[Switzerland] Would you be comfortable with storing your passwords in the cloud? That’s the hope of DataInherit, from Swiss banking security specialists DSwiss, which launched a new password ‘safe’ that lets you store your most important passwords on the company’s servers.

Along with the advantage of being able to retrieve those passwords from wherever you have an Internet connection, the service offers an interesting additional feature: the ability to assign beneficiaries – loved ones, or perhaps business associates or next-of-kin – should anything happen to you. It’s an increasingly awkward problem as we move more and more of our life into the digital domain, how to give others access to that data after we’re gone.

[UK] Larry Ellison isn’t the only one who has his reservations regarding the legitimacy of cloud computing. Synctus, a bootstrapped Manchester-based startup, is emerging from stealth with the introduction of a hardware product aimed at increasing the speed and efficiency of sharing files between different offices of the same company.

Almost two years ago The Filter, a startup backed by Peter Gabriel, launched to bring better music and movie recommendations to consumers. The site got lost in the abundance of more popular music and movie sites out there, so about a year ago CEO David Maher Roberts decided to shift gears and start licensing his recommendation engine to other businesses.

It was the right move. Today, the Filter powers recommendations for sites and devices with a combined reach of about 20 million people, with two more large media deals in the final stages of converting from a trail to a full license which will bring its total reach up to 85 million. The startup’s revenues went from $150,000 in 2008 to about $1 million in 2009. “All that money came from licensing,” says Roberts. “I think we git $2,000 from Google for advertising.” Since November, the company has been “borderline breakeven.” And it just added to its board of directors former Google engineering VP Doug Merrill.

There remains an ongoing desktop Twitter application war. Traditionally Tweetdeck and Seesmic have been at loggerheads for the lion share, although Tweetdeck has remained in the lead so far. Increasingly it appears that Seesmic is heading towards trying to be a much more mainstream application, for anyone on any platform, from celebs to your non-tech friends. But for power Twitter users, Tweetdeck seems to be the go-to app so far. Of course, all that can change, but that seems to be the landscape at the moment.

Just now Tweetdeck has released the latest version of its desktop Air application, this one is v0.33. It’s available right now as a manual download here. Existing Tweedeck users will get an auto upgrade in the next few days.

For uber-Tweetdeck users (like social media experts, as we know) Tweetdeck can get pretty long as they plug in every search term they can think of to avert that client disaster (Eurostar, we’re looking at you). So there are a bunch of new features which extend the app quite a bit and greatly enhance its speed of access to the Twitter firehouse.

So for a bit of fun we’ve decided to open a TechCrunch Europe T-Shirt store on that European startup Spreadshirt.

We’re going to see how it goes (your feedback is welcome) and the store is very simple (black and white T-shirts). But for now, you can grab a T-shirt here.

We’ll be giving a few away in an upcoming competition at some point, plus we’ll be looking for more slogans to put on the shirts. Suggestions welcome. The funnier the better. And other languages than English are cool too.

It looks like some major consolidation is about to go down in the Central European Internet market, and in particular Poland.

According to local newspaper reports, the largest Internet group in the region, Naspers/MIH Group, is conducting due diligence of assets belonging to DST (Digital Sky Technology)-owned holding Forticom. Naspers/MIH Group and DST already together own the largest Russian online portal Mail.ru.

[UK] The London-based online identity startup Garlik has partnered with the UK online stockbroker Selftrade to offer its customers identity fraud protection.

In what looks like a classic premium play, a basic free version of Garlik’s offering, rebranded Selftrade Identity Monitor Lite, is being made available to all of Selftrade’s customers with the option to upgrade to the full version, which offers more widespread monitoring of an individual’s ‘identity’ including address, passport number and credit/debit card and bank account details. The full offering will initially cost £35 per year, with presumably both Garlik and Selftrade sharing revenue.

Nokia this morning published two press releases on its website, one talking about the ‘development’ of one of its manufacturing plants and one commenting on a class action lawsuit filed in the United States.

The Finnish mobile juggernaut says it plans to develop the operating mode of its Salo, Finland plant to ensure production is “focused on the high-value smartphone market, especially in Europe”.

The plans will result in the introduction of new manufacturing methods, but also entail ‘changes to personnel’ at the facility.

AMEE, the US/UK-based startup that aims to build the largest engine for computing greenhouse gas emissions, has secured a $5.5m series B financing lead by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside existing investors, including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures. AMEE will use the funding to expand its geographic reach and platform.

The prize AMEE is aiming for, known in the sector as “enterprise carbon management”, is expected to reach $4 billion by 2017 because of government and consumer pressure to address climate change. AMEE’s engine is now being used by companies offering carbon accounting or business intelligence software, as well as governments, multi-nationals and SMEs.

There’s a certain irony that TechCrunch’s in-house satirist Paul Carr is currently slaving over the sequel to his book about his failure to launch a startup. Fridaycities was to be a site which allowed anyone to swap information about London, in real time, and eventually other cities. The site failed, Paul wrote his book (and a few other things, let’s admit) and the rest is history, including our little run in, thankfully.

If only he’d done it in the era of Facebook rise into the mainstream. Because today, two weeks after launching, the Secret London Facebook group has 182,010 members and counting and is poised to propel its 21 year old creator into her first startup.

Bristol university graduate Tiffany Philippou originally set up the group in response to a competition from ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi to win a mere summer internship. Over 800 groups have now been created, such is the dire economy for graduates now.

However, it seems unlikely that Tiffany will be too bothered. There’s now a holding page and Twitter account (@secret_london) as Secret London morphs into a full-blown startup.

Nsyght is a startup we broke just before the Christmas vacation which focuses on making realtime streams manageable and is similar in scope to Friendfeed and Cliqset.

It currently integrates accounts from Twitter, Facebook, digg, Vimeo, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Delicious, and Last.fm – with other networks planned – and has now introduced a bunch of new features.

[France] As entrepreneurs and entrepreneur hopefuls flooded the Salon des Entrepreneurs in Paris during this last week, the Founder Institute released the details of its Paris program for Spring 2010.

TechCrunch published a previous article on the international launch of the Silicon Valley-based Founder Institute, which is offering additional programs in Singapore and Asia Pacific this spring.

The program itself screens and selects an exceptional group of entrepreneurs to be mentored by stars from both Silicon Valley and the French tech space. Over a period of 4 months beginning on March 16, entrepreneurs meet once per week to be mentored by some of the most successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. A unique equity model has been developed for the program in order to eliminate competition and motivate both mentors and participants to collaborate and help each other succeed. Ultimately, the goal is to develop their ideas and put their businesses into practice – some companies even score funding before the 4 weeks are up. Additionally, the program offers various discounts with service providers, which can help reduce the cost of starting a company by up to 80%.

Registration for the Plugg Start-Ups Rally 2010 are now open. You can register here.

Since 2008 Plugg in Brussels has become a must-attend fixture on the European startups scene. It was one of the first startups events I attended after just joining TechCrunch and it was a brilliant event, made more fun by the great welcome put on by founder Robin Wauters, who later happily became a TechCrunch writer as well.

Every year Plugg gives European startups an opportunity to pitch a large audience composed of entrepreneurs and investors, and an esteemed jury.

The Mobile Premier Awards have announced their full programme, happily occuring at the same time as the Mobile World Congress talkfest in Barcelona. About 30,000 mobile experts will be in the city so it’s great timing. TechCrunch Europe is a media partner with the Awards and I’ll be on the jury this year judging the startups.

Besides the classic MPA in Innovation live 3-minute pitches, this year also features the winners of previous awards.

There’ll also be a special keynote from arguably the most successful startup in mobile history, Russell Buckley of Admob, which was recently aqcuired by Google for $750m.

Asmallworld, the social network for a rather self-selecting elite, was launched several years ago by Swedish Investment banker and INSEAD Alumnus Erik Wachtmeister. Back then he’d deicded to tap into the evolving microcosm of social networking. In that era it was Myspace that was making its way as the leading social net aside from Friendster et al. Specialized social networks were still scarce. Wachtmeister hit up this niche of a an international network of affluent and influential people. Asmallworld grew to a userbase of initially 30,000 users, and later 500,000. So what happened?

[Ukraine] We know Skype is a great tool. It has over 500 million users worldwide. But even Skype has some feature gaps. In fact Skype has no internal call recording capabilities so that produced a variety of call recorders in the Skype ecosystem – from complex to buggy, from expensive to free. But what is the most common characteristic of the tools? They lock users into the computers they are installed in, hardly appropriate in a Cloud computing era. Users who want to access their call recordings or chats from another PC (e.g. home/work) are stuck. If you change a computer or reinstall Windows your Skype history will be irreversibly lost.

Fortunately there is a tool that effectively resolves both drawbacks – G-Recorder is a lightweight and simple Windows (only) application that records Skype calls and chats to Gmail. Its innovation is in integrating a user-friendly Gmail interface to handle Skype conversations like e-mail.

[Ukraine] Divine is a site which converts any Photoshop design to a fully functional theme for Wordpress CMS in several seconds. And it doesn’t require deep knowledge of technical HTML details or Photoshop skills. That makes it pretty unusual.

Since August 2009 30,000 users have installed the Divine plugin. Near 800 beta testers suggested approx. 245 ideas and near half of the ideas have been implemented in the first commercial edition – Divine Personal, which is to be released after extensive beta testing in the second quarter of 2010.

[France] The founding of Paris-based Creads sounds no different from the success stories of Silicon Valley: in 2008, 23-year-old co-founders Julien Michen and Ronan Pelloux founded their company with no more than €7,000 and the money in their pockets. Their main source of seed funding was won through a start-up idea competition at France’s Salon des Entrepreneurs – the same event that is taking place this week in Paris.

Two years later, Creads’ online platform has seen top-name companies leverage their creative community of over 10,000 people.

Everyone knows “realtime” has been a hot tech category for the last year or so but as we all know the ‘realtime problem’ is getting some kind of intelligence out of that firehose, and, crucially, eventually working out if or how it can be monetised. Search found its way with keyword targeting, but what will happen around realtime?

The Cognitive Match startup is applying artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content (product, offers, or editorial) to realtime content. It’s doing this in part by relying on an academic panel of professors in artificial intelligence from Universities across the UK and Europe who specialise in machine learning and psychology. The idea is to ensure maximum response from individuals, thereby increasing conversion, revenue and ultimately profit.

Last year it raised a Series A investment from Dawn Capital, rumoured to be in the $1m+ ballpark. Today Dawn has stepped in again with a follow-on Series B investment of $2.5m which the company will use to accelerate its growth. That takes it’s war-chest to around $3.5m

[UK] Forget farming or being a gangster, a new Facebook game from London-based music store theBizmo, lets users play the role of record label A&R person. And in the process of doing so, help promote and sell tracks by real artists.

Players of Hit Or Not compete with each other to predict the popularity of tracks from a catologue of independent artists. After picking from a range of musical genres, users are asked to listen to and rate tracks. They then earn points based on how closely their judgment resembles the average across all other players of the game from which they receive a “Hit Spotting” rank.