Every year there’s an “off broadway” event during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona which is always way more focused around startups and new applications. Although MWC has this year created an entire, echoing hall called AppsPlanet, the Mobile Premier Awards organised by dotopen usually surfaces most of the best new apps largely because of its symbiotic relationship with the 75 MobileMonday chapters worldwide and mobile entrepreneurs, and because its free to enter for startups. This year pulled in 600 start up submissions globally. Back at MWC you only find mobile apps that can afford stands, like, er, Skype.

Here’s a run down of the winners at the MPAs today.

[Germany] The txtr Reader, Germany’s answer to the Kindle, is to get its own app store.

The Berlin-based company has announced an SDK so that developers can start writing apps for the eReader device, which, like the Kindle, supports over-the-air downloads and is powered by a version of Linux.

Inevitably, there’s the carrot of monetization too for both third-party developers and mobile operators who, presumably, txtr hopes it can cut deals with to offer the device subsidised with a lengthy contract to end users. Third-party apps will be sold through txtr’s application store alongside eBooks and other content – although, initially, apps will be given more limited distribution via txtr’s online developer platform.

[UK] 7digital has updated their BlackBerry app to include integration with Last.fm.

Users of the MP3 download store and media player can now link their Last.fm account to the app, enabling them to ‘scrobble’ tracks played on their mobile phone and send listening data to the Last.fm website in real-time.

As a result, the ‘Now Playing’ status on a user’s Last.fm profile is constantly updated and the music streaming service’s music recommendations will, of course, also improve.

Kiva is p2p-lending site that facilitates loans between lenders in wealthy countries and entrepreneurs in developing countries. Now a new startup aims to bring a simialr model to startups in the developed world but with an investment focus. The idea here is to fix the current inefficiencies of private seed funding for web and mobile companies, especially in markets outside of the hothouse that is Silicon Valley (i.e. Europe and Asia).

Grow VC is a new community funding model for technology startups. Here’s how it works: Grow VC will pool 75 per cent of membership fees into a community fund that gets invested back into ‘promising startups’ which are members of the platform. The fund is managed by Grow VC but all the investment decisions are left to members who determine how to invest their portion of the fund into other startup companies that they feel have the most potential. The most successful decision makers get financially rewarded when the community fund begins earning a return on investment. So, if you promote the best companies you make moola.

Joining Grow VC, and the basic features such as building a person profile, are free. Premium features come with subscriptions ranging from $20 to $140 per month, depending on how much money the startup company is seeking or how much the investor is looking to invest. For unlimited service investments, the monthly subscription fee is $90 per month. The fund is aimed at startups that need $10,000 to $1 million USD.

[Finland] Last year we wrote about dazzboard, the public beta of a browser-based media manager that claims to have all the features of iTunes without locking you down to Apple’s warm but sometimes stiflingly closed world.

The product from Finnish startup Linkotec has now received $1.5 million in seed funding to boost growth and expand globally. The investment round was led by HTT Sixgen (a Finnish, family owned, VC) and was followed by additional funding from another Finnish VC, Veraventure.

As with so many Finnish startups, there is usually an ex-Nokia person hovering around somewhere. In this case it’s former Nokia Ventures head Timo Teimonen is joining the board. It’s also adding Mats Therman, partner at HTT Sixgen, and Tero Salonen, a serial entrepreneur and CEO and co-founder of Dazzboard.

Nice timing guys. France’s Stupeflix has just released a romantic-theme on their video production platform as a digital alternative to the paper Valentine. The company’s platform – similar to that of Animoto but with additional Twitter and Flickr features – allows users to transform their digital photos and media into videos. See our previous coverage of this interesting startup here.

While the Valentine theme is naturally oriented towards the consumer market, the company’s main revenue model lies in addressing the digital marketing needs of businesses. Stupeflix has already seen online real estate leaders HomeFinder and MyNewPlace put their platform to use. Additionally, virtual tourism site Previsite and Orange’s MemoryLife service also make use of their technology.

After an incredibly successful 2009 and the opening of their German office in October, France’s MyFab officially announced its US launch this week. The company that offers premium products at the manufacturer’s price – including modern furniture and jewelry – has set-up shop in California.

Kara Parsons, formerly a Macys.com executive for 8 years, has been nominated to lead the company’s US division. MyFab’s US office is based in San Francisco with a small logistics team in Los Angeles. The company plans to open an additional branch in New York and open several additional international offices by summer of this year.

Update. Paperchase’s PR spokesperson just told us that the design was bought from an outside design agency and they are trying to get to the bottom of this issue. They added they were “deeply concerned” about what has happened and will be issuing a statement shortly.

As we saw with the recent Eurostar debacle, ignoring Twitter can be a big mistake. News travels very fast on Twitter (and Facebook, let’s not forget) and brands and companies ignore it at their peril.

The latest today is that “Paperchase” is trending in the UK (Update: it is now trending globally) because an artist alleges that the stationary retailer had one of their designs copied for an in-house product (see images below, used on artist’s site).

[Spain] With the rise of consumer-facing cloud telephone services, such as Google Voice and Ribbit, the call management services of traditional mobile operators are starting to look a bit long in the tooth. How long, therefore, before they roll out rival offerings of their own?

Not long, hopes Spanish MVNO fonYou, which today announced that it will begin licensing its Online Mobile Telephony solution to mobile network operators.

[Germany/UK] It didn’t take long. Square, the iPhone credit card transaction startup co-founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, already has a European competitor.

Like Square, Berlin and London-based iCharge wants to democratise the ability to accept credit card payments in person through an add-on device for smartphones and the startup’s accompanying application and service that taps into established payment gateways. The result is that any sized retailer – from someone self-employed, an independent shop owner or small trader – can take payment by credit card using just an iPhone or handset running Google’s Android.

It’s practically an identical pitch to Square, although iCharge looks to be slightly further behind. The self-funded company, founded by “experienced serial entrepreneurs and experts from the credit card industry” sometime in 2009, will run a limited trial with select retailers this summer. A wider launch isn’t scheduled until the third quarter of 2010. Square on the other hand is currently in private beta and plans to launch in early 2010.

Music giant EMI is to deliver its premium music videos onto the platforms run by DailyMotion, the French-based ‘European YouTube’.

Content will go onto the main site, mobile, iPhone app and the DailyMotion channel on Internet-connected TVs. The deal covers all EMI’s labels, and the labels represented by EMI Label Services and EMI’s Caroline Distribution unit.

Artists featured from April will include Coldplay, Katy Perry, Robbie Williams and David Guetta. Dailymotion will deliver ads against the videos to all three screens.

Paris-based Dailymotion has over 65 million unique monthly visitors, according to comScore. It raised another €15 million in financing late last year. The venture recently turned profitable, but that additional investment was required to fund its steep growth. It expects a 50% increase in turnover in 2009 and 2010. DailyMotion says it currently serves 1 billion video views per month.

[Russia] Last week we brought you knews that Ukrainian startups are starting to really motor by arrange events where they “crash test” their startups amongst easchother. Over in nearby Russia, the same is starting to happen. The 1st Startup Crash Test event took place on 6 February in St. Petersburg. As it was covered before Startup Crash Test (SCT) is a monthly event aimed at “stress testing” web-related startups’ market strategy, business model, distribution, roadmap, etc. It’s emerged in Kiev, the Ukraine and SCT will be now held every month in St. Petersburg. Moscow will probably follow soon as well.

Mobile marketing solutions provider MADS has partnered with Netbiscuits, which offers a B2B web software platform for the creation, publication, and monetization of mobile websites.

In essence, MADS’ mobile marketing platform will be integrated with Netbiscuits mobile website publishing platform, which enables the latter’s publishers to monetize their sites utilizing mobile ad campaigns via the MADS network, which self-reportedly includes over 20 global ad sales agencies.

With Mobile World Congress (MWC) almost upon us, the mobile industry is already geared up to set us on a path for the next year.

New handsets will be announced and pre-announced, partnerships forged, services and apps unveiled, and future technologies demoed, giving us a pretty good idea of where the next twelve months will take us.

But what if we zoomed out quite a bit more and took a bit of a shot in the dark to try to predict the mobile trends for the next decade.

[Germany] Berlin-based SponsorPay has acquired Hamburg-based GratisPay, creating Europe’s leading provider of advertisement-based payment systems.

The acquisition means that the combined property covers the monetization of the majority of the major online and social game publishers across Europe, including Gameforge, Bigpoint, InnoGames and Frogster.

It’s also an aggressive move on the part of SponsorPay, backed by Team Europe Ventures, considering that both startups were only founded in the past year.

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As I sit here listening to Benjamin Cohen’s radio documentary about how he nearly became a teenage dotcom millionaire, I’m reminded of how tedious us journalists all found him back in the late 90s. We don’t now of course – now that’s he’s grown up and actually turned out to be a pretty good tech reporter for Channel 4 News, and quite an OK guy, I’d quite happily have a pint with him.

But the story of how he became a teenage dotcom (paper-only) millionaire and finally fell to earth has something to tell us about the nature of startups and Europe and why we must finally kill off the myth of the Dotcom Hero CEO. In 2010 there is no more room for dumbass Internet heroes. From now on we must focus on products, teams and businesses. Sure there will always be “the story” about a startup, or how it started with one person’s idea. But as soon as that becomes their focus that are quite simply dead. Ideas are two-a-penny, it’s execution that counts, and you can’t execute anything totally on your own.

[France/Israel] Sparkeo places its bets on advanced visual learning, offering a portable video platform specifically designed for experts from any field to create, distribute and monetize their expertise online. Why? Frederic Ankin, Spakeo’s CEO, argues for the need for simple video monetization to enable people to sell their knowledge on the Web. “Currently, the highest quality end content is not online since the experts have no motivation to give it away,” he says. And I guess he’s right.

We recently covered Sofatutor, also playing in the online education field out of Germany. The big difference between Sparkeo and other how-to and expertise video portals (ie. Mindbites, Sclipo, Edufire) , is that Sparkeo is not a portal, but rather a stand alone video player that users can embed anywhere, bringing their paying audience and students to any site, blog or major social network of their choice.

[France] Ok listen-up kids. Today is “Safer internet Day”. Got that? So put that web browser down right now before you take someone eye out.

But seriously folks – the day is organized each year by Insafe, a “European network of Awareness Centres” promoting safe, responsible use of the Internet and mobile devices to young people. Yes if that sounds like it’s co-funded by the European Union’s Safer Internet Programme, that’s because it is. In case you can’t guess, the idea is to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people. So far so do-gooder.

This year, the topic is “Think B4 U post”. (It reminds me of think before you tweet).

In a few years, it has become important for young people to understand the impact of their online presence, their actions on the web. But in all seriousness, it’s our role – that of startups, social networks, social media etc – not to forget that children and teenagers can use our new wonderful tools in a way they were not thought of: posting pictures on Facebook, meeting new people within communities, posting videos from their mobile phone… all these features are both wonderful but also potentially dangerous when not used correctly. Especially now that location based services are taking off.

[Austria] Social travel guide tripwolf has released an updated iPhone app that ramps up the company’s freemium offering with the introduction of in-app purchases for destinations where tripwolf has more in-depth information.

The premium content is garnered from the Vienna-based startup’s existing partnerships with travel guide publishers Footprints and Marco Polo (a subsidiary of Mair Dumont), which is supplemented with user-generated content from the tripwolf community.

Additionally, the iPhone app offers a bunch interactive features, including photo-uploads, the ability to vote for locations, write reviews, search for points of interest, and add new locations or places to the tripwolf travel guides.