Mendeley, “the Last.fm of research”, has rolled out new premium packages after customers requested features such as more storage and expressed a willingness to pay. If only to see the longevity of the London-based startup.

Mendeley offers a secure online database for scientists, academics and researchers to store their research papers in the ‘cloud’, making it easier to share those documents with their peers. The system also helps researchers find and connect to like-minded academics in similar fields by looking at and extracting relevant meta-data from the millions of research papers stored in its database.

Ok, so what’s this? Porn on the iPad?! Well, not quite. The Sun newspaper is well known for retaining this throw-back tradition from the 1970s, but somehow, somehow, they’ve managed to get their infamous “Page 3 Girl” into the new iPad edition of the newspaper, despite Steve’s war on porn.

Users will be charged £4.99 for the initial app download (it comes with the first month free), and then a £4.99 subscription every 28 days. It’s all part of Rupert “King Canute” Murdoch’s attempt to keep the sea of free content at bay.

But despite Apple’s strict policy on nudity in iPad and iPhone apps, here is the proof that the app is uncensored (the moustache is a TechCrunch addition).

We’re all well aware of Twitter spam accounts but these are gradually turning nastier and nastier. They started out with – usually – pictures of nubile young women whose profile link might lead you to some nefarious site. But now they are starting to embed payloads in these links while @’ing random Twitter users to catch their attention.

The link in the post above is blurred, but leads on to a site hosting some JavaScript.

As security analysts trendmicro points out, if this JavaScript is executed by the browser, an “unpleasant payload” is delivered to the user’s PC.

Hoping to conquer America, touch-friendly mobile search engine Taptu is opening a US office in Denver, Colorado.

But, perhaps more interesting, it’s to be headed up by former Yahoo Mobile European MD, Mitch Lazar, who joined the Taptu Board as recently as March.

Not long in that role, his new title is President and Chief Operating Officer, which will see him “heading home” after 11 years in London.

Lazar will be charged with driving “business development, marketing and product management locally”, a move prompted by Taptu’s “rapidly growing American audience”, says the company.

Today is the day that most of the UK mobile carriers are taking iPhone 4 pre-orders. But, if like me, you’re afraid of commitment – well the 2 year mobile contract kind, anyway – then you might want to hold off for now.

Apple today has announced the availability and pricing of its latest smartphone SIM-free (sans contract) for British iPhone-touting wannabes shy of signing on the dotted line.

Garmz, a fashion startup that just launched in public beta after months of preparation, aims to change how fashion is being produced and distributed from the ground up.

Besides having a nicely designed User interface, the startup wants to disrupt current models of the fashion industry. Young aspiring fashion designers mostly lack adequate outlets for their work and creativity. As in every other real-life commerce business, one ought to have pre-sales distribution contracts and a certain, and mostly not a viable, number of purchasers (be it customers or shops).

Initial financing for fashion designs is almost an unbearable task for them. They either outsource their production to Asian or Eastern European countries, whereas they have to purchase +100 items per order for having those producers actually take their orders.

This is where garmz steps in.

Mixlr, a sort-of UStream for audio, wants to make it easy for DJs and bands to share and stream live performances to fans. The service, founded by London-based Rob Watson (a recent graduate of the Music Informatics department at the University of Sussex), is currently in a closed beta, although TechCrunch Europe has 200 invites to give away to readers.

In its current incarnation, Mixlr is a pretty simple offering, although that’s partly by design. Comprising of a Mac-only client (although a Windows and iPhone app is planned), users can plug-in any audio feed to their Mac and begin live streaming, pushing out a URL of their feed via Twitter, Facebook and MySpace or to share in other ways. Live performances can also be uploaded, archived, and tagged (including location), as well as sent to a SoundCloud account, a service that Mixlr both complements and potentially competes with.

We’re changing our events policy at TechCrunch Europe. Over the last two years we’ve developed and run our own events across Europe, thanks to the unwavering and ever professional support of Petra and Rassami of 2pears. But now that the European startup scene is gradually getting its act together, we’d like to sort of “open source” our events and are looking to partner with existing events and organisations.

We’re looking to work with you wherever your local tech scene is in Europe. So, going forward, please contact me initially and I will pass you on to our events and sponsorship consultant (to be announced) for more details about partnering with TechCrunch Europe.

We’ll be setting as high a bar as possible about which events and organisations we’ll partner with, and we’ll be looking for a minimum level of financial commitment and a combination of all or some of these elements in each events:

Skobbler, the free iPhone Sat-Nav solution based on the ‘Wikipedia of maps’ OpenStreetMap project, is now available for the UK and Ireland.

It’s already reached number 1 in the US App store’s navigation chart – not all that surprising since free beats the hefty prices of competitor TomTom and others – and its been a best selling app in Germany for more than six months, says the Berlin-based company.

The app’s data (and free-ness) is powered by the community of volunteers at OpenStreetMap (OSM), whose 250,000 members report and plug holes in the maps that OSM support. And whilst the model can be effective and disruptive – making free Sat-Nav conceivable long before Google and Nokia began giving away their wares – it can also be hit and miss.

OnePage, founded by Warwick University alumni Oo Nwoye and Joel Gascoigne, wants to make physical business cards a thing of the past by aggregating all of your contact details online.

These can include anything from your homepage address, Skype and IM handles, to your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profile, along with a range of other social networking accounts. There’s also the ability to embed your OnePage as a widget on your blog or website (and others can do so too), as well as the option for third-parties to email you directly through your OnePage via a contact form. Bizarrely though, the latter requires that they sign-up first, which adds far too much friction in itself and sort of defeats the point. It’s supposed to make it easy for others to get in contact after all.

Last night saw the closing of a 3-day-event called STARTEurope, in Vienna. Comparable to the recent Launch48 in the UK, it gathered entrepreneurial minds, developers, investors and a bunch of Wanna-bes to build and extend startups. Over the course of the weekend startups were able to exchange with business people, other startups and ultimately had to present what they were able to achieve and accomplish within those 72 hours.

We’ve seen how Unvarnished is setting out to create a kind of “Yelp for people” where you get reviewed as a person whether you like it or not. Now a new startup has appeared hoping to do something similar, but this time within a network that will give it significant traction from the word go: LinkedIn.

Here’s how it works: A user of Duedil will be able to submit comments or “reviews,” whilst other users will be able to “reply” to them by deeming them “fair” or “unfair.” In other words it’s a kind of ‘karma reputation’. Since the reviews themselves are subject to the scrutiny of other users, the reputation system itself becomes the focus of the system, rather than the object of the reviews (you).

On June 11 (today), it will be exactly five years since Michael Arrington hit the ‘Publish’ button and started TechCrunch with his very first post.

So we’re celebrating this fifth anniversary with a world-wide series of meetups today. The event was already publicised on TechCrunch last month, but in case you didn’t notice, there is also a London meetup.

Microsoft Europe’s communication team has used its Twitter account to make fun of Google’s latest search page feature: the ability to add background images to said page, a feature that has characterized Microsoft’s Bing search service since its debut.

Google yesterday temporarily added a default background image to make more people aware of the new feature, which apparently prompted Microsoft Europe to tweet: “We’ve lost a background image, if found please return to bing.com ”.

This Saturday England will play the USA in the South Africa World Cup 2010. Personally, I’m hoping England won’t be as complacent as it was in 1950.

Back then, the first World Cup saw after the Second World War saw the two teams face each other for the first time. After winning 23 of its preceding 30 games, England was feeling pretty confident. What did the Yanks know about football anyway? When the match kicked off on 29th June, the USA took the lead in the 38th minute. They won 1–0 (that’s “One Nil” BTW).

But to give you a taster of what it would be like if the two Brits on the TechCrunch team (myself and Paul Carr) faced-off against TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington, Erick Schonfeld and MG Seigler, here’s something put together by the nice guys behind behind mloovi and learn10.

Apple’s iPhone app store approval process is famed for its inconsistencies, but today the developer of a popular iPhone app has had enough.

Appsfire, an app for discovering popular iPhone apps, was approved in its version 1.0 form last August, but after two months its version 2.0 has not been approved, despite repeated calls by the startup to Apple, they claim.

In an excoriating blog post today, founder Ouriel Ohayon effectively accuses Apple of not approving its latest update because Apple wants to keep discoverability to itself:

Tweetminster, the UK politics tracker with a particular emphasis on Twitter, launches version 2.0 today.

The latest features – Channels, Lists, and support for Twitter’s recently announced @anywhere functionality – brings the service closer to its goal of making it “easier for people to follow and interact with UK politics”, says the startup.

At a press event I attended earlier this year, Three UK’s CEO Kevin Russell was repeatedly asked about why the network didn’t sell Apple’s iPhone and if it had plans to do so (along with the iPad too).

Russel’s answer was that it was something that they were considering but hinted that Cupertino would need to offer a better deal first – although, ultimately, Three likes to ‘swim in the opposite direction’ to the rest of the industry.

Today, however, the tide has turned. Three have announced that they will be selling the iPhone 4 and will be taking pre-orders from the 15th of June.

This also makes the UK, possibly, the most iPhone-friendly country in the world, with all four networks – five if you still count Orange and T-Mobile as separate entities – offering Apple’s latest smartphone.

It seems that we Brits can’t get enough iPhone.

Is Spotify’s future in devices and services? Like “intel inside”, it’s beginning to feel like Spotify – the hot streaming music service in Europe which is said to be prepping a US launch – may have a better future dealing with service providers and device manufacturers than trying to go direct to consumers.

That at least is the impression as today it launched its streaming music service on TVs across Sweden and Finland as of today, partnering with a Nordic telecommunications giant to do it.

TeliaSonera’s 120,000 digital TV customers will now get instant, remote control access to Spotify, so long as they are existing Spotify Premium subscribers.

Playdom, the Silicon Valley-based social games developer, has announced its intention to try and crack Europe.

It’s planning an aggressive roll out this side of the Atlantic, aiming to create localised versions – French, Italian, German and Spanish – of its top titles, which include Mobsters, Tiki Resort and Big City Life, by the end of this year. The company’s games largely target Facebook and MySpace, although it also has offerings for iPhone and Hi5, among other platforms.

The first of Playdom’s games to be available fully localised will be Bola, a Facebook football game which brings arcade-style football to the popular social network. Already available as a beta, analytics firm Appdata lists it as the 41st most popular application on Facebook, says the company.