Ok, so we’ve whittled down the applicants for the Pitch session of ChristmasCrunch next week. But as we’ve had a lot of entrants this time round we’ve decided to embrace the spirit of the season and give everyone a shot. Get your tickets for the event here. And if you want to come to the evening only grab a party-only ticket.

We’ve dividing the pitches into two sections. Seven three minute pitches (plus Q&A) from startups specifically in the ‘realtime’ space. The second section features 12 one minute pitches from a bunch of startups we’re calling the Free For All Pitch – some are related to realtime, some are not. Hey, it’ll keep things interesting. As is out policy, startups never pay to pitch at our events and get a free ticket for the person pitching.

Here are the main 3 min. pitches:

[France] French startup Silentale, which we reviewed at its launch in September, has added LinkedIn Contacts for users of its service which effectively backs up all your messaging in several platforms, including SMS.

[Ireland] Irish startup ExSafe reckons it has a solution to the problem recently experienced by Duncan Bannatyne of Dragon’s Den fame.

Bannatyne was reportedly one of 500 UK customers affected by a security breach at Anglo Irish Bank when an employee accidentally emailed details of €12.5 billion worth of transactions to an unintended recipient. The spreadsheet in question was sent as an email attachment via an iPhone, something that’s unlikely to have occurred had the bank adopted a cloud-based solution for securely sharing documents, says ExSafe, such as the company’s own offering.

[UK] Timed perfectly to coincide with the Copenhagen Climate Summit, AlertMe has launched the Swingometer, a very simple visualisation tool that gives an overview of its customers’ home energy use.

The UK company sells a home energy kit and accompanying subscription-based web service that lets users measure and track their home’s energy use online by retrofitting hardware similar to so-called ‘smart meters’. The service also ties into Google Powermeter, the search giant’s own home energy monitoring tool, which opened its doors to Brits in October.

[France] Wikio has announced on its blog (in French) that Ebuzzing has joined the “Wikio communication group”. You’ve probably heard of Wikio – you know, a kind’ve competitor to Digg and Technorati in France which expanded to Europe. But you’ve probably not heard of Ebuzzing, which is focused on France. Wikio and Ebuzzing are in fact two major players for French bloggers:

[Germany] Buying clubs remain a hot item. Last week we reported on acquisition talks between Amazon and France-based Vente-Privee, said to be valued at over 2 billion euros. And now we learn that Germany’s Brands4friends has expanded into Austria. The buying club already claims 2.5 million members in its home country and says that since launch 50,000 Austrians have joined the site.

As with other buying clubs, Brands4friends offers members access to major fashion brands at hugely discounted prices, driven by the overstock market. The company says that Austrian members can save up to 70% on top international brands. Brands4friends won’t be opening a local office in Austria, however, (initially at least) but has assigned ten of its 200 employees based in Berlin to support the Austrian site, including sourcing offers from Austrian fashion brands.

[Spain] BBVA, Spain’s second largest bank, is offering the chance for three startups to win up to 100,000 euros in funding. And unlike last year, its Open Talent competition is accepting international entries. The project that receives the most “community votes” will also get to travel and take part in an entrepreneur event in the US. That said, the deadline for entries is just 7 days away – December 15th – so interested companies will need to get their applications in quickly.

[Germany] Twinity, the virtual world that mirrors the real world, has finally launched a beta of virtual London. And if mirroring the real world includes replicating London’s reputation for delayed construction works, then Berlin-based Metaversum, the company behind Twinity, is doing just fine.

The virtual world, which distinguishes itself from the likes of Second Life by building exact replicas of well known cities, launched back in 2006 and while London was always planned to follow Berlin and Singapore, it feels like it’s been a long time coming. And tough luck if you are on a Mac – the 3D browser only supports Windows XP and Vista.

Even now, virtual London is incomplete. Initially, users are only able to visit London’s famous Soho district, “stretching virtually from Oxford Street down to Trafalgar Square including the world-famous Piccadilly Circus and China Town.” However, Oxford Street in particular is at the heart of London’s shopping region and the home to many famous brands. And that’s probably the point. Virtual worlds are all about business and Twinity is no exception.

Last week I met with Stephan Uhrenbacher, the founder and chairman of Qype, the European startup which competes most directly with Yelp in local reviews and listings. He revealed to me some exclusive information about where Qype is now.

In Jan 2009 Qype had 8m uniques across Europe. As with Yelp, Qype members evaluate businesses, places or services such as bars, restaurants, stores, petrol stations, nurseries, doctors, pet shops or sports clubs. Today it has 17.7m uniques and the split is now: 5 million in germany, 4 million in the UK and 4 million in France. Spain is on 1m uniques. It now has reviews of 450,000 businesses in Europe from over 50,000 cities. Currently Qype has more than 10,000 businesses each month that sign up across whole network.

[London] Zemanta, a service that helps bloggers find related content as they write, launches a new version of its service later today. As well as a general makeover designed to make its widget lighter and faster, the big change is that Zemanta is opening up its recommendation engine to no longer just include so-called ‘professional media’ but also content from its community of users. This, says the company, will create a level playing field, giving community content the same chance of being featured as more established sources as long as it’s deemed relevant. However, it’s not yet clear if all community content will make it into Zemanta’s index.

For those that do, however, being regularly featured as a ‘related content’ source could drive significant traffic for a small blog, and presumably that’s Zemanta’s gamble. While it risks diluting the quality of those links, it gives joe-blogger another reason to keep using the service.

[Belgium]Clear2Pay, an electronic payments company, has secured €50 million to fund its next stage of growth and potential strategic acquisitions. The investment was led by the New-York based Aquiline Capital Partners and previous investors.

This investment is taking place in the context of the sale of all shares held by Belgium VC Gimv to Aquiline. The sale has a positive impact of €2.2 million (EUR 0.10 per share) on Gimv’s last published equity value at 30 September 2009.

[Spain] This week has been an exciting one here in Spain, to say the least. The rights of citizens online have been discussed all week in the press. Much as in other European countries, there has been a lot of discussion regarding illegal downloads, intellectual property rights and file sharing on P2P platforms. Our Spanish government, pressured by major music labels, prominent personalities in the entertainment business as well as the polemic of the General Society of Authors and Editors (SGAE) has been lobbying hard on what it sees as the “problem”.

But this week the Ministry of Culture set off a cultural and political bomb. It proposes to create a Commission of Intellectual Property enabling it to shut down any website for infringing copyright (such as sites with links to torrents) without judicial intervention.

[Sweden] It’s not looking good for the pirates in Sweden. The usually pirate loving country that spawned The Pirate Bay and the world’s first Pirate Party, is now pursuing illegal file-sharers like it’s 1790 and the outlaws need to be gunned down.

A recent court order has forced ISP Teliasonera to choose between either coughing up 750,000 SEK (about 72,000 euro) or giving out the names and addresses of the founders of torrent site Swetorrents. The verdict has been made possible because of the so called IPRED law, which was passed in April this year. According to the law, ISPs must give out contact details of file-sharers to copyright holders if they ask for them. Interestingly enough, Internet traffic in Sweden dropped by 33 percent shortly after the law was passed.

[Germany] Cologne’s streaming video startup make.tv, which filed for insolvency in September, can apparently avoid the deadpool. The company has been given a second chance with new partners and will survive, says founder Andreas Constantin Meyer.

Two weeks ago, he countered rumours via a blog post with a defiant WE WILL CONTINUE! Now we hear that make.tv’s insolvency will not be its end because Meyer is in negotiations “with interested parties and partners”. The talks seem so advanced that Meyer says with certainty that make.tv will continue in someway or another but conveniently doesn’t go into details.

It’s all over the news in Russia this morning: Mail.ru, the leading Internet portal in the country, will reportedly be replacing Russian search king Yandex as its default search provider and hand over the keys to Google again.

While nothing has been official confirmed by either party yet, the information comes from solid sources, according to multiple publications.

[France] US retailing giant Amazon is in deep and secret negotiations with Vente-Privee, the French private sales club which has taken the ecommerce and fashion industries by storm, our sources say.

We asked Xavier Court, marketing director at Vente-Privee, on the record if Amazon had acquired Vente-Privee. His response was “Very flattering but not true at all.”

However, our sources say that although the two companies have not yet agreed anything, they are in fact negotiating a price close to 2 billion Euros, or $3.01 billion. In October we learned that Vente-Privee was looking for a sale of between $2 billion and $4 billion.

[Turkey] We recently previewed the upcoming put.io cloud storage service which fetches media files and lets you stream them immediately.

The service has created a lot of buzz, because it’s able to keep redundant copies of your files which you can access from anywhere with a browser, including files for the iPhone and PS3. These can be fetched automatically from bittorrent networks, FTPs, direct download links, Rapidshare links or basic http authenticated links. And you can stream your downloaded files instantly with an appropriate player. For example, Divx Web Player for DivX files. Cleary it has the potential to create something of a media storm. As one commenter on our last post put it “will probably make the RIAA and MPAA pop a blood vessel.” Yes, some may well use this to stream torrented movies. But of course, it’s perfectly possible to use the service for entirely legitimate means like storing videos of your family events. Welcome to the Internet. Imageshack (a US company) downloads torrents without apparent legal problems.

This week we have Christ Dunst, Co-founder of Skillslog.com pitching in our elevator. Skillslog call themselves “A professional development tool that focuses on what you know rather than who you know”.

Basically they are trying to cut down the recruitment time it takes for employers to find the right person for the job, so instead of trawling through loads of CVs for specific skills, Skillslog.com can match the talent to the recruiter based on very specific, self-rated details entered by the user.

[France] Touch screens are definitely in at the moment – the iPhone has seen to that – and they don’t look like going away anytime soon. That’s certainly Motorola’s bet. Its venture capital arm, Motorola Ventures, has made an undisclosed investment in Paris startup Sensitive Object, which is described as “a leader in multi-touch platforms and natural user interface[s]“.

The 20-plus strong company has developed technology that enables any surface to be given touch capabilities. It does this by leveraging acoustics to analyse sound waves departing from the point of a touch, offering an alternative to traditional ‘resistive’ touch screens, which require pressure, or ‘capacitive’ screens, which utilise the static electricity omitted by a finger. Sensitive Object’s approach is said to offer better performance and at less cost, which is presumably why Motorola thinks it could help give them the edge.

[UK] Social mobile location startup Rummble has gradually been updating its service over the last few weeks to meet the oncoming competition from new kids of the block like Foursquare. As we prefaced recently in the Summer, today it’s launched a new Android app for its service (download here). Rummble has had an iPhone app for a while and a Windows Mobile version is in the works.

Furthermore it has also implemented the Twitter’s new Geotagging API which provides accessible location context to tweets from Rummble check-ins and reviews. This works with new versions of twitter clients like Tweetie, Tweetdeck and Seesmic Web, which launched support for the Twitter Geotagging API earlier this week. That means Rummble users can geotag tweets with their current location (if they choose to share it) and any venue in the world. This real-time geo-data is consumable by everyone on Twitter, regardless of whether they are signed up to Rummble or not.

This is one of the first social apps (outside of twitter clients) to use geo tweets. It adds geo lat/long into tweets for Twitter’s Location-api for status updates posted out of Rummble. This covers the user’s location, check-ins and tweets posted of Rummble reviews of a bar or cafe etc. Tweets from the Gowalla and Foursquare aps are geotagged if the setting has been switched on in twitter settings.