[France] Paris-based Glam One, not to be confused with US company Glam Media, has rolled out two new verticals. GlamZic.com and GlamSport.com will target “independent professionals” in the worlds of music and sport. This brings the total number of Glam One offerings to 7, although the company is at pains to point out that additional verticals “can be deployed in under 48 hours from start to finish”, which struck me as a little odd. Build it and they will come rarely works out on the web.

Each vertical site offers a mix of social networking, branding opportunities, productivity tools and ecommerce. Or at least as far as I can tell. The sites are exclusively in french. Oh and there’s realtime search too courtesy of a partnership with Collecta. When I checked out GlamSport, however, there didn’t seem to be much going on, although admittedly it has only just launched. It could also be a reflection of the company’s pile ‘em high strategy.

Twitter’s Retweet functionality, which has caused so much consternation appears to have disappeared not long after it was introduced last month.

The Retweets area in the right side bar has gone and the RT function button on people’s profiles has gone as well.

The design of the Retwet feature created huge confusion over how RTs were attributed, plus different clients treated RTs differently. Retweet of these retweets were even worse.

MOG may well be hitting a sweet spot with its All Access service, but it’s only available in the United States for now. Its most obvious competitor, MySpace Music, was too (apart from Australia and New Zealand) until a minute ago when the company made its official debut in the United Kingdom just over a year and two months after it was launched stateside.

Looks like the Telegraph’s sources were only a couple of months off, ultimately.

Anyway, MySpace users in the UK can now enjoy the same free, ad-supported service our American, Australian and Kiwi friends have had for a while: fully licensed audio and video content from major and indie artists that can be streamed on the social network for free, personalized music players and user & artist playlisting features, in addition to monetization opportunities and access to analytics and charts tools for all artists.

[Turkey] Yesterday Google published its Zeitgeist 2009 and the fastest rising search terms across the globe caught my attention. I wasn’t at all surprised to see Michael Jackson, Facebook and Twitter featured. Or even Tuenti. But Sanalika which sits just below Twitter and above New Moon.

I checked many blogs covering the Zeitgeist 2009 and a couple of them never even mentioned Sanalika, while others admitted that they didn’t know what it was, including Robin Wauters writing on TechCrunch:

No, I don’t know why so many people searched for a free torpedo, nor do I know what a sanalika or a dantri.com.vn is, but lists never lie so we’ll take their word for it.

Yes, I too was surprised to see that Sanalika made the list but that’s because it’s a Turkish startup!

[France] Google and Yahoo have both published their most searched terms of 2009. TechCrunch already took a detailed look at the US rankings, but now let’s see what we can learn from the top search terms in France for 09…

[UK] Ipadio has announced that its live phonecasting service – not dissimilar to AudioBoo – will be utilised by a newly launched Facebook app as part of Sport England’s campaign to get more people to play sport in the run up to the London 2012 Olympics.

The new Facebook tool, dubbed ‘Community Sport Hub’, enables sports governing bodies to “engage” with the 20 million plus people who use the social networking site in the UK, and in particular to organise and market grassroots sporting events. Ipadio will be used by the Hub to offer live commentary and other audio experiences, such as opinion pieces and interviews, through the ability to broadcast live from a standard phone over the web or by streaming and/or uploading recordings using ipadio’s iPhone and android apps.

[UK] As the saying goes, there are no original ideas – only original people. It’s this concept that drives the latest music-related startup to come out of London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout‘, that concentration of tech startups around the Old Street area.

WhoSampled.com has been in public beta for a year, and officially launches today. Founded by Nadav Poraz, the community-driven site focuses on sampled music and cover versions providing side-by-side embedded video for comparison. WhoSampled users can buy the songs or albums featured on the site, either as a download, CD or vinyl. Interestingly, most people buy the original track, rather than the new one.

The 3rd annual Crunchies Awards, co-hosted with GigaOm and VentureBeat, honor the startups, products and entrepreneurs in the tech scene today.

There are 18 award categories, any any company can be nominated, but it will be of interest to European startups that they have a good chance if they nominate themselves in “Best International StartUp”. Nominations are open until midnight PST December 4, 2009 or 9am CET time. And you can nominate your own company.

[UK] Channel 4’s 4iP fund will tomorrow announce seven new investments totaling £500,000 as part of its mission to kick-start new investment in public service-oriented digital media. However, while the full list hasn’t yet been made public, TechCrunch Europe has acquired details of two of the investments. GymFu, an iPhone app designed to encourage people to get fit, and School Report Card, a new web service that should help parents make better informed decisions about which school to send their children. Here’s what else we’ve learnt.

[Sweden] Oskar Stål has joined Spotify as its new CTO after the departure of the original CTO Andreas Ehn, who left to pursue his own startup. I guess people slightly forget that next year Spotify is actually going to be 4 years old, even though it only launched publicly at the end of last year. (Long time in private beta).

Stål comes from the mobile transaction company mBlox, where he’s been for the last eight years, growing from a five-person start-up into a global business.

By hiring a CTO with deep mobile experience it’s clear Spotify sees the mobile as the key supporting plank in its structure. Last night I spoke to a Spotify contact who told me that since they launched the Symbian version of Spotify, the service has “gone crazy.” Make of that what you will. Symbian, as a platform used by Nokia’s non-smartphones, is of course a great deal more mainstream, especially in Europe, than the iPhone or Android.