On Tuesday next week, along with a few other journalists and bloggers, I’ll be visiting SpinVox HQ in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. SpinVox will be demonstrating their technology to us and they will be taking questions about the recent scandal surrounding the company’s speech-to-text technology.

Here’s the invitation I received from them today:

How Does SpinVox Convert Voice to Text?

I know you are interested in finding out more about how the SpinVox Voice Message Conversion System (VMCS) converts millions of voice messages to text, so I am pleased to invite you to our Marlow Headquarters for a technical briefing where you will see the VMCS in action and get to try it for yourself.

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Less than a week ago, after failing to mention Bebo in AOL’s list of core product goals, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong was roughly quoted as saying: ““Bebo may be better off under AOL Ventures, with it’s own P&L.” This led to speculation that AOL is planning to spin Bebo off into a separate company, and, sure enough, things have begun to change already at the social networking site.

Stephane Panier was just appointed Global Head of Bebo. Panier was previously VP and COO at the network. Panier is an experienced strategist and financial officer who spent time at Google. His appointment fills a position left vacant for 14 months after Joanna Shields’ departure.

AOL famously purchased Bebo for $850 million in early 2008. So far, it has failed to make much of the acquisition, despite expansion into Europe. Is AOL trying to end speculation about a potential sell-off? Or is AOL preparing to cut its losses? What do you think?

There’s something in the water of Web 2.0 that makes every semi-successful start-up desperate to “give something back” before they’ve really “got” anything themselves. In the good old days, corporate social responsibility was a pricey but worthwhile PR investment; now, having social conscience seems to be part of the job description for aspiring tech entrepreneurs.

So it is with Skimbit’s Alicia Navarro, whose affiliate sales product Skimlinks has been mopping up at awards ceremonies this year: Alicia’s email signature proudly boasts Best New Business and the Special Award for Technical Innovation from the New Media Age Awards and Innovative Publisher of the Year, Best New Entrant in Affiliate Marketing and Best Use of Technology from the A4U Affiliate Marketing Awards. Beat that.

In May, Skimbit launched Good.ly, a URL shortening service tied to an affiliate tracking system that pays out “the lion’s share” of any revenue to a charity of your choice (55%, actually). Now, they’ve launched a campaign called “Chat for Charity”, pairing up with Prezzybox.com (and soon others). 

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While Google dominates the search market of South Eastern Europe, it has never had a real presence here. Until now. Google just announced its official presence in Croatia, from where it will run all operations for the rest of the region, including Serbia, Albania, and beyond.

Internet marketing, especially search engine marketing, is still in its infancy in the region. Leading local web portals, such as Index and B92, still account for a lion’s share of the internet marketing investments. Google’s AdWords programme has only recently become popular among advertisers in the region, although campaigns are frequently mismanaged.

A rising number of AdWords-certified individuals and companies are slowly changing this. As far as competition on the pay-per-click front is concerned, Google can count on Facebook’s internal ads, as well as regional systems such as eTarget.

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Those crazy Germans just love their pooches. Despite a downturn that’s hitting the central European country hard, German dog owners’ community site dogSpot.de just raised a second round of funding. dogSpot’s existing investors (including the site’s founder and a couple of Angels) have re-invested in the website, which also has a sister spinoff called catSpot for, you guessed it, German cat owners. Sounds like the majority of the cash will go toward core projects like scaling the back end and building the community.

The company behind dogSpot was launched in 2007; the website itself debuted last October. It’s already receiving seven million page views per month. Incumbent competitors, which are generally less social than dogSpot, include Hallohund, the brilliantly named MyWuff and Dogzunited.

British hacker Gary McKinnon has finally lost his latest High Court bid to avoid extradition to the United States to face charges for breaking into US military and Nasa computers in 2001 and 2002. McKinnon was tracked down and arrested under the Computer Misuse Act by the UK National Hi-Tech Crime Unit. After his arrest, and without a lawyer present, McKinnon admitted to hacking, but denies it was malicious or that he caused damage costing $800,000 (£487,000). The argument of his lawyers was not that he shouldn’t be tried, but that he should be tried in the UK and that his extreme Asperger’s Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder, should be taken into account, especially since it could lead to suicide, if he was to be extradited.

However, the judges said extradition was “a lawful and proportionate response to his offending”. He faces up to 70 years in prison if convicted in the U.S. of what prosecutors have called “the biggest military computer hack of all time”. He accessed 97 government computers belonging to organisations including the US Navy and Nasa. Justifiably the U.S. is pretty sensitive about these things and under a 2003 treaty, agreed in the aftermath of 9/11 attacks, the U.S. is able to extradite a British citizen if it can prove to the UK courts “reasonable suspicion”.

Now, exactly what was this hack? McKinnon has always insisted he was looking for classified documents on UFOs which he believed the US authorities had suppressed. This is not a normal guy here. This is a mega geek who believed in UFOs. We’re not talking terrorist material. He’s been described as a 43-year-old “UFO eccentric”. There has been a “Free Gary” campaign backed by 100 MPs and celebrities like Bob Geldof and Chrissie Hynde.

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This week TechCrunch Europe interrogated your hive mind on the subject of bootstrapping your startup. Most startups bootstrap for at least part of their lifetime and how it’s done can determine whether you make it as far as exogenous funding. We also asked founders what you should spend money on even when your resources are limited.

In the next two weeks we will look at getting funding and dealing with investors. Please send any tips on these subjects via email or Twitter.

• If the idea is time-sensitive, reconsider bootstrapping

Nathan Vingoe, KangaReview

When you are funded you can do more, do it faster and get to market more rapidly.  So clearly, if the idea is time-sensitive or easily copied, get funding. Funding also brings with it a network of people who have been there and done that. The greater the number people involved, the more likely it is that suitable opportunities will cross your path.

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Italian startup incubator H-Farm Ventures is running a competition with $200,000 prize money to fund the the 10 most original and potentially successful ideas for web shows, interactive formats and what they call “trans-media narration”. Cirkus is a competition that ends on September 5th, 2009, and is open to anyone who can come up with a fresh and engaging web based program. The winners will be awarded on September 17th, where their formats will be pitched to representatives of potential buyers from broadcasters, brands and social networks.

They will begin to work on their projects as part of the Shado team in Treviso, Italy, where they will get support for anything from the production process to marketing to publishing. They will also get a 10% revenue share based on the commercial use of the format.

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Is Spotify planning to move into video as well as music? Today it launches a new video advertising unit. The first advertiser is Sony Pictures which is using the player to promote Sony Pictures’ latest cinema release, the Tony Scott-directed crime thriller The Taking of Pelham 123, starring Denzel Washington and John Travolta.

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One Young World is a not-for-profit global initiative to find 1,500 “leaders of tomorrow”, to be sourced via social media thanks (in part) to software provided by Lucian Tarnowski’s BraveNewTalent. Two delegates will be chosen from every country in the world to form a sort of alternative or youth UN, with the remaining places filled proportionally in line with global population distribution. China will have 259 delegates, India 223 and the US 61. To be eligible, you must have been born between 1984 and 1986.

The search will utilise WAYN, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and BraveNewTalent’s own platform. BraveNewTalent’s Facebook app, along with the YouTube search for future leaders, will be announced at a press conference tomorrow.

One Young World’s Inaugural Summit will take place in February 2010. Items on the agenda include inter-faith dialogue, the environment and global health. The cost of attendance for each delegate is €3,000.

Lovers of Animals Do The Funniest Things-type video fluffery, rejoice! Mobile and web content platform Babelgum just announced a partnership with top humour site Funny or Die. You’ll soon be able to get your fix of comedy on the move via a standalone application, plus Babelgum will shortly start feeding Funny or Die content into its existing apps.

The Comedy channel on Babelgum’s website will also have a Funny or Die branded area showcasing classic clips, top rated videos and a smattering of the latest stuff.

Babelgum started out as peer-to-peer IPTV company (like Joost). It’s now a Flash-based site with a fairly impressive catalogue of indie content. Those who use the service will no doubt benefit from this fresh injection of LOLs.

My Name is E appeared earlier this year with a product which sounded familiar to most. It enables you to collect all your social and contact accounts – on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and any other network – in one spot. However, the twist was that you could share them in real life with people you met over the mobile web or their “Connector”, the USB product they also sell. Today they’ve released an app for the iPhone. Could this be the final death of the business card? I doubt it, but this is going to be a pretty interesting product to watch.

The Connector is not dissimilar to Poken in some respect, but as well as the wireless USB device it also lets you exchange cards between any mobile via the mobile web. You can connect with someone via Facebook, Linked, in etc, without having to go back to your office and do all the time-consuming inviting. But the mobile web experience is not exactly sinuous.

The new iPhone application allows card sharing through a simple flick of the wrist towards another iPhone with the app. E then connect both users and make sure they get automatically connected on the selected social networks as well. The application also allows iPhone users to exchange cards with other phones. If someone doesn’t have an account on E you can send your E card to their email and they can either view the informatoin straight or connect over E. Users can create a card for each situation with different social networking profiles attached to them. They’ve also launched a short URL Eee.am. e.g. http://eee.am/mikebutcher.

Tweetminster has raised £100k from angel investor John Arnold. The news comes just a few weeks after it launched its Livewire, a tracker that aggregates online political activity in the UK, in partnership with The Independent newspaper.

Arnold, MD of public affairs agency PoliticsDirect, will join Tweetminster as chairman. Alberto Nardelli, a co-founder of Tweetminster, says the company plans to use the investment to build on its capacity and develop premium analytics and data services around the Livewire. These will be released in the next couple of months.

One planned premium service will be a way to use social media tools to survey users around specific political issues – sort of like ‘YouGov 2.0′. Not bad going for something that started life as a side project for a bunch of politics geeks.

Online TV startup Konbini just raised €3M in its second round of founding from NextStage, one of the most active French venture capital firms (NextStage manages a €220m fund). The startup, which already raised €700k in the occasion of its launch in october 2008, aims at a younger internet generation which likes producing and broadcasting videos. The final objective of the company is to become a big player for video content in the 15-35 years old category, between YouTube, Hulu and HBO Premium.

Konbini will open an office in London before the end of the year and hopes to expand to the US too.

The French startup is trying to build a product and user-base aimed at advertisers who want to move budget from traditional TV to the web. They’ve developed a proprietary advertisement platform/format for this purpose.

“We have decided to capitalize on creativity, this second round of funding confirms our model oriented to production and broadcasting for a large audience of internet users. NextStage’s experience will give us all the means to finish the development and reach profitability in the short term,” says Konbini’s founders Lucie Beudet and David Creuzot. Konbini employs 10 people, reaches 300,000 unique visitors per month and is aiming at a million before the end of the year.

Dutch startup Nimbuzz , which bills itself as the “mobile Skype” have just announced an IM application for Android phones which ties together multiple messaging tools (Skype, MSM, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, etc.) via a single interface. The app is now available for download.

The Nimbuzz trump card is Skype VOIP. Unfortunately the Android app doesn’t yet include this but it is available in the iPhone app. The Android application also supports many local social networks like Hyves (dominant in the Netherlands) and a nifty time-sensitive user interface which does things like detecting how long a user presses on a contact; a quick click opens the contact’s profile while a long click opens a chat window.
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Getting sound out of an iPhone and online quickly has been pretty easy for a while, and there are a number of startups playing in the space. Trottr works from any phone and is a simple call-in or upload system. The Tweetmic iPhone app has been gathering lots of speed in the U.S. due to its ability to publish on Twitter – but it has no attached social network. But it’s AudioBoo.fm, launched in December last year, which has been making waves with an iPhone-only app which works very well.

However, a new entrant, ipadio, is potentially about to steal AudioBoo’s thunder with a new iPhone app which covers all the bases: live streaming audio into a web page; high quality uploads from the iPhone; live phone-in service; upcoming Android app – plus, crucially, a business model.

Released to the public at the end of April the existing iPadio iPhone app is simple enough. However, not unlike BlogTalkRadio, it was based around making a phone call to get your audio online. But the new version of the existing ipadio iPhone app [iTunes link], poised for approval in the App store, brings a ton more functionality to the platform.

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Archive: here

I’ve now been given an extended demo of the Spotify iPhone app which is currently awaiting Apple’s approval. Unfortunately the guy who showed it to me managed to prize the iPhone with the app on it from my cold sweaty palms, so I wasn’t allowed to take the app away on my own iPhone (alas), however, screen grabs taken from the video they released this week illustrate how the app works very well. I can confirm that everything in the Spotify app works as the video showed it. It’s in fact a very simple application, but extremely easy to use and the sound is magically good.

Here’s what I found:

The Radio feature of the desktop software is not present in the iPhone app, nor is Play Queue. Otherwise pretty much all the essential features are there.

You open up the app and see your playlists. You select a playlist and – even over 3G, not WiFi – the track streams almost immediately.

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GQ.com will be joining the likes of The Guardian and NME in using we7’s streaming service on its site as of next week. The service will be styled as a jukebox stocked with playlists compiled by GQ’s editorial team. As per we7’s model, GQ online readers will be able to listen for free and buy any tracks they like via the integrated download feature.

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BootStrap Camp (@bootstrapcamp), an entrepreneur-supported community that helps start-ups build connections and find people willing to help them out with a bit of coding or a few introductions, is launching with the mother of all promotions: 25 weeks on Vorovoro, the Tribewanted island in Fiji.

You don’t actually get 25 weeks on the island. That’s the total time available, which will be split between the community: BootStramp Camp will operate on the basis of “credits” you can earn by helping others. You can then spend those credits purchasing services from other members. Or weeks in Fiji.

Personally, I can’t think of anything worse than a bunch of bespectacled geeks (yeah, me included) parading themselves around a tropical island. Don’t expect it to be like Shipwrecked. But as a developer with a bit of spare time, I can think of worse ways to be rewarded.

There isn’t much to look at on the website yet, so I guess you should follow them on Twitter for more info.

One final thought: does this offer not pander to the misconception that European startups are lazy and too busy looking for a way onto to a tropical island? Leave your comments below.