Despite being virtually unknown in the US, and still somewhat hemmed in by its core German speaking market, XING, the LinkedIn competitor, refuses to lie down. And like a scene from the Rocky movie, it’s going into training to become better, quicker and faster than the LinkedIn machine. Although let’s face it, it has it’s work cut out as LinkedIn is now worth over $1bn and has 43 million members to XING’s 7.5 million. XING however is worth $213m and is publicly traded. And today XING launches a partner ecosystem based on 16 (count’em) OpenSocial applications from 13 partners, in 7 countries. LinkedIn currently has 9 applications.

Some XING apps will be be familiar to LinkedIn users: they will both have SlideShare and online workspaces from Huddle. But XING has has sourced heavily from European sources with apps from Doodle, Dopplr, Deutsche Welle, MindMeister, spreed, travelload, Tungle, sueddeutsche.de, Wallstreet:Online, WELT ONLINE and ZCOPE. The applications spread from news and project management through to travel planning and data sharing. They can be installed on your XING account here. As data protection and security are much more of a consideration in the EU, this is the world’s largest completely SSL-encrypted https installation of OpenSocial.

Stefan Gross-Selbeck, CEO of XING, says the over-riding idea is to concentrate on making Xing a hard core business tool. So it makes sense then that this first wave of apps – a second wave is already being planned I gather – is aimed at remote collaboration. That’s pretty similar to LinkedIn’s approach.

Back in October last year LinkedIn launched its OpenSocial-based platform
called InApps. But there users are restricted to including a maximum of 15 applications on their main profile pages – at XING they won’t have much restrictions, as it is instead going to give users their head in what apps they load onto their page. These will compliment the apps already developed by XING itself, including the XING News and Ask XING apps launched in May and the TwitterBuzz app launched in June.

Finally, it has to be said that although XING has clearly worked hard at integrating these apps, it can’t hide its German roots (users in the US won’t be making much use of the German news service apps for instance) so the question remains about whether XING can in the end break out to a more international scene, especially given its recent withdrawal from China.

Here’s their release on the new apps:

Social scheduling:

Doodle
Doodle is a leading online tool when it comes to find the right time for a group of professionals to meet. It takes away the pain of email volleys and calendar notes and closes the gap between personal calendar systems. On XING, Doodle is enhanced with social features, e.g. you can see meeting polls in progress in common with your contacts.

Tungle.me
Tungle.me, a first in click-to-meet technology, is the simplest way for professionals to make meetings happen. Tungle.me enhances a user’s profile by allowing XING members to view their availability and quickly schedule a meeting by proposing multiple times. When the meeting is booked, everyone’s calendar is automatically updated. Tungle.me syncs with Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal and Entourage for Mac.

Collaboration/project management/workspaces:

Huddle Workspaces

Huddle Workspaces offers XING members secure workspaces to privately share information and work together with their connections. Users can store and share files, collaborate on documents and create private discussions. With Huddle Workspaces, documents can be created and edited online, users may also post comments and request approvals. Tasks, whiteboards, phone and web conferencing are available upon synchronising with a free, full Huddle.net account.

MindMeister
MindMeister brings mind mapping to the web, using its facilities for real-time collaboration to allow truly global brainstorming sessions. Users can create, manage and share mind maps online and access them anytime, anywhere through the award-winning web interface. Mind maps are highly useful to brainstorm and share ideas, manage meetings, structure documents and plan projects the easy way.

ZCOPE
ZCOPE is an easy to use project management tool for networked teams of all industries working together from remote locations. It follows the agile method and is focussed on the essential in managing projects. Using ZCOPE, teams can share version-controlled documents, communicate via project blogs, and collaborate on tasks.

Collaboration/web meetings:

spreed
spreed is a web-based solution for organizing web meetings, online conferences and presentations in Europe and around the world. Using spreed, XING members can hold free-of-cost web meetings and telephone conferences, give presentations, distribute documents, or simply meet online with attendees.
That means: they reserve a meeting room, invite participants, and present themselves and their ideas to the audience, live on the Internet.

Sharing:

SlideShare

SlideShare allows XING members to upload PowerPoint presentations, Word or PDF documents, share them with other members, and to find expert presentations on a wide number of topics. XING members can use SlideShare to embed presentations or documents into their profile, and show off their expertise, product, or service to their network: yet another way to get even more business leads.

Travel:

Dopplr: Where Next?

Dopplr is an online service for smarter travel. It helps you share your travel plans privately with friends and colleagues. It spots co-incidences and helps you make more of your trips. For example, it can tell you that three people you know will be in Tokyo when you are there next week. Dopplr’s Social Atlas helps you discover good places to eat, stay and explore while traveling.

travelload
travelload helps frequent travelers organize their trips, manage itineraries, and more. Create a personalized route itinerary, and post it on your XING profile, or download essential trip info onto your smartphone or mobile device, and take it with you wherever you go.

News:

Deutsche Welle

Deutsche Welle is Germany’s international broadcaster that produces television, radio and online content in 30 languages. Its unique mix of news, background information and cultural highlights offers European insights to international issues to people around the world. The “DW News app” offers XING members the possibility to integrate current news from Deutsche Welle into their profile. Every member can adjust the settings to meet their needs. Besides selecting a language, it is also possible to illustrate subject headings in different ways.

wallstreet:online

For the numerous XING members in the Finance industry, the wallstreet:online app is the ideal accompaniment to a XING profile. wallstreet:online is the largest and most active financial community in Germany. Users can create virtual portfolios and watch lists, read news and view detailed analyses and opinions. By linking stock details to the latest community postings, the wallstreet:online app puts detailed market info just a mouseclick away.

WELT ONLINE
One of the largest national daily newspapers in Germany, WELT ONLINE keeps XING users informed of the latest news, with comprehensive background reports, local issues and constantly updated focus topics.

Edutainment:

sueddeutsche.de – CareerCamp
XING users can check their career opportunities at the sueddeutsche.de CareerCamp by taking tests on a variety of subjects such as etiquette, general knowledge or personality. Users can also see their ranking among all participants, or just their contact network. The app also features news and links to interesting and most latest articles on sueddeutsche.de, the online portal of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest daily quality newspaper.

“The good news is, the world is still turning,” said Nic Brisbourne at the Glasshouse‘s “Show Me The Money” event in London last night. “Investment continues, though levels are obviously lower.” Nic quoted £114m garnered from VC funding in Q1 in the UK. “It’s down, but it hasn’t stopped.”

Alongside Nic, who’s a partner at DFJ Esprit, sat a familar face, Michael Birch, founder of Bebo, and a relatively new one, Andreas Lazar, MD of Allen & Company‘s London office. The panel, convened to dispel some of the myths surrounding the current UK investment market, was chaired by Rory Cellen-Jones from the BBC (“back by popular demand”, apparently).

“Media and tech giants aren’t investing in innovation as they normally would,” said Nic, “And VCs are more conservative at the moment, because financing and revenue risks are more acute. But if you can raise money, it’s a good time. Wonga‘s an example of a firm that’s doing well. And VCs are still looking to e-commerce as an area where business is still happening.”

Andreas Lazar explained why Allen & Co. chose to open their first overseas office during a downturn. “It took a long time to decide to open an office in Europe. On the one hand, our timing was questionable. On the other it was fortunate: we can be patient and grow the business over the next few years.

“It’s not all bad news. In the good times, a lot of VC firms could get  started and raise money. More firms were available to write cheques. But a number of the venture firms that have been in the business a long time - Index and Accel, for example - have raised funds in the last 6 months. And they’re deploying that money. There are deals getting done. But we’re seeing money flow to businesses that can articulate a path to monetisation succinctly and directly, rather than more conceptual businesses.”

Michael Birch took a litmus test of the mood in the room. “How many of you think things are harder right now? Raise your hands.” A few dozen fingers tentatively poked the air. “And how many think it’s better?” Noticeably more hands shot up.

“That tells you something about the optimism of entrepreneurs,” said Birch. “And here’s another thing to remember: to succeed, you don’t have to raise money. You haven’t succeeded in business because you raised money. It’s just one component. We didn’t raise money at Bebo initially because we knew we wouldn’t get any – we had no credibility. But when we did take money, it wasn’t for the money itself: it was for the other benefits, like networking. Don’t get caught up in thinking you have to raise money to succeed.”

In the Q&A, Paul Carr’s recent column for the Guardian proclaiming the “death” of London’s internet start-up industry was raised and promptly dismissed. “For me, the big story here is that London and Europe is improving very fast,” offered Nic. “Fifteen years ago, there was nothing. Now, there’s a fair scene. It’s still a bit easier in Silicon Valley, but that difference is getting less. If you can stay here, fantastic – that’s great for the next generation. These things build on themselves.”

Birch agreed. ”I’m not sure anything has changed in the UK since the recession. The UK has always been playing catch-up. But there’s a huge amount going on and some great success stories. Look at Betfair – and Skype, which is essentially a UK company. We announced our fund here and in the first few days we had hundreds of business plans emailed to us.” Birch was of course referring to PRO Founders, the new £30m fund he has set up with Brent Hoberman of Lastminute.com fame and now MyDeco.

There was an interesting discussion about the value of advisory services. To summarise: lawyers like to drag things out, so get a middleman. And Birch offered some sage advice for entrepreneurs looking to exit: “Sell in May of last year.” And so the discussion wound up, with Spotify and Playfish singled out as examples of companies the panellists are currently getting excited about.

The names Judith Clegg assembled last night didn’t disappoint: it was, as the promo materials promised, a “stellar cast”. But the discussion amongst these seasoned pros tended to go over old ground and received knowledge, rather than flare into fireworks.

It was a restrained crowd, too: neither Rory’s tomfoolery nor even the snazzy microphones hidden in our seat rests were enough to raise spirits above the occasional titter. However, perhaps some sobriety was in order: after all, this was a serious subject being discussed at a tricky time in the industry.

I won’t repeat too much of this TechCrunch post announcing that Paul Carr is to join the TechCrunch team. Suffice it to say that when I heard Paul’s popular column, NSFW, had been cut by The Guardian newspaper I lobbied to bring him over to TechCrunch and TechCrunch Europe. It didn’t take much lobbying.

So from this Saturday afternoon Paul will be filing his weekly NSFW column, which will be ‘cross-posted’ from TechCrunch.com over to TechCrunch Europe. Paul will also be filing occasional extra posts from Silicon Valley as “our man” on the spot. I look forward to his coverage. Hang on to your hats.

You may well upload pictures from your phone via ShoZu, so it makes sense for them to partner with an outfit that can turn those cute pictures of the family into handy little postcards for Grandma, right? Thus ShoZu and Touchnote , the mobile print-on-demand service, are partnering to enable ShoZu’s iPhone mobile application a way to print any photo and have it mailed to anywhere in the world in 24 hours by Touchnote. The move represents one of the earliest uses of Apple’s iPhone In-App micropayments system. Shozu will of course get a cut of the revenue when people use it to create a Touchnote.

The Shozu application is available for the iPhone via Apple’s iTunes Store, and directly from ShoZu and its mobile site at m.shozu.com. ShoZu’s mobile app will, later this year, be hitting the app stores for Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Nokia’s Ovi and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry App World.

Ooh, Spotify, you get more handsome every time we see you. It wasn’t enough to announce plans to launch in the US, or the upcoming Android and iPhone apps, was it? Now you’ve gone and filled in a ton of gaps in your catalogue with a brand-new distribution deal.

The Stockholm-based music streaming service just announced a deal with IODA, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance. IODA brokers agreements for independent labels and artists and helps them out with marketing and distribution. The Spotify/IODA deal brings 2 million new indie tracks – meaning you’ll now be able to stream The Prodigy, Bob Marley, Bashy and Stephen Fry. IODA’s international partners, including Bonnier Amigo Music Group, are on board too.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek explains the motivation behind the new agreement: “One of the challenges all music services face is providing a wide range of music for users of all conceivable tastes. We’ve worked hard to add classical, punk and indie content from different sources and this deal with IODA is another leap forward in our mission to provide users with the biggest, most diverse musical catalogue on the planet.”

“Spotify has created a compelling product that redefines the notion of user-friendly and clearly speaks to the desires of the music fan,” said IODA’s CEO, Kevin Arnold.

This is great news for indie music lovers, and – at least on the face of it – yet another threat to iTunes although it’s common knowledge that Apple doesn’t make a great deal out of music so much as it does selling the hardware in the first place. It’ll be interesting to see how all this plays out: although Spotify plans to launch in the US before the end of the year, there’s the small matter of Microsoft’s upcoming music streaming service to factor in…

Is the UK’s experiment with large blog networks over? It is now.

It’s yet to be officially confirmed with anyone at the company, but co-founder Katie Lee – who effectively left in February but stayed on as a freelance – has been Tweeting today that the UK’s well known blog network Shiny Media has gone into administration. There are also rumours flying around that the company was immediately bought up by a new owner, though there is no confirmation of this as yet and no news on who the new owner is. I’ve emailed remaining co-founder Chris Price and will update this story if/when he responds.

[Update at 5pm: I've now heard from the company and there may be a further statement in the next few days]

Andy Merrett, an ex- Shiny Media writer who broke the story at The Blog Herald, wrote: “Access to Movable Type, on which most of Shiny Media’s blogs run, was lost/removed yesterday”.

This will come as a huge blow to the new editors it recently hired in June.

The latest blog post on any of Shiny Media’s blogs is dated July 19. I’m surprised no-one noticed sooner, but that does indicate how low the network had sunk since the heady days when it landed $4.5 million in 2007 from Brightstation Ventures, which acts closer to an incubator that a VC.

But it must also be said that $4.5m since 2007 is a huge burn for a small company and questions need to be asked about why Brightstation let one of its key investments fall into this trap.

Brightstation – owns Koodos and OSOYOU – is reportedly raising a second fund from high net worth individuals which to roll out new websites by the end of the year. OSOYOU entered administration at the end of last year but Brightstation bought all the company’s assets in January. A relaunch is planned. Brightstation CEO Dan Wagner is also founder and chairman at Venda, the full service e-commerce platform that grew out of Boo.com’s ecommerce technology.

However, it’s also highly likely that Shiny is simply a victim of the current media recession. Though it is also worth pointing out that while many US blog networks survived mostly because they had a huge single market to address, Shiny concentrated on the UK, a much smaller market. US blog networks also tended to take tiny, cheap, offices – if at all. Shiny sited themselves in London’s mega-expensive Covent Garden in order to be close to London’s advertising and media sales house.

The most successful blog networks from the UK have resolutely targeted the massive US market. Mashable is still run from Aberdeen and PaidContent – run from London for a year in 2004/5 but always aiming at the large US market, which resulted in its acquisition by The Guardian.

Shiny launched in 2004 and was one of the first wave of blog networks, and was one of the first in the UK. Few others survived. However, last year the company began to show cracks as former co-founder Ashley Norris departed and subsequently penned a controversial bare-all guest post on TechCrunch Europe which attracted 120 comments.

Updates: Reading comments below it’s interesting to see some smaller blog networks still going like Epic Win Media.

The people that brought you HubDub, the prediction site that effectively turns news content into a game, have had a new idea. FanDuel is a premium, paid-for game focused on fantasy sports. Running in private beta for the last month, the game opens up today. The site is totally focused on U.S. sports (baseball, NFL).

Although the competitive space for daily fantasy sports is fairly new, there’s clearly an opportunity there – some 20m people play fantasy games, making it a $2bn industry. Currently big players such as Yahoo, CBS and ESPN dominate the market.

But if you play Mafia Wars and other social games on Facebook, going back to playing traditional fantasy sports on CBS feels like going back to when dinosaurs walked the earth. There’s clearly a gap waiting for something better and more social.

The trouble is most fantasy sports require a lot of time commitment as you have to play for the whole season, meaning a long time to get anything out of it.

FanDuel addresses this problem by letting users play and win in a day instead of the whole season. Players can draft a new team at any point, face-off with another player, but for real money (there is a $25 limit to stakes). The player whose team has the most fantasy points at the end of the day’s games wins the cash prize, so no season long commitment. The game is integrated with Twitter and Facebook, allowing you to brag about your wins. Right now it only covers Baseball but the fantasy football game will launch when the football season starts.

The site books revenues from taking a 10% commission on each of the match-ups, although when you sign up they give you $10 or you can play for free.

But hold on just a second – how is this all legal in the U.S.?

It’s real simple. Because of the fantasy sports carve out of the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gaming Act, FanDuel.com is completely legal to play in the U.S. How? It uses exactly same rules as any other season long fantasy sports game, the only difference is that the games last only a day (for baseball) or a week (for football).

Meanwhile Hubdub – actually based in Scotland although all its products are aimed at the US – won a series A round from from PenTech Ventures in January 2009 and now has a quarter of a million users and partnerships with Huffington Post and Reuters. It came up with the fan duel idea after the most recent SxSW where they met with HubDub users.

While at the recent Seedcamp Speed Dating event, I was introduced to UberVU. UberVU provides a single location to track conversations across multiple locations and sites. This social aggregation tool provides a conversational graph of threaded conversations. UberVU get comments, reactions, and mentions around a story from multiple services. This can be used by corporations to monitor the buzz surrounding a brand, but it also allows users to take part in the entire conversation. 

For example, with the plugin, someone reading an article in Google Reader can see what others are saying about a post. I wonder, though, if we’re already inundated with information and if there’s a need for yet another aggregator. A case in point: a recent story in the Guardian (and this happens on many other news sites) has 300 comments (many of which are by trolls and don’t provide much insight) and a recent post on TechCrunch Europe has 44 comments. Multiply that by the number of comments on other sites and it’s pretty overwhelming.

In the video below, Vladimir Oane, one of the co-founders of UberVU, explains how the service works and its potential for expansion. Developers can add the UberVU plug in to their own sites. Vladimir also explains how it can be used for personal branding as well as brand management.

Something’s going on at Bill Morrow‘s investor network, Angels Den. Not only has key aid Rob Carter just quit – we don’t know why – but familar face Paul Walsh of Segala and Wubud is about to be announced Head of Digital. Paul has been singing the network’s praises for a while now. [See update below].

So does Paul Walsh’s appointment mean Angels Den is focusing on digital (whatever that means these days)?

“Yes,” says Bill. “The largest part of our success has been based on speed-funding – getting random people together with random angels – but we’ve found that digital companies struggle to condense their pitches down to three minutes.

“We’re now a Microsoft European partner and a Sun worldwide partner, but we’re not making the most of those relationships at the moment. Paul Walsh is now heading our digital strategy thanks to his connections with entrepreneurs, angels and the digital ecosystem generally. We’re looking to reach out to a whole new community.”

Walsh will be taken on as a consultant and charged with creating a digital marketplace where tech start-ups will be matched with Angels who know a little more about the industry.

In case you’re not familiar with the two-year-old Angels Den, Bill updated me this afternoon on their latest set of figures: “We have 2,800 registered Angels and just over 10,000 entrepreneurs looking for money. We’ve  completed 157 deals, with an average deal size of £170k which equates to nearly £25m of funding.”

Angels Den takes a 5% commission on deals, which – based on the figures above – means they’ve raked in £1.25m in two years. You can’t blame Walsh for wanting a slice of that pie.

But this new initiative comes at a time when other services are swarming around trying to pick up the service / consultancy side of the startup market. GrowVC is another such “marketplace” which recently launched in the UK offering services to startups including – allegedly – access to small amounts of seed funding from $10,000 to $1m, which is quite a range.

The question is, do any of these services really help entrepreneurs? What are your experiences? Leave your views below.

UPDATE: Bill Morrow has now emailed us to say that Cater was “not a founder” and that they are “not doing a marketplace” and Angels Den has “not taken a 5% fee for more than 6 months.” Make of that what you will, but this is the story we had from them at publication.

In addition to which their site continues to say: “Then, once you’ve got your funding, we ask for a 5% success fee.” and here “Once you get funding we ask for a 5% success fee”.

As you have probably gathered, over the last 6 moths or so TechCrunch Europe has been running a fairly intense events programme across Europe. With our own, curated panel discussion and startup pitch competitions we hit Barcelona, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin and Helsinki. Every event attracted between 150 to 300+ people and each one was live video streamed, usually putting at least as many more people “into the room”. That’s not forgetting the informal meetups we held in other places like Hamburg, and the other events we attended as part of our rolling coverage of European tech, like The Next Web in Amsterdam or Next09 in Hamburg, or the various Seedcamp events around Europe.

But next year we’re going to focus even more.

First of all, we’re going to carry on synchronising our events with the Seedcamp programme – usually running a TechCrunch Europe event the day after Seedcamp in a particular city. This has worked very well and both Seedcamp and the startups we talk to have liked this format. Our TechCrunch Europe organisation and events are totally separate from Seedcamp (separate ticketing, often different speakers etc) but we hope that by synchronising with them, it makes it a lot more convenient for everyone in the European tech scene, given there is enough need to travel as it is. In future we’ll be working with local players and sponsors to bring together the scene in each city. Please contact the editor Mike Butcher for more details about how you can help us bring the TechCrunch spotlight to your city.

Second of all we’re going to make our existing “big” events slightly bigger. Our annual conference, Geek ‘n Rolla – which this year saw 300 people come to the day long event in London and 400 people attend the afterparty – will move to a two day event. We will keep to the same, successful, format of fast pitches which are as educational as possible and have very little “sales” content. Editor Mike Butcher will continue to curate and shape this important event.

We will also expand our annual awards for tech companies, The Europas. This year 300 people came to a glamorous evening in London to celebrate the tech scene from all over Europe. We hope to reproduce that vibrant atmosphere next year.

We will also continue our highly successful partnership with event company 2 Pears, so to become a sponsor for Geek’n Rolla and/or The Europas, please contact Petra Johansson on petra[AT]twistedtree.co.uk or Twitter for more information.

Finally, we’d like to thank all our event sponsors over the last few months for making it an awesome year so far. We’ve had a great time working with you. We like to help our sponsors get lots of value out of our events and we often work very creatively with them. So get in touch today.

Well we’ve been pinging our sources around the telco world today and it looks like this: The “substantive” rumour mill says that, in the UK at least, O2 is going to keep its hands on the exclusivity for the newest iPhone handset, the iPhone 3GS. That looks pretty certain. In other words, the early adopter crowd who will spend anything it takes to get their mits on the best iPhone will stay with O2.

The older iPhone 3G, however, is heading off to at least three other networks: Orange, Vodafone and T-Mobile. The iPhone 3G will be available on both contract and PAYG from Orange and T-Mobile in September. Orange has, apparently, known since March that it would have the 3G for a September launch.

Acccording to PaidContent UK T-Mobile is “in talks” with Apple. But it’s our understanding that all these deals have already been agreed, just not announced.

That means that O2 is fast becoming the repository of the “latest” handsets, recently signing an exclusive deal with Palm for the new Pre.

Does that mean the iPhone 3G will be available SIM-Free? Probably not – each network is likely to lock the phone to their network. Though it would be great if that happened of course.

Would this farming out of the old iPhone 3G screw up Apple’s retail plan? Confuse customers? Maybe, but it appears Apple is simply treating the handset like its computers: If you want the latest model with all the best features you buy it from Apple or their chosen partners (in this case O2 and Carphone Warehouse). If you want the slightly older model with less features you head to a “reseller” – in this case the other mobile networks.

It’s not generally well known, but there is a large Italian-expat community in Silicon Valley. A lot of first-time entrepreneurs decided to move there for all the obvious reasons and the lack of opportunity in Italy. But, luckily, there is a section of that diaspora that has not forgotten those they left behind. Some of them are trying to help Italian startups move to the Valley and thus gain a global perspective and a cycle of companies coming back and forth.

One of the most interesting initiatives is the Mind The Bridge foundation. It is a non profit association, founded by Marco Marinucci, a senior executive at Google, and Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol. Among all their activities one of the most interesting is the Business Plan competition they hold every year. The winners get mentoring and possibly a chance at a 3 month incubation in San Francisco’s Plug&Play Tech Center.

The deadline for applications is set on August 25th, finalists will be announced in September and winners will have the opportunity to fly to the Valley between December and April. Previous winners of the event include Zooppa, Eris4, and Econoetica.

It looks like a pretty unique opportunity to get a grasp of the Valley’s spirit and try to bring it back in Europe – possibly with some fresh capital in hand…

I met Qype last week at the Seedcamp Speed Dating event as part of the Traveling Geeks tour.  Here’s a quick heads-up if you’re new to it: Qype is a way to discover new places (restaurants, events, nightlife, sports, etc.) with a focus on European cities, by going through other users’ reviews and feedback. There are many categories for each vertical, along with a simple to use search engine and Google maps. The site currently enjoys a traffic of 11m visitors per month and has over 350,000 registered users from 9 European countries (UK, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Ireland and Brazil).

In the video below, Andrew Hunter (UK General Manager) explains how the service is differentiated from competitors like the well-known – at least in the US – Yelp. For instance, the site shows each review in 6 different languages, thereby allowing people to read a review about a restaurant in London in German, French, English, Spanish, Polish or Portuguese.

RealTimecCarbon is a new joint project by Dynamic Demand, AMEE and Demand Logic. It’s a pretty clever idea.

As they explain, the amount of pollution caused by using a single unit of electricity changes throughout the day. This is because the “generation mix” on the grid changes. Sometimes there are more coal power stations running, for example. Other times there’s more wind power. Also, additional pollution can be caused by the extra back-up supply we need at times when our demand is hard to predict. So wouldn’t it be better if we could use power when it’s greenest?

Real Time Carbon lets you see the real-time carbon intensity of electricity so consumers can avoid consuming at times of high emissions. This could eventualy be linked to appliances, buildings and factories so they could automatically manage demand according to the carbon being released.

Here’s how the explain it:

RealtimeCarbon.org screencast from Jamie Andrews on Vimeo.

You think you have it bad, Mr.-Silicon-Valley-entrepreneur-trolling-Sand-Hilll-Road-for-cash? Try life in the UK.

Out of 39 firms that were active investors in British start-ups over the last five years, only thirteen venture firms have £5 million or more left in their coffers to invest, according to NESTA, the UK agency that advocates for start-ups and also sponsored the recent Traveling Geeks blogger tour.

That’s right: All but thirteen firms in the United Kingdom are either completely tapped out or have committed the rest of their funds for follow-on investments in existing portfolio companies. In total, NESTA estimates there’s about £400 million left that’s uncommitted among the thirteen, with only half of that available for brand-new series A deals. To put that into perspective, there’s roughly the same amount of money in the fund Marc Andreessen just closed than there is for new companies in the entire United Kingdom right now.

READ MORE

TechCrunch Europe is planning a new series of articles on common issues faced by startups, especially European ones. For this we’re going to ask the people who know – you, our readers. We’ll be producing a series of articles, the first two articles of which will be:

• The TechCrunch Europe Guide to choosing your co-founders.
• The TechCrunch Europe Guide to bootstrapping your startup.

I’ll be putting these together, so please set in touch by email or Twitter with your hard-won wisdom on either of these areas. TechCrunch Europe will compile an article based on the best suggestions and we’ll also be name-checking the contributors (assuming they wish to be named – if you want to contribute thoughts anonymously that’s OK too).

UK entreprenuer Colin Gilchrist has developed Tweetabits, effectively a Tweet-deck style interface layered over Twitter search.

Developed for a franchise with 56 offices across the UK (which he won’t name) the issue was that they didn’t want those offices competing over tweet responses to customers. Actually this isn’t such a bad idea. Who wants to subscribe to Zappos (the legend in the Twitter customer services area) and see every customer service response they have to every schmuck with a problem with their shoes?

The version you can see displayed is only only providing results for Tweets sent from Edinburgh (assuming peiople have bothered to make this clear in their settings of course – millions of people have their Twitter location set to the default Hawaii).

But here’s the best bit. Each user £495 with a support contract – if required – which delivers consultancy on best use and providing statistical data on use and interaction. “Support” is a word which sets alarm bells suddenly ringing in terms of scaling this thing.

Gilchrist says it’s “an easier way for those less familiar with twitter search to deliver location specific columns of results that they can track.”

Indeed it is but perhaps a customise version of Tweedeck could easily put paid to this idea? Your thoughts in the comments below.

Although we now have multi-touch interfaces via the handy iPhone, it appears the rest of the world promised by the Minority Report movie and its “Precrime” concepts has arrived sooner than we thought.

Brit Andrew Poole organised a simple barbeque to celebrate his 30th birthday party. He expected a total of 17 guests, so he bought a lot of burgers, rented a marquee and put some batteries into the portable MP3 player, as anyone with an impending significant birthday and an unused BBQ stove would. But his first mistake was to create an events page on Facebook. His second was to send out invitations to join the BBQ in a Devon field owned by a friend.

However, Minority Report became real when when eight police officers, some dressed in body armour, swooped in via a helicopter and a riot van. Police claimed they received reports a “large-scale” dance rave organised via something called the Internet. Police said local residents had tipped them off about a possible rave, which suggests that the “red ball” in this case was the people Poole is connected to on Facebook who tipped off the authorities.

Said Poole: “The thing (the helicopter) hovered over us for about 25 minutes, watching 15 people eat. They told us to take down the sound system and said everybody has got to leave. It was 4pm and we had not plugged in the music. What effectively police did was to stop 15 people eating burgers.”

However, Poole was clearly guilt of some kind of precrime. He put the time on it as “overnight” just in case “people wanted to sleep over.” Bad move.

Now, admittedly some people do organise a lot of, shall we say, interesting things, over Facebook. But using a helicopter to swoop a Facebook organised BBQ is a new one on us.

(via The Daily Telegraph)

Tweetminster Livewire launches today. It’s a browser-based dashboard that aggregates the tweets of Members of the UK Parliament, Prospective Parliamentary Candidates and of Parliament, Government and political parties.

It also – big breath – aggregates the tweets of political journalists, commentators and news sources from mainstream media to blogs; Filters relevant tweets in real time around trending topics; Recommends new users and helps to discover content via the Mr. Tweet API; Acts as a Twitter client, allowing people to interact with all the various feeds, tweet and view the posts of their friends.

The feeds update in real time a la twitterfall (or near real time for friends, mentions and DMs – every 30 seconds). That’s just a few of the features.

The service is being launched in partnership with The Independent newspaper

Is Tweetminster launching another Twitter client? No, Livewire is aimed at political news and conversations.

It’s an interesting move and could well be applied to all sorts of other areas.

Here at TechCrunch Europe towers, we’ve decided to broaden our coverage to include new gadgets going on sale in Europe. Why? Well frankly Europe gets some of the best stuff out there and our mobile phones tend to pretty much rock, if not in the “application store” front (that will of course change over time) then at least in the hardware stakes. Plus, frankly, people keep sending this stuff to us. So we may as well do something with it. And what better thing could we do than give it away. To you.

To that end we’ve been sent the new Samsung’s i8910HD, the successor to its Omnia i900. It’s sleek, looks good. It has a whopping eight-megapixel camera and records 720p HD video. Check out this 3.7in display, which is bigger than the iPhone 3G S’s 3.5in. Plus, being able to shoot 720p HD video is a first for a mobile phone. If anyone thinks these things won’t replace things like the Flip Mino HD then they need to wake up and smell the burning coffee.

Its predecessor, the Omnia i900, had a stylus. We say #FAIL. The i8910HD has a capacitive touchscreen so it’s much more responsive to fingers. We say #FTW. 8GB of built-in storage helps on the music front.

Then again, they do say the best camera is always the camera you have with you. And the iPhone is pretty damn fast at taking quick point and click shots, even if they may not be the best. The i8910HD has considerable shutter lag, which is really rather tedious. And there’s no optical zoom, so it’s not a total replacement from a real camera just yet.

More interestingly for TechCrunchies is that its OS is built on Symbian S60, not Windows Mobile. Samsung has skinned the Symbian engine with its own widgets which works pretty well. The Samsung i8910HD is exclusive to Orange for now. It also has turn-by-turn navigation GPS, used for Orange Maps, included in some tariffs. The iPhone 3G S does of course have the new TomTom app.

But with no app stores attached as yet, it’s basically a big feature phone. Did I say big? This thing is huge. People who had mobile phones in the 80s will feel nostalgic holding this thing. Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating, but it’s definitely hefty. I guess you don’t get HD video without some kind of price, and here we are paying in weight and size.

So, you want one? We have one to give away. But we’re going to try something new to get this to you.

Here’s what you need to do. We will randomly select the winner from anyone who Re-tweets any tweet from the @tceurope Twitter feed in the last few weeks. You also need to include the hashtag #tceurope to make sure we know you are entering this competition.

We’ll pick you up on our search and select someone from that feed at random. That’s it.

Just include @TCEurope in the tweet and a link to one of our stories and the hashtag #tceurope. You can grab anything you like from here: http://twitter.com/tceurope.

Since you can only enter once, just send one tweet. Do not do more than one tweet.

The competition lasts today (Friday 17 July) until 5pm London time when we’ll announce the winner.

(Whilst entries will be accepted from anywhere, TechCrunch cannot be held responsible for the non-compatability of the phone if registered overseas. If you’re not lucky enough to win, or you can’t wait to get your hands on the Samsung i8910HD phone, you might want to try our friends at Orange/Samsung. Good Luck!

Update: The winner of @TCEurope’s #FreebieFriday is: @Wedge7 “Uni student, Mobile Web Developer” in Bournemouth