The BBC’s new documentary, The Virtual Revolution, is ploughing a few new paths. Not only is it broadcasting an official hashtag every time it appears on a Saturday night (#bbcrevolution is way longer than my suggested #vrev… so much for crowdsourcing, but hey). It’s also allowing anyone to mashup its footage in a Creative Commons kind of way. Very nice of them. Of course, some of the results are, rather than re-imagining the storytelling, designed instead to make fun of the pundits on the show. Darn that InterWeb! This one is by Cassetteboy.

N Building from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.

This is a vision of augmented reality I thought it worth sharing. A person can hold up a mobile to a building and see the realtime Tweets coming from individuals inside, who are tracked by their location. If you’re worried about privacy, this could make your head explode. Other than that it’s completely plausible. Fascinating use of QR codes as well.

This is a guest post by Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur who has gone to the Dark Side of VC. He started his first company in 1999 and was headquartered in London, leaving in 2005 and selling to a publicly traded French services company. He founded his second company in Palo Alto in 2005 and sold this company to Salesforce.com, becoming VP Product Management. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner focusing on early-stage technology companies.

TechCrunch Europe ran an article in November of last year that European startups need to work as hard as those in Silicon Valley and I echoed the sentiment in my post about the need for entrepreneurs to be maniacal about their businesses if one wants to work in the hyper competitive tech world.

During the 2010 GSM World Mobile Congress, TechCrunch Europe will be returning to Barcelona for yet another interactive and live-video-streamed session featuring some of the most innovative and interesting mobile startups and investors in Europe. You can get your tickets to the event here. And by the way, you don;t actually have to be signed up to Mobile World Congress (i.e. pay) to come to our event, which is offsite.

Here’s the programme for the day so far.

The BBC is soon to launch a major new documentary, The Virtual Revolution, on the emergence of the Web and technology into society over the last 20 or so years, featuring Dr. Aleks Krotoski. Here’s an exclusive peek at Tim Berners Lee, founder of the web, on the day it was switched on:

This is a guest post by Daniel Tenner, CTO and co-founder of Woobius, a web-based document sharing tool for architects, engineers and designers. Woobius is his second start-up. Daniel spent four years consulting at Accenture with large investment banks. One day, he decided that there were more exciting and fun things to do in the world, and went start-upping instead. He holds a Masters in Physics from Oxford University. He also blogs at danieltenner.com and on various other sites. This is his take on the iPad.

To much of the geek-sphere, the iPad is somewhat of a disappointment. It’s underwhelming – there’s nothing all that surprising in there, no “oh, and one more thing” to throw some real techno-magick spices into the pot. We saw it coming from a hundred miles away, so now that it’s finally here, there isn’t much surprise left.

I think part of the reason for this is, as usual, that the first round of people interpreting the meaning and purpose of the iPad are all geeks – developers, designers, and assorted Macheads who already own one or two macs at least, and an iphone. I believe the collective “Meh” is absolutely right from this crowd. Yes, the iPad is a nice-to-have, yes, I’ll probably be getting one, but it’s not really all that revolutionary. It doesn’t do anything that we can’t already do with our iPhones and Macs, after all.

But geeks and assorted Macheads constitute a relatively small percentage of the computer-using people around the world. The vast majority of the world is still using Windows PCs. And for them, an iPad may be exactly what they’ve been waiting for. Let me elaborate on this…

We’re taking a short break from our normal coverage to bring you breaking news about the environment.

If you’re a tech company sending out irrelevant press releases to journalists and bloggers, think again, you are killing the planet! Please, we implore you, watch this video.

For all our sakes.

An Inconvenient PR Truth from RealWire on Vimeo.

[France] Following controversial moves in which its CEO went missing from a major conference and initially appeared to have been ousted, the streaming music startup Deezer, has finally clarified the company’s new structure.

In a terse press release, the startup announced the appointment of Axel Dauchez as CEO, replacing former CEO Jonathan Benassaya. Dauchez was the CEO of leading European animation group Moonscoop for nine years. See our previous story for all the juicy background.

Dauchez has his work cut out. There is a viable business model still to be found for the company, which has been struggling to monetize the Deezer Premium and Deezer HQ paid-content models that it launched in November 2009. With over 12 million members, the company has seen fewer than 15,000 register for either of the paid options. Thus, Benassaya will continue to be part of Deezer’s board but will have to yield all strategic responsibilities to Dauchez.

[UK] A quick reality check. Despite the rise of social media, mobile messaging is still very much owned by the carriers in the form of the humble text message.

A new report out today from the Mobile Data Association (MDA) shows that throughout 2009, Brits sent an average of 11 million text messages (SMS) an hour or 265 million text messages per day, up 23% on the year before. Picture messaging (MMS) also saw an increase – up 9% or 1.6 million per day.

Overall, says the MDA, text messaging (and the carriers) are holding their own against competing mobile messaging channels, such as Facebook or Twitter’s DM feature. But why?

A quote from Steve Reynolds, MDA Chairman, is telling: “These statistics show that even with new social media forms of messaging such as Twitter and Facebook, people are using SMS as a social messaging tool because of its simplicity and ubiquity.”

Simplicity, maybe.

Ubiquity, certainly.

Yes, you’ve never probably never heard of the Markit Group. But today it announced a $250m investment by General Atlantic valuing the 6/7 year old company headquartered in London at $3.3 billion. This makes it possibly one of the two or three most successful UK start-ups ever (if you stretch the startup thing to seven years of course, which is an ongoing debate).

I thought it might be worth while highlighing this company, as a contrast to our usual programming. Yes, so it deals with trying to create quality data in the burgeoning credit derivatives market. This is not the realtime web or augmented reality. It’s not that sexy, huh kids.

[UK] Developers start your engines. Hot on the heels of Apple’s iPad announcement, a new fund has been launched by the UK’s Northern Film and Media to help startups in the region to be amongst the first to enter this new market.

NFM are putting aside £40k to invest in iPad app ideas, with submissions open until February 24th. Each idea can receive between £1k and £10k of investment, though funding must be matched by either the company’s own time and resources or a private investor.

The new fund is thought to be the first of its kind – not surprising as the iPad was only announced yesterday and won’t go on sale in the UK until March – and certainly suggests that NFM has its eye on the ball.

Tom Harvey, Chief Executive of Northern Film and Media, says of the new fund: “We want the North East to have a place in the rapidly evolving global content market. We will do whatever it takes to ensure that North East companies have every opportunity to get their products developed, made, distributed and bought on whatever new platforms come along.”

Here’s the full criteria for those wishing to apply.

Mårten Gustaf Mickos, former CEO of MySQL, has joined Index Ventures as Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR).

The news comes four months after the man joined another VC firm, Silicon Valley-based Benchmark Capital, also as EIR.

In a statement, Index Ventures says Mickos will focus on seeking out new investment opportunities within the European technology market, helping to identify and evaluate companies on behalf of the VC firm.

That’s absolutely splendid news for European entrepreneurs and promising startups.

Apple’s European PR team have confirmed the impending arrival, inside two months, of the Apple iPad to European shores.

“The Wi-Fi version will ship worldwide in March,” said a spokesperson, but she added, “Watch this space for Wi-Fi plus 3G.”

In other words it’s clear Apple is still in negotiations with mobile carriers over which will stock the new device.

Unfortunately there is no word yet on international pricing.

[Germany/UK] Mycitydeal, the recently launched German Groupon clone, has secured €4 million in a first round of funding, reports paidContent. The backing comes from Holtzbrinck Ventures, eVenture Capital Partners, and Rocket Internet, amongst others.

The new investment will be used primarily to expand into the UK, says the company. No easy task considering how crowded this space is fast becoming.

Welcome to the Touch revolution. Ahead of the impending news about the iTablet/iPad from Apple today, comes news that a French maker of touch input technology has been acquired by Tyco Electronics for $62 million upfront. Motorola’s venture arm also has an interest in the technology. Will we see the mobile maker create new touch devices? Could be.

The news wraps up a good day for key European venture capital firm Sofinnova Partners, which has exited its stake in its portfolio company Sensitive Object. At the same the VC has announced the closure its sixth fund, Sofinnova Capital VI, raising €260 million.

Sensitive Object has created a touch input technology based on acoustic waves processing. Oh yes, you read that right. Instead of making the screen itself touch sensitive, it analyzes the sound waves that pass through object when somone touches it. Star Trek huh.

Streaming music firm we7 announced at the recent MidemNet event in Cannes that it will launch advertising-free premium services on 1 February, but today it’s released the prices for its two packages. However, the jury is out on whether revenues from premium subscriptions will cover the costs of music licensing, which remains the final ‘last mile’ in making free online music streaming services scale effectively.

We7 Premium will offer unlimited streaming of over four million songs (including personal radio, playlists and sharing) for £4.99 a month. There’s an introductory offer of £3.99 a month for the first 90 days.

We7 Premium Plus adds mobile to the element, making it a direct competitor to Spotify’s mobile offering. We7 will start with iPhone and Android apps, bringing in other smartphones later this year. Crucially they are matching Spotify’s offline mode ability to listen to your playlists without a 3G or Wifi connection. That costs £9.99 a month, the same price as Spotify’s premium product.

Now, there is a way forward here for We7 since Spotify’s free product is still invite-only. We7′s is free-to-air for anyone. But increasingly I think this battle will come down to quality of service, and just, well, user experience.

[UK] Nobody generates hype better than Apple and we Brits lap it up just like everybody else.

Hitwise Intelligence, the web measurement firm, reports that the iTablet, iSlate, Apple Tablet (or whatever) was the 4th most searched for ‘laptop’ in the UK last week. A product which doesn’t even exist yet, although it’s not expected to remain a rumor for much longer. Just in case you haven’t heard, today is the day that Steve Jobs will finally let the cat out of the bag.

I’ve got a feeling something interesting is happening to the way real estate operates online in the UK. Anecdotal evidence is emerging that social networks like Facebook and less conventional startups are perhaps starting to find the chink in the armour of the traditional property listing market here.

In particular, Facebook Marketplace is starting to be used by niche poperty agencies like Pimlico Flats, more successfully than the usual online suspects like Craigslist and Gumtree. That latter site has had problems with other aspects of its site like, having to dump dating because of spam and scams. The same problems are plaguing Craigslist in the UK, and this is something that Pimlico Flats picks up on in a blog post on the subject. The ability to verify Facebook users turns out to weed out the scammers.

At the same time, although Findaproperty and Rightmove remain strong, less conventional sites like Globrix, Nestoria, Zoopla (see below) and even niche social networks like Asmallworld are being used.

[Spain] We covered Tuenti, Spain’s leading youth social network, quite recently when they outnumbered Facebook and Google in pageviews in Spain. Today, Tuenti has done it again.

Only 4 days after releasing their iPhone App, they’re #1 in the Spanish App Store with the company reporting 43,500 activations, and the app receiving an impressive 870 reviews. They climbed up to first place a mere 8 hours after launch. To put that into some perspective, Facebook is currently in 12th place and has been reviewed 414 times.

[Norway] Browser maker Opera this morning released their latest State of the Mobile Web report, this time zooming in on the rising trend of social networking on the go. For the first time, Facebook comes out as the most-visited social network on the mobile Web, but Twitter‘s growth has surged even faster in 2009.

According to the report, unique users of Facebook grew more than 600% during 2009, helping the site surpass VKontakte, the Russian social network that was formerly the most popular among Opera Mini users (the mobile browser is quite popular in Russia and Eastern Europe).

Twitter saw its usage increase more than any other social network, surging more than 2800% in just one year.