Anything Apple can do… OK not quite. Nonetheless, Samsung is feeling pretty pleased with itself, announcing that its own app store – Samsung Apps – has seen 10 million downloads in Europe since its launch in September 2009. Initially available in a limited number of European (and Asian countries), including the UK, France, Germany and Italy, the handset maker’s app store now targets 109 markets worldwide, including 34 countries across Europe.

However, to put that 10 million figure into context, reminiscent of Nokia’s Ovi store, Samsung Apps is fragmented across several supported Samsung handsets and multiple platforms: Java, Windows Mobile, and the company’s newly launched bada OS. Also, right now, most of Samsung Apps’ wares appear to be of the free kind. Furthermore, Apple actually hit the 1 Billion mark in just nine months.

There’s probably hundreds of sites out there that are trying to sell customized things on the web. MyMuesli, a successful and still growing German startup was one of the first ones in that field and they paved the way for these types of e-commerce websites. Furthermore they showed that there is apparently a demand for pricey yet customizable cereals.

Chocri, a site for mass-customization of chocolate coming out of Germany and until now privately funded, has managed to establish a partnership with one of Europe’s leading chocolate manufacturers, Ritter Sport. For both parties such a collaboration makes sense. Chocri gets to benefit from Ritter Sport’s deep understanding and knowledge of chocolate production (and eventually know-how how to reduce their production cost and expand sales with an established sales force), while its new partner gains access to the growing market of online food order and customization.

Today thousands if not millions of Twitter users were affected by the onmousover Twitter exploit which created malicious pop-ups and could also fill and send a status update ‘on your behalf’. How nice. Here are our Top 5 Tips on how to avoid the worm until Twitter fixes the problem:

BREAKING: Post javascript into your status update on Twitter and you can make something appear in the pop-up as a user mouses over your tweet. This is clearly now causing havoc across the Twittersphere as users either do funny, rick-rollling type stuff, or scammers catch on to the exploit. It looks like many users are currently using the flaw for a joke but cybercrims could redirect users to third-party websites containing malicious code, or for spam advertising pop-ups. [Update: it appears the exploit could also fill and submit a status update form 'on your behalf' leading to it spreading to over 40,000 tweets within 10 minutes. Here are our top 5 ways to avoid and fix the onmouseover Twitter bug]

As Security experts Sophos put it:

The Twitter website is being widely exploited by users who have stumbled across a flaw which allows messages to pop-up and third-party websites to open in your browser just by moving your mouse over a link. Thousands of Twitter accounts have posted messages exploiting the flaw. Victims include Sarah Brown, wife of the former British Prime Minister. It appears that in Sarah Brown’s case her Twitter page has been messed with in an attempt to redirect visitors to a hardcore porn site based in Japan. That’s obviously bad news for her followers – over one million of them. To Mrs Brown’s credit, she has posted a warning on her Twitter page: “don’t touch the earlier tweet – this twitter feed has something very odd going on ! Sarah”… Some users are also exploiting the loophole to create tweets that contain blocks of colour (known as “rainbow tweets”). Because these messages can hide their true content they might prove hard for some users to resist clicking on them.

This is only affecting the actual Twitter web site (which has the highest number of Twitter users), not third party apps like Tweetdeck, Seesmic, etc.

This is a developing story, stay tuned for updates.

Clickworker.com (Humangrid), the European paid crowdsourcing platform and a competitor to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, has picked up a new client: U.S. high-school sports media network Swink.tv.

Similar to Amazon’s offering, clickworker breaks down potentially complex tasks, or at least those that can’t be easily automated by a computer, into micro-jobs, which it then distributes to any number of its 60,000 registered “clickworkers”.

After investing some 15 million euros in France-based OneDirect a few weeks ago, Belgian VC fund Gimv has just announced that it is dropping 4.9 million euros on a Vente-Privée competitor called Private Outlet. This investments brings the company’s second round of funding to 9 million euros and should add a bit of monetary fuel to its international development.

Today, the company which refers to itself as Europe’s “private online shopping club” counts some 1.8 million members in 5 countries, including France, the UK, Spain, Italy and Germany. Like a majority of the other private sale sites out there, Private Outlet offers up to 70% discounts on fashion accessories and clothing from roughly 150 luxury brands (Christian Dior, D&G, Chanel, etc.). One aspect that distinguishes Private Outlet from some of its competitors is that passing internet users can see which products and brands are on sale without having to become members. But alas, in order to purchase anything from the site, you need to become a club member – obviously.

Flexiant, which provides cloud software and services, has raised approximately a further £1 million in its latest funding round from “over twenty angel investors”, along with the company’s management team. That brings the total raised to-date to around £2m.

Flexiant, one of only three independent public cloud providers in Europe (and five worldwide) says it will use the additional capital to further develop Extility, its cloud computing technology, and FlexiScale, its infrastructure-as-a-service offering.

BREAKING: Betfair, the world’s biggest Internet betting exchange and a UK Internet success story, is today announcing plans to list on the London Stock Exchange as part of its first moves to go global with the business. The company cuts out traditional bookmakers by matching individual gamblers who bet against eachother.

The UK is still it’s biggest market so growth will come internationally, specifically Europe and Australia with development in the longer term in the United States, India and China.

Betfair was launched 10 years ago by Andrew Black, a former professional gambler, and former JP Morgan trader Edward Wray, who jointly own one quarter of the group.

Spareroom.co.uk, the UK flat and house share website, has chosen ImpulsePay to power its mobile payment option.

Users can now pay for access to ‘Early Bird’ ads on Spareroom using their mobile phone, giving them a heads-up of any available rooms, the cost of which will be added to their mobile phone bill or taken from their pre-pay credit. That’s because ImpulsePay (formerly GoPayforit) utilises Payforit, the service backed by all the UK’s mobile operators, providing an alternative option to Premium SMS or credit card payments — see our previous coverage.

Microsoft is finally launching the Zune media player brand outside North America, with an Autumn launch in the U.K., France, Italy and Spain initially.

Zune software and related services, like the Zune Marketplace online store and Zune Pass music subscription service, via channel partners not direct from Microsoft.

It’s taken a year for Microsoft to reach this point after saying they intended to take the Zune brand international.

The Zune Pass, which includes unlimited streaming. will only be available in the U.K., France, Italy and Spain. It will cost 9.99 euros, or 8.99 pounds, a month. The Zune video service will also now expand to Australia and New Zealand. Movie rentals for PC and Windows Phone 7, will go live in another set of countries.

Jay Penske, the man behind Mail.com has sold off the email portal side of the business (Mail.com) to Germany’s United Internet Group, in order to focus on the company’s more content driven sites such as Deadline.com, HollywoodLife.com, Movieline.com and OnCars.com. The United Internet Group is Europe’s largest publicly listed Internet company. It’s main brands are 1&1, GMX, WEB.de, united-domains, Fasthosts, InterNetX, Sedo and affilinet.

This sale will also marks a transition from also mark a transition from the clunky Mail.com moniker to the more streamline MMC. Sources say the deal just went through for between $50-$100 million.

Polar Rose, a Malmö, Sweden startup which built a very interesting facial recognition programme which hooked into Facebook photos, has been bought by Apple, according to Swedish media.

The 15-person company was previously majority owned by Danish private equity fund Nordic Venture Partners, and it now appears Apple has taking over the entire shareholding. Neither Apple nor the company is commenting.

However, we have rock-solid sources that say the company went for $22 million. Polar Rose has had about $6 million in VC funding since 2006.

“Do I have any views on the rumoured sale of LoveFilm to Amazon? Many. But not for public consumption. Sorry!” That’s the quote from one of my sources close to the story that is developing around the so-called Amazon/LoveFilm discussions.

The Sunday Times broke a story (no link because of their paywall) yesterday claiming Amazon.com has made an offer for European DVD rental business Lovefilm of £200 million ($313 million). Amazon already has a large stake in LoveFilm after selling its U.K. and German DVD rental business to them in early 2008 and putting some cash in to take a 42 per cent stake in the business.

Amazon spokesman aren’t commenting on the rumour and all my sources are claming up as well. This indicates that something is going on but it may well not be a sale to Amazon at all. It may in fact be a feint, a rumour put out in the marketplace to create some buzz about a business that, after several years of scaling, has investors impatient for a liquidity event. The Sunday Times is routinely used for these kinds of “plant” stories. If I had a pound for every time…. etc

We’d already had a hint that it was forthcoming: MXP4, the interactive music startup, is powering a new ad unit on Spotify in conjunction with Sony Music.

Described as a first-of-its-kind, the campaign for Mark Ronson’s new album uses MXP4′s technology to enable Spotify users to play with tracks in a “game-like environment” directly within the ad. Although we’re not quite sure how it’s a first considering that the startup recently rolled out similar offerings on Last.fm and Facebook. That said, it is a first for Spotify I suppose.

DriveGain, the UK startup that helps motorists learn to drive more efficiently and save fuel, is dipping its toe in the freemium waters. It’s released a free iPhone app – CarEconomy – that does one thing: show your average fuel economy as you drive.

But, taking advantage of Apple’s App Store in-app purchasing, users can upgrade to add additional features, and there are ads for the full DriveGain app (see our previous coverage) as the company hopes to up-sell even further.

Dailyplaces, the Frankfurt-based social location startup, has launched an iPhone app dedicated to the Oktoberfest which kicked off on Saturday and runs for 17 days.

Developed in partnership with muenchen.de – the official portal of the Bavarian capital – the Wiesn App is being described as a “temporarily community” and enables beer festival goers (OK, the Oktoberfest is about more than just beer) to update their status, post photos, and find (and check-in) to various locations such as all the big and small tents, rides and ATMs. Friends can also follow each other to get their updates pushed to the MyNews tab of the application.

We7, the UK music streaming service and rival to the likes of Spotify in Europe, has launched its Android app, which is now available through the Android Marketplace. And to mark the full launch, the company is giving users a 2 week free trial by waiving the need for a ‘Premium Plus’ subscription, which is normally required to listen on the go, making it easy for Android handset touting users to experience the mobile version of We7.

Claiming to have been given a revamp compared to its iPhone counterpart, including a new User Interface, the We7 Android app offers unlimited streaming of music each month, along with the ability to ‘cache’ playlists for offline playback, negating the need to always be connected to the net.

Other features include:

Last year’sLondon Digital Week covered “digital marketing, interaction design, advertising, planning” and similar topics. In other words this was not really focused on tech so much as the creative/design aspects. Which is why we’re delighted to back a week this year which is very much more focused on the hard core of what today’s ‘digital’ is all about: the Internet and its role as a platform for a new wave of innovation.

So I’m looking forward to Internet Week Europe, which will launch in London in November, when a leading European internet companies will come together to celebrate with a week-long festival showcasing Europe’s thriving technology community.

Event backers include all the right people such as Tweetdeck, The Guardian, Moo.com, Google, BBC, WPP Digital, TechHub, Channel 4 and Penguin/Pearson as well as flagship sponsor Yahoo!. These companies will put together events during 8th-12th November 2010 like conferences, technology demos, panel discussions, educational programming and meet-ups and parties.

But the point is that you get involved too by syncing anything you are doing with the week. Any organisation can participate in Internet Week Europe. There is no fee.

All participants can add their event to the official calendar at no cost, and will have their events showcased and promoted as an Internet Week Europe Official Event Partner. Got that?

With an estimated $89 billion dollar market size, tours and activities are definitely some of the most underestimated genres that are not yet entirely tackled by Entrepreneurs. Isango, one of Europe’s leading tour operating networks, raised $8 million in its early days and now reportedly employs around 70 people in their offices.

Tour operators are much like local businesses. They tend to neglect the internet and it’s powers for driving new customers and generating revenue out of it. They are also vastly spread around the globe, mostly in rural areas, living off from travel agents selling their tours or tourists stopping by by chance.

Earlier this week was the first European edition of the Founder Conference, the conference put on by Adeo Ressi‘s Founder Institute. And just as the Founder Institute made its European debut in Paris, so did the Founder Conference.

According to Alain Baritault, one of the organizers of the Paris Founder Institute, the organizers selected one of the hardest cities in Europe for the launch of the program – and was very pleasantly surprised by the results. Several companies had already been approached by investors and one even secured funding before the famous 4 months were up !