GigsWiz, a Helsinki-based analytics service for the live music industry, has grabbed €150,000 in a seed round of funding.

The service basically helps music bands interact with their fans with a widget on their site. During the beta phase bands can collect requests from fans – “where do you want us to play live?” – through the GigsWiz tool on their websites. They can then view the data plotted on a map or as charts and lists. “So far bands have had a rather vague picture of their regional and international fan base by looking at the traffic to their web pages. Now they can measure the actual interest to attend a concert and be inform the fans when the tickets come on sale” says Juuso Vermasheinä, responsible for customer development.

Karsa Flash Payer offers a way for content creators to monetize their online video using a bait and switch model in which payment is only requested mid-viewing, once the user is already hooked. The service was developed by UK-based Steven Carroll, the guy behind Documentary-film.net, which came very close to entering the Deadpool after he found it difficult to generate enough revenue to cover the hosting and bandwidth costs of the site.

Instead of forcing the viewer to commit to paying up front for content that they may not yet consider worth their cash, Karsa allows for it to be viewable for free for a set amount of time, after which the video pauses and the user is prompted for payment. Once paid-for, playback of the video can be resumed.

The UK broadcaster Channel 4 has appointed Richard Davidson-Houston in a newly created role of Head of Online. Previously he was Head of Online Products, and with this promotion is being given responsibility for “all Channel 4’s online propositions and commissioning”, which will also see 4iP, the broadcaster’s digital media fund, reporting directly to him.

Appstream, a simple visualisation tool to help iPad owners discover new apps via a matrix-style wall (perhaps inspired by Apple’s own efforts at its World Wide Developer Conference), appears to be resonating with users.

It’s currently hovering in the top 50 of free iPad apps in the U.S. App Store, while in France (the iPad’s second biggest market), it’s doing even better, currently sitting at number two.

That’s not such a big deal in itself but what makes this case study a little more interesting is that the company, also behind the much more fully blown app discovery service Appsfire, created Appstream as a sort-of side project while it grew more and more frustrated waiting for Apple to approve version 2.0 of its main app.

UK real estate startup Zoopla has launched an iPhone app which rather puts the competition in the shade with an Augmented Reality option. Main competitors Rightmove and Findaproperty have apps, but all they do is For Sale and To Rent searches. Zoopla by contrast offers all the data its has on every UK home with a number of features you won’t find in the average app. The app has map-led search (map and hybrid options) as well as list view and Augmented Reality (3GS or 4 only).

Because of Zoopla’s combined crowdsourced and land registry approach, it claims to have every UK home on its platform, not just those for sale and to rent. That means it can give value estimates for all 27 million UK homes, with 15 million+ house prices paid dating back to 1995.

TechCrunch Europe Summer Pitch Battle (which used #tcbattle on Twitter) was a new kind of event for us. Over 40 different pitches where heard from people ranging from tiny one-person startups to much more developed entities. In the past we’ve run more formal events where startups have to apply to pitch prior to the event and slide presentations are pre-loaded. With this we literally flew by the seat of our pants and packed in as many pitches as we could.

With Pitch Battle we threw open the doors. Anyone who had bought a ticket could submit a 1-2 line description of their startup (or idea). In total almost 200 people came. The judging panel was: Katy Turner and Ben Tompkins of Eden Ventures; Eileen Tso Burbidge (White Bear Yard); Wendy Tan White of Moonfruit and Paul Jozefak of Neuhaus Partners.

The initial pitches were sifted very quickly by the judges, who selected 30 to pitch for 1 minute. We even let the ones who weren’t selected (another 12) to just introduce themselves and read out their one-liners. Afterwards, 7 were nominated (along with another three who were part of a previous UKTI pitching clinic we help run) to pitch for a 3 minutes each and then the judges selected 3 final winners.

Local reviews site Qype has released an updated iPhone app which does something interesting and new. If users use the app to check-in to venues, or if they’ve put in some reviews, it will give automatic recommendations for venues.

These recommendations are based on your previous behaviour, such as what you’ve reviewed, check-ins, not on what your friends like. So if you like speciality coffee shops you will get those recommended to you. Qype is in several European markets now, so it can do things like recommend a bar to you in London based on the kinds of bars you like when you are in Berlin. The new app is also fully social so can see where friends have checked in to a venue.

Yelp doesn’t do this at all, so this new feature of Qype appears to better its main competitor. Notably TellMeWhere has tried this but their audience remains largely French.

Forget France.fr for a moment  and consider MyLittleParis. With over 200K subscribers, it’s probably hard to imagine that these unique newsletters came about by pure accident – but it just so happens that that’s the case. Turns out the founder, Fany Péchiodat, was asked non-stop by friends for her creative ideas and insider information on the best places in Paris and eventually found herself with only one option: to launch an e-newsletter.

Only 50 or so of her friends subscribed to the first edition of the newsletter in 2008 – and the userbase has grown naturally via word of mouth ever since. Today, the famous free newsletter is distributed 3 times a week for the Paris region, Marseille and Lyon.

The British Prime Minister David Cameron and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg look like they could be about to fall out already. Just days after that cosy, if a little awkward, video chat, it seems that this particular marriage of convenience may be over.

Yesterday, when answering a question in Parliament regarding whether or not Cameron should ask Zuckerberg to remove a Facebook page housing opinions offering support and sympathy for murderer Raoul Moat, Cameron replied:

“As far as I can see, it is absolutely clear that Raoul Moat was a callous murderer-full stop, end of story-and I cannot understand any wave, however small, of public sympathy for this man. There should be sympathy for his victims, and for the havoc he wreaked in that community; there should be no sympathy for him.”

The Prime Minister’s press officer later reportedly followed up by suggesting that the UK government would in fact ask Facebook to remove the ‘offending’ page.

Whether or not this has actually happened isn’t clear but it was enough for a nervous Facebook to issue an official response, perhaps fearful that the story was about to get legs. Here’s the full statement:

Mobile social network Flirtomatic (“the world’s number one flirting company”) today announced that it has raised $9 million in Series C funding from Nauta Capital and existing investors Doughty Hanson, Seraphim Capital and Chairman Avi Azulai. This brings the total capital raised to $17 million.

The London-based company says it will use the new investment to “further its growth across Europe and the US”, and in particular focus on its co-marketing efforts with partners, which include AT&T, MetroPCS, Virgin Mobile, and T-Mobile.

Flirtomatic has also signed a distribution deal with a “multi-national operator”, which saw the mobile social network for young adults launch across eight countries under a single payment and billing system, says the company, although it isn’t saying who.

GrabCAD, an open source library for CAD (computer aided design) engineers, has secured €256k of angel funding from the Estonian Development Fund and telecommunication technology company Astrec Baltic (owner of Motors24.ee) with the aim to become “the world’s leading web environment for CAD engineers within three years.”

Founded by Hardi Meybaum and Indrek Narusk, GrabCAD, which is set to debut in Beta in early August, lets CAD engineers share 3D models, solving the problem in which they spend too much time designing products or components that already exist elsewhere in the form of drawings. By making these models available to others, engineers will be able to dedicate “more time to creating unique products and components”, says the company.

But where’s the revenue stream, I hear you say.

We R Interactive, a London-based online games publisher, has turned on the lights, and is on a mission to give birth to a “new generation of interactive and social games that allow players an unprecedented level of control, influence and engagement across multiple platforms”.

The company is headed by former PlayStation and Eidos executive David Rose, ex-ITV Interactive Commissioning Editor Oli Madgett and media analyst Richard Dale.
Rounding out the management team are two of the directors of production company Bigballs Films, Tom Thirlwall and Chris Kelly.

We R Interactive also launches with the backing of Peter Mead, founder of ad agency Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO,Fru Hazlitt, former Yahoo and Gcap Media boss, and ITV’s new commercial and online director and Eric Fellner, co-founder of Working Title.

Ideas4all, the platform where users share ideas to help solve problems, has raised an additional €1 million, largely from existing angel investors, adding to the €3m raised in previous rounds.

As well as its consumer facing site, the Madrid-based startup sells a version of its service to businesses and organisations who want to foster innovation amongst their employees. Ideas4all says it has signed contracts worth 418,000 euros in the first half of 2010, putting it 6 months ahead of its business plan.

To-date, users have submitted over 50,000 ideas to ideas4all.com and have raised over 3,000 problems and offered close to 2,700 solutions, says the company.

Oportunista.com, a coupon-finding service local to Spain, has just launched an iPhone app (developed by MUBIQUO), an important missing piece for a company that specializes in online coupons. The company was founded two years ago after Rodrigo Gimenez Rico and Alexandra Klein came back to Spain from working in the U.S. and decided to give entrepreneurship a go back at home. Among others, the company is backed by some well known shareholders including Alberto Feliú, co-founder of Infojobs.net, DAD and Gustavo García, founder of Buyvip.com.

A few months back I had a brief chat with Oportunista about their plans for mobile. I thought it was an obvious and well-overdue component for a coupon based model. Rodrigo said they were working on it but that in Spain there was a significant barrier and it wasn’t smartphone market share. Local Spanish shops and restaurants are not keen on accepting mobile coupons because they apparently have no way to account for them.

Scytl, the Internet voting company, has closed a $9.2 million round of funding led by European VC firm Balderton Capital, and supported by Nauta Capital, a previous investor. The new funds will enable Scytl to “consolidate its leading position in the electronic voting market and support its international expansion”, says the company, with a primary focus on the U.S.

Scytl’s secure technology, which enables the traditional voting process during elections to happen online, has been used by 13 out of 16 of the countries worldwide who have introduced electronic voting in their public elections, says the company. The advantages offered by Internet voting are said to be “cost, efficiency, speed and security”, although it’s not yet proven that electronic voting necessarily increases participation.

Mobile Backstage, a new social music service and mobile app that lets artists and bands “engage” with their fans, is set to officially launch next week, although it’s already been trialed by the likes of hip hop star Dizzee Rascal, and the ‘emo’ outfit You Me At Six (yes, I’ve never heard of them either). It’s been developed by Steam Republic, a Finnish mobile solutions company, which says it recently raised a second round of funding in the region of €2 million of its target of €3 -5 million.

That’s not necessarily all that newsworthy in itself – there are already plenty of ways for artists to interact with fans online – but what’s perhaps more interesting is that the company claims that its bespoke mobile app, which can be fully branded for each artist/band and runs on iPhone and Java-enabled handsets, beats uber social networks such as Facebook and MySpace in terms of the level of fan interaction and user-generated content.

There are already tons of sites that let you share photos, with Facebook, arguably, the default way for friends, colleagues and family to share those captured moments. Yet Yogile, a bootstrapped startup and one-man shop founded by Netherlands-based Maurice Sikkink, thinks it has spotted a gap in the market: dead simple photo sharing with an emphasis on multi-authored albums without the need for everybody who contributes to sign-up first.

The latter functionality nicely skirts around network effects as it doesn’t require the user to get their social graph to commit to using the same photo sharing service if they just want others to contribute ad hoc, uploading and sharing photos around a certain event, for example. In fact, the service is pitched perfectly for this purpose.

One of the key advantages of on-demand music streaming services compared with traditional radio is that as well as listening to the music you choose you can do away with the DJ’s endless chatter and other interruptions. But there is a potential downside: being isolated from current events, such as breaking news.

We7, the UK music streaming service and rival to the likes of Spotify in Europe, thinks it has a solution in the form of a partnership with The Guardian Media Group-owned GMG Radio, the company behind stations such as Smooth, Real and Rock Radio. Under the agreement, GMG Radio will provide We7 listeners with breaking news via the Real Radio brand, with the two companies essentially creating a kind of hybrid offering, which potentially mixes the best of on-demand and live radio.

Facebook has often been criticised in the UK for not having a child safety ‘panic button’ and while a few media outlets are reporting today that it has launched one, the reality is somewhat different. What Facebook is launching is a tailor-made marketing application and campaign for a government body which till now had no presence at all on the social network. That’s quite a different thing altogether.

The move is the latest from the social networking giant to address its obligations to it’s younger members. In the US it recently added a number of new safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyber bullies. But till now it’s been seen as something of a laggard. Both Bebo and MySpace bother have ‘panic buttons and have been happy to tell the world about it. However, Facebook launched a new Safety Center in April and it’s long argued – not unreasonably – that panic buttons imply that social networking is inherently dangerous, which would be a warped way of looking at things.

The reality is that the media rarely checks these panic buttons out: Bebo’s button just takes you to a 7 page form – not exactly what would might call an engaging way to address this issue.

Spotify has been released for Linux. As of today, a Penguin-friendly version of the streaming music service is available as a preview, although we still don’t seem any closer to the much-rumored U.S. launch.

According to an official blog post, the Linux version was built by developers at the company “during hack days and late nights”, and shares most of the same features as the Windows and Mac OS X desktop applications. That said, due to issues regarding decoding of local music on the Linux platform, Spotify hasn’t been able to include support for local files in this version.