This is a guest post by Richard Leyland, an entrepreneur and writer with a particular focus on the future of work. Richard is also the founder of WorkSnug, the location-based service for mobile workers.

Last year I founded a tech company in the augmented reality space. We’re doing pretty well. What began as me, an idea and a laptop is now a company with five people, plus a small army of freelancers and contractors. From roots in London we’ve now launched in sixteen cities across nine countries and two continents. We can reasonably claim to be global.

But we don’t fly. More than that, our founding principles make a public commitment that we won’t fly in the course of our business.

Viola Private Equity, an Israeli buyout and growth capital technology fund, is injecting $17 million into Adsmarket, a global performance-based advertising network based in Tel Aviv.

An affiliate of Viola Group, an investment consortium with nearly $2 billion under management, the PE fund will hold 21% of Adsmarket’s shares, valuing the company at $80 million pre-money.

Farfetch.com, an online fashion shopping site, has secured a $4.5 million investment from Advent Venture Partners.

Farfetch.com is a classic marketplace play which brings independent fashion boutiques from Europe and North America under one roof.

Launched in 2008, it’s had a lot of growth and sales have more than doubled in the last six months, compared to the previous half year. The money will go towards new hires, infrastructure, and increasing the number of retailers on the site.

In it’s seemingly never ending quest to slash public spending and bring down the deficit the UK government is resorting to increasingly bizarre stunts to whip the public up into a frenzy of “slash and burn”.

One of the most recent was the YourFreedom campaign which is trying to get the public to suggest which “red tape” inducing laws they want slashed (we’d like the repeal of the badly drafted and rushed-through Digital Economy Act, thanks very much). The latest is a clearly staged video chat between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Prime Minister David Cameron, now released below, about what to do about deficit. Huh, Mark? Huh? Come on then, let’s hear your ideas…

Quite why Mark chose to “meet” the PM in what looks like his spare bedroom in a T-shirt is something there will perhaps be PHDs written about. Or perhaps not.

Digital commerce giant eBay announced this morning the international releases of its eBay Selling application and its eBay for iPad application. The free Selling application is now available in Germany and the UK, and the eBay for iPad application is now translated into French, Italian, German and Spanish and currently available through Apple’s 77 iTunes App Stores.

In a separate release, eBay also announced that its Android app is now available for free download in the Android Market in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Social CRM platform vendor Attensity has issued its analysis of the sentiment expressed throughout various social media platforms about the World Cup finalists. Based on data drawn from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, video and forum sites, the startup has concluded that while Spain owns the largest share of conversations across the Web, social media users speak slightly more positive of The Netherlands.

According to Attensity, 54 percent of the total conversation about the World Cup (by English speakers) is being directed toward Spain, yet, of that total amount, only 47 percent of the chatter has been positive in sentiment. While only garnering 46 percent of the total conversation, Holland, on the other hand, has seen greater positive sentiment (53 percent).

As we’re postponing The Europas Awards for tech companies in Europe until after the Summer (sign up here to get news on that) we’re instead holding an event we’re calling “TechCrunch Summer Pitch Battle”.

It is on July 14 in London, 6.30pm at the new coworking space for startups, TechHub, Ground Floor, 76-80 City Rd, right by Old Street tube station.

Here’s how it will work:

A couple of weeks ago, the first trailer for the upcoming Facebook movie, The Social Network, hit the Web. Well lo and behold, a couple of hours ago the second trailer was released (embedded below). Remember, you saw it here first

The apocalyptic score remains, and the audio cuts from the movie you hear in the teaser are largely the same as in the first trailer, but this time conversations are played out like a chronological run-down of a Facebook news feed.

This is a guest post by Franz Enzenhofer (Xing), the SEO manager for tupalo.com. He’s an SEO expert who’s previously worked with Bwin.com, the Austrian Press Agency, 123people.com, tripwolf.com, dealhamster.com. He believes startups should absolutely link to their competition, and benefit from it. Here’s why.

Crisis! Oh great, the financial crisis is just behind us and we are already in the next one. But there is another: The Link Liquidity Crisis. Everybody needs Links, nobody wants to give links. There are not enough links on the market. And this crisis has been going on for years. This crisis is seriously hurting your own business, your market niche, your market segment and the Internet as a whole. And we are so accustomed to this crisis that most of us can’t even imagine an online business world without it. Shocking, isn’t it? But: every crisis is also an opportunity, for those who can adapt, change and are willing to try new things. Sounds like a perfect fit for startups. So now, link to your competition.

Yesterday, in a small Hamburg court room, something special happened – at least when it comes to the legal parameters of people search applications on the web.

The ligitator, a young woman, sued 123people. Specifically its German web property 123people.de, which has recently been sold to Pages Jaunes Groupe, for showing a photo of herself on its landing page. The court, however, declared the defendant “not guilty”(in German). To our knowledge this has been the first ruling from a higher court in Europe that puts often critized people search engines out of their, supposedly, legal grey area.

Flattr is a new startup with an inovative business model, coming out of Sweden. In fact it’s the brainchild of a group of people formerly associated with The [infamous] Pirate Bay, including Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi. It’s highly ironic that Flattr has sprung from a similar group that refused to pay for content, like movies. But Flattr just might work because there are already signs that the micropayments startup is getting grass-roots traction – and it’s still only in closed beta. Flattr is reminiscent of Digg or perhaps Facebook Like buttons – but this time with real money. That could make things very interesting.

According to one blogger he has had €875.89 for the month of June from Flattr and the amount has increased steadily upwards. Plus Flattr (as in flattering someone and a flat-rate payment model) is already in use by two major German newspapers, completely unprompted: taz.de and Freitag.de

There are also lists appearing of people appearing who are starting to make actual money. Admittedly these are small amounts, but that fact it’s even happening is interesting. Flattr has competition in the form of Kachingle but it’s fair to say the latter is not getting quite the same amount of buzz.

So how does it work?

The number of visitors to MySpace UK has halved in the last six months, TechCrunch Europe has learned, leading to a fresh round of layoffs at the London office of the social networking site.

According to internal figures that we’ve seen, monthly visits to MySpace UK are down from a peak of just under 10 million at the start of the year to around 5m as of the end of June 2010. If indeed this is the case – and we have every reason to believe the stats are authentic – it would appear to show a pretty staggering decline.

MySpace declined to comment on the details of this story aside from issuing the following statement: “We don’t publicly share internal data but these figures aren’t accurate.” However, we stand by our well placed sources.

Furthermore, in a bid to mask the decline in its userbase, our sources say that MySpace UK has been using a strategy of buying up cheap and sometimes unrelated Google keyword ads in order to “generate dirty traffic” to bump up the publicly accessible comScore stats. Ironically, according to our sources, Facebook.com is also now the third biggest referrer of traffic to the site.

Google has now joined global publisher Pearson to become one of the first founding sponsors of TechHub, a new co-working space and innovation centre for technology start-up companies in central London. The space has a launch party on Friday and officially opens on Monday 12 July.

It would appear Pearson came on board to tap into startup talent, but for Google the TechHub project is clearly of interest as a way to enliven the developer scene. Google’s Reto Meier, Android developer advocate, says Google is supporting TechHub’s aim to provide developers and budding tech entrepreneurs with “an affordable, buzzing and creative working environment.” It can’t hurt that TechHub will play host to developer meetups and there are plans for a device room / hackspace with lots of goodies in it.

TechHub launches next week on July 12 and has finally revealed its location: the ground floor of 76-80 City Rd, 10 seconds from the Old Street Tube station, here, slap bang in London’s “Silicon Roundabout” cluster of tech companies.

Yoose, a Berlin-based mobile coupon startup, just launched into their public beta phase. The idea behind Yoose is to provide a multi-level distribution platform for Coupon publishers, such as local businesses or larger firms that plan to target specific campaigns with coupons.

However, it took the company quite a while to deliver its service – two years to be precise. After being a finalist at Seecamp in 2008, they were stuck into a closed beta up until today. This was largely due to the fact that the founders separated and the remaining staff carried on. Apart from this problem, the company had to struggle to acquire partners to distribute coupons that are being bought by advertisers.

Although coupons, and especially mobile coupons in the light of smartphone ubiquity, are a hot topic, Europe still lacks a “coupon mindset”, compared to the US. As Groupon, and ultimately also the Euro Clones such as CityDeal, effectively showed, these times are slowly changing and Europe is adapting a coupon culture. This is still lightyears away from the US, where coupons became a substantial business, both for customers and shops, but Europe is getting there.

Online fashion search company Empora has acquired German fashion social network FashionFreax.net, a multilingual fashion social network. Terms were not diclosed. Founded by the Theilmann twins in 2006, FashionFreax is in German, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese has members in 90 countries.

The acquisition will see Empora enable FashionFreax with its fashion search technology to connect users’ street style content to products available for sale online. In turn, FashionFreax users will feature on Empora’s street style channel.

Tourist Eye pulls out of their closed beta this morning, as they simultaneously launch their app for the iPhone and Android. Two young Spanish founders, Javier Fernández Escribano and Ariel Cámus, are aiming for an international smartphone userbase. The company offers a collaborative space for creating and sharing travel plans and compiling travel guides and will compete with other startups such as Tripwolf.

E-commerce continues to provide a rich seam of businesses for European tech investors and this is represented today by a series A funding in an online retailer of ‘affordable’ designer fashion. My-wardrobe.com today announces a $9 million Series A investment round led by Balderton Capital, the first institutional investor in the company, supported by existing angel investors.

Dharmash Mistry, partner at Balderton Capital, will join the board joining existing members: Nick Wheeler, CEO of Charles Tyrwhitt; Carol Duncumb, former Intimas CEO; Jean-Marc Bouhelier, executive chairman of my-wardrobe.com; and founder and CEO Sarah Curran (pictured).

On the face of it a good idea: four days in the beautiful Tuscany shooting the breeze about tech and entrepreneurship between European and US delegates.

However, try organising that from the U.S., not locking down the sponsors so they couldn’t pull out at the last minute and then telling the delegates the event is officially cancelled, but so late that some of them have already arrived in Italy.

That at least seems to the be outcome of the abortive Partners for Growth and Innovation conference, which, despite a slick web site filled with enticing images of Tuscany, put up a statement this week:

“We are terribly sorry for the inconvenience caused by the cancellation of our Tuscany conference, due to the unexpected defection of our main corporate sponsor, and some unfortunate miscommunication, on our side. We learned our lesson and do apologize. We are now directly fixing any remaining issues, and will work soon on preparing for a new gathering, this Fall, with a different format and a pristine long term organization. Thank you for your understanding and support. Stay in touch!”

That was the official story. But since canceling the event with less that 24hrs notice to delegates – many of who were on their way to the venue – the principle organiser, Tanya Noel, has continued to promote another event in the Fall, with many of the same speakers, including myself. I’d agreed to speak at the one this week, but realised recently that Noel had put me into the line-up in the Fall (this is not the case).

So what is going on? TechCrunch Europe has had access to a series of emails which throw light on the abrupt cancellation of this event.

It was always probably too good to be true.

Groupola‘s aggressive campaign to build up its mailing list and create name recognition for the group buying site, appears to have somewhat backfired. The UK Groupon-clone has been running a promotion offering a limited number of its email subscribers an unlocked iPhone 4 for £99, a massive discount of 80.16%.

The deal was scheduled to go live today at 9.30am, but it seems that the majority of those who clicked on the link provided never actually got through due to Groupola’s wonky server falling over.