[UK] The UK mobile SMS payment startup ImpulsePay (formerly GoPayforit), whose launch we covered in November, has added the option for content owners to sell adult content and services, including the ability to verify that customers are over the age of eighteen.

It does this by tying into the mobile operators’ own customer records whereby if the account isn’t registered as belonging to somebody of adult age, content such as certain films, games and music, as well as more traditional 18+ material, can’t be purchased using ImpulsePay.

Well, we know some of you have gone through a lot to be here for GeeknRolla in London.

And some have had to hang around in London long longer than you thought.

But we know everyone is here to make this a great day to discuss the wonderful world of tech startups, so here’s our programme for today.

Below you’ll find our live video stream. We’re also live blogging on TechCrunch Europe.

[UK] Bryan Tookey has joined social media monitoring startup Brandwatch as its new COO. He joins the Brighton-based company from search engine Ask Jeeves (Ask.com) where he was the European Operations Director. Prior to Ask, Tookey was Google’s head of Sales Finance for European Partnerships and before that, a Senior Engagement Manager at management consultancy McKinsey.

Commenting on his new role at Brandwatch, where he’ll be charged with managing the startup’s growth, Tookey says: “I can’t think of a more exciting role than helping organisations and individuals figure out and react to what people are saying about them in social media.”

[Estonia] “Don’t talk, just execute”. That was the goal of Garage48, a sort of bootcamp-meets-hackathon organised by the Estonian Startup Leaders Club, a non-profit organization that works with major startup founders from Estonia.

The event, which took place at Estonian IT College last weekend, involved 100 developers with varying startup experience – from student to experienced entrepreneur – and included a number of Skype founding engineers. After a brain storming session, 40 ideas were presented, with 16 services selected to be developed and launched by the end of a single, presumably caffeine-fueled, 48 hours.

The results – which range from a service where kids can create an online pet and purchase their own physical hand-made version as a soft toy, to a chatroulette-inspired cocktail suggestion tool for when you’re at a loss as to what to order at a bar – are pretty impressive — see below.

Well folks, it’s been an interesting weekend of email and phone calls, but the good news is that GeeknRolla is STILL ON tomorrow, and there is not one single damn volcano on the planet, however ash-filled, that can stop us bringing this awesome event to you. The very last tickets and DemoPit tables are available here.

And frankly, we have to pay tribute to you guys. We have been hearing amazing stories of how people are getting to London for tomorrow’s event – from hiring boats, airplanes and even keynote speaker Morten Lund driving to London in a banged up car from Copenhagen. And our live streaming partners Bambuser are on a “#volcanrolla” road trip from Stockholm, overland and sea. Speaker Cédric Giorgi just got the very last ticket available on Eurostar, and Jennifer Lee has been collecting people at Calais to take over by car ferry. Amazing.

Of course, because of the airlines situation, there will be one or two changes to the line-up. But we are working hard to make sure it all goes smoothly, and there will not be a drop in any of the quality of the speakers, and we still have over 400 people confirmed for the event.

For breaking news about GeeknRolla we have fired-up the @GeeknRolla Twitter account to help people with information on travel plans, ticketing and anything else relevant to the event. Please subscribe to it.

And if you cant make the main day but want to party with us and SixNationState, hit the After Party which has a separate ticket.

Here are some more details for you.

[Germany] With the revelation last week that the incredibly well funded social networking service Ning was dumping its freemium model to move to a paid-for only offering, it’s perhaps a good time to re-visit European startup Babbel.

The Berlin-based language learning site took a similar decision back in November 09, announcing that its then 500,000 users would have to pay up or… you get the idea. Five months on, however, and the decision appears to have been vindicated. Babbel is reporting a Q1 profit for the first time in the company’s history.

“Sales in the first quarter were significantly above plan and now the company is slightly cash-positive a lot sooner than we hoped”, confirms managing director Markus Witte.

[Spain] As volcanoes erupt and plans get covered in ashes, others continue with good news. ReviewPro, an advanced reputation management platform for the hotel sector has secured an additional €820,000 ($1.1m) in seed capital for further growth, having raised approx. €1m last year.

The new funding comes from well know personalities in Spain, among them Nicolas Iglesias, co-founder of Spain’s top hosting provider Arsys, Marek Fodor, co-founder and ex-CTO of Atrapalo and Eric Shultink, CTO of Tuenti and one of the first Facebook employees, as well as other well known business angels.

Some amazing things are starting to happen with this Icelandic Volcano. (No, I can’t pronounce Eyjafjallajokull yet, but give me time).

After learning that the entire Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship would be stranded in London till at least Friday, Nathaniel Whittemore and others decided to see if they couldn’t turn this into a cool opportunity. They got in touch with TED and pitched the idea of a “TEDxVolcano” in London.

So on Sunday night (April 18) in London TEDxVolcano will feature June Cohen from TED and a number of other speakers. It’s going to be a pretty impromptu session, obviously, but I have a feeling they will pull it off.

The ash cloud over Europe is proving a nightmare and a boon for some startups. It’s certainly a nightmare for startup teams traveling to events, like GeeknRolla on Tuesday. (And on that note, please now follow @GeeknRolla where we will sharing information on the event and helping you get to London). But if you are in London tomorrow (Sunday) you have a rare opportunity, and it’s thanks to the ash from Iceland.

First Round Capital, are one of the lead/premier early-stage VC funds in the US. One of their managing partners, Chris Fralic (@chrisFRC) is stuck in London because of the volcanic ash’s effect on the airlines. So he’s planning to host one of First Round’s famous “Office Hours” events. This is when anyone/everyone is welcome to pop over and meet and chat with him (usually entrepreneurs wanting to pitch). This will be the Volcano Office Hours.

So like everyone else in Europe right now, I am fascinated by the impact of the volcano in Iceland, which is spreading ash all over northern Europe and shutting down the airlines. Eyjafjallajokull is now the new in vogue swear word in Europe, if you can say it.

Yesterday my Twitter stream was full of entrepreneurs suddenly saying their travel plans were being thrown into chaos. It seems that Europe’s startup economy has been running partly on the spread low-cost airlines for the past 5 years, and without airlines the startups, along with the whole of the general business sector, are going to be badly affected.

As I have long said, the quintessential startup in Europe is: CEO from anywhere, money from a pan European investor (often based in London, the biggest financial centre) and developers/engineers often in Central Europe. That implies plenty of travel. After all, by plane we are all, at the most, two or three hours away from eachother. With planes grounded, that is going to have a huge effect.

Genevieve Shore, Pearson’s director of digital strategy, gave a briefing to the media this morning in London and the news is looking good for startups potentially looking for an exit route to a media company. Asked if Pearson plans to grow its innovation through acquisition she replied that “there is definitely an M&A strategy. We’ll be focusing on digital service providers and acquiring great technology.”

Pearson has what it calls an “internal and external” startup strategy. Externally it’s partnered with startups like LiveMocha, the language learning site which has integrated a lot of Pearson’s educational material. In addition it’s working with MobileDo, a startup in China focused on English language learning over mobile.

Israeli entrepreneurs and VCs, I’ll be happy to meet as many of you as humanly possible in the span of 3-4 days while I’m spending some time in Tel Aviv in a few weeks. I’ll be heading down there – first time ever – on the 3rd of May and stick around until the 6th of May around noon.

I’m traveling to Israel for Techonomy 2010, a must-attend event for anyone professionally involved with the Web and technology in general.

Viewsflow appeared in the last few months as a sort of high-brow filtering mechanism for Twitter users. It’s majored on finding the best people who tweet about Peak Oil, or China’s economy, for instance. It’s been producing quite a nice little daily newsletter full of the kinds of links you’d expect more from an editor on The Economist or The Atlantic Monthly. And that’s precisely the point. If you can work out who really knows their stuff on Twitter, you can get some great knowledge and insight, right?

The realtime nature of the stream lends itself well to the coming world (which may already have arrived?) where we start to make trading decisions based on the data we can pull from social networks. This is well known as a discussion.

Now, like many startups, now Viewsflow has stumbled on its real business. In around June/July it’ll be launching PeerIndex, a data play based on the algorithms it developed building Viewsflow.

In previous years it’s fair to say that France has not exactly been a hotbed of entrepreneurship, despite actually coming up with the word entrepreneur. It’s perhaps not hard to see why when you visit. There is a general anti-business culture and talking about business or money is seen as beneath mainstream society. French students are also not well prepared for the real world. For instance, there are 65,000 psychology students in France – that is a quarter of the European total for that subject.

However, to think this is still the case is to completely miss the sea-change that is happening right now over last year and this.

Our recent TechCrunch Paris event was buzzing with entrepreneurs, and TechCrunch France has relaunched with a bang. Recent tax changes for investors are now supercharging the scene. Watch for a longer post on that soon from our France editor, Roxanne Varza.

So it’s fascinating to see that ISAI, billed as the French internet entrepreneurs’ fund, has announced the first closing of its “ISAI Developpement” fund, dedicated to early stage internet investments.

Next Tuesday, GeeknRolla (remember, it’s all one word), the annual conference from TechCrunch Europe which brings together Europe’s technology startups and investors, will, quite literally, rock London.

All the delegate passes are *SOLD OUT*. However, we have begged and pleaded with the venue to cram more chairs into the space. So there will be a final allocation of 25 tickets going online tomorrow at 11am. If you want to come then watch the ticket page like a hawk at that time.

If you are feeling lucky, you can try entering SurveyMonkey’s raffle for a chance to win one Geeknrolla ticket (SM account required) by clicking here.

Right now there are just 35 tickets left to the Afterparty, where another 100 people will be joining us to network, and later on, listen to the awesome upcoming band Six Nation State (@sixnationstate).

During the day an amazing line-up of speakers, panels and startup judges will witness the launch of 15 startups in front of a panel of around 18 judges, while the offstage networking in the DemoPit will be fast and furious. Over 400 people are coming in total. See the programme.

The start-studded line-up includes: Tommy Ahlers, ex-ZYB now Vodafone; Morten Lund, Skype investor & serial entrepreneur; Stefan Glaenzer, Angel; Brent Hoberman, MyDeco & PROFounders; Reshma Sohoni, Seedcamp; Mattias Ljungman, Atomico Ventures; Lukas Gadowski, Team Europe; Anil Hansjee, Google; Irena Goldenberg, Highland Capital Partners; Daniel Heaf, 4IP; Ari Wegter, LoveFilm Co-Founder and Alicia Navarro, Co Founder, Skimlinks.

Check out our generous sponsors and partners after the jump.

[UK] Following Google’s move to offer free satellite navigation in the US, and Nokia’s response to make its world-wide turn-by-turn solution also free, it was inevitable that other providers would join the race to the bottom.

That’s exactly what’s happened with today’s announcement that UK startup Navmii in partnership with map provider Automotive Navigation Data (AND) is offering an iPhone Sat-Nav solution – Navmii GPS Live – for the headline grabbing price of €3.99 per country.

Initially, it is only available in Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, with France following on Monday. Navmii says, however, that the rest of continental Europe will be rolled out “within months”.

To put this into context, says the company, TomTom currently charges €69.99 for its iPhone app for France.

[UK] Cambridge, UK-based Taptu, the mobile search engine that targets the touch-friendly web, has appointed “industry veteran” and former Yahoo Mobile MD Mitch Lazar to its board as a non-executive director.

Prior to Yahoo, Lazar “launched, ran and commercialized the mobile services and products” of various media brands, including Time Warner’s CNN, Cartoon Network and TCM. He also led the international roll out of AOL’s mobile initiatives.

Obviously, Lazar brings to Taptu a lot of experience in the mobile sector and, crucially, a large number of contacts that could help provide the needed inroads to grow the business.

Los Angeles-based Mobile Roadie has just announced that its iPhone and Android application creation platform is launching in Europe in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German. The company has also announced plans to set-up local offices, starting with Paris.

The company was founded in 2009 and has done apps for a number of high-profile clients, including Madonna, Ashton Kutcher and Taylor Swift – whose 2-month-old application has been used to stream her songs over 2 million times.

In France, Mobile Roadie has been behind the applications for big-name events like MIDEM, MIPTV and LeWeb, which was the company’s first application that also integrated UStream in order to live-stream the event – as well as the application for the newly released book of Vincent Ducrey, a web advisor for the French government.

[Sweden] Stockholm-based Videoplaza, the video ad server startup, has announced two new recruits to its board of advisors today: former CTO of Spotify Andreas Ehn, and Nils Winkler, previously CSO of ADTECH.

This follows last month’s news that the Swedish startup had raised a new €3.5 million funding round from leading Nordic VCs Creandum and Northzone Ventures.

In case you hadn’t heard, Iceland’s volcanoes are sending tonnes of volcanic ash towards the UK right now. Yeah, so that’s not the tech story. The tech story is that courtesy of FlightRadar24 you can watch as the skies across the UK clear of aircraft.

FlightRadar24 receives information from several ADS-B receivers in real time. This is presented as airplanes on a Google-map.