[UK] Hyperwords is a Firefox plugin that has already received glowing reviews. It’s a nifty little program that could completely change the user experience online, if it actually manages to be as intuitive as it promises. The selling point is that users can command text online and control the browsing experience in new and interesting ways.

[Denmark] One thing that’s sometimes overlooked on the tech scene is content. But whether you like it or not, content is what makes the web go around. Or without it the internet environment would clearly be a bit less interesting. Wordy is a start up that among other things wants to step in and get rid of all the rambling blog posts out there. It’s a service that allows anyone producing text online to access professional copy-editors 24/7.

[UK] Mendeley wants to be the Last.fm for research papers. The company offers a free academic desktop software for managing and sharing research papers and a website where you can back up the data and connect to like-minded researchers. For anyone working on a thesis this might seem like a godsend.

The service automatically extracts data from research papers and can also generate bibliographies.

[US] Superfeedr wants to help you out with all your feed needs and hope to be “the lube for the real-time web”. Interesting. The service promises to collect up to a 1000 feeds for free and push them to users in real time, which in reality means less than 15 minutes.

The service turns feeds into one standardised format and users can add any atom or RSS feeds they want, but also follow Flickr, Twitter and similar services.

[Ukraine] LiqPay is a startup that wants to compete with Paypal by allowing its users to withdraw and send money with their mobile phones for free.

The service allows users to send money from Visa or MasterCard cards to an account linked to a mobile phone number. Money can then be withdrawn or transferred by sending SMS invitations to clients, customers or banks.

[US] Are you constantly attached to your iPhone? Do you like to stay fit? Why not combine the two? That’s the thought behind Fitnesskeeper an app for smart phones that allows runners, cyclists and other outdoorsy sporty types to track their process and training.

The app is an extension of RunKeeper that does pretty much the same thing, only for runners. If RunKeeper’s success is anything to go by, then things are looking good. The app was received well and has been downloaded over 900 000 times since it was launched in June 2008.

[Denmark] Sports predictions is a service that might make all the football geeks out there salivate a bit. The site hopes to attract sports geeks and betting fans by promising to deliver scientific premier league predictions.

[UK] Kukunu is a London based start up that aims to replace traditional travel agents. The founders Gerald Goldstein and Itamar Lesuisse wants to help people build their holidays online, with the tag-line ”travel is better when you plan it yourself”. Most reasonably tech-savvy people already know this and can find their way around all those price comparison and hotel review sites out there. However Kukunu wants to offer a broader service than their competitors and guess their way to all your travel needs.

[France] Paris-based Pearltrees has been catching interest around the web the last few days not least because a gaggle of influential Silicon Valley bloggers have descended on Paris for Le Web, but mainly because of its interesting model for visually mapping how people collect and share information on the Web. But today the startup opens the kimono on its full system.

They will announce two new things today: Twitter synchronization (enabling a user to create a pearl automatically from Twitter and to tweet automatically from their new Pearltrees), Pearltrees search, Real time discussion and connection.

The other new aspect announced today on stage at Le Web is the Pearltrees Social System.

[UK] Twitter and politics go hand in hand in the UK. There isn’t a news, politics or current affairs TV show that doesn’t mention Twitter or feature the ‘tweets’ of its viewers. It seems appropriate then that British political anoraks should have their own Twitter-powered search engine, which is exactly what London-based startup Tweetminster have built.

Tweetminster Search doesn’t just look for tweets that feature keywords related to UK politics, however. It aims to be a lot smarter than that. To begin with, not all tweets are treated equal. Tweetminster Search is based on an index of known political twitterers, made up politicians, news sources, bloggers and the wider-public. The index will grow over time too as it seeks out further connections by analysing the conversations taking place between its initial index of users and those that they converse with.

But perhaps most ambitiously, Tweetminster claims to be able to measure sentiment on any political issue, as well as how opinions have changed over time.

[Germany] Two and a half years after Facebook, its German clone StudiVZ follows the US social network’s most successful move by adding support for third-party applications.

The 15.7m users of StudiVZ and its siblings MeinVZ and SchülerVZ can now play games from Plinga or Wooga, sing online Karaoke with Mikestar or order Italian food from Pizza.de. After 12 months of engineering and a trial with a music video app since October, nine apps are available as of Monday and several hundreds are in the making. The next step will be the implementation of a payment system in early next year, so that users can fork out money for in-game goods, pay for pizzas or make charity donations to the fund raising portal Spendino.

Online shopping has come along in leaps and bounds since 1994 when the first e-commerce transaction actually occurred — but as dotcom bombs UrbanFetch and Kozmo proved, delivery can be the most painful point in the ecommerce chain. Enter Shutl, which today launches an on-demand delivery platform that aggregates transportation carriers. Think of it as cloud computing for the logistics industry, focusing primarily on local same-day courier firms.

Launching in London first, the service is targeted at multi-channel retailers and their customers, promising delivery within 90 minutes of purchase in urban areas — and all this at a lower cost to retailers than their standard delivery charge. The company is keeping quiet on delivery time or cost if you happen to live in the ‘burbs or the boondocks.

The Shutl platform will initially plug into retailers’ websites, enabling the retailer to offer its customers immediate home delivery of goods, delivered directly from their local stores. All the couriers have GPS units and this data is aggregated so customers can watch their delivery en route in real-time on a map.

[FRANCE] Another startup pitching on their home turf is Storific, which is all about getting companies and customers talking to each other using the de facto social media avenues we know as Twitter and Facebook.

It’s your classic ‘opt-in for great rewards’ model that drives the plethora of email newsletter services which most companies still rely on as their mainstay of direct communication with consumers. In the social media space, this communication loop is scattered and disorganized, which is the problem the company is trying to fix. Co-Tweet provides a similar service which focuses only on Twitter.

[FRANCE] Sokoz is a quick-fire real-time, reverse auction platform in beta that makes bidding for online goods dangerously fun for the shopping-addicted. The site is available in French and English.

Each auction starts with a top price which begins to fall until either the reserve price is reached or all units of the product are passed. Like a shopping channel TV show, live sales begin at a scheduled time — you snooze, you lose.

[IRELAND] CloudSplit, a real-time analytics tool working towards private beta, helps businesses understand where their cloud computing costs are going and hopefully saves them from the shock of a massive bill when the PUT and GET requests come thick and fast. This is pretty exciting stuff, when you consider that Amazon itself doesn’t have a solution like this for its own customers.

You may remember this company from their pitch at TechCrunch50. Based in Dublin, Ireland, and founded by Joe Drumgoole and Eamon Leonard, the service has VCs and cloud computing customers agog with the potential for cost savings on this essential operating expense.

[RUSSIA] Here’s something that ought to get personal productivity geeks a little bit hot under the collar. Task.ly, not yet launched, approaches to-do management with the same re-engineering focus that Google Wave’s creators took to email.

The prototyped product looks very exciting. It incorporates some fairly obvious features that make a task management app kick butt, like having a desktop-like user interface even though it’s web-based, supporting SMS reminders and communication with the app via IM, and having an accompanying iPhone app.

Task.ly co-founder and developer Dmitry Gorshkov says there are three principles shaping the company’s ideal for a truly fluid and unique user experience:

[FRANCE] French startup Tigerlily offers a white label Facebook Page management system that makes community management a heck of a lot easier than Facebook intended.

In essence, the tool set encompasses flexible contest and quiz widgets to customize a Facebook Page, and is targeted at media groups, large brands and their agencies and marketers. The FPMS uses ‘Share’ buttons on the individual items, encouraging conversation around posts.

[FRANCE/US] Stribe is a plug and play service to instantly create a social network on any website — not unlike competitors Ning, socialthing and meebo. It was founded in March 2008 by Kamel Zeroual, Gaël Delalleau and Demba Diallo, who launched Stribe at TechCrunch50 in September this year.

The B2B offer is simple — site administrators can copy and paste a bit of javascript, and hey presto, they have a customizable, freely branded social network for their sites accessed via a small footprint toolbar that pops up at the bottom of the screen. The differentiation happens on the Stribe network service, which allows a site’s community to interact with other communities on all Stribe-enabled sites.

Stribe’s business model is based on selling premium modules including analytics such as the Stribe Back-Office, which provides all key metrics on the site’s community including social metrics, breakdown of users and their engagement times, comment analytics, metrics on ‘hidden activity’ including private chats and messages, and the community’s overall activity.

[UK] With the mass of social networking sites and tools out there comes the dire need for aggregators to unite the threads and bring order to the chaos.

One of the latest such offerings is FriendBinder, an aggregator launched in beta in September that combines all your friends activity across multiple social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, Last.fm and RSS/Atom. Videos and pictures are displayed in-line, making the overall experience tidier and more coherent than a raft of freshly spawned tabs would.

FriendBinder also supports cross-posting of status updates and replies/comments/likes. The tool is available in desktop and mobile web flavours, with other options coming in the future. Founder Richard Cunningham promised an exciting new announcement, and he made it today: FriendBinder now offers searchable trending topics from your friends across all their social networks:

[Ireland] The top 50 technology start-ups in Ireland are now being ranked and tracked weekly online, receiving a score of 1-100 based on performance, press coverage and other variables.

In a joint effort with Silicon Valley-based tracking company YouNoodle, the Irish Times newspaper is producing the Irish Times Tech 50 feature, posted on its business website, where the 50 companies’ weekly ups and downs can be followed.

Top of the pile for the first two weeks is mobile social media software company NewBay, founded by entrepreneur and former Baltimore Technologies executive Paddy Holahan. The company includes most of the largest European mobile operators among its customers, including Telefonica, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and France Telecom.