[Sweden] The Swedish government is following in the footsteps of the Finns (well almost), as their IT-ministry is now promising that 90 percent of all Swedish homes will have access to a 100 mbit/s broadband connection before 2020.

According to Swedish IT-minister Åsa Torstensson it isn’t possible to function in the information society of today without a fast internet connection. You hear that? This is the information society, people!

[France] The list of French tech firms that have raised over €1 million in 2009 that we published last week is already obsolete, and that’s great! French company Aquafadas have announced that they’ve raised 1.2 million euros with Credit Agricole Private Equity and Soridec.

Following an investigation that lasted over a year, Turkish authorities are fining Internet giant Google a total of 71 million Turkish Lira (approx. €32 million or USD $47 million) for supposedly dodging the national tax system.

Local media reports (links in Turkish) teach us that the Turkish government claims it is entitled to additional taxes because of the fact Google operates its online advertising in the country and even boasts offices and a registered subsidiary there while bills and payments originate from Ireland. That latter part rings true, since the search juggernaut’s European headquarters are located in Ireland’s capital and most of its support and financial services are centralized there.

But Turkish authorities say Google is required to pay national taxes for revenue generated through its registered company based in Turkey, and asserts that an extensive audit shows that the American company owes the government nearly $50 million in unpaid taxes.

[UK] Ipadio has secured its first blue chip customer – the UK’s Virgin Media. The quad-play provider (broadband, TV, phone and mobile) will utilise ipadio’s phonecasting service to improve the communication amongst its field workers who install and maintain the company’s products used by almost 10 million customers.

Ipadio offers similar functionality to AudioBoo but with additional features such as live phonecastng and audio to text translation through SpinVox’s API. Both iPhone and Android clients are available, though it seems that Virgin Media staff out in the field won’t be going the smartphone route but will use a regular telephone to interface with the service.

[Finland] Last week marked the end for Nokia’s unsuccessful games service N-Gage. Nokia announced that they will be closing down the service at the end of September 2010. About four hardcore fans protested mildly in the N-Gage blog as the rest of the world yawned.

Seems like N-Gage was a project doomed to fail. Who was the target audience again? Oh who cares.

The service was launched in 2003 as an attempt to tap into a growing games market. Anyone remember the clumsy N-Gage phone? No didn’t think so. Unless its hideousness and general usability difficulties stuck on your mind.

[Denmark] The Danish startup YouCalc launched their realtime analytics for SaaS in December last year. Today they say they get a new user every hour. It’s that success that means they are now considering more funding and that – often inevitable for successful European startups – move to Silicon Valley and the big US market.

Sunstone Capital has invested $5 milion in YouCalc since 2007, and with 5,000 company sign-ups and a further 170 new users per week – YouCalc is focusing on partnership with SaaS providers – the company reckons it’s best bet now is to seek expansion in the US with a US VC.

[Croatia] Croatian startup Trillenium is to launched their web-based 3D shopping mall and social network with financial backing from a local angel investor and partnerships with a dozen local and international brands that will offer their products.

While the hype over 3D experiences started by Second Life has passed, Trillenium is betting its future on what they see as a more realistic shopping experience, closer to real shopping malls. Users will be able to move freely between shelves and products as well as talk to salesmen and each other, but since the project hasn’t launched yet, we’ll have to wait a while to see the user experience. With web shopping still in its infancy in the region, a 3D shopping experience goes leaps and bounds in terms of technology.

[Germany] Yahoo is claiming it has “displaced” Google search in Germany. Let’s just check that again. What has happened is that Yahoo has entered into an exclusive, multi-year, partnership with O2 Germany to become the preferred partner for mobile search and services. Who was the previous partner? Google. So that’s not actually the same thing at all.

The deal means O2 users there can now access to Yahoo!’s mobile-optimized search engine on O2s mobile portals. Users also will be able to sync their PC and mobile homepages. Yahoo! will also deliver sponsored search results for O2. It also includes links to and content from other Yahoo properties.

[Update] Yahoo tells me that it is not paying O2 through the nose for this deal and it’s not the continuation of a any kind of contractual arrangement. (In 2007 Yahoo made a deal with Telefonica, which owns O2, that put Yahoo search on Telefonica phones in Latin America and O2 in the UK. O2 Germany had at the time just signed a deal with Google). So O2 consciously chose Yahoo over Google as O2 Germany was not part of any over-arching Telefonica deal. It’s also fair to point out that T-Mobile has also more or less displaced Google’s search for its mobile services in Europe for Yahoo’s.

Skype’s Linux version will soon become open source software – and maybe run on every smartphone, TV set-top box or other gadget powered by the free operating system.

It could also become part of multi-protocol messengers like Pidgin or eBuddy or Meebo.

Or at least that was the hope for some hours today after a French user got the following answer from Skype customer support.

[UK] Orange UK will begin selling the iPhone on November 10th, just eight days time. But it won’t usher in the price war that many had predicted (although I wasn’t one of them) now that 02′s exclusive has ended. Instead, Orange have chosen almost without exception to match its rival’s existing iPhone pricing. The retail monopoly has been broken but Apple’s supply monopoly remains in place and it shows.

[UK] The fashion industry prides itself on being able to predict what will be hot next season. Get it right and there’s serious money to be made. Get it wrong and warehouses and clearance stores are left with stock that nobody wants.

Up until now, however, making that call hasn’t been an exact science but thanks to Twitter that could be about to change. Or so says London-based Stylesignal, whose newly launched software-as-a-service (SaaS) product Trend Science claims to be “the world’s most accurate forecasting service”, and it’s, in part, powered by Twitter.

[Germany] With only days away from the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, how best to mark the occasion? Rebuild it or at least a virtual two kilometer stretch. That’s the approach being taken by Metaversum, the Berlin-based company behind virtual world Twinity, who have constructed a replica section of the wall in-world.

Visitors to Twinity’s virtual Berlin will be able to travel back to 1989 to explore a two km-long, true-to-scale section of the Berlin Wall, from the Reichstag, past the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz, ending with a realistic replica of Checkpoint Charlie. Along with the wall itself, visitors can also access various multimedia content, including video and audio guides at seven key points describing the building of the wall, important dates in its history, witness accounts and, of course, the climatic events of 1989. The exhibition is a collaboration between Metaversum, the Berlin Senate and media partner Berlin.de.

[Sweden/UK] Stockholm-based Videoplaza have recruited blinkx’s former European Director of Business Development, Gavin Morgan, as its new UK Commercial Director. In his new role, Morgan will be charged with growing the ad server company’s client base and increasing revenue in the UK.

While at AIM-listed blinkx, which claims to be the largest video search engine, Morgan helped forge partnerships with the BBC, MSN, Ask.com, Miniweb, Rambler and Radian6, among others, and so certainly from the outside he looks to be a good catch.

And potentially, a significant loss for blinkx, a company that, let’s just say, we haven’t heard much from of late.

[Spain] A few weeks back, I met with Ícaro Moyano, in Tuenti’s Euro-chic offices – free drinks, comfy sofas, and game room included. I had just had lunch with a friend, who doesn’t have a lot of knowledge about the Web. However, as I mentioned Tuenti in passing, she lit up. “Oh, Tuenti? I know Tuenti. My daughter spends hours online on Tuenti”. Her daughter is 15 and Tuenti is without a doubt, the social network on the tip of every Spanish youth’s tongue. If you’re 15-25 in Spain, you and you’re social life reside and play in Tuenti. Facebook is for the slightly older crowd (sorry Mark!).

Tuenti is a Spanish grown start-up that’s seen exponential growth. Note I haven’t said successful. I believe they have yet to reach that point. But they appear to be on their way.

[Denmark] Despite the recession, ecommerce online is booming, especially in fashion, as consumers are flooding online to bag bargains and fashion sites too are getting better and better at presenting their wares.

Nordic consumers (Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland) have put fashion on the top of their shopping list, with 13 million online shoppers in this region, with double-digit growth rates

Now Danish company Boozt is now benefiting from this upswing as fashion retail brands increasingly find it hard to keep up with the pace of technology. The Malmö-based Boozt, with a Danish CEO, Henrik Haagen, has also now secured €2 million in VC from SunStone Capital.

[Germany] You could say StudiVZ, the German Facebook clone has a few problems on its hands – and some unwelcome publicity.

Back in August Facebook officially became Germany’s biggest social network, increasing reach by more than 50% from March to July 2009 taking it to 6.2 million unique users in Germany. By contrast StudiVZ had 4.28 million uniques (though it continues to claim 6 million registered members). Even it’s spinoff aimed at post-university adults, MeinVZ, is ailing.

Then StudiVZ became the subject of some high profile hacks which showed up its lax attitude to security.

In particular was that by a 20 year old man who used crawler software to harvest detailed user information from all of the “VZ” sites (owned by VZ-Netzwerke), copying 48,000 profiles in just four hours. Bizarely he asked for just €80,000 and threatened to sell the information to gangs in Eastern Europe. The plan didn’t come of however. He turned up to the VZ offices to collect the cash, where the Police (doh!) were waiting.

But today the story just took a sinister turn.

We interrupt normal programming to bring you an issue that’s affecting our ability to create a better tech ecosystem in Europe. At TechCrunch Europe we’ve been trying to help really energize the startup tech community across Europe – which suffers from the difficulty of being disparate and spread out – with a series of organised meetups.

These are unlike casual networking events just in a bar. They feature speakers, lots of pitches from startups (no startups pay to pitch of course, ever) and live video streaming for those who either can’t make it or who want to tune in to get a glimpse of what the tech scene is like in that country. That live feed has gone onto TechCrunch.com and brought hundreds more to visit the place we’re in.

Now, we’ve done this so far in plenty of places, such as Helsinki, Paris, Stockholm, Barcelona and more recently Berlin and Munich. Frankly I didn’t think we’d be doing anything anyone on the local scene hadn’t already done at some stage. However, without exaggeration I’d have to say the reception in each place has been incredible. Clearly there is something about the the TechCrunch brand that brings all the right people together in the one place: entrepreneurs, startups, angels, VCs and other interested parties.

So we’d like to do more – visit more European cities, do more events. But – and here’s the point of this post – we are fighting against Europe’s high venue costs.