The Difference Engine is shaping up to be the kind of raw, Web 2.0 incubator the UK has lacked for some time. Whereas Seedcamp tends to take more fully formed early stage startups on, The Difference Engine is closer to having a hacker mentality. When you want to just go and build a product, this might be the kind of programme that appeals. Word on the street is that the programme is sidlign up to the TechStars programme in the US, but nothing is confirmed as yet.

Based in the north-east of the UK, TDE has £200,000 of public funds to put into 10 start ups from anywhere in Europe. Closer to Y Combinator (Silicon Valley) and TechStars (Boulder, Colorado), this is a full time programme to accelerate early stage digital start-ups from an idea to version one of a product/service during a 16 week programme. The equity funding comes down to £20k for up to 10% of the business, but comes with mentoring, coaching and training. The new start-ups are typically 2 to 3 members of which at least 2 are developers.

Good Noows, from ZNet Labs, is described as a personal news stream. And like Netvibes and others before it, is another attempt to take RSS mainstream.

In its first incarnation the product offers a simple but elegant RSS reader, with various newspaper-like page layouts and pre-defined content bundles. Moving forward, however, ZNet Labs founder and ex-Googler Daniel Franz has more ambitious plans.

He aims to develop the product into a news-centered social network that makes “XML-exchanged news content better accessible for the average consumer.” But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, here’s what Good Noows offers today.

Acton Capital Partners, the Munich-based investor in consumer internet and mobile companies formerly known as Burda Ventures, has closed its new Heureka Growth Fund, worth €150 million.

The growth-equity fund will invest in, you guessed it, internet and mobile communications companies in the consumer space for e-commerce, media and marketplaces, mainly within Europe but also in North America.

Groupalia, a Spanish Groupon clone group buying service provider, has raised €2.5 million in its first institutional round. The financing comes from Nauta Capital, who led the round with an investment of €805,000, and Spanish bank la Caixa who contributed €250,000.

The rest comes from individual investors, namely Lucas Carné and Jose Manuel Villanueva (the founders of Privalia, another Nauta portfolio company) with an investment of €660,000, and Groupalia CEO Joaquin Engel (€125,000).

People in Australia, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain and Japan can now pre-order the iPad from their respective Apple Stores, reports Boy Genius Report.

Late last week, Apple had already shared some details on the international roll-out, including the fact that the tablet computers will effectively hit stores in the nine countries cited above on May 28.

Details on pricing at the time weren’t disclosed yet, but now these are live, too.

We’ve taken the liberty of checking out all nine local stores to see what the respective starting prices look like:

Aepona, the Belfast-based developer of a software engine that powers the “Network as a Service” (NaaS) business model for mobile operators, has just raised a $10M round, led by new investor BlackBerry Partners Fund, a Toronto-based global fund focused on applications, services and supporting infrastructure for mobile platforms.

Tech startups in the Nordic and Baltic regions or Norther Europe will be wooting. Conor Venture Partners has closed Conor Technology Fund II, its second early stage technology fund, at €46.5 million ($59 million).

According to fund’s limited partners include the European Investment Fund, Finnish Industry Investment, Etera Mutual Pension Insurance Company, Veritas Pension Insurance Company, Atine Investment Partners and FoF Growth (managed by Finnish Industry Investment). It also includes other major Finnish investors.

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

Augmented reality startup Layar is launching Layar Stream, which reveals immediately what Augmented Reality content is available around a user.

The problem with AR content is that discovery is an issue with all the new content available. There are now 1.2 million augmented objects served daily by Layar.

So Layar Stream tries to solve this by generating a stream which users can pre-filter.

They explain it thus:

tripwolf, a social travel site, just released their Augemented Reality iPhone App (iTunes link). Based on their current version and together with a research team out of Salzburg, they are currently the only travel portal providing Augmented Reality travel content on an iPhone.

Lonely Planet, a well-known leader in the travel space, also offers an AR app, but it’s only available for Android right now. Interestingly Lonely Planet has teamed up with another Austrian company to create their AR application – Mobilizy (the creators of Layar competitor Wikitude), whereas tripwolf worked together with the above mentioned research institute.

London based startup Timetric enjoyed the UK election night. They stayed up all night updating graphs. But seeing as their company intends to be a sort of ’statistics on speed’ platform, and they have funding, that seems appropriate.

Below are the two graphs they’ve produced from the election results.

Perhaps he most interesting aspect is the performance of the Lib Dems.

Sometime rolling your eyes to the sky is the only appropriate response.

Fresh from being defeated in her race to become a Conservative MP, London candidate Joanne Cash has simply deleted her Twitter account.

Her final speech on election night, accepting her defeat, was to attack the media.

In another privacy slip-up, today Facebook showed me who my friends wanted for PM in the UK General Election. On election day.

Today Facebook was continuing to push out it’s Democracy UK poll, and interested in what it did I tried it out myself. I idly pushed the “Cameron for PM” button wondering if it would just give me some results (actually that’s not how I vote as it happens) and I was presented with the results. There was a button to see how my friends had voted, and duly, up came people in my social graph and who they had voted to be PM.

Now, this is admittedly a poll which was started before the election today. The results of the poll were released on Tuesday.

But today the rules are different. Voting intention polls and exit polls are illegal on the actual election day. Which is why I was surprised that Facebook was allowing this poll to continue.

German travel search engine Swoodoo has been acquired by the leading U.S. flight search engine Kayak.

Although Kayak has lots of cash in the bank and is a major player in the US, it is still not well known in Europe, hence its need to make an incursion here. Financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed but we hear on the grapevine that T-Venture and Deutsche Telekom were “very happy with the Exit”.

Swoodoo was founded in 2006 in Germany and since then has established its position as the self-proclaimed “market leader in online flight search in Germany” in a competitive market.

[UK] Livestation, the online TV service from London-based Skinkers, has added business and financial news channel CNBC as a premium option, and premium is the right word.

Users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa can now watch the live pan-EMEA feed of CNBC on Livestation’s online TV platform for a monthly fee of €4.99. It’s accessible through the company’s browser-based version, as well as a Mac/Windows/Linux client, and a dedicated CNBC-branded iPhone app.

It’s interesting to see Livestation continue to expand its relatively new subscription model – a similar arrangement for CNN became available last December – as the service morphs into a cable TV-like company for the Internet, albeit one that targets multiple platforms and has a focus on news.

It appears that hot streaming music startup Spotify will launch in the Netherlands on May 18 if Dutch news reports and their own manager there are to be believed.

Currently Spotify operate in Britain, France, Spain, Sweden, Norway and Finland. But not yet the US, even though they have confirmed their CTO is over there right now looking into servers (see interview with Paul Brown, Spotify’s go-between man with the music labels, below).

Apprupt, an affiliate network for mobile apps aimed at developers and publishers, has closed what we think is a large financing round with Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture arm, KfW and its existing investor Neuhaus Partners. The startup, based out of Hamburg Germany, will use the additional funding to accelerate growth and international expansion. Terms were undisclosed.

Apprupt’s performance analytics shop focuses on iPhone apps but the Android store is to come. The platform track click-thrus and conversion rates for online and mobile links to iPhone apps, with the idea that developers can then find where there best traffic comes from and target resources accordingly.

Yes, that’s right – we’re talking about the launch of yet another Chatroulette site. Andrey Turnovisky’s successful idea, which has over 4 million monthly unique visitors, has set off a wave of copycats around the world – with Bazoocam (previously Chatroulettefr.org) and Camtoya amongst the leaders in the French market.

But it gets better. Only 2 months after Bazoocam’s official launch and the team is already announcing a gay version of the site: Camtogays. This new site went live on May 4th and will be monetized with localized, targeted ads in partnership with the dating site Easyflirt. However, the founders and planning to eventually develop and integrate their own dating platform into the site as the traffic picks up.

Isotoma, a UK open source hotshop, is having a little fun with the UK election.

They want Brits to register who they voted for after they’ve hit the polling booths. There is of course zero chance of verifying this.

Local reviews site Yelp has launched a site for France. Yelp France is the startup’s first non-English speaking country. The site can be toggled through French or English.

This will be of interest to European player Qype which is bigger than Yelp across Europe.

Yelp has claimed one million unique visitors consulted for Yelp UK and Yelp Ireland last month 16 months after launch.