BREAKING: Google has donated $100,000 to bring the papers of the UK’s most famous computer scientist, Alan Turing, to the home of Bletchley Park where he worked as a codebreaker

The Second world war papers went under the the hammer today in an auction at Christie’s. Google donated $100,000 (£62,700) towards the bid by Bletchley Park Trust, home to the National Museum of Computing, which has also received donations from individuals via a campaign by freelance tech journalist Gareth Halfacree.

The papers were valued at £500,000, however, although reaching a bid of £240,000 failed to reach their reserve price and could now be the subject of private negotiations between their owner and Bletchley Park.

Vzaar, an online video platform aimed at SMEs that want to publish video, has been plugging away since 2007, but seemed to go in an odd direction – aiming at eBay sellers who wanted to sex-up their auctions. Needless to say it was the low end of the market and eBay auctioneers tend not want to spend money on a dedicated video platform outside of free ones like YouTube. But after bringing in new management, new CEO Stephen McCluskey, formerly with PA consulting group, has pivoted the company towards a more upstream market and gone out looking for new funding.

Through various twists and turns on that funding road it’s now found further funding – terms undisclosed – through a slightly left-field source, namely Hollywood director Oliver Stone, famous for movies on The Doors, JFK and Wall Street. He’s invested alongside existing investor Sophrosyne Ventures LLP.

MyVoucherCodes, the UK’s leading discount voucher code site, has launched its local offering with an iPhone app (and accompanying website) that helps consumers locate the best local deals via GPS. However, as we noted when the company first unveiled its ‘hyper-local’ strategy, the idea isn’t a new one and MyVoucherCodes is entering a space that is getting crowded fast.

In the local mobile discount market, Vouchercloud from Invitation Digital, which we profiled in February, is probably MyVoucherCodes’ closest competitor. So encouraging has VoucherCloud’s iPhone app been, the company has seen fit to take a slice of the lower end of the market too with a recently launched SMS-powered option. And of course, 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.

That’s a lot of discounting.

Twago, which provides a “global online intermediation platform” for services in the areas of IT, design, and business support, has received backing from a Frankfurt, Germany-based investment group from the private banking sector. The exact amount isn’t being disclosed but is described as in the “six-digit” Euros, while the actual investors are also remaining coy.

However, that isn’t stopping Twago talking up its valuation – said to have risen to a multi-million Euro figure in just one year – or its average monthly growth rate of 40 percent.

Plista, the self-declared “preference-based advertising network” that is primarily targeted towards monetizing publishers and major outlets, is raising €2.5 million in a Series A funding from Crédit Agricole Private Equity and NWZ publishing house.

Existing backers DuMont Venture and semi-public High-Tech Gründerfonds have also participated.

MyThings, which provides personalised retargeting services, this morning announced that it has raised $6 million in their third round of funding. The financing round was led by T-Venture, Deutsche Telekom’s venture capital arm, with participation of previous backers Accel Partners, Carmel Ventures, Dot Corp and GP Bullhound.

MyThings, founded in 2005, claims its technology is capable of increasing return conversion rates of online retailers by more than 500%. Its proprietary optimisation technology is currently being used by leading European retailers such as Price Minister, Republic, PIXMania, Etam and Orange, and its total reach is said to surpass 1 billion monthly impressions these days.

A new independent car comparison website has launched in the UK hoping to take on much more established media in the car review space.

Founded by 23 year old “car enthusiast” James Hind, Carbuzz aggregates expert reviews and ratings, along with user reviews, statistics, and additional video and images, in order to help car buyers make their next purchase based on criteria such as budget, features and taste. The site currently houses around 8,000 reviews, each categorised by model and engine type.

Local reviews site Qype, which lets you review any venue from restaurants and bars to gyms and childcare, has raised a new funding round amounting to a combined 6.5 million euros to throw fuel onto its mobile business. Investors include Vodafone Ventures and existing backers. Currently the largest user-generated local review site in Europe (yes, it’s ahead of Yelp), Qype has raised 3.5 million euros from Vodafone Ventures and a further 3.0 million euros from its existing three investors, Advent Venture Partners, Partech International and Wellington Partners.

The main aspect of this deal means co-branded version of Qype’s application will be pre-loaded on supported Vodafone devices, including Blackberry and Android on handsets in the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands and Ireland. It’s likely that Qype will do best out of pre-installation on Android devices.

Skillender recently launched the beta version of its site. It’s a place to share your “skills” but with the added element of your availability.

One the one hand if you are a someone with the skils to provide (like a builder), Skillender is little like a “Tungle for Skills” allowing you to say when you’re available to be hired (although if I know most consultants, that usually means any time). You put in when you are available and in come the requests for jobs based on availability – in theory.

On the other hand, for the people looking for others with skills to provide, it’s a way of booking service providers via an availability calendar. This mimicks the traditional flight or hotel booking system.

Two year old Hellotxt, a similar service to Ping.FM where you can update many social networks form one place, is slowly extending itself. It now has an Android app, where you can watch and post to Facebook, Twitter, Posterous, Blogger, WordPress.com and many other networks. But I have Tweetdeck for that I hear you say. Well, yes and no.

Hellotxt also has a “Smart Feed” where you can comment on Facebook and Twitter as well as use Doodle to draw on your screen and send it to any feed integrated with Hellotxt. Doodling over a Map is most useful.

As of today it also has a new release of its iPhone and iPad application, offering multilingual support.

It’s been a while since we published about upcoming events here, so here’s a little stab at it. We don’t tend to major on this kind of post, but if you want to get a regular heads up about upcoming events in London and the rest of Europe’s tech scene I recommenda few sources: Startup Digest newsletters for your city, Chinwag’s upcoming events listing, and the RougeFrog calendar.

Kwaga, which offers a semantic toolkit to help manage email, is partnering with LinkedIn competitor Viadeo to make the social network’s 30m user profiles available within Gmail, with other email services to follow.

Specifically, Viadeo support is being rolled out first for Kwaga Context so that a sender’s Viadeo profile (if available) will be displayed, as well as other contextual information, at the bottom of each email inside of Gmail. Of note, Kwaga Context already supports LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.

GrabCAD, the open source CAD (computer aided design) library and engineering community, has flicked the monetization switch with the launch of its CAD services marketplace.

Harvesting the talent of its 1,000 engineer-strong community, the marketplace connects those engineers with anyone in need of technical drawings and CAD-related services, promising a 24-hour turnaround and a flat fee of $30 for all “simple projects”. These can be things like technical drawings, photo-realistic images and 3D models. For those commissioning CAD services, the marketplace aims to solve the problem of finding a reliable outsource partner and to take away the hassle related to payments, workflow and confidentiality. While, of course, CAD engineers get a place to sell their skills.

MobiCart, the free service lets users build a native storefront for Apple’s iOS, has left private Beta so that anybody can sign-up.

First unveiled at the DEMO Fall conference held in San Francisco in September, MobiCart offers a fully customized storefront that can operate standalone or tie into a website’s existing e-commerce content management system via the startup’s open API. But unlike similar offerings, the service is potentially disruptive because of its headline price of free, which could see lots of independent or boutique shops flooding Apple’s App Store and soon to follow the Android Market.

Music blog Musically has jumped on the new accounts of Spotify’s UK Limited company to reveal some interesting figures, to say the least. The accounts also reveal that at the end of 2009, Spotify’s parent company Spotify Technology SA was negotiating further funding.

The most interesting stat, to me at least is that Spotify started 2009 with around one million users and ended with seven million users across Europe, of whom over 250,000 were paid-up subscribers. That is a sevenfold increase.

The latest official Spotify numbers , says the company, is that they had over 10 million registered users (in October this year) and over 500,000 subscribers across Europe (a figure revealed in June).

But assuming the growth rate in the second year was slower, let’s call it a two to threefold increase, then Spotify could well be heading toward 15 million users by the end of the year, and 750,000 to 1 million paying subscribers. Let’s hope for their sake they are.

Smartdate announced a €2 million round in February of this year so that you could stop poking and start actually dating the friends of your Facebook friends. But now the company is kicking it up a notch and announcing that it’s raised an additional €3.5 million with the fonders of PriceMinster, Pierre Kosciuscko-Morizet and Pierre Krings. Oh, and just in case you forgot, French Ebay competitor PriceMinister went to Rakuten in June for €200 million (about $250 million) so maybe that’s why the founders have a bit of cash to spare.

As with a number of French dating sites, like the likes of Adoptaguy and Meetic, Smartdate is rapidly developing and already has a 25 person team in place.

TechCrunch Europe and UK Trade and Investment are organising a series of pitch workshops to help startups hone their pitch for events. These are free.

The next on is on 23rd November. It is free to attend for qualified UK-based startups, which means any startup in Europe that also has a UK base of course. It gives you a chance to possibly pitch at a forthcoming TechCrunch Europe event as we tend to look at those startups coming through this UKTI filter.

Here are the details:

The Europas, the European Startup Awards, were held last night 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 paid to join 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.

The Europas, the European Startup Awards, will be held this Friday, November 19, in London. The event is now totally sold out, with over 350 people coming from the cream of Europe’s startups, VCs and entrepreneurs. Here are the finalists.

The online voting, running for the last month (thanks to PollDaddy), has closed. Some 33,126 votes were cast in total. The Europas Advisory Board has submitted their results. The two have been merged and we now have our finalists. The winners will be revealed on the night. If you can’t make it, or just didn’t get a ticket in time, below is the live video stream of the awards announcements and you can watch Twitter hashtag #TheEuropas.

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

This is a guest post by Colette Ballou, founder of Ballou PR.

Conferences are awkward situations. You know that you need to make the most of your time there – chances are that you paid not only the entrance fee, but also for the flight and the hotel. But why do we fail to make meaningful connections at conferences? Because we often forget the perspective of the very people we are trying to connect with.

Conferences are excellent opportunities to further your business goals, be it funding, partnerships, sales, an article, or an invitation to speak. So have these clearly in mind when approaching each person. Know what you need to get from that conversation, and realize that you’re likely not going to get funding, close the sale, etc., right there. But you can get yourself further down the line with an invitation to connect later about that very topic.

Here are Ballou PR’s Conference Tips: