Readers would be forgiven for not remembering the Odigo IDproject. This was an instant messaging service based in Israel, founded in 1998 by Avner Ronen. It was purchased by Comverse Technology in 2002, and then shut down in 2004. However, like a handful of startups that came after it, it allowed you to interact with your instant messenger friends who were surfing the same web page at the same time. IМ services stayed put but social networks have since come to the fore. But now, in the era of social networking, the idea has come to light again.

Now Moscow-based company Keenko has created a web-service of this type in the form of a plug-in for the Firefox browser. The service is integrated with Facebook and Twitter and enables users to see who is looking at the same webpage and view the social network profiles of these users. Clearly that can lead to people friending eachother on these existing social nets.

TechCrunch Europe will be co-locating with Engage, Invest, Exploit ’10 in Edinburgh on 12th May 2010. Our venue hosts will be holding EIE in the morning and in the afternoon TechCrunch Europe will be running an interactive seminar followed by a joint networking party for both events in the evening. Full details of the day are below. You can grab your tickets here.

Delegates will be able to mix between both events and confirmed investor guests include: TTP Ventures, TRICapital, The Entrepreneurial Exchange, Silicon Valley Bank, SigmaCapital, Seraphim Capital, Seedcamp, Scottish Equity Partners, PrioryHouse Ventures, Pivot Capital Partners, Pentech Ventures, Par Equity, LINC Scotland, Kelvin Capital, IQ Capital Partners, Hotspur Capital, Frontier IP Group, Elvingston Science Centre, Balderton Capital, Archangel Informal Investments, Angels Den, Amadeus Capital Partner, 4iP and numerous individual Angel Investors.

It should be a lot of fun, so come along. See below for the agenda

The Norwegian software company has yet to make any announcements of its own, but Opera has acquired email service provider FastMail.FM, according to a message posted on the latter’s company blog.

The terms of the agreements are not disclosed, but the Australia-based company in a notice said it will continue to run its email service, which has been in operation for over 10 years.

[Italy] A Moai statue couldn’t be more appropriate as a logo for an Italian venture capital firm. Like those big heads emerging on Easter Island’s otherwise flat landscape, Italy definitely needs new heads and brains (and money too) to appear in a fairly static VC market.

Milan-based Moai Capital Group is indeed a curious monolith on a remote island: It was founded by a 29-year-old entrepreneur, and the VC firm’s investments won’t be focused on national start-ups only. UK, France and Spain will get the biggest share of the pie, while just 20% of the fund will stay in Italy. It’ll have an eye on Eastern Europe too.

We’re not always convinced by the developer initiatives of mobile operators but we can’t argue with a good old fashioned mobile app competition when there’s cold hard cash up for grabs.

Enter Vodafone’s AppStar, which today announced the regional winners in its Europe-wide competition, each of whom have already bagged €25,000. They’ll now go head-to-head against the seven other country winners in a public vote to decide the overall winner of the competition and claim a total prize of €100,000. Not bad for writing a few lines of code. (I’m joking, of course.)

[Estonia] Fortumo, the mobile payments provider, has launched FortuMoPay, a new service designed for selling credits in “online games, web applications and social networks.”

It differs from competitors such as Zong (which recently signed a partnership with Facebook) and boku, says the company, in the way it targets small and medium-sized businesses (or even individuals) by making it quick and easy to start taking mobile payments. There’s also no upfront costs; Fortumo takes a share of revenue instead.

A merchant gets to specify the amount they wish to charge for 1 item or credit and then Fortumo automatically handles the back-end activation of all corresponding short codes, keywords and currency conversions. It shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to implement, says the company, and with very little technical skills. In this way, Fortumo is targeting the long tail of virtual goods.

I just got out of a Yahoo! press conference in London where I got an opportunity to talk briefly with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz.

The topic on everyone’s lips was Yahoo’s rumored talks with Foursquare, so I asked her what she thought of TechCrunch’s advice to the location-based startup: don’t sell out to Yahoo!.

Bartz’s response: “It depends how much money they want.”

[Netherlands] RES Software, which offers workspace management software and services, has secured a €4.7 million investment from the publicly traded European private equity and VC firm Gimv.

Having recently appointed a new CEO and seen ‘significant customer wins’ in the Netherlands, UK and France, RES Software says it will use the new finance to further its international expansion, although North America is cited as a priority.

[UK] Brits are football mad and so are advertisers. It’s no surprise then that the online rights of the English Premier League are highly contested. This morning, Yahoo UK announced that it has secured the exclusive UK online highlights for the next three seasons (2010-13), taking over from Virgin Media who is the current rights holder.

The deal means that from August this year, British football fans will get access to five minute highlight packages of every Barclays Premier League match exclusively on Yahoo.co.uk, helping position Yahoo as a serious player in the coverage of football online and help to beef up its advertising opportunities as a result. It follows the success of similar efforts by the company in the US with regards to NBA, PGA, NHL and MLB among others.

From the press release:

[UK] Sponsume is a new online platform to help individuals and organisations promote and crowd source the funding of their projects.

The site soft-launched this week and is the brainchild of Grégory Vincent, an ex-financial analyst and fund manager for M&G Investments, the investment branch of Prudential Plc. The London-based startup is currently bootstrapped with funding from ‘friends and family’.

At Sponsume’s heart is the ability to let entrepreneurs, artists, charities, inventors, or just about anybody, raise funds for their idea through the sale of project vouchers, which can – should the project go ahead – be redeemed for various rewards. These can be almost anything, except equity and intellectual property rights, with the contract existing between the user and project owner, not Sponsume itself.

[Greece] Athens-based Virtual Trip Group has announced plans to start an angel investment fund through its subsidiary Virtual Trip Holdings SA. It will be focused on ‘innovative startups’ from Greece and abroad, and will be the third angel investment fund in the country following OpenFund and Driin Ventures.

What we know so far is that they’ll target investments of between €50.000 to €200.000 for an equity stake of around 35-45%. And while it can certainly be argued that this may not represent the best available deal out there, if we take into account the financial difficulties Greece is facing, it’s an offer that many startups could find both useful and necessary in order to stay out of the deadpool.

[Germany] There’s only two weeks left until one of Germany’s leading gatherings for the digital economy, next conference, takes place in Berlin. Two thousand participants and more than 100 speakers from all over Europe and the USA are expected on May 11 & 12, 2010. And best of all, TechCrunch Europe has two tickets to give away.

Under the slogan “Game Changers” the next10 conference will discuss how the currently emerging economy of mobile applications is influencing companies’ digital strategies. The schedule looks quite promising and gets regularly interrupted by elevator pitches from startup companies.

[Lithuania] GetJar, the largest independent mobile app store, has announced a ‘strategic partnership’ with Reliance Communications (RCOM), India’s second largest mobile operator.

Under the arrangement, the two companies will create India’s largest free mobile apps store, in which RCOM’s 100 million subscribers will get access to GetJar’s 65,000 free mobile applications, which target a range of handsets and platforms, not just high end smartphones. Popular apps available through the store include Facebook Mobile, Yahoo!, Opera Mini, and Nimbuzz.

Reliance Communications will offer the GetJar apps store across both its GSM and CDMA networks.

Music streaming startup Spotify is going social. Today it unveils new features under the unpronouncable title of ‘Spotify Music Pro@ile’. Essentially it’s creating a true social network inside the Spotify service, but at the same time integrating Facebook Connect features. It is wil also now synchonise your existing music collection with your Spotify account. The update will roll out to Free and Premium users from 9am GMT today. Update: Rasmus Andersson, lead creative & designer at Spotify, says “Spotify will automatically update itself and restart.”

This update from Spotify is a major one. The trouble is what we really want to know is, having launched in several European markets and talked for the last five or six months about launching in the US… when will it launch in the US? No news on that front yet.

Meanwhile, the main new feature is the ability to share playlists and musical tastes outside Facebook. This will be good news for Spotify users, but for the startups which have been building out services around sharing playlists it’s going to be a potential new problem.

So the news features are as follows:

[UK] WorkSnug, the location-based service for mobile workers, has updated its iPhone app (iTunes link) to let users add new locations and even measure their noise levels.

The augmented reality-based app connects mobile workers to potential working spaces – coffee shops, libraries, formal co-working spaces and Wi-Fi hotspots etc. – and provides ratings on Internet connectivity, “community feel”, power sockets, and, crucially, the quality of coffee. With the app installed, simply hold up the iPhone to view the surrounding area and, bingo, information pops up with working spaces nearby. It’s pretty neat.

Swedish video ad server startup Videoplaza has signed a deal with Barcelona-based Grupo Godó. The first sites launching in the deal are La Vanguardia, Barcelona’s highest-circulation daily newspaper based, and El Mundo Deportivo, one of the largest sports publications in Spain.

The launch follows recent news of the company signing key advisors, and also receiving €3.5M in funding.

[UK] Brits can now get their hands on Google’s so-called ‘superphone’ for an upfront cost of “free”. Kinda.

Available from today for pre-order on Vodafone UK, the Android-powered Google Nexus One can be had for £35 per-month on a 2 year contract, including a bundle of minutes and texts, and the much needed 1GB monthly data allowance — this is a Google Phone after all (see TechCrunch review). There are a number of other tariffs available too. Customers who pre-order can expect deliveries to go out on April 30th.

Cloud hosting company Memset this morning announced that it has agreed to acquire URL shortening service Is.gd. Memset in a statement says it has thus secured the URL shortener’s future, and added that it plans to maintain it as a non-advertising-supported, free Internet service indefinitely.

The acquisition and Memset’s stated intents represent good news for Is.gd users, who (should) have been rightly worried about the service’s ability to compete with the likes of Bit.ly and major Internet players who’ve introduced their own short URLs (Amazon, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, etc.).

[Geneva, Switzerland] Information security and identity management software and services firm WISeKey has closed a $20 million financing round at a $200 million valuation. The investment comes from a group of undisclosed institutional and private backers in both Europe and the United States.

With the extra capital, WISeKey plans an accelerated expansion in BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

WISeKey also marks itself an IPO candidate, saying that it will file to go public as soon as the market stabilizes.