As many will know from my Twitter stream over the last few months I have been working on trying to put together occasional special screenings of new Sci Fi movies (hey, we’re in tech, right?). This has worked very well on TechCrunch US, with screenings of Iron Man among others. In particular I wanted to put together an event around upcoming Sci-Fi movie “District 9″ as per this.

However, the film industry generally seems bloody hopeless to deal with. Despite my explaining, no-one I deal with seems to quite understand that we could probably fill a cinema at a stroke with people who would blog and Twitter about the movie inside 24 hours. Oh well, their loss I guess.

So while I work on that, instead I have found the Electric Cinema in West London (The Electric, www.electriccinema.co.uk, 191 Portobello Rd, London, W11 2ED, 020 72298688) which is screening District 9 next Tuesday night (next week, September 8 ) at 6.30pm. Crucially, you can pre-book tickets.

We can get about 70 people in (some tickets have already gone to someone called ‘general public’ ) if you all go and *literally* buy a ticket right now. I’m assuming that we could go for a quick pint somewhere nearby afterwards (suggestions for venue?). I’ll post any updates about arrangements on this post.

This is an open invite, not a closed event. Any reader of this post is invited to come along – we’re assuming you read TechCrunch Europe are somehow in this industry!

You can grab a ticket (for the 6.30pm session) here. I would go for the “Adult Other” rows or the “Adult Front 3″ if those are all gone.

I’m not going to look for sponsors and all that stuff as this is a totally casual, fun, social event. If someone wants to put some cash behind a bar to buy us a drink afterwards I’m happy to mention that on TechCrunch Europe by way of thanks.

News reaches us of a marriage in Finland. Linkotec, the company behind Dazzboard, an “open iTunes” that works with pretty much any media player, just announced a partnership with social cloud storage provider MySites. Both companies are based in Helsinki. The deal gives Dazzboard users access to the MySites cloud where they can store and share an unlimited amount of data. Users will also be able to move files in the cloud to and from their portable devices. Read More

Wonderful news for geeks: Pasta Pizza Hut is partnering with online film and TV aggregator blinkbox. Soon you’ll be able to order your extra toppings right alongside your Hollywood blockbuster from a co-branded website, and you’ll get 20% off the movie rental (well, stream) when you order your grub as well. Perfect for all those late-night coding sessions!

It looks like the site will only allow you to choose from eight films a week, which is a pity, but this is one of those recession-busting, cashing-in-on-the-credit-crunch type things that will probably do very well. (I mean, have you got the cash – or time – to eat out every night?) Read More

Microsoft’s BizSpark (@BizSpark) program offers support and services to emerging technology companies. Success stories like Huddle began on BizSpark before being put on Microsoft’s Startup Accelerator Program.

On Monday, September 28 2009, Microsoft will host the first UK BizSpark Summit at its Victoria offices in London. It promises to be an interesting event for members of the BizSpark family (and their extended network, too), with talks from “Dragon” James Caan, Moo‘s Richard Moross (@richardmoross) and WAYN‘s Jerome Touze (@jerometouze). There will also be a quick-fire pitching session, featuring TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher (@mikebutcher), with prizes for the best pitches. Read More

OK, so they haven’t officially called it Boogle (possibly because there’s something called that already), but we thought we’d get in there before anyone else does. So what’s it all about? Well, BT is shortly to become an authorised reseller of Google AdWords, as part of a new a deal designed to help small businesses boost their online marketing performance. BT Business customers will now be able to get professional, full-service AdWords account management, including set-up and ongoing campaign monitoring. Currently, over a million businesses in the UK are served by BT Business, including the 350,000 members of BT Tradespace. Read More

On Tuesday we carried the news that Twitter’s site traffic (for all that number means) had overtaken MySpace’s. No great surprises there, we said. But that’s not the only site Twitter is trouncing, according to Hitwise director Robin Goad.

Twitter is also beating Bebo and Microsoft’s Bing, when you take into account estimated traffic from third-party clients like TweetDeck. Twitter is the 17th most-visited site in the UK and the second-most popular social network after Facebook, if you take third-party traffic into account. Read More

Laggard UK music retailer HMV announced at its AGM today that it’s buying a 50 percent stake in the online music retailer 7Digital for £7.7 million. The move looks set to give HMV a ‘great leap forward’ in digital, since 7Digital has been fleet of foot in pushing non-DRM MP3s, open formats and signed deals with tech rock stars like Spotify. CEO Ben Drury, CTO James Kane and other managers are staying on and will be joined by three more from HMV on the JV board.

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This is a guest post on TechCrunch Europe by Barry Vitou and Danvers Baillieu, lawyers at London firm Winston & Strawn. Vitou and Baillieu run Bootlaw (@bootlaw), a free monthly meet-up for start ups covering the legal issues they face.

The humble termsheet has been the subject of a fair amount of debate and comment over the past few weeks. VC Chris Dixon got the ball rolling with his post on the ideal termsheet, then Fred Wilson weighed in and finally the mighty Michael Arrington, no less, on TechCrunch, following up the story that TheFunded.com had released a standard termsheet for use in series A rounds. As Arrington said, the aim of the TheFunded.com’s “plain” termsheet is to reduce legal fees on a VC round “which average $50,000 or more per venture round”. In the interests of full and frank disclosure, we’re lawyers – and here’s our take.

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When the news broke yesterday that SpinVox, after 15 months without a full-time Chief Financial Officer (remember, this is a company that has raised over $200m in investment and is making significant losses every year, not to mention the recent scandals that have been engulfing the company) had finally appointed Manoj Parmar to the position, our first reaction wasn’t “at last!”, but rather: “Who?” Read More

Twitter has been going crazy over the last 48 hours as start-ups desperate to know if they’ve made it on to the Seedcamp Week 2009 shortlist have been bombarding @seedcamp with questions. The Seedcamp team spent much of this afternoon politely fending off enquiries until, finally, at around 5pm this evening, they began sending out emails to applicants.

41 start-ups have been selected to progress to the “interview” stage, where they’ll be met in person and quizzed about their businesses. At Seedcamp’s request, we’re not publishing the full list, but here are a few of the teams that made it: Read More

Back in February we were excited to see a sort of “Humorous Twitter” appear in the form of Popjam. Except it wasn’t – it was more a microblogging-meets-Digg-meets-CollegeHumour. But as we said at the time, getting Twitter integration fast would really help.

Aiming at College Humour and eBaumsworld or Icanhascheezburger with something Twitter-like seemed like a no-brainer and it was PopJam’s aim to effectively ‘sit above’ all of these sources. And the gaming element with a leaderboard was a smart idea. We duly wrote it up:

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MindMeister is an online mind mapping tool that allows you to  create, share and collaborate on mind maps. The MindMeister iPhone app that’s today available in the App Store was originally developed by Ultravague for the Mindmaker iPhone app and was then acquired by MindMeister in January of this year for an undisclosed sum.

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Vouchers, so Hitwise tells us, are seriously hot property right now. It’s easy to see why: we all want to save a bit of cash at the moment. Today, a new way of finding and sharing money-saving vouchers launches in the UK. It joins VouChaCha and VoucherCodes.co.uk in the UK and Savoo.co.uk (savings.com in the US).

So what’s different about VoucherHub? In a word, people. VoucherHub is more of a community site, where consumers are offered a quick and easy way to share, recommend and acquire vouchers. The best bit? You don’t even need to register. That’s always a win in our book. Read More

It’s that time again! Well, not quite, actually. The real, actual, worldwide, record-breakingly epic craziness of Twestival proper isn’t until early next year, but Twestival Local (just as exciting!) hits soon – very soon – and if you’re a start-up who’d like to sponsor Twestival Local London at a knock-down price, here’s how:

All you need to do is tell us about the fantastic, fun activity you’ll create and run at Vinopolis for Twestival-goers on 10th September. If you win, the sponsor slot and space to run your activity (and importantly, to display your brand and meet 1200 Twestivalees and press attendees), is yours for just £300. Read More

I’ll be honest. I never quite understood what you could do with Huddle that you couldn’t with, say, the latest versions of Microsoft Office. (Woah, steady on there. I’m just sayin’. And since you bring it up, yes, I think Word 2007 is the best word processor ever conceived by man. No, really.) Sure, it was nice and shiny, and I liked the people who worked there, and Gosh! they seem to be growing pretty quickly, don’t they? What is it now, 30 members of staff?

But I never really got it… until this morning, that is. This morning, when, after receiving a mailshot about a few fairly minor new features, I thought I’d log in again and give it another try, after perhaps nine months. Crikey. It’s bloody marvellous, isn’t it? Looks great, works great, and of course my comparison with Office is unfair: to use Groove, for example, you have to have everyone in your team using a version of Office with it installed. In a world were IE6 still reigns supreme in corporate environments (the last big company I worked for – a media organisation – was still stuck in the dark ages in that respect), it’s not a given that everyone will be upgraded promptly.

Huddle, on the other hand, is completely web-based, and so platform and office suite agnostic, but it’s also file format agnostic. You can upload any kind of file to collaborate on. A Zoho-powered editor enables you to work on Word and Excel files together directly in the browser. You need only visit the homepage to see who’s using the service these days, from big corporations to government departments.

But I have a question. Why on earth isn’t there a mobile version? Read More

We all knew Twitter was on the way up and MySpace was on the way down, but who’d have thought that the once-mighty behemoth would be eclipsed by our favourite avian upstart quite so soon? Yet here it is, in black and white (well, blue and orange):

(Credit: TheNextWeb)

Without wishing to over-dramatise two lines on a graph touching each other, this is a watershed moment in social networking. But what’s interesting isn’t so much Twitter’s recorded site traffic, which is predictable, yet doesn’t mean much because so many people use third-party clients, but rather MySpace’s numbers. The graph’s seemingly inexorable decline suggests a steady exodus of users. How on earth can the site hope to recover in this market now? Its upcoming clutch of mobile clients? MySpace Music? It seems my previous optimism on the subject was profoundly misplaced. No wonder there have been so many redundancies recently.

These figures should be read in the context of a market (the UK) where MySpace has never been as dominant as in the US, and in which Twitter has been particularly successful. But still… somewhere, I can hear a bell tolling. Read More

Where commercial success leads, boozy networking events are sure to follow. And so it is with next Wednesday’s Games Gone Wild, a London event put together by Mind Candy‘s Michael Smith (@acton).

Actually, that’s not entirely fair. Games Gone Wild promises to be a bit more interesting than that: there will be speeches from some key players in the space and the chance to connect with other like-minded companies. And anyway, it’s about time the profile of social gaming was raised a bit. Read More

Why are shares in XING, the German-born business social network that competes most with LinkedIn in Europe, skyrocketing?

Rumors are reaching me that prominent stakeholders in XING – current and former employees – are taking advantage of this moment to offload significant share stakes, and who can blame them. So why the spike? Well, it appears there is chatter of a buyout deal in the offing. But who would want to buy XING? Well the obvious answer is LinkedIn. Such a deal would consolidate its position in Europe, making it basically unassailable in business networks.

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