

Business & Tech mix: People from business and technology innovation also mix a lot more in the US and understand eachother’s worlds. There are also centers of excellence for both of these fields on one university campus (MIT & Sloan; Stanford etc).

However, although Europe is lagging, there is no reason for despair and we have come a long way. For example, in Germany “the last 5 years have been incredible!” he said. So the groundwork has been laid.

Gadowski suggested further ways to improve the environment for startups in Europe. He said to bridge the gap between technology and business students must study business as well as technology course, at the same time (e.g. a Double Major).

European culture – which can be pretty anti-capitalist at time’s and is very much so during the economic crisis – needs to be changed. “Capitalism is good! It is not evil! Exploitation is the exception, value creation the rule!” he said. So “the Rolex watch” aspect of business’ conspicuous consumption is the exception, the foundation of new venture is the rule in business. It’s significant that he actually had to spell this out and although I’m sure he was preaching to the converted at a TechCrunch event, the fact he felt he had to do so does speak volumes about the prevailing attitudes in Germany and, perhaps, across Europe.

He also told the audience to “Please tell your local CCC chapter”. In other words, go tell the Chaos Computer Club members – who have a history of anipathy towards business – that tech startups are not evil. Wow.

He also added, “be ethical yourself; don‘t sell your soul and do not support unethical groups. Have Respect!”. In other words, there’s a prevailing feeling in Germany that business sometimes operates unethically. Personally, as a Brit, I’d say they have much less to worry about than the UK!

He also called for tech business people to not look down on geeks because they seem less interested in the money side of the business.

He also called for startups to “Innovate!” rather than copy, to get the best returns on their businesses. “But: please make sure your innovation is a business! Most are not.”

In contrast he added that people should still not scoff at copycats, since “a successfull copy makes great entrepreneurship and helps us to climb the learning curve.”

Gadowski told the audience to stop being secretive about their startups and share knoweledge as “1000% confidential sucks – it misses lots of benefits. Ideas are overrated, execution is key.”

He also addressed the issue of clusters. Many VCs in Germany are based in Munich. There are no full-blown VCs in Berlin, and yet that is currently where most of the German startups are based, as it’s cheap to startup here. “When will the first VC relocate?” he asked.

In a final “to do” list he told the crowd to “Support A teams (and learn) instead of building the 5th B company. Focus the Community on Successes; Go international!”

Finally he told everyone to read Techcrunch Europe and Gruenderszene. Thanks Lukasz.

Berlin is a cradle of innovative startups in Europe right now and we got a taster if it here in Berlin today with some great presentations at Seedcamp Berlin. As is often the case the bag was mixed, but there was plenty for mentors to get their teeth into. Below are the winning teams from this round followed by the other teams that pitched.

Winners:

asgoodas
Their Pitch: “asgoodas.nu is a way to turn used electronic gadgets into cash. Sell online directly to asgoodas.nu by answering a few questions and mailing them in free of cost. A few days later the price will be paid to your account. The price is based on a fair market value calculated from thousands internet transactions daily, like a stock quote. Faster and easier than Ebay, price is guaranteed, no auction troubles. asgoodas.nu tests and refurbishes the used gadgets and sells them “as good as new” with a 12 months warranty. Margin and profits come from the markup that consumers are willing to pay for a professionally refurbished device with warranty as compared to a private transaction. Current sales are 15K/month, a first cooperation with a major brand closed.” Founders have a background in Deutsche Telekom.

TechCrunch Europe Quick Take: Sounds very much like Speedsell in the UK.

Platogo
Pitch: “Platogo is the first platform to apply the Web 2.0 ideas of user-generated content and strong community focus to browser-based gaming. The number of Platogo games and levels grows indefinitely with and through the community: users can also be producers, creating and sharing their own game levels. Game developers also gain significantly, as Platogo offers them an attractive platform for their games and appealing revenue shares. Revenue is driven by sales to users (e.g. in-game features via micropayments) and multiple advertising options, both on the website and inside games. Our team consists of highly skilled experts in web front-end development, server-side programming, graphic design, game- and business development.”

TCE Quick Take:
Great presentation. Platform looks pretty awesome. P2P online games creation platform where users create their own levels. Very much about challenging others to play your levels, so potentially addictive.

PaperC
Pitch: “PaperC is a platform where users can read educational and academic documents from a to z, free of charge. If users purchase a page for a nominal fee, the text can also be downloaded and printed, or worked on online. Furthermore, PaperC retails print books via the publisher’s online shop.”

TCE Quick Take: It’s a platform for academic documents. Users only pay for downloads or printing. DRM an issue? Publishers get revenue share. Looks useful for scientific/academic papers. Could well do with partnerisng with someone like Mendeley or Academia.

Studdex.com
Students can search andf compare higher ed programs and apply to universities. Currently tracking 1000 programs from 75 universities and 45 languages schools. Studdex earns 10% commissino when a student takes a course. Can also upsell travel insurance etc.

TCE Take: This appears to solve a lot of the issues with university application processes and uni courses selection. Universities can showcase their curricula and gather data on prospective students. Looks good.

My picks:

Wozaik
Pitch: “Searching the Web has become easy with Google. Bookmarking has been around for years but keeping and managing the contents you found is still a painful and hard consuming task. Today, Wozaik introduces the Dynamic Bookmarks. Cut portions of any webpages and gather them on your personal space. There, visualize your contents at a glance and interact with them as if you were on the original websites. Your Dynamic Bookmarks are automatically synchronized with the sources and kept up to date. Naturally you can also share spaces with friends or send them, instead of text links, directly the content you want. Wozaik will monetize its customer base from premium services. Moreover, Wozaik will provide server adds with targeted recommendation to help them maximize their revenues.

TCE Quick Take: Looks very cool. Visual, dynamic, self-organising dynamic bookmarks. If web site is modified then the dynamic bookmark is updated and sent to your profile! In private alpha.

Expertnews.me
Pitch: “expertnews.me is a service which combines the best of twitter, a RSS reader and a rated experts’ directory. You follow experts from a directory to get a facebook-style feed of their latest news (=all public sources: RSS, twitter, … also isolate a single expert from a newspaper feed). You can rate experts and contribute to the directory. Compiling teams for your topics helps you to stay on top and others to select the relevant experts for a topic. Use facebook/twitter to share news. expertnews.me is a working prototype and an idea of the “newspaper” of the future. It could potentially shift the power from the publishing companies to the individual editors. expertnews.me will make money by advertisement and premium accounts.”

TCE Quick Take: Seems like a media play but worth a look. Digg for experts?

The other teams:

CashCollie
Pitch: “CashCollie is an international Belgian based start-up focusing on social finance for groups. Users can instantly mobilize, share, administer and settle for socially incurred expenditures or social purchases. This means no more hassle to look for money, no more hassle to collect money and no problem in losing money. We are delivering instant value via the interactive processing and settlement and an additional value through visualizing the personal financial layer of socially incurred transactions. Income is generated via the proprietary payment mechanism and through the adoption of a B-A-A-S subscription model. Advertising is triggered based on the data and insight on social expenditures in groups of individuals. In June 2009 the company received a grant from the IWT (Institute for Science & Technology).”

TCE Quick Take: This is P2P lending a bit like Zopa. Elements of Mint.com and Wonga for smaller amounts, and Billmonk.

CloudControl
Pitch: “CloudControl is developing a highly available and on demand scalable cloud hosting solution for modern web applications. As todays hosting companys fail to provide these services without excessive systemadministration or at exorbitant prices, cloudControl offers a full service solution at an affordable price. By using cloud computing principles cloudControl increases the service quality while keeping prices competitive. At the same time the platform enables customers to focus on their distinctive competencies in developing own products without worrying about time consuming infrastructure administration. The monetization will happen through offering the hosting solution to end customers as well as licensing the whitelabe platform including the innovative resource-marketplace for handling trafficspikes to third party hosting companies. ”

TCE Quick Take: Hosting and charging only for what people use. Looks like bespoke cloud services, instead of bundled solutions.

Con’angel
Pitch: “Con’angel is a Personal Event Planner for mobile phones. Every user can build his own favorite session plan. Event organizations get with the App direct access to all visitors at the conference. At a conference or festival the visitors get realtime data of the sessions and workshops. When a room, time, speaker changed, the information is submitted directly over the air to the mobile. The service is free for all users. The organizers pay for this amazing service. And we are the best team for that.” See http://get.conangel.com/ for the iPhone app.

TCE Quick Take: Events manager on iPhone. Competitive edge and revenue model in question, but looks like a SAAS model.

Elefanta.pl (from Poland)
Pitch: “Our service is the first Polish social service recommending the best of what the global net offers – excellent web pages, video, pictures, blogs, etc. (in short – all favourites web sites) served to internet users according to their individual interests and needs. Our users can explore the global web either using Elefanta’s toolbar or the main service. Elefanta.pl has been present on the market since the end of 2007. We have been able to acheived: 400 000 internet visitors monthly on average (through the last 6 months), 100 000 favourites web sites added to the service, 15 000 register users. We want, in the near future, to fully take advantage of artificial intelligence in our service to improve its performance. So far, we explore successfuly only one income chanel – ads.”

TCE Quick Take: Hard to asses claims but seems to have traction in Poland, with 400k unique users and 15k registered users.

Mapegg.com
Pitch: “Imagine that your phone detects where you’re at – not as coordinates, but as an actual location, for which we deliver web content on the spot. mapegg is an interactive map of the world for mobile devices. It uses selected open datasources like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap as authoritative sources for points of interest, and links Web content such as photos, tweets, reviews and opening hours to these points. The result is a comprehensive map that bundles content from all across the web, featuring type-specific icons, searching and multilingual labels. This creates a real value-added for urban navigation and could be monetized by app store sales, bundling agreements with network operators, or location-aware advertising. The team has made major contributions to the W3C Linking Open Data project.”

TCE Quick Take: Location-aware advertising, info on physical locations, filtered for what you really look for. Lots of resource tagging, semantic web etc. Lots of potential if they get it right.

MendMyPC (UK)
Pitch: “The market for IT support services is fragmented and is not transparent in terms of the cost of service and reputation and skills of the Engineer. Engineers often have to incur huge sums to find customers and buy software to deliver their services and get paid. MendMyPC is a clear and transparent online marketplace that connects people that need IT support and other related IT services with engineers that provide these services. The platform also provides tools to manage the delivery of services. The revenue stream is a success fee deducted from money paid to the engineers by customers. The other revenue stream after private beta is a listing fee paid by engineers. Future revenue streams are advertising and mobile services.”

TCE Quick Take: Basically a market place for engineers to freelance their services to SMEs. Operates in UK & GER. Remote or “in person” help. Virtual geeks!

ChannelQ
Pitch: “With ChannelQ.de we aim to build a unique online quiz experience offering users a fun, challenging, rewarding and really useful type of gaming. ChannelQ features a variety of classic game show principles, letting users on one hand take part in the shows as contestants and on the other hand create their own questions and shows to become the host by themselves. We intend to make our quiz games available through a variety of partnerships with big online portals and monetize it with successfully proven business models from the online gaming industry – mainly skill gaming and virtual item selling. However, the current version of ChannelQ is based on advertising and content licencing only.”

TCE Quick Take: Online quizzes that users build themselves. Whitelabel business model also.

Move&Play
Pitch: “Move&Play provides to Internet users a groundbreaking solution enhancing mobility and reducing management tasks. Instead of managing files, you can directly browse and share all your devices libraries; this is the magic of peer-to-peer. Contents accessed with Move&Play are transparently uploaded and stored online for at least two months. Your personal space is free and unlimited; this is the wonder of peer-to-cloud. Also, you can play, edit, share and publish all your contents using Move&Play web applications or integrated web services. Thanks to Move&Play, you get true mobility, simply! Move&Play has a classical freemium business model. However, while all users have free and unlimited space, thanks to our low cost storage technologies and guaranteed exposure duration advertising spaces, Move&Play’s free-users also ensure profitability.”

TCE Quick Take: Browse and share device libraries. Sounds like Wuala.com

petsicon
Pitch: “petsicon is the first pet disease diagnosis system on the internet. It helps pet owners check and inform themselves about possible diseases and provides detailed information and instructions for non-veterinarians. It further helps pet owners to get in touch with each other, gives helpful advice for pet care and lets its users access a variety of other pet related services. The basic service is free for the users, the company will make money with online advertisements and special premium services which are available to the users for a small fee. A beta version with the segment dog is online (petsicon.de) and the full version with the segments dog and cat will go online in the middle of june.”

TCE Quick Take: Locate a sympton for your pet, look at rankings for possible diseases etc. You can record medical history of your pet and share info, social network, premium services.

Softicator
Pitch: “Softicator is the social platform for software developers to publish and promote their apps. We built Softicator.com to help software producers pull in users and customers in a social way. Because we know that today’s mainstream means of pushing out software, by submitting to download portals and getting reviews, is broken and inefficient. And because we believe developers and their users should share a social-network-ish experience, unlike on major software portals (which feel like the 90′s). We’re in the business of selling software, be it commercial or free, by helping publishers leverage their users and customers’ community. The basic account has all the features and tools, free, with some limitations. Multiple apps per account, extra branding, more social toys come with a monthly fee.”

TCE Quick Take: Enterprise SW reports filtered from the Web for CIOs. They can choose what to buy, get bugs repaired.

TaskWriter
Pitch: “TaskWriter is a flexible ever Getting Things Done tool. We are offering quite a few ways to get your data online, and, the most important thing, you are being supported in using TaskWriter as an addon to your very own GTD workflow. You can extract the information as Excel, RSS, iCal, Word, Text, PDF or XML, you can setup email or twitter integration hooks, and you can view your data both as “lists” and “task snippets boxes”. The basic version is free, while you have to pay for the premium features.To demonstrate that we are capable of developing competitive projects in a timely manner and that we are here to stay.”

TCE Quick Take: Premium version of $9 per month. User defines what they need to accomplish, the platform selects the tool. Can it really double your productivity as they claim?

TwiMarket
Pitch: “TwiMarket helps users post and explore all their Twitter classifieds in a single user friendly interface. The problem solved is not having ads thrown all over users timelines, but actually finding them in a single place, either on our website or via our Twitter accounts that re-tweet the ads they receive. It just makes posting and finding micro-blogging ads a lot more productive. We intend to follow the trends in Twitter services monetization and we are considering right now making a micro-payment platform to allow users to promote some of their posted ads into a premium area.”

TCE Quick Take: Marketplace for Twitter. Post classifieds on Twitter.

vooch
Pitch: “Vooch is a location based mobile couponing solution. Consumers find offers and coupons from their surrouding through a mobile application (available for most recent mobile phones) in a highly interactive and entertaining way. The redemption process is controlled via localisation and advertisers are billed on a referral basis for every activated coupon. There is no need for the installation of hard- or software at the POS. vooch allows companies to flexibly advertise without waste coverage in a highly measurable and controllable way. Consumers enjoy the pull-based approach and benefit directly from the coupons. Mike has studied computer sciences and has worked for an online retailer as a web developer and designer. Tobi has worked for two years as a consultant in the mobile industry after finishing his business studies.”

TCE Quick Take: Location based couponing and validation through GPS positioning. Similar to the UK’s VouChCha but has an Android app as welll as iphone.

Earthfaves
Pitch: “A word-of-mouth platform that plugs into existing social networks, allowing people to share their favorite places with friends and colleagues, while allowing companies to manage, cultivate and grow these communities of customers who actively promote their business. earthfaves lets people to perform a “social search” and access a manageable list of places (from restaurants, hotels, pubs, adventures, beaches, etc.) that their friends love – in a simple Google Maps-based interface. This end-user platform is connected to a back-end “promoter relationship management” solution, the first networked SaaS solution developed for businesses in the leisure, lifestyle, and tourism industries, enabling them to identify, communicate, and reward their active group of promoters and increase their advertising reach by broadcasting recommendations to multiple social spaces in the Web.”
TCE Quick Take: It could work. Maybe. If the travel agents get Twitter any time soon.

The TechCrunch Berlin event is tomorrow and, to be frank, we screwed up. We should have realised that we’d need a lot of space to house all the people who wanted to come, especially since Berlin is one of the largest cradles of the startup scene in Germany. So, our bad. But well done to the just over 100 people who will get to see this awesome lineup of speakers and pitches.

However, we have, at the last minute, come up with a solution for those that couldn’t squeeze in to the daytime event, and at least it will enable lots more people to network and meet startups, investors, and of course TechCrunch Europe. So thanks to the awesome offer from Soundcloud to host the TechCrunch Europe afterparty on their very convenient, and large, roof. Here‘s a taster of what it looks like.

The after-party is free to come to but it has some easy conditions:

1. Please – if you have a FB profile – RSVP on the TechCrunch Berlin After-party Facebook page, if possible, thanks.

2. Party starts at 9pm

3. The party is free but people should bring:

- All the booze they want plus some extra for their friend who forgot
- An umbrella since we’ll be under the clouds
- A prepared surprised look for when the Police arrive (you think we’re kidding?)
- GPS is always good.

The Address is:
CloudClub (aka SoundCloud’s offices with the roof terrace)
Across the yard, top floor
Auguststrasse 5A
101 17 Berlin–Mitte

Google Map here.

Or Map: http://tinyurl.com/tcberlinafterparty

Follow TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher on Twitter at @mikebutcher to get live tweets from the event or the Hashtag #tcb09

Pasaj is a website for users to buy and sell handmade items. Just like Etsy in the US, Pasaj also focuses on a niche market and limits its sales on “user generated” products.

Nokta, the leading Turkish online media company, founded Pasaj in January 2009 and inside a couple of months it has a reached nearly 10,000 items listed. That’s not bad for a Turkey-focused startup.

Of course, Pasaj’s success is backed and aided by Nokta’s reach into a large number of online Turkish communities like izlesene.com, the leading Turkish video sharing site, Blogcu.com, the leading Turkish free blog provider, FotoKritik.com, the leading Turkish professional photo community and Sinemalar.com, a Turkish movie reviews community.

Nokta, with all its sites, has nearly 4 million members, and they reach around 2.5 million daily unique visitors.

As comScore’s latest report showed, Google sites ranked as the largest property in Turkey with more than 16 million visitors in April 2009, a reach of 90 percent of the total online population. Microsoft Sites ranked second with 15.5 million, followed by Facebook.com (12.8 million visitors) and DOL (10.1 million visitors), owner of Turkish-based entertainment and sports sites Ekolay and Fanatik.

Recently Pasaj launched its Facebook application which lets its members to list their products on Facebook profiles. Facebook has over 10 million Turkish members. Considering Facebook’s Turkish user potential, it will probably boost Pasaj’s user growth in a short while.

Also, it’s important to remember Sergistan.com which was the first company to try Etsy’s business model in Turkey. It focused on handmade items in Turkish markets but didn’t really get traction.

Turkey currently stands at #7 with its 26.7 million online population and one of the most engaged online audiences in Europe, but its online economy will need more time to catch the European average of online spendings. However, the e-commerce market is growing year on year and, wih 80m in population, my reckoning is that by 2012 the country’s online economy will be in the list of top 10 countries of Europe.

Startups need to sit up and take notice of big change to the domain name system coming around the corner or miss out potential new opportunities. That at least one of the messages coming out of a new report issued, predictably, by a domain name registrar. But hold on a second, do they have a point?

From next year The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the international body that oversees the structure of the Internet, will liberalise the market for domain name extensions – the .com or .uk part of a web address. This means that anyone, in theory, can apply to operate an extension. So instead of “DietCoke dot com”, Coke could set up diet.coke, zero.coke etc etc.

A new report carried out by The Future Laboratory on behalf of domain name registrar Gandi.net quizzed a survey of 1,000 Britons and 50 e-commerce managers from large high street businesses and 50 e-commerce managers from SMEs. It found that while two thirds of businesses were unaware that this change is taking place, over 80% thought, when told about it, that it would be a good idea in terms of branding, domain name control, things like that.

Here’s the interesting bit for startups: less dumb names like woohahoo.com, and something more like greatname.news.

If you’re a well funded startup you could in theory set up a registry to reinforce your brand i.e. every microsite campaign would be punctuated with .yourbrand e.g. .myspace. There’s an argument here about controlling piracy and counterfeiting.

There may also be a startup play for new registries. There will be plenty of opportunities around .news, .film, .london, .restaurant, .football, .fashion etc.

But there’s the flexibility issue. zynga.facebook is a great for a while, but what happens if the business switches to iPhone apps?

Curiously while only 19% of those surveyed said an extension like .microsoft would be memorable only 24% think a .com domain is. What can we concur from that? A lot the time confused punters are probably just Google the domain because they can’t rememember the extension anyway.

The big problem of course is that cybersquatters register all the best domain names or use domain names that resemble trademarks for phishing or similar.

So given the complications and requirement to register even more domain names perhaps woohahoo.com doesn’t look so bad after all?

There’s also another problem. Startups of the kind TechCrunch likes to talk about tend to end up as global plays. So getting .woohahoo might be handy, but it’s only useful if the average person gets used to the idea that .toyota is a normal domain name. Other than that we’re back to relying on search again.

And that change in mindset probably won’t happen for a long, long while, given it’s taken ten years for everyone to get used to .com and .net.

Wonga.com, the startup that has started to change the face of short-term lending in the UK, has closed a $22.25m round of funding led by Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, with the support of its existing investor, Balderton Capital.

Founded by Errol Damelin and Jonty Hurwitz, Wonga provides cash advances to UK consumers, helping solve occasional cash flow problems. It’s provided nearly 100,000 flexible cash advances of up to 30 days since it launched eleven months ago.

The killer USP is that Wonga is the first consumer finance company to fully automate the lending process, providing a completely online credit solution around the clock. Via a Web interface applicants select exactly how much cash they need, up to £750. They can then determine their own price by then selecting how many days they want the money for. The company’s risk and decision technology means applicants receive an instant answer, and if they’re successful, Wonga deposits cash into their bank account within an hour, at any time of day or night. However, it’s not cheap. Interest on a £100 loan for 10 days costs £1 a day. So including fees, a £100 loan for 10 days would have to be repaid at £115.91. APR is generally more than 2,000pc. The maximum loan is £750 and the maximum term is 30 days.

Damelin attributes Wonga’s rapid profitability to its technical innovation and desire to “amaze” its customers. He says Wonga has been built to scale, and plans to expand very rapidly now that the funding is in place.

Accel has a track record of backing some of the fastest growth companies of the last two decades, Facebook included, while Greylock Partners is a long-term investor. Between these approaches, we can expect to see rapid development of the service offering, and expansion into global markets.

Given the global economic situation and the need for a collective rebooting of the lending models that make the world turn, it’s good to see VCs supporting a disruptive lender that makes no bones about focusing on responsible lending and a sustainable business model.

A few days ago TechCrunch carried some fascinating new research into seven million Twitter accounts by Web security firm Purewire (which operates TweetGrade). This showed that some 80 percent of Twitter accounts have fewer than 10 followers, 30 percent have zero followers. However, since 32 million people globally visited Twitter.com in April alone, there are plenty of people getting into it in some way. But this evidence suggests that most people on Twitter are not doing a lot of two-way “conversations” (@replies etc), and that this is generally a more advanced activity. Most people are using it to broadcast one-way, which – to be frank – misses a lot of Twitter’s huge potential as a global platform for conversation.

But it looks like Twitter is used just like many other new media that came along, including blogging. A Harvard Business School study recently suggested that the top 10 percent of Twitter users produce more than 90 percent of all Tweets. Of course just because people are not Tweeting does not mean they are not listening to others’ tweets, of course. So Twitter is similar in a sense to other forms of user generated content, with the top users producing the most content and the majority ‘listening in’.

Further evidence of this arose today in the UK. During a heated exchange between UK politician Lord Mandelson and BBC journalist Andrew Marr this morning, “Andrew Marr” became the top trending term on Twitter, with Mandelson not far behind. For those of you who take an interest, the consensus seemed to be that Mandelson had pwned, or rather beaten Marr into submission during the interview (see 40 mins in here).

This trending topic seemed to throw the Twitterverse into confusion. I saw lots of tweets asking “who the hell” Andrew Marr was, along with Mandelson. But at the same time many of the people I follow – it’s fair to say these are all big Twitter users – were Tweeting away about the Mandelson / Marr exchange.

So in other words we can surmise therefore that Twitter is big amongst those who used to be known as the Chattering Classes and it is not perhaps quite as mainstream in day-to-day use as many would like to think. Or at least, even if it is, most people listen but don’t tweet.

Meanwhile, MPs themselves have gradually been claiming their Twitter accounts over the last year, egged on perhaps by projects like Tweetminster. But one disappointment has been Andy Burnham MP. While his colleague Tom Watson used his Twitter account to great effect to engage with the tech community about business policy, Burnham – a minister who was making policy about the future of the Internet in the UK – didn’t seem to notice when we kidnapped his account to try and encourage him to engage with the industry.

In seven months Burnham never contacted us to claim his account back, and according to some, is too busy to type 140 characters or use it as a platform to engage with constituents. In light of the recent scandal about MPs expenses, this is pretty much par for the course from UK MPs these days. This is one member of the chattering classes that is clearly the exception to the rule when it comes to Twitter.

Well Andy, you can have your account back now. You’re no longer a Minister making Internet policy. And the new Culture Secretary, Ben Bradshaw seems, at least, to be actually using his Twitter account.

Back in April Fring, the Israel-based mobile call and chat application provider, closed a Series C round of financing, estimated to be around £10, on top of the $13 million it had raised since its inception in 2006. So in other words they have plenty of money to play with, lots of traction with their free, ad-supported mobile app that enables VoIP calling, IM and social networking. Android and other platforms await it. But the company faces plenty of other well-funded rivals, including Nimbuzz, Truphone and eBuddy, but also Skype, which recently launched a great app on the iPhone.

So why, at this crucial moment, have they lost a senior member of staff? Neal Fullman, former International communications director at fring, has now jumped ship to join Nimbuzz in the role of chief marketing officer, leading brand development, marketing and communications strategy. Nimbuzz claims to be growing at 25,000 new users a day.

Speaking to Fullman today he told me he wasn’t going to “slag off” Fring, but instead said he felt Nimbuzz had the “right strategy” going forward. He’d also been there two years. Could it be a case of getting itchy feet, waiting for four year-old Fring to – to use a well-worn British phrase – pull their finger out and get on with it? He wouldn’t say.

However, let’s not read too much into this. Marketing people are a dime a dozen and usually, once they’ve changed the logo at a company (“strategic rebranding”), there’s not much for them to do other than twiddle their thumbs until the next job comes along.

Nimbuzz is headquartered in the Netherlands, with offices in Argentina and Brazil and is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners who famously backed Skype, Naspers/MIH and Holtzbrinck Ventures.

You’d think that with the futuristic and gravity defying creations they spawn, architects would be leading the vanguard of efficient working practices. It turns out they’re still stuck in the 90s, where sharing files and collaborating with partners and clients is done via CD and bike messenger, or – shock! horror! – even printouts sent by post.

Tech startup Woobius is trying to solve this problem with its collaboration tool for architects and engineers, built to suit the specialised workflows of the construction industry.

To set the scene: your typical building project involves hundreds if not thousands of drawings, depending on the size of the project. Each drawing has multiple revisions and comments from consultants on the project. Multiply this by 15-20 companies involved in a typical building project, and it makes for a pretty big collaboration headache.

Woobius is taking on existing tools in this space, such as BIW, Asite and 4projects, which have been criticised for being slow, expensive, hard to use and often introduced only in the construction stages of a project, rather than starting from the design process.

The service is centred on two tools: the dropbox, a light-weight inter-company file sharing tool, and the vault, which includes document control functionality. It’s been in beta for a year and has evolved in response to feedback from architects using it on live projects in that time.

The business model is a straightforward freemium one; projects are free up to 200MB, and £10/GB/month thereafter. The privately funded startup was founded in 2007 by architect Bob Leung, who designed the product, and technology lead Daniel Tenner.

They plan to officially launch and market Woobius now that proof of concept is in place. Given the site’s reported growth through word of mouth alone – from 15 initial users to over 2500 registered users across 100 construction projects in 27 countries – I’d say they’re on to a winner.