Well people, it’s time. It’s time we really celebrated the tech scene in Europe with an awards event which we can really call our own. July 9 will see the first Europe-wide awards ceremony for technology innovation. “The Europas”, an awards concept created by myself as a side project and separate from TechCrunch, will honour 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.

These awards will recognise and celebrate the most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations of the past year (Summer 08 – Summer 09), with the tech community invited to have a say in which finalists should be recognised. Leading lights of the the tech community will be invited to give away the awards to the winners, so you’ll have the opportunity to meet your tech heroes and heroines. The initial filtering will be done by referencing the database on European companies on CrunchBase (so make sure you are in it), then by public vote online, with the final Award winners to be determined based both on the popular votes received through website voting and by The Europas Advisory Board.

You’ll be able to vote shortly.

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.

Award categories

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

Join the awards ceremony!

On the evening itself we will have a handful of opening speeches in the “GeeknRolla” format of quick-fire information. These will be followed by a short pitch competition of up and coming 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 you company/project/startup etc on CrunchBase (you can add your company onto it if it is not already there). Include: The market “problem” you are solving with your startup, your solution, your competitors, your team, and what you’re looking for (Series A round, etc).

And finally… there will be a special announcement of the launch of a new innovation from Techcrunch Europe.

How it will work

1) You will be able to vote for one of the companies and products nominated which you believe most deserves industry recognition for achievements made in the past year. If you are a site, grab a badge to encourage your community to nominate you for a Europa. Badges will be released when voting starts.

2) The Europas Advisory Board will advise on which entrants should be selected to win from the highest scoring entrants.

3) Join the ceremony!

Following a short pitch event sponsored by UKTI at 6pm, the awards will commence at 8pm. There will be a DJ, an open bar and finger food.

Dress code

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.

The Rules

All internet and mobile tech companies from the continent of Europe, the middle East and Africa are eligible for nomination. Nominees will be picked by the Board from our database of companies on CrunchBase, so make sure you have submitted your companies there. Certain awards have specified criteria (i.e. best unfunded start-up or best new start-up launched in 2008) but, otherwise, all companies and products are eligible for consideration based on their accomplishments made between Summer 2008 and Summer 2009. Companies may be nominated for multiple award categories, and companies may win multiple awards. There are no fees to nominate companies for consideration, and no fees to be a nominated company, and no fees to vote. Startups are defined as startup companies with less than three rounds of funding, under 3 and a half years old.

Everyone will be invited to vote on our resulting shortlist of the top companies in each category.

The Europas Advisory Board will advise on the selection of the top companies voted for per award category, winner and, only where appropriate, also advise on the selection of a ‘Highly Commended’ award finalists they wish to recognise.

Finalist companies will be most welcome to join us for the Award Ceremony. Acceptance speeches will be in 140 characters or less.

The Europas Advisory Board reserves the right to discard any and all votes that it reasonably determines to be fraudulent or submitted by bots or other computer-generated voting applications.

The award winners will be announced at the Awards Ceremony to be held July 9, in London.

Tickets

The first tranche of tickets are now on sale. To attend the event, tickets will be £60. Attendee identification will be checked at the door. Due to strong demand for tickets, we regret tickets are not refundable. Tickets are not transferable. In some cases we may be able to transfer names on tickets (if we’re asked nicely), this is at our complete discretion and the more people do this the more complicated an time consuming it can get (we are only a small team!). If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door. If you show up at the event without a valid ticket, we reserves the right to charge the full ticket prive £60 plus £15 administration fee to allow access to the event subject to availability.

Sponsorship opportunities

Sponsors will be able to be creative with their sponsorship, with a pre-award video announcing the finalists and winners. Opportunities include sponsorship of individual award categories, sponsorship of the awards ceremony, after-party, drinks and more… Please contact Petra Johansson petra(at)twistedtree.co.uk for further details.

Press

If you are a member of the press wanting to cover the event, 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.

In September 2007 I launched TechCrunch UK & Ireland. But within three months I realised the tech story that needed to be written was across Europe. So I went on tour to find contacts and companies. This year we’ve re-launched as TechCrunch Europe and I’ve begun running events across the continent to bring the European tech scene together, along with our first ever day-long conference. Today I’m opening up TechCrunch Europe to new contributors from across Europe so that we can really tell the European tech story the way it is.

We’re looking for guest contributing writers for TC Europe. Contributors will get a log-in and password to the back-end WordPress publishing system of TCE. But in order to apply the same editorial standards as we have across all the TC blogs, we’ll be running a slightly different system to ‘normal’ blogging. To save anyone wasting their time writing something that we can’t publish, the blog posts will need to be pitched first as ideas to TC Europe editorial. This is not going to be a free-for-all where anyone can post anything. The posts will require our approval to go live on the site and will almost certainly be copy-edited by TC Editorial staff prior to release. Some may not like that approach, but that’s the way it will run. At least for now.

But posts that do go live on TC Europe will have the byline of the writer and will also get Tweeted by our @TCEurope account with the Twitter name of the writer, e.g. “Headline http://tcrn.ch/xyz by @person”. That Twitter account has over 3,000 followers right now, and obviously this will grow. If there is a post we really like then the post would get “cross-posted” to TechCrunch.com (but that’s up to us).

Content-wise we are looking mainly for breaking news, exclusive stories and other types of content, like interviews. Unfortunately we don’t have a budget for European contributors as yet, but we hope that this would be a good way of promoting yourself in the scene. Plus, it will almost certainly bring you more Twitter followers. Of course, it goes without saying that our preference is for contributors to be independent of the things they are writing about, and where they have an interest, that is declared.

In order to apply to be a TechCrunch Europe guest contributor you must send an email to me, Mike Butcher, marked “TC Europe contributor”. Please include links to previous blog posts you’re proud of and stories you’ve broken. In particular we’ll be looking for people who have contributed to country-based blogs that cover the tech scene in the local language.

We’ll be running this contributor model for the next few months. Assuming it works OK we’ll make it a permanent arrangement, but it will be reviewed periodically.

We are looking for contributors from the countries that, coincidentally and conveniently, also make up the Eurovision Song Contest catchment area, as well as wider Europe. Anyway, These are, in alphabetical order:

Albania
Andorra
Armenia
Austria
Azerbaijan
Belarus
Belgium
Bosnia & Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
FYR Macedonia
Georgia
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Iceland
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Latvia
Liechtenstein
Lithuania
Luxemburg
Malta
Moldova
Monaco
Montenegro
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia
San Marino
Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Turkey
Ukraine
United Kingdom (we have that covered)

The Mobile 2.0 Europe conference is coming up in June and TechCrunch will be descending on it too in the shape of myself and Robin Wauters. 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.

TechCrunch is 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.

Meanwhile the organisers have released the names of the presenting startups for the Mobile 2.0 Europe Demo Launch Pad. Here are their descriptions:

Appswork (Santa Clara / London) – “This is an application based on Twitter that allows users to send files, online status, message backup, person to person (voice) chatting, all unified to get your contacts closer and in one place.”

Distimo (Utrecht) – “Distimo makes mobile app distribution and monitoring easy. Every phone brand or operator is launching its own mobile app store this year, enabling mobile developers and brands to reach a large audience. To truly compete a developer needs to distribute its app in multiple app stores making monitoring performance difficult and time consuming.”

Layar (Amsterdam) – “The World’s First Augmented Reality Browser. Layar shows you what is around you by displaying realtime digital information on top of reality through the camera of the mobile phone. Flip through the directory of ‘layers’ and find ATM’s, bars, houses for sale, hotels and other cool stuff around you.”

Pikkoo [pick-koo] (Oulu) – “This is the world’s first community for you to create, download and share interactive mobile screensavers and wallpapers for free. Pikkoo is an innovative startup based in Oulu, Finland. Pikkoo focuses on social, user generated and interactive mobile content for Adobe Flash Lite and non-Flash Lite enabled phones. The company is privately held and founded in early 2009.”

TheChanner (Barcelona) – “This is a mobile TV Tuner that allows to watch the best Internet TV, 24/7, on your mobile phone. theChanner aims to help everyone to discover channels close to their culture, expressed in their own language, push forward their popularity, and encourage new channels to start mobile broadcasting. Social Mobile TV is here!”

Vulevu (Berlin) – “Think Twitter for dating!” There’s not much more description from these guys – they’re still in alpha – no link yet.

TechCrunch is coming to Berlin next week on June 10 to create and event exploring the German startup scene. The event sold out even before we announced our programme, but we hope you’ll agree it’s going to be pretty good. Check out the schedule below and the awesome sponsors supporting this event. And we still have a few sponsorship opportunities available. If you are interested in supporting the event or any of the other forthcoming TechCrunch events around Europe, please email our event organiser Petra Johansson of TwistedTree. If you are a member of the press wanting to cover the event or any of the forth-coming events, please email Rassami Hok Ljungberg of rassami PR.

In addition, I am heading to Berlin for most of the week, attending Seedcamp on Tuesday, running TC Berlin Wednesday and I’m free Thursday for meetings with startups. I will be based in the Mitte area. Feel to get in touch.

Venue:
ZANOX.de AG
Stralauer Allee 2
10245 Berlin

Here’s our schedule:

3pm: Tea/Coffee

3.20pm: Introduction by the Chairman, Mike Butcher, Editor, TechCrunch Europe

3.25pm: Speed Speech: Lukasz Gadowski, Team Europe, (Topic to be confirmed)

3.45pm: Panel Discussion: “German innovation and Entrepreneurialism”

Debate topics:

- Do German tech companies have what it takes against outsiders launching into the market?

- Management and marketing in Germany: What’s the situation?

- Does Germany have a Silicon Valley or a Silicon Valley mindset capable of creating the next Google/Skype?

Panelists:

Paul Jozefak is a Managing Partner at Neuhaus Partners one of the leading early-stage VC firms based in Germany. Prior to this, he was an Investment Director for Europe at SAP. Here he was in charge of the European region for SAP Ventures with more than 200 million Euro under management. From 1998 until 2000, in his function as Business Development Director Europe at Davis Polk & Wardwell, he accompanied the IPO’s of corporations such as Software AG, Freenet, Travel24 and comdirect. Starting in the mid-90s, Jozefak built up his expertise as a consultant for the software branch at Andersen Consulting.

Inma Martinez Stradbroke Advisors
Inma Martinez is one of the world’s leading digital media strategists, described by Fortune and Time magazine as one of Europe’s top talents in Human Factors and Social Engagement through technology. Switching a career in the financial markets at Goldman Sachs and The Institute for Infrastructure Finance, she joined Cable & Wireless in the mid-1990s to form their New Technologies Advisory, specifically focused on the Internet and IP services. Co-founder in 1999 of Escape Velocity, a 3i-funded AI software company in the early days of mobile services and selected by Lehman Brothers, in 2006 she founded Stradbroke Advisors, a digital media and fund raising consultancy working with Venture Capital firms (3i, Index Ventures), large corporations (NOKIA Finland, Blyk, BBC, MTV Networks, HP, IBM) as well as Web 2.0 startups and film and TV production companies. She is also an Advisor to the EU Technology Commission.

Stephan Uhrenbacher is the founder and was the executive director of Qype. On Germany’s largest assessment portal for local news, its users exchange tips and recommendations about stores, service providers, gastronomy and free time activities all over Europe. In the late 90s Uhrenbacher established the travel portal TravelChannel for Gruner+Jahr. In subsequence followed the supervision of the Northern European market for Lastminute.com in London and he created the reorientation of Bild.de for Axel Springer. At the despatch pharmacy DocMorris he was responsible as its COO for the growth of the corporation in 2003.

Hans Penz, is the CEO and founder of Couch Tycoon. The Hamburg based start-up financing community allows start-up founders to raise their first 20k $ online without a big business plan or a filed investment proposal and enables everyone to become a venture capitalist for only 100 $. Prior to CouchTycoon he worked as technical due diligence consultant for private investors in Munich after he co-developed and licenced a proprietary data transmission technology which allows to send short messages through GSM networks for free. His career as entrepreneur started in to highschool when he founded my first company, an advertising agency which was specialized in youth advertising.

Markus Berger-de León, was appointed CEO of studiVZ Ltd. on 1st March 2009. Prior to his current position he served as CEO of MY-HAMMER AG. From 2002 – 2007 he worked for Jamba, the leading provider of mobile content and entertainment services. During his last two years at Jamba he served as Managing Director, taking overall responsibility of the Jamba business unit. Markus has also previously acted as CTO and COO of a software company that he co-founded, where his responsibilities included establishing IT-driven business-to-business procurement services for customers across Europe. Berger-de León holds a degree in business administration from the WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management in Koblenz, Germany. Additionally, he studied at the Columbia Business School and at Plekhanov in Moscow. Currently Markus still holds the position of CEO of the Abacho AG and supervisory board Chairman of the MyHammer AG. Berger-de León is an authority on mobile, media, web 2.0 and convergence topics and frequently speaks on mobile services and content, digital entertainment, mobile technology and industry convergence.

4.30pm: Tea/Coffee break

4.50pm: Speed Speech: Christian Geissendoerfer, CEO, Yoose.com on “Bootstrapping”

Christian has had various marketing and sales experiences in the enterprise software and IT environment. His professional experience includes developing “routes to market” strategy and lead management work at IBM for the EMEA geography across brands and customer sets as well as two years as a sales representative for Lotus Software in France (selling to financial institutions). Based on his interest and experience with mobile enterprise solutions, he has started in 2008 his own venture in the mobile marketing and advertising space. YOOSE offers a mobile couponing platform to reach the right person with the right message at the right time and right place. YOOSE was a Seedcamp finalist in London in September 2008 and launches its service in Berlin in June 2009. Christian is fluent in German, English, French and Spanish and holds a Diploma in Business Administration form the University of Bayreuth. He participated in INSEAD entrepreneurship classes with his venture, was leading the entrepreneurship club and the European Entrepreneurship Accelerator Program with INSEAD and IESE, while his wife attended INSEAD for her MBA.

5.10pm: Startup Pitch Competition

(Startups to be confirmed)

6pm – 8pm: Informal networking over drinks

Startups Judging Panel

Dwight Cribb is the founder and Managing Director of the executive search firm Dwight Cribb Personalberatung. Since 1998 he is an influential advisor of Germany’s leading new media firms in management searches and HR questions. Together with his team he is responsible for around 80 management placements per year in the German new media sector. The Hamburg born Briton studied Marketing with Psychology in Scotland and obtained an MBA with a specialisation in international business. Prior to entering the executive search field Cribb worked at innovative firms in the fields of electronic business information (Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing) and video conferencing (PitcureTel). Dwight Cribb is also the Chairman of the Aravati Global Search Network, a network of twelve owner managed executive search firms in Europe, North America and Asia and Co-Founder of myynto, an HR outsourcing firm. Together with his Partner Maren Freyberg he is an early stage investor and has recently invested in Cliplister, Tolingo, Spreadyo and Carsablanca.

Paul Jozefak
Inmaculada Martinez
Stephan Uhrenbacher
Thomas Hessler, CEO , Zanox

Our sponsors and partners:

Location sponsor: ZANOX.de AG is a global market leader for performance-based online marketing and has established a strong presence in all core markets around the world. More than 2000 prestigious international companies rely on the zanox affiliate network and sector-specific expertise in all sectors where innovation is taking place. Affiliate programmes provide companies with global solutions for efficiently marketing their products and services on the internet. zanox attaches great importance to the quality and the continuing development of its affiliate sites, whose owners are in addition being motivated by fast and transparent compensation. zanox’s international focus is strengthened by its Global Alliance Partner (GAP) programme. Furthermore, in May of 2008, the GAP Campus opened its doors at zanox headquarters in Berlin to serve as an international meeting point for developers and designers.

Media Partner: Gründerszene is the magazine for founders and people interested in founding a company. On a regular basis Gründerszene publishes news and expert content, dealing with the branch. Hands on reports and technical essays shall inspire founders and help them to implement their visions. Gründerszene explicitly wants to foster the passion and the respect towards entrepreneurship among young founders and experts of the branch.

Video partner: sevenload is a social media network for internet television and user generated content. Every channel on sevenload offers independent, intelligent and creative content from users producing their own content as well as professional production companies. sevenload was founded in 2006. sevenload is a global social media platform for photos, videos and interactive show formats. sevenload enables users to manage and share their photos and videos online for free. The site offers an array of different interactive internet shows in various languages and categories. In addition, some of the available channels are from famous and popular artists and musicians.

Strategic partner: Seedcamp is an intensive week long event held in September in London targeted at young entrepreneurs from across EMEA. Seedcamp have set it up to provide seed funding and world-class connections for startups. September 2007 marked the first Seedcamp Week and group of funded startups. September 1009 will mark the third.

Drinks Spornsor: Dwight Cribb Personalberatung was founded in 1998 to provide executive search (headhunter) services to new media clients. The Hamburg based firm is responsible for around eighty high profile new hires in the industry each year. From the outset working with start-ups has been an important part of the business and Cribb in some cases offer “consulting for equity” arrangements to particularly promising start-ups wishing to recruit top-level talent whilst conserving cash. Talk to Dwight Cribb about your plans at Techcrunch Berlin.

It’s widely known that China runs a pretty tight ship – to put it mildly – on what its citizens get to see online, especially that content which exists outside of China. YouTube has been blocked for some time and although Wikipedia was blocked for a while, it’s gradually become more available. However today Chinese authorities have come down like a tonne of bricks on a number of services including Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail.com, Blogger and a number of other sites. And that’s no joke, given that we’re talking about the Great Wall of China here.

Since many of the sites don’t actually have Chinese versions, it’s hard to know how many people will be affected by this, but for those brave and resourceful business people, entrepreneurs and social commentators with strong links to the world outside China, it’s a crushing blow.

Having traveled to China last year I have a number of contacts there now who have all now confirmed the shutdown (all agreed to be named in this post). The shut-down is almost certainly related to the date. The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened in June 4, and the lead-up to any date like this is usually a time when the Firewall is tightened. The API to Twitter, used by clients like TweetDeck, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop, has also been affected. [Update: News is coming in that the Twitter API has not been affected as badly as the Web site, making API based Twitter applications better placed in China].

Kaiser Kuo, a Chinese-American writer and consultant in Beijing working with Youku told me via direct message after the system shut down completely using a VPN (which, like proxies, are commonplace in China) that “My only surprise in this matter is that it took ‘em so long.”

Ryan McLaughlin, an ex-pat Amercian writer and web designer/developer based outside Beijing, said [updated:] that VPNs, which many Chinese use to get around the Great Firewall, are not being affected by the shutdown. He also blogs “Undoubtedly the blocks are in an effort to curb online commentary and the dissemination of information about the , which on celebrates its 20th anniversary.”

Mimi Xu, a China/San Francisco based product dev and entrepreneur who Tweets as MissXu, summed it up: “The 3 web services I cant live without – Twitter, Flickr, YouTube – are all blocked in China. Cheers, motherfuckers!”

Edocr, a smaller competitor to other document sharing startups like DocStoc and Scribd, re-launches today with new features and an API, after a long time off-radar.

Eschewing the publisher focus of Issuu, or the broad business focus on DocStoc, the boot-strapped Edocr focuses on corporates and enterprises. So for instance, companies can upload all their public-facing documents, whether they be company reports, press releases, guidance documents, you name it. Admittedly the slightly dull-but-necessary focus is not going to set the world alight, but with plenty of enterprises still getting their heads around the basics of blogging, RSS and even social networks like Twitter, edocr is a simple way for companies to share their PDFs without being lumped alongside a pirated copy of a Harry Potter novel. New features include an improved design, bulk uploading of documents, an API, document categories, better search and the ability to auto-tweet to a Twitter account when new documents get uploaded. Edocr’s Groups feature lets you allocate a bunch of docs to a group. You can also tag up documents with any keyword, which pulls all the docs on any subject in, similar to DocStoc.

The business model is a fremium one. Accounts are free but premium accounts delete advertising on a company’s page. Although pricing is in UK pounds right now (£25 a month, £145 per 6 months or £250 per annum) they are looking at launching US pricing as well, since a third of the site’s traffic is US-based. The site has the usual features like rating, tagging and embedding flash versions of the document in other sites.

Howwever, UK-based Edocr still has a long way to go. Scribd is the largest global player in document sharing by traffic, userbase and number of documents. Docstoc, the second largest, like edocr, also targets the business market, but it splits AdSense revenues 50/50 with anyone who uploads documents and wants to opt into the service. DocStoc has over 3 million documents uploaded and 1.6 million unique visitors a month in the U.S., according to comScore. Needless to say Edocr is way below that right now. Then there is Twidox in Germany, which also concentrates on organisations, though largely German ones right now.

And if edocr is ever going to be able to compete it’s going to need to make more of its features appealing to this “niche” of businesses that want document sharing. Edocr is closer to Issuu in its concentration on enterprise customers, but Issuu Pro users are also professional magazine and newspaper publishers. Edocr’s concentration on corporates only may not be enough. Plus, Issuu charges a low $19 per month.

It’s to be hoped that edocr, which launched in October 2007, has put its somewhat erratic performance to date behind it now that former co-founder Rhys Jones has exited the business (amicably I gather) and sole remaining founder Manoj Ranaweera has full control to set strategy. I can see edocr being potentially successful in the UK, but a question hangs over its ability to scale internationally, unless, perhaps, it launches a US service soon.