[UK/Germany] ClickandBuy, the ‘European PayPal’, has launched a Facebook app – Buxter – that enables users of the social network to send and receive real money through the site rather than virtual currency, which the company claims as first.

In fact, it’s a little more ambitious than that.

The London and Cologne-based company also wants to become the platform that turns Facebook into an e-commerce marketplace thanks to an associated Facebook-API, meaning that third party developers can create apps that accept payments from users, powered by Buxter.

It’s no secret TechCrunch, like all media outlets has a love hate relationship with the PR industry. Take the guy who just rang me. “Hi, my name is Rob, I want to tell you about a news story.” OH REALLY? How about you say where you are from first? But moving on…

You’ll recall the video we posted on the weekend about another tedious annoyance: The Embargo. The satirical video featured was in fact created by TechCrunch Europe Contributing Editor Steve O’Hear, (@sohear) who has form in this filmaking business, having directed a real documentary, In Search Of The Valley.

Steve is building up a nice line in these movies recreating conversations between PR professionals and bloggers/journalists. We just hope he doesn’t get snapped up by Hollywood or we’ll have to place a want ad.

Here’s Embargoes II.

[France/US] The #3 online travel boutique in France, VoyagePrivé, has just announced its launch in the US. The company has been expanding internationally for the last year, with offices in Spain, Italy and the UK in addition to their Aix-en-Provence headquarters.

Founded in 2004 by some of the former management team from Lastminute France and Orange, VoyagePrive has become the leading invitation-only travel site with over 4 million members. Their users benefit from reductions of 30-60% on exclusive luxury travel deals and packages, which the company guarantees to be at the lowest price at the time of purchase – otherwise users are reimbursed the difference.

The Founder Institute has just added 5 additional mentors and extended the deadline for their Paris program, which we covered in a previous post.

While the Founder Institute claims to reduce costs associated with starting a company by up to 80%, the main incentive for applying to the program is being referred to the mentor list and the related networking opportunities. Thus, the additional mentors are not likely to go unnoticed. The list now includes Match.com’s Will Bunker, CityCentric’s Matthew Mandell, OpenCandy’s Chester Ng, Shadow Logic’s Roger Yee and LaCie’s Philippe Spruch.

[France] Paris based dating service Smartdate has raised €1.7 million with European VC 360 Capital Partners.

Smartdate, which previously secured Angel investment from four international Business Angels for a total of €300,000, was founded by Fabrice Le Parc, who also launched be2.com in France and Benelux in 2006-07. This €2 million total amount of seed funding (one of the largest in France lately and one of the largest for a dating site) will be mainly used to market the service as they have an objective of one million users before the end of the year.

The Filter, which pitches itself literally as a personalized discovery engine for digital entertainment, has signed a deal with Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest video sites.

Specifically it will deliver recommendation services to Dailymotion’s 66 million monthly users (according to comScore). Dailymotion’s goal in this is to up the level of video consumption, user engagement and dwell time.

The deal is most significant mainly for The Filter, since its main business model is a white label personalisation engine for mass audiences. It needs content partnerships like this to prove its technology scales into the billion-request level.

Alex van Someren is a “Dealmaker” with the Global Entrepreneur Programme at the department of UK Trade and Investment. A serial entrepreneur specialising in IT software and hardware product development businesses, he’s had two exits through IPOs and is now Entrepreneur in Residence at Judge Business School. Below, he answers our recent guest post which attacked the way UK business regulation authorities treat small but fast-moving startup businesses in the same way as regular, slow-moving ones.

Azeem Azhar’s article about UK small business bureaucracy doesn’t tally with my own experience running businesses in the UK. In fact, from what other entrepreneurs are telling me it’s a lot easier here than in most developed countries.

I wonder whether he’s tried starting a company anywhere else in the world? Just this past Monday I was listening to a guy complain to the Prime Minister at a conference that he’d been to the USA for three weeks and during that time he still hadn’t managed to get a trading subsidiary incorporated there. I’ve done it myself in an afternoon in England.

Plugg, the annual conference organised by my TechCrunch colleague Robin Wauters, is due for next week on Thursday (11 March) in Brussels, Belgium. I’ll be there along with other European tech industry pundits, bloggers, venture capitalists and many entrepreneurs, to listen to a slew of presentations by executives from Nokia, Opera Software, Index Ventures, Duval Guillaume, eBuddy and many more (full program can be seen here).

If you’d like to come too, TechCrunch Europe is pleased to offer a 25% reduction on the ticket fee for our readers – simply use promotion code plugg-25percent upon registration and you’re all set.

And if for whatever reason you’re a European startup that couldn’t make this deadline, then check out how to apply for Geek’n Rolla in London on April 20th.

Meanwhile, at Plugg, I’m most looking forward to the yearly Start-Ups Rally, an on-stage pitching competition between European startups. Over the weekend, these 20 startups, who will be pitching a group of judges and the audience in attendance, were announced by the event organizers.

Let’s take a look at them, shall we?

New York, the city that never sleeps, may finally meet its match. TechCrunch is coming, and we’re bringing three days of non-stop conference and startup-competition energy, May 24-26.

We call it TechCrunch Disrupt because we want to debate what’s really changing in media and technology right now, what’s causing disruption and what we need to do about it to survive and thrive in real time.

Each morning, we’ll explore media and technology disruption themes through hosted panel discussions, keynotes, roundtable conversations and select product demonstrations. We’ll bring the experts, thought leaders, top entrepreneurs and business leaders and others together to talk about what’s next. And why. With lots of audience participation.

Each afternoon, we take our morning debate into the field. New startups and products will be unveiled and will compete for recognition and a top prize in the Startup Battlefield.

According to our tips inbox and complaints on Twitter and local blogs, popular social network Facebook has been unavailable to at least a subset of users in Turkey for a number of hours now, although it appears to be coming back up for some users in the last half hour or so.

Facebook being down for several hours in Turkey is a big deal, because the country is said to be the third largest on Facebook, at least according to comScore.

The question is: is this a technical issue limited to one country only, or did the Turkish government move to (perhaps temporarily) block access to the social networking service?

[Spain/Austria] Last week busuu.com closed their first funding round from an undisclosed Austrian serial angel investor. The total sum is also not clear, but appears to be below €500,000.

Busuu.com is a two year old, online community based language learning startup, launched out of Spain, founded by non-Spaniards, Bernhard Niesner (Austria) and Adrian Hilti (Switzerland).

Last December, busuu.com reached break even. With the new money, busuu.com plans to mainly invest in expanding and improving their platform, including its language offering, mobile apps and of course a marketing push to grow their user base which currently claims 300,000 users, mainly from Spain, Germany, UK, France, Italy and Austria.

Shout’em today adds a major new feature to its service which could well super-charge it into a whole different place: location. The white label service lets you build a Twitter-like social network, but it now leverages Foursquare’s API and Twitter’s GeoAPI.

The mobile-optimised social networks can be private, location-based and used by any niche group. So far Shout’em has apps for java phones, the iPhone, android. They are now adding a Blackberry app to that roster. All will be leveraging the location feature. In addition Shout’em is throwing in some augmented reality magic into its iPhone app. The Android app is still in progress.

[Germany] T-Venture Holding, the venture capital company of Deutsche Telekom, has made a strategic investment in Neubiberg, Germany-headquarted Lantiq, a provider of next-generation access and home networking technologies. The terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed.

Along with the investment in Lantiq, Deutsche Telekom will provide future strategic advice to the company.

Lantiq is the second largest fabless semiconductor company in Europe with revenue of just over $450 million in 2009. The company, which specializes in broadband communications encompassing analog, digital and mixed-signal ICs along with comprehensive software suites, has a global team of about 1,000 dispatched across Europe, North America, the Middle East and the Asia Pacific regions.

[UK] Little World Gifts, the Liverpool-based mobile virtual goods startup, has signed WWF as its first major brand partner. That’s WWF-UK, the world-renowned conservation charity, not the wrestling federation with the same initials.

More interesting, however, is where Little World Gifts is headed next: Location-based gifting. In a future update, users of the company’s iPhone app (iTunes link) will be prompted to purchase and receive virtual gifts based on their current location, moving the service a little towards the rewards element of the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla.

But first let’s deal with the WWF announcement.

In something of a surprise move AOL has sold Buy.at, the affiliate marketing network it bought in early 2008, to UK network Digital Window. AOL acquired Buy.at for a rumoured $150 million but although sale terms have again not been disclosed this time round it’s fair to say it will be for substantially less that that.

Buy.at was operating as a wholly-owned business unit of Advertising.com, part of AOL’s Platform-A organization. Buy.at ‘special play’ of marketing on social networks does not appear to have come off as planned. buy.at is based in Newcastle, UK and NYC.