As Google allegedly courts Groupon with acquisition offers of up to $6 billion, we thought it worthwhile to bring you an update on the UK ‘deal-of-the-day’ sites.

And perhaps the best way to think about this is in terms of supermarket brands. No, really, hear me out on this one, it sort of works.

As we know Groupon expanded into Europe by buying the discount supermarket of the space, the Walmart or Asda if you will: MyCityDeal. MyCityDeal was the pile it high sell it cheap of the pack, had the biggest volumes and was aimed at the mid-to-low tier discount space.

LivingSocial is another US entrant which is expanding across the UK, but we’ve heard that sales volumes are medium to low and seem caught between the cheap deals and the high end market.

This is a guest post by Guillaume Decugis, CEO, also the company behind Scoop.it.

Over the past few months, there’s been an interesting number of new developments with regards to Web Curation, following several predictions that this would become a hot topic or even a billion dollar opportunity.

What’s this all about?

A definition I like for web curation is Rohit Bhargava’s: A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.

How can you sort out signal (information) from noise (pointless babbles) in the social Web? How can you organize and editorialize content? Give it context? In short, how do you make some sense out of the social Web when it’s moving at 3,283 tweets per second ? That’s the problem curation is trying to solve.

Bloggers have been the Web 2.0′s journalists and writers, curators could be its editors.

There’s been several innovation layers on curation.

On December 13, TechCrunch Europe is coming to Moscow, Russia, for our first ever “TechCrunch Moscow”. The event will be held at the first
Russian private tech incubator, the Digital October Center, located in a historical manufacturing building Krasny Oktyabr (or “Red October” / Красный Октябрь in Russian). You can now buy tickets here. TechCrunch Moscow attendees will enjoy a full day packed with speeches by the leaders of the industry, networking opportunities and a chance to preview promising Russian tech startups.

You can now check out the dedicated event web site here.

Co-organised by TechCrunch Europe together with Kite Ventures and Telemarker, the conference will focus on the key issues regarding tech entrepreneurship in Russia. TechCrunch Moscow is about supporting the startup and venture capital eco-system in Moscow and Russia. It’s also about uncovering the trends and the hottest companies and startups in the market right now. If you are in Europe for Le Web and want to spend a few productive days in Moscow, TechCrunch Moscow is your chance to check out the scene there.

Flook, which we’ve previously described as a StumbleUpon for location-based discovery, has partnered with English Heritage, the UK government’s quango responsible for helping preserve historical landmarks, such as famous sites like Stonehenge and Hadrian’s Wall.

Under the arrangement, English Heritage is working with flook to let users ‘discover’ almost 400 British castles, ruined abbeys and stately homes via the startup’s iPhone app. Flook already has similar content partnerships with Reveal Kings Cross, Postal Heritage and the British Library.

The Europas, the European Startup Awards, were held recently in London. It was the culmination of a month of online voting by the European tech startup industry for the finalists, where some 33,126 votes were cast across 23 categories, eight judges deliberated over the results and over 350 people joined the cream of Europe’s startups, VCs and entrepreneurs on the 31st story of stunning venue with amazing views over central London.

A huge thanks to our awesome sponsors Moonfruit, Winston & Strawn / Bootlaw, Latitude, Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, TechHub and video streaming partner Newspepper.

Here are the winners and finalists and here’s a Wrap video of the event:

TechCrunch Europe / The Europas 2010 Final Cut from Newspepper on Vimeo.

Is there no escape from the Playboy franchise? Jolt Online, the Ireland-based social games publisher that was acquired by GameStop last December, has unveiled its latest Facebook game: Playboy Party.

Described as featuring “pretty much all the things that you can imagine from a Facebook Playboy game” – I haven’t a clue what that means – the accompanying press release assures us that you’ll “find it entertaining”.

“This is our Christmas present to the Internet”, proudly boasts Dylan Collins, Chairman of Jolt Online Gaming. “We almost went blind developing this game but we think that Playboy Party will keep you entertained anywhere you can access your Facebook account”.

Ooh err.

The European Commission has launched an investigation into Google after two vertical search engines submitted formal complaints that the firm had use its dominant position to crowd out and disappear results from these engines – as reports various outlets including Bloomberg and the BBC.

The EU is obliged to look into whether Google as purposely lowered the search rankings of price comparison sites Foundem (UK) and Ciao (owned by the Microsoft’s Bing), and French legal search engine ejustice.fr in its results.

The EU investigatation will also take in Google’s ad platform, which covers Google’s unpaid and sponsored search results and “an alleged preferential placement of Google’s own services.”

We’re going to take a look at what all this means.

MyTweetMag, launched quietly in the summer by Hamburg-based Sebastian Schuermanns, is a paper.li-like service that lets users create a ‘magazine’ based on links and other content pulled in from their Twitter stream.

However, where it differs slightly from paper.li is the degree of manual intervention that is required. Instead of automatically culling links from a user’s tweets and those of the Twitter users they follow, MyTweetMag requires that tweets use a specified hashtag, similar to curated services like stori.fy or curated.by. In addition, each ‘magazine’ follows the tweets of the “editor” and up to 5 co-editors only, although the option to multi-author the resulting ‘MyTweetMag’ is potentially quite powerful without significantly raising the barriers to publishing.

So far, so ‘me too’, perhaps.

In France, the excitement is already building up. LeWeb, the famous conference that pretty much transforms Paris into Silicon Valley, is only 1 week away.

For everyone who is coming from abroad to attend, I thought it’d be a great time to introduce you to Korben (photo), one of the well-known French tech bloggers, and his new real-time tech job board, RemixJobs.

Now for anyone who doesn’t know Korben (aka Manuel Dorne), he began blogging back in 2004. At the time he was writing mainly for forums and whatnot, until eventually he decided he’d had enough and went off to launch his one-man blogging show. He has single-handedly accumulated some 1.2 million monthly readers since. And while we’re at it, I may as well mention that he’s a die-hard Android fan, lives on open source and has also launched a site to defend privacy and the liberty of expression online.

But enough about Korben, let’s talk about his latest project: RemixJobs.

Remember Dailymotion? No? You remember! That web site that came out soon after YouTube with lots of video on it. Still nothing? Ok, well here’s a refresher. It’s not YouTube but like YouTube. It’s had $68.5m invested in it to date and is very big in France.

But that’s not all. According to comScore Media Metrix figures released today, it’s the 32nd most visited online destination in the world, up from the 49th most visited site in May 2010. Traffic on Dailymotion properties grew from 64 million unique visitors to over 93 million during that six-month period.

“Dailymotion has remained focused on offering the best experience for our users, partners and advertisers,” said Cedric Tournay, CEO of Dailymotion.

Dailymotion puts the growth down to curating content from premium partners alongside user generated video and sharing across social networks.

Over 60,000 people have been hit in the past few hours on Facebook by a scam which claims that after installing an app called ePrivacy you can see who checked your profile. Needless to say the app does not work. Instead it just lets the scammer access your profile and post “OMG OMG OMG… I cant believe this actually works!” to your wall, with a link to the app, thus spreading it further.

Sophos is reporting that the application does not work and simply allows the makers to steal your private data and virally spread the app amongst your friends.

The best way to check you privacy settings and remove the app is to go to Account -> Privacy Settings -> Applications and Websites.

The scammers are simply playing on peoples desire to see who looks at them on Facebook – which rather makes me wonder why Facebook doesn’t just release an official app for this and keep the scammers out.

So we have Seedcamp, Startup Bootcamp, The Founder Institute, Launch48, Hackfwd and various other startup programme across Europe. And we can now add another to that list: Springboard.

But this is not the Springboard we wrote about last year. Then, it was the brainchild of Red Gate Software who were effectively offering a very informal arrangement, helping young startups. It was also B2B focused.

This is a different beast. The new Springboard programme has wisely realised that there is a gap in the European eco-system for the super-early stage startup that really just needs enough cash to create something. That is in the Y-Combinator and TechStars sort of area, which is much more at the hacker/product end of the market.

Yandex, Russia’s search engine leader and the nation’s largest Internet company, is reportedly considering a flotation that would value the firm at around £1 billion or $1.56 billion, thisismoney reports, citing City sources. The company is said to be mulling a listing in London early next year, although it could still end up picking NASDAQ.

The IPO would follow in the footsteps of fellow Russian Internet giant Mail.ru’s successful listing – the company raised roughly $1 billion.

Txtr, maker of the txtr Reader, Germany’s answer to the Kindle, is partnering with bol.com, Netherlands’ largest online retailer, to power its newly launched eBook store pre-installed on the Samsung Galaxy tablet and Android-based smartphones. In addition, an iPhone/iPad version will be available for download from bol.com.

Similar to Amazon’s multi-device approach, with various Kindle apps complementing its own dedicated e-Reader, txtr employs what it calls its “buy once – read anywhere” strategy (up to 6 different devices per eBook purchase) and targets Apple iOS, Android, PCs running Windows, as well as web and dedicated e-Ink based eReaders.

If you were one of those people that watched the iPhone4 v. HTC Evo Xtranormal videos made by Brian Maupin and caught yourself thinking that today’s mobile phones are just downright overcomplicated, you’re definitely going to like Lëkki. The brand new Paris-based startup launched in September is looking to bring back the good old simple portable phones of the 1990s – but in an environmentally friendly and stylish way.

Forget Facebook, Foursquare, email and all those other time-consuming applications out there. If you don’t want to spend your life on your phone (which also happens to be a clock-camera-calculator-garage door opener-microwave-in-one), Lëkki’s “Back to Basics” approach offers telephones that make calls and send texts – and do absolutely nothing more.

Glancing at my Twitter stream of an evening, I’ve been surprised at the number of Geeks watching The X-Factor TV show (in the UK) . But then I guess it lends itself extremely well to witty asides on Twitter. This actually makes the show worth watching, much more for the social media discussions around it than the show itself. It’s like being at a football match where the crowd’s chants are more entertaining than the game. If there is a business model for bland, manufactured TV I guess this is it.

So we make no apology for passing on the news that social media monitoring company Brandwatch is claiming that it can predict who is about to exit The X-Factor TV “musical competition” based on what’s being said about it on Facebook and Twitter. I asked what else they track, but sure enough, Twitter tops the list as a data source.

Simfy, a sort of German equivalent to Spotify, has signed an exclusive partnership with VZ networks, Germany’s largest social network and operator of the so-called Facebook clone StudiVZ.

The deal will see VZ’s 16 million users being given access to simfy’s ad-supported and free on-demand music streaming service, which comprises a catalog of more than 6.2 million songs. In addition, simfy is launching a new student rate for qualifying VZ users offering premium features, such as offline playback and mobile access, starting at €6.99 per-month – a first of its kind, says the company, and fully supported by the major labels.

BREAKING: We just heard from Web2Asia in China that users there, when opening Google.com, find that the search box is completely missing. This has been the case for the past 30 minutes we’re told. More to follow…

Index Seed has released an update on it’s progress since launching in April this year and the stats make for interesting reading.

Index Seed ‘lead’, Robin Klein of TAG, blogs today that (quoting):

• We have an active investment committee comprising 5 partners who meet weekly to review potential investments. Saul Klein, Neil Rimer, Mike Volpi, Danny Rimer and myself (Robin Klein)
• We are supported by a dedicated Seed Associate, Terrence Rohan, by Alex Gezelius (Associate at Venture – who has been invaluable to us) and by Thai Tran – a brilliant engineer who has been an EIR at Index and has acted as our Technology advisor.
• We have backing from the full Index Partnership as well as the operations team including, Legal and Admin – Nicola, Andre, Sayula, Nina and Pet
• We have reviewed over 750 plans and met with over 250 companies
• We have made 12 seed investments so far in 2010 (5 in London, 3 on the West Coast, 2 in Israel, 1 in Estonia and 1 in New York). Many are still in stealth so will only be announced at a time to suit the company’s needs.
• Amounts invested have ranged from $100k to $1m
• We have a standard seed term sheet, refined and made founder friendly, closing deals at minimal legal cost
• Every investment has been made with fellow travellers including: Chris Sacca, Dave McClure, Quincy Smith, Ariel Poler, Simon Levene, Aydin Senkut, Marten Mickos, Robert Dighero, Stefan Glaenzer, Alex Zubillaga, Jerry Yang, Yaniv Golan, Avichay Nussbaum, Fabrice Grinda, Michael van Swaaij, Seedcamp, Redpoint, First Round Capital, Betaworks, True Ventures, Polaris, Ron Conway, Joi Ito, Matt Cohler
• Together with the other investors interested in supporting the earliest stage businesses like Eden, Notion Capital, Lars Hinrichs at HackFwd, we have actively backed Seedcamp with investment and attendance at events

What they are still working on includes a 3 week turnaround time on feeding back to entrepreneurs.

The UK’s High Court has ruled that news monitoring agencies will have to pay publishing companies to use their web content, effectively re-classifying headlines as separate literary works subject to copyright.

The moves follows a legal battle between the Newspaper Licensing Agency, owned by eight of the UK’s largest newspaper groups, and Meltwater, a news monitoring agency. Although cutting agencies like Meltwater pay the NLA a fee for reproducing full-length articles, this case was supposed to clarify the limits of the NLA’s licensing scheme. Meltwater didn’t like its clients needing to have a licence from the NLA for the use of mere headlines and short extracts from its service. Instead the case has ruled that similar aggregation sites that charge for a service will have to pay for those headlines.

Meltwater plans to appeal against the decision, but if it’s upheld, you can expect a wave of more legal actions. And thus the fabric of the UK’s online publishing industry will start to break down. Well done High Court.