Swiss start-up Memonic lets users to select and collect snippets of websites, documents, and pictures on the web and any offline content for later use.

The Swiss startup will launch a new collaboration feature in the coming months that will enable the user to retrieve information anywhere. It is stored at Memonic, which makes it independent of its original source. So if you need the information, lets say, 6 months later, snippets can be shared, sent, etc.

“In the last years new technologies have sparked an explosion of published information. This in turn lead to great developments in the creation and searching of information. What we are missing though is an effective tool to capture the relevant information and actually work with it”, says co-founder and CEO Selz, who is spearheading the team of six.

Voddler, the so-called “Spotify for movies”, has announced its first mobile app for Android.

The free Android app will be rolled out in stages. A version limited to movie trailers is currently being tested with Voddler users, and a more featured offering – full movies, and sharing of playlists on social networks – should be available by the end of this month.

Because the service is cloud-based, users are able to begin watching a movie in one application and finish it in another, while another feature in the pipeline is the ability to use the Android app as a television or PC remote.

Simply Zesty, an Irish social media agency, has raised €500,000 from one of the UK’s largest market research firms for a minority stake. The investment values the company at over €1m.

The Oxford Research Agency (TORA) invested in the agency whose clients include Vodafone, Universal Pictures, Nokia and The Body Shop. The deal will see the companies develop social media and research tools further. The investment is unusual as it comes against the backdrop of Ireland’s continuing economic problems.

Money Dashboard, which is shooting to become the Mint.com for the UK, launched its open beta today, coming out of a period in closed Beta which, they say, was “massively over-subscribed” after its appearance in October. The site recently completed a funding round, securing £1 million of investment via a consortium of investors.

It also has a lot less competition now that main competitor, Kublax, deadpooled this February.

As magical as Apple’s iPad may be, it’s unlikely to go mass market anytime soon. That’s according to research carried out in the UK, which concludes that consumers struggle to see how the device could fit into their lives.

Simpson Carpenter‘s qualitative research drew comments from participants such as: “It’s just a big iPod Touch … a big iPhone without the phone” and “everything it does I can do on my PC or my phone right now.”

All of the iPad’s perceived advantages were seen to be filling a niche or too use-case specific, such as reading eBooks, consuming content on the train, or making presentations. And while the majority of those interviewed thought the iPad had the wow factor, they couldn’t justify a purchase.

“It occupies too much territory already covered by smartphones, PCs, laptops and traditional media”, says the report, concluding that most consumers are unable “to find enough rational argument to justify taking the plunge.”

But over time that could change.

TechCrunch Europe is co-locating with Engage, Invest, Exploit ’10 in Edinburgh today. Our venue hosts will be holding the EIE event in the morning and in the afternoon TechCrunch Europe will be running a more TC style event, TechCrunch Edinburgh.

The room is full of startups and VCs. This morning we’re hearing pitches from some more developed startups in the morning, ranging from internet tech to cleantech to energy companies. Twitter hashtags are #tcedin and #eie10.

The live stream from streaming partner TechFluffTV is below.

Europe’s main LinkedIn competitor XING, has released a financial update which is overall positive.

In the first quarter, the publicly floated XING AG posted net income of €1.3 million. The start of 2010′s financial year has seen the site generate revenues of €12.60 million in Q1, a 17 percent increase over figures for the same period last year (€10.75 million). This equated to equating to €1.3 million profit. EBITDA was €3.3 million. There was a 23 percent increase in member numbers compared to the previous year and it had 420,000 new members in Q1. It now has 3.9 million registered members in total.

Nuroa, a real estate vertical search engine launched in Spain in 2007, has secured an additional €1 million from Highgrowth Ventures, their investor from a previous round in 2007. The new round comes during a difficult time in Spain and particularly in real estate, but Nuroa appears to have grown well during the last year. Traffic growth has been 200% up just during the first quarter of 2010. In the last year, they’ve rolled out in ten new markets in Europe, America and Australia.  Highgrowth expects that the latest round will give the company what it needs to transform it from a startup to a solid business.

During the next10 conference in Berlin, TechCrunch Europe had a chance to sit down with Michael Schade, CEO of mobile game developer Fishlabs. The company builds games for iPhone and iPad in the “high quality and premium segment”. He talked about Fishlabs’ latest release and its future plans, including a new funding round.

At the conference today, Fishlabs announced a brand new iPhone ad game for Volkswagen’s Touareg, their 4th game for VW. The app allows the user to experience the car, book a test drive, and more.

Who says nothing useful ever comes of a hackathon? Enter Tweet Trumps, which was coded over 24 hours by Tom Scott and Dom Hodgson at WarbleCamp, the Twitter developer ‘unconference’ held last weekend in London. It turns your mutual Twitter friends (the people you follow who follow you back) into a deck of cards ready for a game of ‘trumps’.

After nearly a year in private Beta, Silentale, which is calling itself the “Dropbox for communications”, opens to the public today.

The service is a kind of personal CRM system, providing a searchable backup of your contacts, messages and attachments across various communication channels, including email and social networks Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s designed to address the fragmentation of electronic communication, combining a unified address book and archive of messages – see previous TC Europe coverage.

Adopting a classic freemium model, Silentale comes in two flavours, a free and paid version. However, premium accounts are being waved for users who sign-up before the end of May.

During his presentation at next10 today in Berlin, Jolicloud founder and CEO Tariq Krim talked up the move to HTML5 (via Google’s Chrome browser engine) and indicated that the company’s netbook OS will open up to 3rd party developers within a couple of weeks. Krim has garnered a lot of attention for the free cloud-based operating system, which recently exited beta.

To keep up with the latest industry trends, Jolicloud is in the process of moving their entire system to HTML5, which Krim describes as a “virus that will spread over all browsers and platforms”. He says it will enable the cloud to become “offline friendly” and that this represents “a major disruption in the distribution of software.”

Viadeo, the social network for professionals, has reached somewhat of a milestone today, claiming 30 million members. It competes directly with the likes of Germany’s Xing and Silicon Valley heavyweight LinkedIn, which claims 65 million users.

To put Viadeo’s growth into context, however, when we reported on the company’s latest funding round in July 2009, it could only boast 8.5 million users, leaving us to question its ‘break out’ strategy. How was the Paris-based company planning to differentiate itself and win mind share over such a well established competitor as LinkedIn?

Today sees the launch of Radar Music Videos, a platform that enables artists, bands and music labels to commission music videos from established and upcoming directors.

The site, which has been in Beta for just over a year, is entirely bootstrapped by ex-BBC producer Caroline Bottomley and is already cash-positive. That’s thanks to a business model that shuns free or freemium in favor of paid-subscriptions only, for both the artists who are commissioning works and the directors who are hoping to land a gig.

TechCrunch Nordic – Copenhagen – 26th May 2010
TechCrunch Europe will host its 3rd TechCrunch Nordic event – joining Seedcamp on their European tour in Copenhagen at the end of May. Join us!

Tickets are now available here.

Startupbootcamp in Denmark, has become the first “Global Affiliate” of the US based accelerator program TechStars.That means Startupbootcamp, run by 
Alex Farcet, will now be screening applications from startup teams across Europe.

From their announcement…

We’ve been tracking down some of Facebook’s little quirks and flaws lately. But let’s get back to an old favorite. Twitter, which appears to have sprung a leak as well.

Is there a bug in Twitter which literally forces any account to follow you?

The flaw appears when a user tweets this format: “accept [Twitter Username]”. Magically that user appears as one of your followers.

This of course could be quite handy. Suddenly you could boast that some of the world’s most influential followers like Robert Scoble or Barack Obama was following you.

A man who threatened on Twitter to blow up Doncaster airport has been found guilty of sending a “menacing electronic communication”. He is thought to be the first person in the UK country to have been arrested for comments on Twitter. He is now the first person to be found guilty for being “menacing” on Twitter.

On January 6 Paul Chambers joked on Twitter “Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” He was annoyed that snowfall threatened to delay his plans to travel to Ireland on January 15.

Since last week’s chat exploit, I’ve received further tips of Facebook ‘security bugs’. Only each time they’ve turned out not to be bugs at all, but, well, features. With regard to the site’s privacy controls, users are clearly confused. This confusion, I suspect, is leading to over sharing, which Facebook’s critics say is intentional. More sharing equals greater monetization opportunities.

As an example, a privacy quirk on Facebook appears to produce the following scenario: User A sends a friend-request to user B but they choose not to accept, at least not yet (it’s a pending request, so they haven’t declined either).

However, just by issuing that request, some of user B’s activity begins showing up in user A’s Facebook News Feed under ‘Most Recent’. This could be complete status updates if user B has chosen or inadvertently made those public (again, remember, this is a feature not a bug, a bit like following somebody on Twitter).

That’s probably OK, assuming user B knows what they are doing. But, more bizarrely, the feed could also show who user B has recently befriended.

Video-on-Demand movie site, blinkbox is launching the first optimised legal movie streaming service for Playstation 3 owners in the UK. It’s featuring recent DVD releases like Avatar, The Hangover and Sherlock Holmes. The PS3 is now optimised for iPlayer and YouTube, but blinkbox wants to win the race to get blockbuster movies into increasingly web-enabled homes. In effect it wants to become a UK based Netflix. The site now has an archive of 6,000 movie and TV titles.

However, of course, the UK startup in this space which already has tonnes of traction via its DVD rental business is Lovefilm which already has streaming available. And Blinkbox is also competing with PS3′s own movie rental and to-own VOD service.

So this makes it yet another attempt to get traction for blinkbox, which started off as a service letting users overlay a video clip taken from a movie or TV show with a personalised message at the beginning.