Of course, being a European awards, fashion is an essential part of The Europas. So, better late than never, we thought we’d tell you the dress code this evening at The Europas Awards, the Startups Awards for Europe.

The dress code is the same as last year: “Dress To Impress”

Here’s a selection of what people wore last year.

Also, there will be food.

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

Exclusive – Zemanta, which assists bloggers by providing tips, suggesting content and helping them promote their contributions to the world, has recently secured its largest venture capital round to date. Previous investors Union Square Ventures and Eden Ventures have injected another $3 million into the European startup, bringing its total of capital raised since its inception to roughly $6 million.

The startup, which won Seedcamp back in 2007, says it now expects to be able to reach profitability without the need for further capital injections.

Apple has announced that it will be launching its iAd mobile advertising network in Europe shortly, as expected. First up are the UK and France, which will be getting iAd this December, with Germany following next January.

Apple has also announced which advertising partners it will launch in Europe with – the list includes L’Oréal, Renault, Louis Vuitton, Nespresso, Citi, Evian, AB InBev and Turkish Airlines.

Europe’s business environment lacks the dynamism required to produce the next ‘Google’, according to a new report published by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and FORA, which compared the business climate in Europe with that of the US, as well as Canada and New Zealand.

Based on detailed analysis of the growth characteristics of six million businesses in total between 2002 and 2005 across each region, the report titled ‘Growth Dynamics’ found that European firms grow and shrink at a slower pace than their American counterparts.

“This lack of dynamic movement in Europe means that innovative, high growth businesses find it harder to penetrate the market whilst companies which stop innovating continue to exist”, notes the report.

Apprupt, the affiliate network for mobile apps, has today announced that its bagged MTV Networks as a publisher partner.

Four of MTV’s German mobile websites – MTV Music, VIVA, the children’s and family station Nickelodeon, as well as GameOne – will now offer iPhone users relevant and value-added apps for download via apprupt’s affiliate network.

Headquartered in Hamburg, Germany (along with an office in London), apprupt primarily targets iPhone app developers – although Android is said to forthcoming – letting them market their wares on a on a pay-per-download basis to specific target groups of users within its publisher network. Existing publisher partners include WEB.DE Mobile, Financial Times Deutschland and RTL who have utilized apprupt’s white label app store front to offer readers a preselection of apps.

And as of today, MTV can be added to that list.

Recently some research from Dow Jones came out which showed the number of venture capital investments in Europe declining dramatically.

The third quarter of 2010 saw the lowest quarterly deal count for venture in Europe since DJ began tracking the region ten years ago. According to the data, the European VC industry seemed to be focusing on a smaller number of key deals in core industries such as health care and on later-stage deals, leaving less for investments in startups, according to Arno Castanet, a research manager at Dow Jones VentureSource. In the UK, VCs put €200 million into 55 deals, but this was a fall of a third in investment and deal flow from the same period last year. Deal flow in IT dropped 29%, although ‘software’ increased to 55%.

However, I don’t think this is really telling the picture today and it seems to me that this data is pretty much behind the curve in terms of what is happening and has been happening on the ground in the last 18 months.

You can’t leave government alone for a minute can you? One minute they are heaping garlands on the tech industry with TechCity proposals and the like. The next minute they are proposing to dump Net Neutrality – the entire reason we had a flowering of innovation in the first place.

UK Communications Minister Ed Vaizey said in a speech at an Financial Times conference today that Internet service providers should be allowed to favour traffic from one content provider over another, so long as the user was aware this was happening. Oh sure, that’s going to happen. Vaizey’s view is that market should decide whether ISPs can charge for preferential content delivery, thus creating a slow lane for those who can’t or won’t pay for the fast one.

Howwever, by not supporting Net Neutrality the UK government stands to hand large swathes of the Internet economy over to large ISPs and increasingly big media companies like Sky which offer Internet connectivity. Can you imagine Sky allowing non-Sky programme’s packets ahead of its own content? No.

Though ISPs can charge media companies for more assured delivery if content like streaming video, innovation startups – a whole sector which the government appeared to be supporting only the other week – will not have the same market clout.

Thus there will not be a ‘free’ market under this policy.

Here is Vaizey’s speech, as released to the media.

Well, we’ve landed a great addition to our speakers at TechCrunch Moscow. Arkady Dvorkovich is a Russian economist and assistant to the President of the Russian Federation 2008. A Chess master, he spends his days advising the President Medvedev on economic policy, but also it’s approach to technology innovation strategy.

Dvorkovich is also no slouch as a blogger, with his own slot on The Huffington Post. Respect.

For those of you that need to get up to speed on this event, 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.

True Knowledge, the Cambridge, UK-based natural language search company, has set out to find the most boring day of the 20th century. Or, technically speaking, the most “uneventful” day, since the term boring is far too subjective for even the most sophisticated computer program to understand.

That day, apparently, is April 11th 1954.

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.

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, we’ll be posting a live video stream of the awards announcements and using the 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.

The Europas will take take place at a ridiculously cool London venue: Paramount in the heart of London’s West End, which has amazing views across the city (Top floor, Centre Point, 101-103 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1DD) (pictures below).

There has been a huge response from the community, and we’d like to say a huge thank you to the sponsors of the event so far. If there are any last minute requests to sponsor the awards and get in front of the best of Europe, you can email our vents director Aléna Dundas ( alena [@] techcrunch.com ).

Below you will find lots more information, but for now, here are our finalists for the awards, all of whom are listed on Crunchbase should you require more information:

Let’s face it, bug tracking is a chore. It’s by far the least sexy side of software development and, frankly, many of the tools available to handle the process reflect this. That’s something that London-based startup PlayNicely Labs is trying to change with its first offering, PlayNice.ly, a web-based bug tracker that focuses on speed, UX and, well, fun.

Yes, you read that correctly. PlayNicely is attempting to actually make bug tracking fun. It does this in part by adding gaming metrics via Foursquare-style badges, which as gimmicky as that sounds, Flickr’s own internal bug tracking app already does this. So perhaps it was inevitable that a publicly available offering would do something similar, and PlayNice.ly might just be the first. To that end, Beta testers will have already got the “Early Adopter” badge, while 20 bugs cleared unlocks the “Squasher” badge and so on.

(And to think PlayNicely Labs co-founder Basheera Khan, a former TechCrunch Europe alumni, left us to squash bugs. It takes all sorts.)

Pretty much everything is going social these days  and getting a kick of real-time – whether it’s for discovering music via Playlistnow or following stocks via StockTwits, etc. Everyone’s adding a social layer to their existing platforms and integrating some forms of real-time services- and one of the latest to go this route is Yakaz, who has just announced that its launching real-time social classified ads.

The new platform of the Paris-based company is in many ways not that different from Facebook’s MarketPlace – even visually, the interface looks a bit like a Craigslist-meets-your-Facebook homepage, chat included.

Khojan is a new UK startup that is on a mission to help independent or boutique stores get online, aiding their discovery in the process.

Initially soft launching in London’s trendy Brick Lane and Portobello road areas, Khojan is described as an online shopping community that allows shoppers to buy products, view profiles and interact with individual shops all within one platform. Users can either browse by products, essentially rolling up all that is on offer, or by independent store, which works quite well to give a flavour of the diversity and characteristic of these iconic areas of London. Additionally, the site offers a search feature.

So, for example, Brick Lane reveals “Eastside Books”, a thirty year old independent book store, alongside “Mendoza Menswear”, which does a line in vintage menswear. Obviously, for stores like these perhaps getting online isn’t highest on the priority list, relying instead on tourist and local visitor footfall.

Moneybookers, the European PayPal alternative or “eWallet provider”, has announced that it is rebranding to Skrill.

The new name, which will take over as the consumer-facing brand by the end of 2011, is said to better capture the “ease and functionality of the company’s online payment suite”. Of course, the word skrill (short for skrilla) is already a commonly used slang word for money or “dough”, according to the infamous Urban Dictionary, which definitely makes more sense.

But there’s more.

Today AOL UK launches SafeSocial, a service previously launched in the US, which is designed to allow parents to monitor their child’s activity on social networks. AOL is now offering a free 30 day trial for the new product, after which it costs £6.99 per month.

The child has to agree first (quite how AOL verifies this is unclear, especially if the parent knows their kid’s password), then the softare can monitor key pieces of information about a kids’ internet accounts, social media friends, photos and posts. Key words like “shoot” and “bust” trigger alerts in the system, though as you can see from the examples supplied by AOL themselves, these can lead to a lot of false positives. “Watch me bust a move” or “Shoot! I’m late for school” are hardly worrying, but what is more cack-handed by AOL is that no British school child uses these kinds of phrases. One hopes AOL adapted the software to include the more typical language of British children, like shit and fuck.

Gigaboxx, the mobile music download platform targeting artists and record companies who want to set up shop to sell direct to fans, has dumped its monthly subscription charge to make the bulk of its B2B service free. This actually makes a lot of sense since the UK startup gets a kick back for every track sold, so why charge for the razors? Furthermore, Gigaboxx says that it’s seen 1,000 new sign-ups since it quietly switched to free last week.

As we reported when the service was first outed in April at TechCrunch Europe’s GeeknRolla, it has a particular emphasis on live events – hence the mobile component – offering artists a “suite of marketing tools”, including their own store URL, QR codes and a SMS reply service that they can feature in promotional material and share on social networks.

There’s a strong case to be argued that, ultimately, premium music streaming services like Spotify et al. will need to partner with ISPs and telcos in order to achieve the “feels like free” proposition that’s required for mass adoption. But this is proving quite difficult, especially so when there are a number of companies offering white label versions of such services that ISPs and telcos can rebrand as their own.

Aspiro is one such company, already operating various white label music and video services for clients such as T-Mobile, Telefónica O2, Telenor, 3, TeliaSonera, BBC, Aftonbladet, mBlox, TVNorge, Entel and VG. And today, the Sweden Nasdaq-listed company, has announced that it’s partnering with NMusic SA to deliver a “game-changing” music streaming service (PC and mobile) for customers of an unnamed Portuguese operator. The agreement “further cements” Aspiro’s position as the premier provider of white labeled music services to operators and ISPs, says the company, which already delivers several similar music services in Norway, Denmark and Sweden — the same Scandinavian stomping ground that Spotify competes fiercely in.

The Europas, the European Startup Awards, will be held on November 19 in London. The event is now sold out. Boo hoo. But over 350 of you are coming. Hurray!

But there is still time to vote in all the categories here.

The deadline for voting in The Europas is Tuesday Midday Central Europe Time (CET) (or 11am GMT).

Don’t forget to Tweet or share the voting pages to your social networks, and you can of course vote for yourself. Use the logo above on your site to encourage voting.

The Europas will take take place at a ridiculously cool London venue: Paramount in the heart of London’s West End, which has amazing views across the city (Top floor, Centre Point, 101-103 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1DD) (pictures below).

There has been a huge response from the community, and we’d like to say a huge thank you to the sponsors of the event so far. Want to sponsor and get in front of the cream of Europe’s startups, VCs and entrepreneurs? Then email events director Aléna Dundas ( alena [@] techcrunch.com ).

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.

Co-organised by TechCrunch Europe together with Kite Ventures, 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.

As the programme is at full capacity, there are no longer any speaking slots so please do not ask the TechCrunch team for this. For all sponsorship and exhibitor inquiries, please get in touch with Events & Sponsorship Director Alena [AT] TechCrunch.com. Please ensure all emails are in English. Thank you!

More details on the final program will be announced, but for now we can say that Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine; Annelies van Den Belt, CEO of SUP/Livejournal; Semyon Voinov, founder of Zeptolab and creator of “Cut the Rope”; Demyan Kudriavtsev, CEO of Kommersant; Lukasz Gadowski, founder of Team Europe Ventures; Oskar Hartmann, founder and CEO of KupiVip, and many others will be among the speakers.

Amidst Global Entrepreneur Week, a report from Enterprise UK has found the UK ill-placed for global entrepreneurship.

The survey data gathered online by YouGov and YouGovStone between November 2 and November 4 2010. The total sample targeted UK entrepreneurs and small business owners and the sample size was 1,046 adults.

It found over 50% of the notional adult population want to start a business but only 5.8% are in the actual process of starting a business.The rate of those starting a business in the US is 8 percent, Brazil 15 percent and in China 19 percent.

It estimates an increase in self-employment rates of only 1% (or 300,000 entrepreneurs), would boost the UK’s GDP by around 1.5% and add approximately £22bn to the UK economy.