Mobilizy, the Austrian based company behind Wikitude, one of the leading Augmented Reality browsers in Europe and a direct competitor to well-known Layar from the Netherlands, has just raised an undisclosed round of funding from Austrian VC Gamma Capital Partners and tecnet Capital as a co-Investor.

It’s Mobilizy’s first round and will be used for developing their two core products, the World browser and their AR-based navigation system and for pushing their worldwide rollout. The deal was led by M&A boutique TheMerger and is said to be between €1 and €5 million.

Starting with the simple question “What are you doing next?“, the newly launched Fyesta.com, developed by Germany’s Blue Oceans Labs, lets users share their upcoming travel and event plans with select friends or to make them even more public so that they can be discovered further afield.

The service hopes to tap into a sentiment its founders are calling the ”intention web“, which is based on future-looking and predictive data. Now clearly, in terms of events, Facebook also covers this space, as does sites like Plancast, which is probably its closest competitor.

Meanwhile in hardware news: ChipSensors, a developer of innovative silicon sensor chips to detect temperature, humidity and gases, has been sold to Texas-based Silicon Laboratories after a major share holder sold it 40% stake. The Bank of Ireland Kernel Capital Equity Fund has exited from the company in an all cash trade sale, though terms were undisclosed. It put €1.95m into ChipSensors.

Based at the University of Limerick, the company was started in 2005 by Tim Cummins after he secured €100,000 in a loan note from the early stage equity fund supported by Bank of Ireland, Enterprise Ireland and private investors.

So, The Europas are back.We’ll be honouring the best in tech across the web and mobile scene from across Europe. The awards will be in London on November 19 – grab a ticket right now. The Europas is all about geting together and celebrating the tech scene in Europe with an awards event which we can really call our own (check out the pictures and video from last year).

The categories we’ll be judging are:

Best Business or Enterprise Startup 2010
Best Advertising or Marketing Tech Startup 2010
Best Cleantech/Environmental Tech Startup 2010
Best Hardware or Gadget Startup 2010
Best Startup Founder / Co-Founders 2010
Best VC or Seed Fund of the Year 2010
Best Angel Investor of the Year 2010
Best Startup Advisor/Mentor of the Year 2010
Best Service Provider to Startups 2010
Best Ongoing Startup Programme 2010
Best New Startup in 2010
Best Platform Startup 2010
Best Exit 2010
Best European Startup Tool For Startups 2010
Best European Web Application Or Service 2010
Best Mobile Startup 2010
Best Entertainment, Sport or Leisure Startup 2010
Best Learning Startup 2010
Best Music Startup 2010
Best Video Startup 2010
Best Social Innovation Startup 2010
Best Commerce Startup 2010
Overall Winner: Judges Choice Only

Please email our events and sponsorship director Aléna Dundas on alena [AT] techcrunch.com regarding sponsorship opportunities.

Lovefilm, the European Netflix, has announced that its movie streaming service is coming to Sony’s PlayStation 3 games console.

A YouTube video leak, quickly pulled, had been widely circulated in the blogosphere earlier this week so it comes as no surprise. It’s also in line with the ramping up of Lovefilm’s digital strategy as it, like Netflix in the States, slowly begins to wean itself off the DVD in the post model that it’s founded on.

When The Guardian newspaper released its Open API, interesting and potentially cool things were bound to happen. Developers love great content and great content loves smart developers.

We’d previously gushed over Today’s Guardian developed by Phil Gyford, a web app that we described as The Guardian newspaper re-imagined for the iPad, even though strictly speaking it wasn’t targeted at Apple’s tablet. But it did bring newspaper reading into the digital age, dispensing with non-linear navigation and other distractions to maintain a coffee-table reading experience.

Well today comes a similar take – in fact directly inspired by the work of Gyford – but this time it is an actual iPad app.

Telefonica-owned O2 UK, the largest mobile operator in the country with over 20 million customers, is rolling out ‘International Favorites’, a new low cost international calling service with the aim to double its market share of overseas calls.

Unsurprisingly, it’s powered by Jajah, the VoIP company its parent Telefonica Europe purchased last December for 145 million Euros. A similar service was also launched by O2 Germany in July.

With the deluge of Internet-connected TVs and consumer-facing set-top boxes hitting the market, not to mention the soon-to-launch YouView IPTV platform in the U.K., it seems inevitable that sometimes kludgy and niche PC-to-TV solutions will continue to be squeezed. Why involve a PC for getting Internet video onto the television, if it’s not necessary.

But that not stopping a whole host of VCs pumping a further $6 million in to Veebeam, which offers a wireless USB streaming solution for getting content from a PC to the TV. The funding round was led by Amadeus Capital Partners, Intel Capital and Oak Investment Partners, reports paidContent. Bay Partners, Formative Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Vision Capital also participated.

I’m here in Munich in Germany at a brand new event: The Munich Startup Event.

Hosted by the b-neun organisation, the event is a great new idea to really energise the Munich tech scene. That’s important because in Germany, Munich has a number of local VC houses based here, such as Holtzbrinck Ventures, Target Partners and Wellington Partners.

Below is the live streaming from the event and the Twitter hashtag is #tcm10. The startups pitching are (sorry, will add links later after the pitches):

We’ve seen quite a few ingenious ways to use the Web for recruitment or to land a job. The Daily Mail newspaper’s job advert in its search engine-targeted robot.txt immediately springs to mind as does the ad man who bought up Google Adwords spots next to the names of six ad executives he wanted to work with.

But the following effort from German digital marketing agency Jung von Matt/Neckar involving Facebook Places before it had launched locally is the stealthiest of them all. Here’s how it worked:

Could it be that the iPad and its ilk are the savior of the newspaper industry? The jury’s still out but today’s news that the Financial Times’ iPad app has generated a cool £1 million in ad revenue since its launch in May does bode quite well, at least in relation to the FT itself. That figure comes from the paper’s own deputy chief executive Ben Hughes as revealed at the MediaGuardian Changing Advertising Summit (via paidContent).

Now clearly Apple’s pricey (and luxury) device and the FT do make for a cosy demographic fit, but nevertheless this is ad revenue alone not income garnered from digital subscriptions, with the paper also sitting behind its own paywall.

INQ, the British handset maker and wholly owned subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa (who also own mobile network 3), are working on a “Spotify phone”. Or so says BusinessWeek in a report that seems to be somewhat confused.

It’s not a particularly new story – both INQ and Spotify share an investor in Li Ka-shing (who also owns a stake in Facebook) – but this time the report claims to come from the horse’s mouth: INQ CEO Frank Meehan. It’s also here where things start to get a tad non-specific.

Octopus Investments and YFM Private Equity have announced a £3.95m joint investment in Bluebell Telecom who will use the new funding to expand and, in particular, incorporate Callstream, the inbound telephony specialist, into a newly formed Bluebell Telecom Group.

Callstream’s technology provides customers with “cost effective management of external and internal communication” through its cloud-based platform, and the tie-up with Bluebell will strengthen the latter’s position as a “market-leading provider of unified communications” targeting retail, hospitality and care markets, says the company.

I’ve been chatting to a few mobile startups lately and while no-one wants to rain on the parade of the launch of Windows Phone 7 there is a recurring theme here. If I am a startup, who has traction in the market for my application? Right now it is iPhone, the increasingly powerful Android (in fact I know startups who are now thinking Android first, because it’s easier to get visibility on the app market) and to some extent RIM/Blackberry. Nokia/Symbian remains languishing until they can get their sh*t together with Meego, though the recent announcement by Nokia that users will be able to pay for apps via carrier billing, means that smart app developers and startups creating apps for the rest of the world outside the smartphone obsessed developed world should do quite well. But Windows?

Well, it’s a truism to say it’s nowhere right now. So what Microsoft will rely on is getting the phone into the hands of ordinary people, getting them excited and getting them buying the damn phones in the first place, in significant numbers. Apple did this because it changed the game in the mobile interface and applications eco-system. That’s effectively been down once now, and every other handset maker is largely copying those initial moves.

So what remains for Windows Phone 7 to innovate on? Quite simply, the Windows OS. Everyone knows that it’s Apple’s integration of the iPhone with iTunes that lies at the core of its strategy. Here’s a story you will possibly recognise:

Say what you will about the state of Nokia, Europe’s favourite Finnish handset maker, but no one will disagree that its product launch strategy over the years has been the very opposite of Apple’s. Whereas Steve Jobs likes to start shipping a product within weeks – if not the same day – of an announcement, a typical Nokia launch goes something like this:

First, a blurry photoed product leak or two, followed by an early hands-on review by Nokia’s most wanted Russian blogger. Days if not weeks later comes the official press conference or announcement, and then… nothing. Six months later said device finally begins shipping, meanwhile the mobile world has understandably moved on.

A year ago, Amazon.co.uk introduced free delivery for orders in Ireland, the first country outside the UK where shoppers could benefit from the policy. As from today, just in time for the holiday season, an additional 17 countries gain free delivery for millions of items, provided the orders are above £25 (about 28.6 euros).

The countries in which the service will also be available from today include: Italy, Greece, Norway, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Poland, Sweden, San Marino, Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal and Finland.

Dezineforce, a developer of software for big engineering projects like new aircraft, has raised approximately £1m of additional equity from existing and new shareholders. Lead investor was the South East Seed Fund, managed by Finance South East (FSE) and supported by existing investors DN Capital and IQ Capital.

Dezineforce develops and sells software specifically designed and optimised for design engineers performing computer analysis and simulation. It’s based on the Microsoft Windows HPC platform. It’s sold either as an on-site high performance computing appliance, or as a cloud based on-demand service. Basically it lets engineers get on with designing a car or aircraft, while taking care of the heavy lifting on data handling and simulation.

This is a guest post by Simon Waldman, author of new book “Creative Disruption: why you need to shake up your business in the digital world”. Waldman joined the Guardian as a journalist to work on some of its earliest internet ventures in 1996. He was launch editor of Guardian Unlimited in January 1999, and became the company’s first Director of Digital Publishing in 2001. He rose to become Director of Digital Strategy and Development at the Guardian Media Group. He now works at LoveFilm as group product director.

p>The internet enables dramatic change in the way that businesses can operate – this is what I have called the new ‘physics of business’.

But in any given sector, if that change is going to happen, a number of forces need to be working together. The most critical of these is a healthy cadre of entrepreneurs.

Indeed, the commercial story of the internet is also the story of how a remarkably small number of entrepreneurs have caused a remarkably large amount of upheaval, and reated a quite spectacular amount of value as a result.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Jerry Yang and David Filo, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Reed Hastings, Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com), Andrew Black and Edward Ray (Befair), Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, Natalie Massenet (Net-a-porter),Tony Hsieh (Zappos.com), Evan Williams and Mark Pincus.

Worldreader.org is a huge non-profit initiative, based out of Barcelona, Spain and founded by David Risher, former renown Amazon executive and Colin McElwee. It aims to use technology in order to bring “Books to All” in developing countries.

Today Worldreader.org announced another cool initiative. With the help of publishers like Ghana-based EPP, Sam Woode, and Woeli and other local and international organizations, including Innodata, to help digitize thousands of titles from African writers, making them available to international readers for $5 or less in the Kindle Store. The twist to the initiative is that proceeds from the sales of thousands of local African titles, will then be split with Worldreader to feed back into and fund it’s program for bring books back into Ghana to promote literacy. Worldreader is funded by several partner organizations and general public.

Permjot Valia (@permjotvalia) is a prolific angel investor and in 2008 co-founded Flight & Partners. Here he talks about his frustrations with the UK Angel investor scene, especially the anti-entrepreneur ‘pay-to-pitch’ culture.

In 2008/09, £44.9m was invested by UK Business Angels registered to Angel Networks in UK based companies. Across the 5,500 registered Angels that is less than £10,000 per Angel. These figures are very poor and do not bode well for future economic growth. So what is a UK based digital company looking for funding to do?

I have invested in 20 companies in the UK over the last six years, and three companies in Canada as a Business Angel. I am by no means an expert but with the experience I have had in Canada with Angel groups and as of recently with Seedcamp, I do find the UK ‘organised’ angel scene very depressing.

In North America, most Angel groups are run by Angels (whom for the most part have been successful entrepreneurs) for Angels. Across Europe most networks are run by administrators for the benefit of the network and not necessarily for the benefit of either the entrepreneur or the angels.