A new law in Germany could soon make it illegal for employers to check out prospective job candidates on Facebook and other non-career focused social networks, according to local newspaper reports.

Bizarrely, however, it will still be legal to “google” applicants, although they are to disregard information that is either too old or outside of a candidate’s control. Social networks specifically designed for professional purposes, think LinkedIn or the larger local player Xing, are OK too.

(Interestingly, there’s no provision for Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s prediction that a free and legal name change once a person reaches adulthood could be the solution.)

Here’s an interesting new iPhone app. The Accidental News Explorer, just released, is a new iPhone based news reader which adds serendipity to the news reading experience [iTunes link].

You start by searching for a subject you want to know about and then browse the suggested articles taken from hundreds of news sources. Tap on the “related topics” button and you are presented with connected topics, which in turn lead to more articles and of course more browsing.

At the moment Facebook Places is only available in the United States. Or to put that another way, it’s only available to IP addresses associated with the United States. But clearly Facebook has been working on it for several months, and that also means that they have probably been tentatively testing it in other parts of the world, although there’s not a lot of information to go on right now. But, handily, Mark Zuckerberg travels a lot and has probably been testing Places out himself. Evidence to that affect has emerged today via a developer in London.

Arun Stephens has uncovered what looks, at least to our eyes, like a Facebook Places footprint which Zuckerberg and his entourage left behind on their recent visit to the FB hack day and Facebook Developer Garage in London. His findings make interesting reading.

GetJar, the largest independent mobile app store, continues to bed down in India. Today the company, which originates from Lithuania, has announced a partnership with Virgin Mobile India to operate a white label app store for the youth-oriented MVNO. This follows a similar ‘strategic partnership’ with Reliance Communications (RCOM), India’s second largest mobile operator, announced back in April.

Virgin Mobile India’s GetJar-powered app store will give its customers access to a catalog of more than 70,000 free mobile games and apps, including popular titles such as Facebook Mobile, Yahoo!, Opera Mini, eBuddy, and Nimbuzz. While Virgin Mobile India will charge users a fee per KB to cover the data costs, with the overall aim, presumably, to drive up data use and feed customers’ growing appetite for apps and content.

WorldTV, which funnels the world of web video as a TV-like experience, has gone High-Definition, adding full support for YouTube HD videos. The feature allows users to set the quality for how they would like YouTube videos to be played and scales the video to the highest quality available.

On WorldTV the idea is that you create you own channel of preferred web videos, eventually coming up with something that feels more like linear TV. So far there have been 225,000 channels created on WorldTV from users in 200 countries. Interestingly the site is biggest in Brazil.

WorldTV users use the site’s chanel editing tools to incorporate clips from YouTube, live video, and 25 other sites, like an iPhoto of videos. Every playlist creates a channel which is then embeddable. The end game will be a WorldTV app which turns your TV into Internet video TV.

This is a guest post by Geert Claes, a Business Improvement consultant, Information Architect, User Experience Designer and Business Analyst with extensive international experience. He’s lived and worked in Australia for most of the last 10 years but in August last year moved back to Europe to the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta.

If Europe is still looking for its Silicon Valley, Malta could well be it.

Malta is a little Mediterranean Island south of Italy, somewhere between Sicily and North Africa. The current Maltese IT scene is, as one might expect with a total population of about 410k, fairly small. Malta does have a healthy number of IT companies and Malta’s taxation system to attract foreign investment has also resulted in a more than average (unhealthy?) number of online gambling or iGaming companies.

However, SmartCity Malta is a €275 million business park that could truly make Malta a contestant to become a hub for European IT talent and tech start-ups. SmartCity Malta is a joint venture between the Maltese government and Dubai based TECOM Investments to construct a technology park with offices, hotels, apartments and even retail outlets. Why this rather big investment for this tiny island you wonder? Well, Malta does have some excellent drawing cards:

I’ll confess that I’m not familiar with SZ Magazine, a supplement that is part of the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, but this is pretty cool.

In what the dead tree magazine claims as a first, although other publications have flirted with the concept, the latest edition is fully Augmented Reality supported. Yep, that’s right, point your iPhone’s camera at pages of the publication, after downloading the accompanying app of course, and – bingo – additional content is unlocked or brought to life.

The latest revision to the prestigious Oxford Dictionary gives recognition to the rise of social media. Along with the phrase social media itself, other new entrants include microblogging, defriend (as in ditching someone on Facebook) and, wait for it, tweetup.

I know, that’s twunbelievable! Seriously.

For those of you who don’t know what a tweetup is, it’s a gathering of people arranged through Twitter often so that users of the microblogging platform can actually meet up for perhaps the first time. It’s a fun concept but seems a bit too niche to make the Oxford Dictionary.

This is a guest post by Nick Lewis, a copywriter and SEO analyst for Brighton web design agency Bozboz and sister company Search Optimist.

Real time is the buzz in search at the moment. As exciting and interesting as that is, to my mind, something much more interesting is happening at Google. Certain moves made lately suggest they are moving beyond the present and encapsulating the full scope of the past and the future too.

Google Timeline

Although having been around for a while, Google Timeline is a very little known feature. It allows you to search for any topic and see results ordered in chronological order of historical reference. For example, here are the results for ‘fishing’:

This is a guest post by Amy Hoy (@amyhoy), the designer & co-founder behind Freckle Time Tracking, a former interaction design consultant to Fortune 100 companies, and a passionate crusader for creating no-nonsense products. In 2008, Amy moved from her home state of Maryland to Vienna, Austria. This article is a result of her entrepreneurial culture shock.

The mindset of the entrepreneur doesn’t come with a genetic code or a zip code, it comes with deliberate practice. You don’t have to come from an entrepreneurial family, or even come from an entrepeneurial culture.

You can cultivate your entrepreneurial mindset from anywhere… and you don’t have to do it alone.

Think like a Chess Grand Master

Did you know that there’s a measurable cognitive difference between Chess Grand Masters and novice players? Surprisingly, the difference isn’t in processing power, it’s in memory. Show a Grand Master a board in play, and she can memorize every piece in a couple seconds. Try the same trick with a novice, and you’ll be lucky if he manages a third.

Show a jumbled board — with no logic behind it — and suddenly the Grand Master and novice are equals.

MyVoucherCodes, the UK’s leading discount voucher code site, is preparing to go hyper-local. The idea isn’t a new one: let users find the best local deals using their iPhone via GPS.

In fact, Vouchercloud from Invitation Digital, which we profiled in February, is another such offering. There’s also competition from the host of deal-a-day Groupon clones, of which MyVoucherCodes founder Mark Pearson has one of his own – and Groupon itself, of course.

Earlier this week, we reported that Paul Brown, formerly Spotify‘s SVP of strategic partnerships and managing director of its UK office before that, had recently quit the digital music streaming startup and landed a gig at another startup.

We knew it was a company outside the music space, but not which one. Now we do: Brown has been hired as chief operating officer at research collaboration software company Mendeley (our coverage).

Zemanta, the service that helps bloggers find related content as they write, has partnered with Automattic so that its plugin is now available to users of Wordpress.com.

This follows existing partnerships with SixApart’s Movable Type, Blogger.com and Scribefire, and means that with today’s addition of Wordpress.com, Zemanta now reaches 30% of the blogosphere, claims the company.

Skobbler, the free iPhone Sat-Nav solution based on the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, has seen a major update today.

New to version 3.0 is support for Google local search which offers an alternative to traditional address input based navigation. Instead users can input the name of an establishment or type of restaurant, say Pizza, and based on the list of results begin navigating with a single tap.

Deskarma, which describes itself as a “business expertise sharing platform”, launches in beta today. It’s designed to enable professionals to share their “business insights”, with the motivation to do so partly driven by the user’s ability to build an online reputation as an expert via the site’s karma-based points system.

Basically, users can write posts, comment, and answer questions, while the quality of their contributions are peer rated so that the more interesting content and users become more visible. Related to this is the fact that Deskarma doesn’t sit behind a walled garden and therefore is indexed by Google et al, meaning that a user’s newly forged reputation might end up appearing in search results. That’s the idea anyway.

Off-line, watching video is more often than not a social experience as friends and family gather around the telly. Whilst, arguably, online and in the age of the laptop or smartphone, it’s very much a solitary exercise. Attempts at making the online viewing experience more social aren’t anything new but video monetization platform Invideous has perhaps a novel solution: something it’s calling a ‘social playhead’.

Installable as a plug-in for most of the popular video hosting platforms, in the same way that a regular video playhead lets a viewer see at what point they are in the video, the social playhead lets users see who else is watching the video and, specifically, at what point they are at too. Users can then initiate a conversation by clicking on the person’s avatar displayed within the playhead upon rollover which launches Invideous’ own in-video IM client.

Entrepreneurship is getting younger – even in France ! I just learned that a 17-year-old French high school student, Andrés Talavera, is developing a TechCrunch mobile app for the Windows Phone 7 competition hosted by Microsoft France.

Andrés is going into his final year of high school in Strasbourg, France, where he’s currently specializing in information systems. Apparently, he’s been passionnate about everything Microsoft since the age of 14. As a Microsoft Student Partner since October 2009, he’s also been in the process of puting together his own startup, Crésus. The website, www.cresus.net, should go live on September 1st and the company will most likely be a service provider and distributor for various Microsoft products. Go figure.

Video search engine blinkx has announced a partnership with Internet Video Archive (IVA), the “leading aggregator” of movie and TV trailers, game previews and music videos. Under the terms of the deal, IVA’s portfolio of videos – 500,000 video assets from over 1,000 content providers – will be indexed and viewable at blinkx.com.

IVA provides users with trailers of new releases, classics and “everything in between” from major film studios including Warner Bros, Paramount and MGM, along with video game publishers such as Nintendo, Capcom and Namco.

This a guest post by Chris Wild, CTO of Altran Praxis, a specialist systems and software house which delivers engineering, technology and innovation for the world’s embedded and critical systems. Chris has 28 years of experience in the software industry and has worked in the aerospace, automotive, telecoms and mobility sectors. His technical background covers mathematical algorithms, real-time and embedded systems delivery, AI, HMI and architecture.

The App Store, in one form or another, is now an established, and even standard, feature of any smartphone worthy of the name. Consumers are able (and expect) to update their devices with applications and services in a manner which is robust, secure and with a well understood cost. Whether by web page or device specific clients, App Stores provide for secure purchase, download and installation of new apps in an easy and controlled process. Importantly, consumer confidence in the apps available on an App Store is maintained through pre-qualification by the App Store operator.

This approach has brought many benefits to the smartphone market, notably allowing an army of creative developers to provide content in a volume and speed-to-market which would have been impossible in a centrally integrated or commissioned development model.

In-car infotainment systems are currently seen as another market which could benefit from an App Store approach. Potentially, a number of issues associated with infotainment systems and their delivery could be solved using the same central App Store concept as smart phones.

Following an initial investment in February, the UK private buying club Secretsales has raised a second round of funding from Germany’s Brands4friends. The actual amount is once again undisclosed but is in the “multi-million pound” region.

Secretsales runs so-called “flash sales” of fashion, beauty, travel, lifestyle and home wares, offering up to 70% off brands such as Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana and Christian Dior. The company says it has seen a doubling of visitors since Brand4friends’ initial investment, and now claims over 1 million unique users per month.