In 1938 Winston Churchill made a radio speech which was broadcast to America, describing what was happening as Nazi forces spread across Europe.

“The stations of uncensored expression are closing down; the lights are going out; but there is still time for those to whom freedom and parliamentary government mean something, to consult together.”

Perhaps if he’d been around today and au fait with the Internet he might have used the same phrase to describe what is going on in legislatures across Europe.

Tonight the UK Labour governement, together with the Conservative arty, forced through the controversial Digital Economy Bill. The Bill now gets a ‘third reading’ in the House of Lords, which means it is almost certain to become law. The government did a deal with the Conservative leadership, which got a number of provisions it didn’t like removed. In other words, it was, to use an old British phrase, a “stitch up.” [Update 9 April: The Digital Economy Bill has received Royal Assent and is now law].

France-based Plyce recently has just confirmed that it has scored funding from high-profile French seed funds, Jaina Capital and Kima Ventures.

The location-based social network that is along the same lines of Foursquare and Gowalla was only officially launched last month. Founded by former managers from web agency Majes as well as the current COO of Criteo who was previously at Yahoo-acquired Kelkoo, the start-up strives to be the strong-player in Europe within the next 3 years rather than conquering the already competitive markets in the US and the UK.

Paris-based recruitment platform Jobintree has just scored another €1 million round of funding with 123Venture.

Founded in April 2008 by two former managers from another leading French job site, Keljob, the company had previously raised €2 million with business angels at the end of 2008. Now, with the new funds, Jobintree plans primarily to expand their national presence and development. The start-up has already announced that it’ll be setting-up an office in Lyon and possibly Nantes or Lille in the near future. In addition, the recruitment platform will be adding new members to its own team and developing several new sites focused on professional training, which should go live in September.

[Spain] Minube, a social travel portal out of Spain, launches in China today. It’s the beginning of a roll-out across Asia and the company expects to add Japan within weeks, as well as opening an office in Guangzhou.

Launched in November 2007, Minube already has Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian and French versions. In Spain, traffic is over 1 million monthly visits and at 1.6 million globally.

“We were convinced we would launch Minube in China from the the very beginning of the project, but we decided to wait until now, having reached several logical milestones”, says founder Raul Jimenez. “Having a successful experience in the European market, finding the perfect team to lead this project and a business model that adapts extraordinarily to the Asian market.”

This is a guest post by Tim O’Shea (Twitter: @timothyoshea), founder of Blurtit, co-founder of Qhub and most recently co-founder of the short lived UK group buying website Snippa. He addresses challenges facing the group buying site market in the UK following the explosion of Groupon clone style startups through his own experience with Snippa.

On a trip to New York in November 2009 I stumbled across Groupon for the first time. The deal displayed for New York seemed too good to be true and despite the obvious active community I quickly closed the page.

However, within a few weeks of my return I revisited Groupon again after reading the first Groupon TechCrunch post and decided that the UK needed this service badly. It appears I wasn’t the only one thinking the same thing! I put together a team with my co-founder David Hobart at the end of 2009 and set about building a business focused initially on London. By March 2010 it was clear that we weren’t going to be able to do what we set out to do in the short term (offer exceptional deals to our customers) and that some of the competition were clearly out gunning us. So Snippa was closed down a few weeks after its launch. In this post I’m going to share what I learnt about the group buying market in the UK at a time when a large number of similar startups are chasing the same goal.

[Spain] Ticketea, a Spanish startup centered on event promotion and management, has secured a further round of funding after raising $280,000 last summer. In line with most early-stage funding in Spain, it’s on the small side: €100,000 from an undisclosed business angel and €100,000 from public credit fund ENISA.

Ticketea operates in particularly crowded sector. Locally, there’s the traditional but perhaps stale player, Entradas, and the early-stage StageHQ. Internationally, competitors include Eventbrite, Amiando (both of which have traction in Spain) and TicketLeap, among others.

AOL is giving notice that it will make its annual filing for Bebo in the UK with Companies House tomorrow. That filing will show that the online giant is looking at a “sale or shutdown of Bebo in 2010″, a property it bought in 2008 for $850m.

In a message sent to employees today, the company said:

“The strategy we set in May 2009 leverages our core strengths and scale in quality content, premium advertising and consumer applications, positioning us for the next phase of growth of the Internet. As we evaluate our portfolio of brands against our strategy, it is clear that social networking is a space with heavy competition, and where scale defines success. Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space. AOL is not in a position at this time to further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking. AOL is committed to working quickly to determine if there are any interested parties for Bebo and the company’s current expectation is to complete our strategic evaluation by the end of May 2010.”

[UK/US] FanDuel, from UK-based social gaming company HubDub, has picked up its first major US newspaper partner.

A white-labeled version of the fantasy sports site is being used by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Philly.com to bring social gaming to the newspaper and, of course, generate much needed revenue. It’s a model that has already proved successful in the UK, says HubDub.

FanDuel, which focuses solely on US sports, offers a slightly different take on the traditional fantasy sports game model. Instead of games lasting the whole season, players play and win in as little as a day – think of it as “one-night stand” fantasy sports, says the company.

What’s more, there’s real money involved, so in that sense this isn’t far off from online betting, something that might normally fall foul of US law.

[Germany] While the Groupon-clone fall out has already begun in the UK, it’s looking more and more like a two horse race in Germany based on funding alone.

Berlin-based Daily Deal, whose main rival is the Samwer brothers’ City Deal, has secured a further 7 million euros, this time from Mangrove Capital Partners and Adinvest.

Stefan Glänzer (an early investor in Last.fm), Michael Brehm (Ex-StudiVZ) and Jochen Maaß are existing seed investors.

Bebo co-founder Michael Birch has confirmed that he will be joining us at GeeknRolla in London on April 20, the annual London conference for technology startups to launch, network with investors and talk about how they build themselves.

Michael Birch is the Co-founder of Bebo and Birthday Alarm. Birch was raised in North London, England, went to Imperial College, London in Central London, worked in West London and moved to San Francisco in 2002. Michael and his wife Xochi Birch sold Bebo to AOL in March 2008 for $850 million. Since then he has gone on to invest in many other startups and is a champion of the UK/Euorpean tech scene from his bases in the UK and the US.

Anyone who has seen Birch speak will know he tells it like it is. His appearance at GeeknRolla is not to be missed.

Birch is just the latest to join the start-studded line-up of investors and experienced startup founders at GeeknRolla. Our full speaker programme is here.

[Romania] What better use for that shiny new and expensive iPad than to turn it into a Twitter-driven picture frame? That’s the idea behind Chirp Frame, a new iPad app from Romanian web and mobile development outfit Work in Progress.

It’s a Twitter client with a difference in that it displays one tweet at a time from those that you follow, in full screen glory. Designed, says Work in Progress, to make it easy to read tweets while watching TV, something we’re big fans of doing here at TechCrunch Europe. “It’s like following updates hands-free”, says the company.

German Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner has written an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, expressing her concerns about Facebook’s plans to further relax data protection regulations on the social networking site.

She refers to the recent tweaks the company made to its privacy policy in anticipation of new features that will likely be launched at Facebook’s upcoming F8 developer conference.

Admittedly, there are a number of questionable passages in the new privacy policy: TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid has talked at length about some of the issues in this post, and a later one in which he foresees a ‘privacy wake-up call’ for Facebook.

Nevertheless, the ending of the open letter is somewhat amusing.

“Should Facebook not be willing to alter its business policy and eliminate the glaring shortcomings, I will feel obliged to terminate my membership,” writes Aigner.

Curious to see how Facebook will respond to her threatening to quit the social network – we’ve contacted the company to find out.

You can read the English version of her letter in its entirety after the jump, courtesy of Spiegel Online:

This year’s GeeknRolla in London on April 20 will, in a word, be awesome. I created the concept of this this annual conference to bring together Europe’s technology startups to network with investors and talk about how they create and build themselves. There’s a heavy educational component, if you will. So if the cool kids will be at TechCrunch Disrupt in May, you can bet they’ll but out in force in London in April at GeeknRolla.

Our speaker programme is below. This year there is a special emphasis on launching startups and connecting them with investors. As you can see we’ll be launching around 15 startups in front of a panel of around 18 judges. There will also be a DemoPit for startups not selected to appear on the main stage.

[UPDATE: We are now sold out of tickets to the day programme. There are now less than 100 tickets to the now legendary Afterparty where you can join the 400+ delegates from the main day - I'd grab one of those before they all go very shortly.]

It’s an amazing line-up including: Tommy Ahlers, ex-ZYB now Vodafone; Morten Lund, Skye 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.

I’d strongly advise you get a ticket. Last year we more than sold out.

We’ll be hearing from of Europe’s best entrepreneurs about how they are building their own companies and with it, the European tech ecosystem. I can pretty much guarantee that the speeches will be fast, furious and fulfilling.

[UK] While we don’t yet have an official date for when Brits will be asked to go to the polls (hint: May 6th), UK startup Tweetminster has rolled out an ‘election special’.

The new site, effectively a mash-up of existing features with a few new ones thrown in for good measure, lets users get a pulse on how well each of the main political parties are fairing through Twitter and the impact that their tweets are having throughout the election campaign.

[UK] With over 12 UK competitors, it’s no surprise that the Groupon clone fall-out has begun.

After writing about the group buying aggregator Deal Romeo earlier today, one of our readers alerted us to the fact that Groupon clone Snippa, which launched as recently as March 9th this year, has entered the deadpool. A notice on the site reads:

“Following careful consideration we have decided that the group buying space in the UK is too crowded to allow us to offer an outstanding product to both our merchants and customers.”

Which just about sums it up as well as we could.

Would you like to read the regular postal mail that comes through your letterbox on a PC, e-reader or mobile over breakfast? Then move to Finland. Within two weeks, the state-owned national mail enterprise, Itella, will begin opening, scanning and distributing letters electronically to some Finnish households and companies. Yes, you read that right. Postal workers will be opening your mail.

Customers will be notified by e-mail when they receive new letters. They can then read them by logging in to a website called Netposti. It has up until now only been used for a limited amount of company correspondence.

In its initial stage, the postal service experiment will involve hundreds of people and tens of companies in Porvoo’s Anttila village, close to the Finnish capital. However, it’s possible that the experiment will be extended to cover many more areas. It has already attracted considerable interest from around the country.

[UK] There doesn’t seem to be a week gone by without the launch of another Groupon clone. In fact, so hot is the group buying space that we’re now hearing of a number of sites that do nothing more than aggregate the daily deals of the Groupon clones.

West Sussex-based Deal Romeo, which has only just launched, is one such offering. The site, which is privately funded and was founded by brothers Dexter Grima (23) and Jason Grima (26) in February this year, aggregates the best offers available from 12 of the UK’s group buying sites. These include Groupola, My City Deal, Scrum Buy, Wowcher, Deal Bunch, Viva Voucher, KGB Deals, Wahanda, Snippa, Likebees, Deal Mob and London’s Best.

It lets users search for offers based on their location and interests and have the results delivered regularly by email.

Facebook has been famously thin in terms of its international organisation. Visiting their London offices recently impressed upon me how few people they actually have in Europe. A few sales staff, a PR, receptionist etc. As far as I could tell, only the affable Christian Hernandez was doing anything in wider Europe, as Facebook’s international biz dev guy. So it’s not before time that it’s expanding its global sales organisation.

Joanna Shields has re-emerged after recently exiting from her role at AOL, as Faceboook’s new VP of Sales and Business Development for EMEA. Joanna was previously CEO of Bebo and President of People Platforms at AOL.

Joanna was also the person who got advertising agencies to buy into Bebo, thus triggering its sale to AOL. We are talking one persuasive person here.