[UK] 3UK has announced it’s launching a tariff with an inclusive Spotify premium subscription which will be bundled with their first Android handset, the HTC Hero. Hutchison Whampoa, which owns 3, is an investor in Spotify. There were rumours of the move but this is now official confirmation.

The offer will come in at £35 a month over 24 months plus £99 for the Hero handset. That tariff includes unlimited use of Spotify Premium on both the handset and the owner’s PC for 2 years, 750 minutes to other mobiles, unlimited texts, unlimited data, and other usual 3 tariff features like free Skype calling.

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[UK] They are still playing their cards close to their chest, but stealth-mode Shutl, the UK-based startup, is today sneaking out the news that it’s secured a £0.5m investment from a group of Angels led by Angel investor Simon Murdoch and Big Bang Ventures in Belgium.

Murdoch is well known and respected in the UK tech scene after setting up online bookstore Bookpages in ‘96 and selling it to Amazon in ‘98. The other investors include the likes of Bebo co-founder Paul Birch, Robert Dighero (formerly of QXL) and Mark Zaleski (former DailyMotion CEO).

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[UK] The Launch48 event in London this weekend has seen six teams attempt to launch a startup in, you guessed it 48 hours. The event, which was basically created by some UK startup enthusiasts, is different to StartupWeekend in that separate teams come together to each work on their own project rather than one. After frantically coding for the last couple of days, the results were presented tonight at the event, so here they are in order of presentation. I liked Given and Grapeshots. As you can see some were more fully formed than others:

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[Guest Post: TechFluff.TV, the video blog started by Hermione Way over a year ago has done a lot to make the European startup scene a lot more fun and - hell, let's just say it out loud shall we? - a lot less male. So with the recent revamp of her site, and a locked-and-loaded video camera, TechCrunch Europe has given her a mission: to hunt down a European startup every week and get them to give her an elevator pitch. In an elevator. Will she come up with the goods? Will she fail? Stay tuned. Here's her first instalment. Meantime, we'll be rotating this slot with other contributors around Europe as well, so if you've got a video blog about startups, get in touch.]

Describing themselves as ‘The future of video communication ‘ Winkball.com is a video messaging site which aims to ‘bring personalisation back to email and bridge the gaps of Skype and Youtube. They say:

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Once in a while we like to point you to events that may be interesting to European tech entrepreneurs. We’re not necessarily endorsing them. Buyer beware and all that. We’re just saying you may want to check them out. We’ve added events where there will be a TechCrunch Europe writer attending, or those we are running. And please definitely put December 15 in your diary for “TechCrunch Europe’s ChristmasCrunch – It’s A Realtime Holiday!”

So, for your interest…

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[UK] In the last couple of days there has been enormous speculation in the games industry that Accel-backed Playfish – the Facebook social games startup which has amassed 60 million users with games like Restaurant City – has been bought by Electronic Arts for $250 million. However, nothing has been confirmed as neither company, or Accel Partners, is talking, leaving news outlets speculating on what’s happened.

A report by Inside Social Games suggests the deal was struck weeks ago.

Playfish’s viral approach to social games has seen its titles spread like wildfire across Facebook, MySpace, Google, Bebo, the iPhone and more. Revenues are put at $75 million this year.

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[Germany] Now that was fast. Only two days after their first article on TechCrunch Europe, mobile startup Mobilinga gets its first VC investment. German entrepreneur Hans Rudolf Wöhrl, a famous fashion producer who bought the German arm of British Airways (Deutsche BA) for €1 in 2003 – just to sell it three years later for €120m, has invested an undisclosed sum in Mobilinga and takes over 25.1 per cent of the company. The deal was made via his holding company Intro Invest.

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[Sweden] First they found a way to make music streaming legal and free, now they’re trying to bring more TV content online through an advertising platform. I’m talking about Swedish entrepreneurs of course. This week Swedish ad-server Videoplaza has signed another deal with a UK company, branching out into a wider European market.

They’ve signed on Myvideorights.com, a company that works as a link between video producers, publishers and advertisers. Videoplaza signed its first UK deals in June this year, with Factory Media and Incisive Media.

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[International] It looks like the founders of Skype are already moving on from the recent Skype controversy and the failure of Joost. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom are planning to return to the startup fray with Rdio, which is already being prematurely dubbed by the media as a “Spotify killer”.

Rdio is currently funded by their own venture capital fund, Atomico Ventures. The plan is to launch in the US first – though whether is will beat Spotify’s US launch plans remains to be seen. The CEO is Drew Larner, who comes from the film industry.

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[Austria] Social travel guide tripwolf.com has announced a deeper long-term partnership with travel book publisher Footprint. Both companies are increasing their existing partnership (so far limited to only a couple of countries) with a full syndication of Footprint’s travel guide books. The deal entails the digitization and import of 60 print travel books, consisting of 150,000 points of interest worldwide, which adds onto tripwolf’s exiting 500,000 POIs.

The content from Footprint hasn’t been published online before. The process of scanning and importing was enabled by a semantic-extraction-tool, specifically created for this deal. The content, in addition to User generated content and Marco Polo’s content will be available on Footprints own website, the tripwolf iPhone app and on the tripwolf.com Website. The latter one closes the circle of print to online by providing downloadable, free PDF guides, much like Offbeat guides is doing with external content providers.

Travel startups regularly compete over this kind of content, so it’s a reasonably big coup for tripwolf.

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[UK] BREAKING: This is quite a big move from TV broadcaster Channel 4 in the UK. They appear to be admitting their 4oD video-on-demand ‘catch-up’ service is no match for putting the lot on YouTube. Here’s the release that just went out:

YouTube, Channel 4 sign pioneering long-form content deal

October 15 2009: YouTube and Channel 4 have signed a pioneering content deal which will make the broadcaster’s original programmes available on demand, in full and free-of-charge via YouTube in the UK in the coming months.

The strategic partnership marks the first time that a broadcaster anywhere in the world has made a comprehensive catch-up schedule available on YouTube, providing Channel 4 with additional advertising inventory and reach: YouTube last week announced it was serving over 1 billion video streams every day.

Under the terms of the deal, Channel 4 will make its 4oD video-on-demand ‘catch-up’ service of new programmes available via YouTube shortly after television transmission, including series that have already proved particularly popular with online audiences such as Skins, Hollyoaks, The Inbetweeners and Peep Show. YouTube users will also be able to access around 3,000 hours of full length programming from the Channel 4 archive at any given time, including shows like Brass Eye, Derren Brown, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Teachers and many others.

Content will begin appearing in the coming months and be fully available in early 2010. All programmes will be available only in the UK, free-of-charge supported by advertising.

Financial terms are not being disclosed, but the partnership runs for an initial term of at least three years and the two parties will share advertising revenues on an agreed formula. The deal will create significant value for Channel 4 and its independent production partners, generating additional revenue to invest in creating high quality, original content. YouTube and Channel 4 will continue to co-operate on additional monetisation opportunities as new technology evolves.

Channel 4 will have a branded presence on YouTube and will be able to sell advertising around its content on the site. The agreement also allows Channel 4 to sell advertising around some non-Channel 4 content on YouTube for the first time, expanding the amount of inventory available to its sales team and bringing its considerable expertise in advertising around full length TV content to the YouTube platform. It will help Channel 4 develop its advertising sales proposition in digital, including the use of YouTube’s demographic targeting tools to target advertising against Channel 4 content on YouTube.

The deal builds significantly on Channel 4 and YouTube’s existing partnership; Channel 4 was the first broadcaster to sell pre-roll advertisements on YouTube clips and to incorporate an offline sponsor into an online YouTube package (Lucozade, Big Brother).

The deal is non-exclusive, allowing Channel 4 to continue distributing its 4oD service via its own website, channel4.com, and other third party sites and services.

Nikesh Arora, President, Global Sales Operations and Business Development for Google, YouTube’s owner, said: “Over the past few years, fans have had access to increasing amounts of professional programming online as TV companies experiment with new ways of distributing their content. Channel 4 have been visionary in their online strategy and are consistently at the forefront of new uses of YouTube to engage their viewers and unlock new revenue streams. This significant new agreement brings Channel 4′s great full length content to the YouTube community, helping Channel 4 to grow their online revenues and to continue to invest in the creation of high quality original content.”.

Andy Duncan, Channel 4’s Chief Executive, said: “Channel 4 was the first broadcaster anywhere in the world to make all its commissioned content available online and we’ve consistently pioneered in this field. This strategic partnership is another important milestone for us and we’re delighted to be combining the power of the ‘4’ brand and the appeal of our content with YouTube’s unrivalled reach and reputation online.

“Making our programmes directly accessible to YouTube’s 20 million UK users will financially benefit both Channel 4 and our independent production partners and help bolster our investment in quality British content. It demonstrates our ability to strike dynamic commercial partnerships to help underpin our future as a commercially funded, not-for-profit multi-platform public service network.”

Jon Gisby, Director of Future Media and Technology at Channel 4, added: “Channel 4 has a clear lead among commercial broadcasters in video-on-demand and we’re convinced extending our relationship with YouTube will help consolidate that position. The deal will grow our share of the audience and enhance our advertising sales proposition. It will create new advertising inventory for Channel 4 Sales in digital media and will help us realise our ambition to be the UK’s leading sales house for video-on-demand.”

Patrick Walker, YouTube’s Director of Partnerships, added: “We know that the YouTube community is enthusiastic about full-length programming on the site, and we’ve been working hard to create the right environment for more broadcasters to make their content available with the right branding, the right advertising formats and the right level of control over advertising sales. This partnership demonstrates our commitment to bringing an even greater range of content to YouTube and we look forward to other similar agreements to come.”

[Netherlands] InBox2 is a fledging product which attempts to bring together all your input streams (multiple mail accounts, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) into a single master inbox. The company has just launched a Facebook application which gives you access to that Inbox via Facebook.

Recipients

The release of Google Wave has prompted a lot of discussion on the future of email or the lack thereof. InBox2 was inspired by the insight that people use their inboxes for all kinds of purposes including content sharing – sending themselves or others links or files – and storage. According to InBox2 people have an average of 2.9 email accounts. They communicate with certain contacts mainly via Facebook or Twitter rather than email and they access mail from multiple devices. Ideally, users should be able to filter, label and organise messages, documents and files arriving from all sources on any device. Read More

[UK/Wales] It feels like these guys have been on the fund-raising trail forever. But finally SubHub, the platform for subscription content websites, has closed a significant funding round. Led by commercial funder, Finance Wales, alongside Angels including Simon Murdoch and David Hulston, SubHub now plans to expand its website building and monetisation tools and service.

The startup has done well out of formally locating it’s business to Cardiff, Wales – although not all the management actually live there, admittedly. Historically it took plenty of grant funding from the Welsh Assembly Government which pumps money into the local economy. Total funds raised by the company has been over $1.2 million. Of course it also has revenues from its paid-for platform. The company is not disclosing the exact, but say it’s the “largest single chunk of the total $1.2 million raised to date.” We estimate it’s in the region of £500,000. They’re calling this a Series A, but that appears to apply to the total amount raised to date.

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[Turkey] Until now, there’s been a lot of chatter about Put.io in the Turkish tech scene – but no-one had seen it. Today they’ve let us in to have a look at the service.

So imagine a service that downloads files from Rapidshare for you, then saves them on your 50GB Put.io account. Or forget about Rapidshare, maybe it collects files from Bittorrent automatically. Here’s an another example. Put.io lets you watch a DivX video online, without downloading it to your computer, in high quality, and listen to your music files inside your browser.

Put.io will be launched as a paid service. The service is in private beta right now, but they soon plan to accept beta users.

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[UK] Fizzback, a SAAS provider of CRM to large retail, telco and financial enterprises, has secured £1.6 million in second round (Series B) funding. The round was lead by Nauta Capital and included existing investor Advent Venture Partners.

Fizzback offers a cross-channel platform (sms, email, voice, web) for real-time dialogue between business and customers

Nauta Capital operates out of Barcelona and Boston. Advent Venture Partners is in London. Advent led the previous £2.5 million round in October 2006.

[Apologies for the brevity, I'm posting via the WiFi on a train in the UK] It looks UK-based TVCatchup has launched a new service which has the Twittersphere chattering today. Accessing iphone.tvcatchup.com on an iPhone (or iPod Touch) lets the user tap into live UK TV channels, with a delay of about one minute. Quite some feat to pull off. And the Brighton-based outfit is claiming it’s all legit. TVCatchup ran into pretty serious trouble last year with broadcast.

Here’s a some video I found about the service:

[Germany] The iPhone’s App Store Bonanza is over. Not only have most sellers failed to turn a profit, many come nowhere near recouping their investment at all. And for non US companies it’s even more difficult to make a buck since they have to wait even longer to get their iPhone software approved for the strong-selling US App Store.

That’s why the small startup Mobilinga, from Bremen, which already took the number 1 spot for the most downloaded software in the German App Store, is happy that their programs can now be downloaded in the US and Canada too. For $2.99 the Germans teach how to speak Latin-American Spanish, French, German and Italian with their “mobilinga for Your Trip” line.

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