Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, ousted in this year’s election, is forming the Gordon and Sarah Brown Foundation, and has accepted three pro-bono appointments all with some connection to the Web. He’s joining Queen Rania of Jordan’s Global Campaign for Education. Queen Rania has 1,337,872 followers on Twitter and last year spoke at Le Web. Brown is also working on a new programme to bring the internet to Africa and joining the board of Tim Berners Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation.

If you recall, just prior to the election in May, Brown launched a policy initiative to put £30m into a “centre for the semantic web” which would have been headed up by Berners-Lee. That centre has been cut dead by the new government, so perhaps Brown joining BL’s Web Foundation is a sort of thank you?

But what is more interesting about Gordon Brown is that despite his former PR wife’s massive, million-plus following on Twitter, Brown himself appears yet to join, at least personally. Should he listen to her advice?

Belgium’s Gimv – the investment firm that is behind companies like Inside Contactless, Openbravo and Telenet – has just put some 15 million euros into Onedirect, which specializes in e-commerce for B2B telephone devices and solutions. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed but with this operation, Gimv will be the primary shareholder in the France-based company. In addition, the Lyon-based investment group Siparex – which invested in Onedirect in 2007 – will no longer be a shareholder as a result.

This is the fourth France-based management buyout that Gimv has completed. The 2 co-founders, Hervé Lafont and Emmanuel Stern, will naturally continue to be shareholders in the company they founded back in 1999. The primary change in the management team will be the addition of Jean-Louis Coustenoble, the former Chief Executive of Kalamazoo Spain as well as 2 French-based Staples subsidiaries, Bernard and JPG.

Music identification app Shazam has announced big feature updates to its iPhone and iPod touch music discovery apps. There are now customised settings for ‘tagging on start-up’ make the process of identifying a music track faster, a new UI, the ability to search for ringtones and videos on iTunes and better video. You can also share tunes you find via Facebook and Twitter. Shame it doesn’t own its name on Twitter then.

There’s also a new annual pricing option for its premium offering. The app also supports multitasking on the iPhone 4 so you can leave the Shazam App and use another function, such as to take a call or go and buy the music you’ve identified.

The new features are applicable to all Shazam versions for the iPhone and iPod touch – Shazam Encore, Shazam (Product) RED and the Shazam free App.

Headline: Slightly insane Finn decides to drive all over the Nordic countries looking for startups.

“The Travelling Salesman” aka Kristoffer Lawson, Co-Founder of Scred.com, is setting out on expedition through every single Nordic city with a computer science department and a startup scene. So that’ll be over 30 cities, over 10000 km of continuous driving, through 5 countries in temperatures as low as -30C and in almost total darkness much of the time. It’s his replacement for a holiday, he says.

“Things will go wrong, but my mission is clear: to learn about the weird, wonderful, crazy and ambitious people setting up companies and working on new technologies in such a unique area. Along the way I hope to discover tales of success and failure, to inspire and to learn, and to locate the world’s most northernly tech startup,” he says.

I hate to tell him that certain northern European countries like Finland and Estonia actually invented technologies like Dopplr and Skype so you didn’t have to get in a car to find people – but that might spoil his fun.

Apple’s latest wave of new iPods and a re-iteration of Apple TV are ‘cool’ from a consumer’s perspective (ok, maybe not the new Apple TV which is once again a half-hearted product), but its movement into the social media space with Ping, a music focused social networking service, has the potential to impact the media market in a vastly different way.

Analyst firm Frost and Sullivan makes that point in a research note today. It says Ping probably won’t affect Facebook but may affect MySpace, which has a heavy music focus and is already on the ropes.

But it also suggests to me that while iTunes might make a nice music focused social network along the lines of how Spotify now has social features, it’s your iTunes account that could become the core of a new identity system and the centre of a nascent social graph. If that is the case then Apple really could impact Facebook.

Yahoo and Vestel Group, the largest TV manufacturer in Europe you’ve never heard of (because much of their business is white-label), have struck a deal to ship Yahoo! Connected TV to consumers in more than 40 countries across Europe starting in Q1 2011.

The service covers movies, TV shows, social networks, videos, and other kinds of Internet content. The Vestel Group of companies, based out of Turkey, account for 16% of the LCD TV market and 25% of the digital set-top-box market in Europe, making it a leading OEM and ODM producer.

When Danish entrepreneur Tommy Ahlers sold his ‘social phonebook’ ZYB to Vodafone in 2008 for €31 million and joined the company, it didn’t seem like he would stay forever at such a slow-moving corporate entity. And sure enough he has now left. But ever the restless entrepreneur he’s decided against lying on a beach somewhere and careered headlong into a new startup which is poised to come out of stealth mode.

Ahlers has now invested in, and become the CEO, of Podio, a hot new startup out of his home town of Copenhagen. I’d heard excited whisperings of the company when I was in the city recently, and indeed, Podio has been around for one and a half years as a boostrapped project, but with big ideas. It’s now open via invitations – either from Podio or from existing users – and it’s pretty awesome.

The iTunes-for-apps, Allmyapps, has just announced its first round of funding with French VC fund, Elaia Partners – the same firm that has backed French all-stars like Goom Radio, Goojet and Criteo. With 1 million in the bank, the Paris-based company founded in June 2009 plans to focus on product development and emerge as the leading Microsoft-dedicated app store.

Just so happens that Allmyapps, founded by Thibauld Favre and Arnaud Coulondre, is also the company that won the startup pitch competition at TechCrunch Paris in March.

The European music streaming service Spotify has partnered with Sonos, the Californian maker of Wireless Multi-Room Music Systems. This will mean that by the end of this month, Spotify Premium subscribers – the same tariff that enables mobile access – will be able to stream Spotify’s music catalog around the home to a networked Sonos box (or multiple boxes), which is a nice additional option for users of the cloud-based music service.

Spotify is currently available on Linux, Mac and Windows, along with mobile OSes, Android, iOS and Symbian. There’s also televisions via a partnership with telco TeliaSonera.

Televisa Interactive Media, the digital wing of Televisa, the largest Spanish-language media company, has partnered with Busca Corp-owned Level Up to launch an “exclusive” video game channel across Latin America. Level Up is the leading online social media and news site for the Spanish-speaking video-gamer market.

The new channel will be co-branded and will have a content tie-in with Televisa’s vertical video site Tvolucion.

AOL has announced that it is creating 20 new software engineering jobs at its Dublin Development Centre, the majority of which will be with AOL’s Media Technology division and will focus on “developing AOL’s global media channels” which include AOL News, DailyFinance and the AOL.com homepage, amongst 80 brands in total. The new jobs are in addition to 50 software engineering jobs announced in June, says the company.

Candidates are also being sought for AOL’s Advertising Technology division in Dublin, which develops the company’s advertising services – ADTECH and AOL Advertising, and Patch – a new local news service which provides personalised news in towns across the U.S.

The U.S. location-based social gaming platform SCVNGR is launching in the UK today through a partnership with Quno, a web based rail search and booking service due to launch later this year. It will give rail passengers the opportunity to “participate in fun challenges” in stations across the country.

In line with other games built on top of SCVNGR, which runs on iPhone and Android, the Quno Challenge gives commuters the chance to compete against each other for badges and rewards. To take part, rail passengers first need to download the Quno Challenge app and then ‘check in’ at their station upon which the Quno challenges can be accessed. The game will be available at the following stations: London Waterloo, Paddington, Liverpool Street and Euston; Bristol Temple Meads, Birmingham New Street, Manchester Piccadilly and Edinburgh.

Withings, the Paris-based company behind the famous tweeting wifi body scale, has just scored 3 million euros from French VC firm, Ventech. It’s the company’s first round of funding and will be used primarily for the development of 2 new products, which should come out within the next 6 months.

For anyone who isn’t already familiar with the company’s first product, the tweeting wifi body scale, it’s a terrific wifi-connected device that tracks your weight. May sound simple but it can recognize up to 8 users and allows you to transfer your weight information to a computer, iPhone or iPad – which is where the Tweeting comes from, obviously. The product launched officially last year on June 25 goes for €129 in France and is a great little way to track a fitness program or diet.

Goodypass, a new ‘flash offers’ startup which will offer members goods at cut down prices, looks to be more than just another Groupon clone. If you think about it, most offers sites are startups with no pre-existing brand or audience. The only thing they have to go on is the attractiveness of their offers.

But Goodypass heralds a new wave. It’s fronted by UK breakfast TV star Kate Garraway and backed by investor Kite Ventures. Edward Shenderovich, a Russian-born internet entrepreneur raised in California, is providing seed capital thorough Kite, which has also backed AlterGeo.ru, a Russian social networking site and SponsorPay.com in the past.

Goodypass wil have two main advantages as I see it: access to celebrities to promote the offers and the ‘brand values’ of each celebrity. And crucially, a pre-existing audience for those celebs who will be almost certain to push the offers out through social media.

It’s Alcatel-Lucent‘s second acquisition in 3 months and without a doubt, the company is trying to flex a little muscle in the mobile applications space. The company bought ProgrammableWeb, a well-known respository for web API’s back in June and has just announced the acquisition of OpenPlug for cross-platform mobile app development.

With the acquisition of France-based OpenPlug, Alcatel-Lucent will provide tools enabling developers to develop and easily deploy mobile apps across multiple platforms. OpenPlug’s solutions allow developers to write apps once and then convert them into native software, compatible with various mobile operating systems – including iOs, Android, Symbian, Windows Phone and Linux.

Online marketing is now so mainstream and so prevalent that the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has finally – after about 15 years – decided to step in and start subjecting online advertising to the same regulations as ads that appear on TV, in newspapers or other media. The new rules will target ads that sell products. But the big news is they will also regulate ads on social media services. This will of course also mean advertisers may have to police what customers are writing on their Facebook pages. The rules will even encompass YouTube videos where ordinary people are asked to pimp a product.

Good luck with tracking that one.

It will clearly cost more to do this but Google is staying on the right side of the regulator by contributing £200,000. There will also be an extension of the 0.1% voluntary levy on paid-for advertisements across all media which has so far funded the ASA to date. According to the ASA, Google “pondered for a while” before agreeing to sign up to the system.

The CEO of T-shirt customisation startup Spreadshirt has stepped down amid difficult financial performance of the company and a tough economy for items like customised T-shirts. Jana Eggers had spent the last four years at Spreadshirt, the Germany-based startup which crowd-sources t-shirt designs, three of them as as CEO. Eggers posted the news on the Spreadshirt blog, but didn’t give a reason, according to local startup blog Gruenderszene.

Spreadshirt is a platform for design-your-own clothing and print-on-demand and is considered to be one of the pioneers in this space in the German market.

The grand daddy of online flash sales, vente-privee.com, says it has appointed a new Marketing Director, Nicolas Cosson, although it appear he put the news on his LinkedIn account back in June.

Typically of French companies the need to mentino that 39-year-old “studied at the prestigious ISG (L’Institute Supérieur de Gestion) and ESCP (Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris)” before pointing out that he’s taken over from Xavier Court, co-founder and partner. Court moves into Public Relations, Advertising/Marketing and Member Relations Services divisions.

TweeShot has launched as a simple way to share screenshots of web pages via Twitter: a sort of TwitPic for screenshots. That’s in the short term anyway. Longer term, the service, put together by a team of Spanish developers, bloggers and designers, wants to become the “pause button” for the web by offering an API so that other applications can tap into the screen capture or, more specifically, webshot functionality.

With the fast moving nature of the dynamic and realtime web “sometimes a pause is necessary”, say the site’s makers. “TweeShot lets us share concrete ‘moments’. Moments that most probably will have already changed seconds later.”

Here’s how TweeShot works today.

Audience measurement company comScore has acquired Nedstat, an Amsterdam-based provider of web analytics and video measurement solutions for approx. $36.7 million.

ComScore says the purchase will help the company accelerate its global expansion strategy, particularly in European markets.