As I sit here listening to Ben Cohen’s radio documentary about how he nearly became a teenage dotcom millionaire, I’m reminded of how tedious us journalists all found him back in the late 90s. We don’t now of course – now that’s he’s grown up and actually turned out to be a pretty good tech reporter for Channel 4 News, and quite an OK guy, I’d quite happily have a pint with him.

But the story of how he became a teenage dotcom (paper-only) millionaire and finally fell to earth has something to tell us about the nature of startups and Europe and why we must finally kill off the myth of the Dotcom Hero CEO. In 2010 there is no more room for dumbass Internet heroes. From now on we must focus on products, teams and businesses. Sure there will always be “the story” about a startup, or how it started with one person’s idea. But as soon as that becomes their focus that are quite simply dead. Ideas are two-a-penny, it’s execution that counts, and you can’t execute anything totally on your own.

[France/Israel] Sparkeo places its bets on advanced visual learning, offering a portable video platform specifically designed for experts from any field to create, distribute and monetize their expertise online. Why? Frederic Ankin, Spakeo’s CEO, argues for the need for simple video monetization to enable people to sell their knowledge on the Web. “Currently, the highest quality end content is not online since the experts have no motivation to give it away,” he says. And I guess he’s right.

We recently covered Sofatutor, also playing in the online education field out of Germany. The big difference between Sparkeo and other how-to and expertise video portals (ie. Mindbites, Sclipo, Edufire) , is that Sparkeo is not a portal, but rather a stand alone video player that users can embed anywhere, bringing their paying audience and students to any site, blog or major social network of their choice.

[France] Ok listen-up kids. Today is “Safer internet Day”. Got that? So put that web browser down right now before you take someone eye out.

But seriously folks – the day is organized each year by Insafe, a “European network of Awareness Centres” promoting safe, responsible use of the Internet and mobile devices to young people. Yes if that sounds like it’s co-funded by the European Union’s Safer Internet Programme, that’s because it is. In case you can’t guess, the idea is to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people. So far so do-gooder.

This year, the topic is “Think B4 U post”. (It reminds me of think before you tweet).

In a few years, it has become important for young people to understand the impact of their online presence, their actions on the web. But in all seriousness, it’s our role – that of startups, social networks, social media etc – not to forget that children and teenagers can use our new wonderful tools in a way they were not thought of: posting pictures on Facebook, meeting new people within communities, posting videos from their mobile phone… all these features are both wonderful but also potentially dangerous when not used correctly. Especially now that location based services are taking off.

[Austria] Social travel guide tripwolf has released an updated iPhone app that ramps up the company’s freemium offering with the introduction of in-app purchases for destinations where tripwolf has more in-depth information.

The premium content is garnered from the Vienna-based startup’s existing partnerships with travel guide publishers Footprints and Marco Polo (a subsidiary of Mair Dumont), which is supplemented with user-generated content from the tripwolf community.

Additionally, the iPhone app offers a bunch interactive features, including photo-uploads, the ability to vote for locations, write reviews, search for points of interest, and add new locations or places to the tripwolf travel guides.

[Switzerland] Would you be comfortable with storing your passwords in the cloud? That’s the hope of DataInherit, from Swiss banking security specialists DSwiss, which launched a new password ’safe’ that lets you store your most important passwords on the company’s servers.

Along with the advantage of being able to retrieve those passwords from wherever you have an Internet connection, the service offers an interesting additional feature: the ability to assign beneficiaries – loved ones, or perhaps business associates or next-of-kin – should anything happen to you. It’s an increasingly awkward problem as we move more and more of our life into the digital domain, how to give others access to that data after we’re gone.

[UK] Larry Ellison isn’t the only one who has his reservations regarding the legitimacy of cloud computing. Synctus, a bootstrapped Manchester-based startup, is emerging from stealth with the introduction of a hardware product aimed at increasing the speed and efficiency of sharing files between different offices of the same company.

Almost two years ago The Filter, a startup backed by Peter Gabriel, launched to bring better music and movie recommendations to consumers. The site got lost in the abundance of more popular music and movie sites out there, so about a year ago CEO David Maher Roberts decided to shift gears and start licensing his recommendation engine to other businesses.

It was the right move. Today, the Filter powers recommendations for sites and devices with a combined reach of about 20 million people, with two more large media deals in the final stages of converting from a trail to a full license which will bring its total reach up to 85 million. The startup’s revenues went from $150,000 in 2008 to about $1 million in 2009. “All that money came from licensing,” says Roberts. “I think we git $2,000 from Google for advertising.” Since November, the company has been “borderline breakeven.” And it just added to its board of directors former Google engineering VP Doug Merrill.

There remains an ongoing desktop Twitter application war. Traditionally Tweetdeck and Seesmic have been at loggerheads for the lion share, although Tweetdeck has remained in the lead so far. Increasingly it appears that Seesmic is heading towards trying to be a much more mainstream application, for anyone on any platform, from celebs to your non-tech friends. But for power Twitter users, Tweetdeck seems to be the go-to app so far. Of course, all that can change, but that seems to be the landscape at the moment.

Just now Tweetdeck has released the latest version of its desktop Air application, this one is v0.33. It’s available right now as a manual download here. Existing Tweedeck users will get an auto upgrade in the next few days.

For uber-Tweetdeck users (like social media experts, as we know) Tweetdeck can get pretty long as they plug in every search term they can think of to avert that client disaster (Eurostar, we’re looking at you). So there are a bunch of new features which extend the app quite a bit and greatly enhance its speed of access to the Twitter firehouse.

So for a bit of fun we’ve decided to open a TechCrunch Europe T-Shirt store on that European startup Spreadshirt.

We’re going to see how it goes (your feedback is welcome) and the store is very simple (black and white T-shirts). But for now, you can grab a T-shirt here.

We’ll be giving a few away in an upcoming competition at some point, plus we’ll be looking for more slogans to put on the shirts. Suggestions welcome. The funnier the better. And other languages than English are cool too.

It looks like some major consolidation is about to go down in the Central European Internet market, and in particular Poland.

According to local newspaper reports, the largest Internet group in the region, Naspers/MIH Group, is conducting due diligence of assets belonging to DST (Digital Sky Technology)-owned holding Forticom. Naspers/MIH Group and DST already together own the largest Russian online portal Mail.ru.