We’re less than a month away from LeWeb ’10, still to date the biggest tech conference in Europe, put on each year by Geraldine and Loic Le Meur. This year’s agenda features a whole lot of TechCrunch as several of us will not only be on stage at various times, but there’s also a modified version of the startup competition that will have more of a TechCrunch Disrupt flavour. So so we’re delighted to announce the 16 startups that have been selected to compete this year.

The 16 companies were selected by LeWeb and August Capital. They were chosen from over 400 applications submitted. Here they are:

Today TechCrunch.com discovered the open sale of a Kindle edition of a book which is effectively a Pedophile’s “guide”.

Incredibly, this book, which contains detailed instructions on what amounts to the sexual abuse of children, is not only available for sale on the U.S. version of the Kindle store, but the UK store as well, priced £3.48. (We are not linking for obvious reasons).

GigsWiz seems like a no-brainer idea. Work out where your band should be playing based on where your fans want you to play. And, as a venue, work out what the local fans are really into, and book that band. This is a natural for a world where, because of the Internet, a band could potentially find a fan-base anywhere on the planet from San Francisco to St Petersburg. The trouble is, the execution. Others have tried portals, but with social media being so distributed, and fans so intent on setting up their own little fan groups all over the place, it’s hard for a young band to keep track of it all.

So GigsWiz generates analytics allowing bands to gather accurate information about local fan demand.

Now it is taking this idea to the next step, developing a ticketing service which shares revenues from booking fees with the artists that use its platfom. It’s been piloting ticket sales exclusively with Hot Vox, Substance Gigs and Glasswerk in the UK and is now in discussions other promoters and bands. A closed beta phase for a limited period starts today. Here’s a typical band listing.

Talend, a global provider of open source data solutions, has raised $34 million in new funding led by Silver Lake Sumeru, with existing investors Balderton Capital and IdInvest Partners participating. This brings Talend’s total funding to over $60 million.

Talend develops a range of open source data integration, data quality and master data management (MDM) solutions for the enterprise. Talend chooses to take an open approach by publishing the code of its core and base modules under a GPL license, offering the developer community the ability to improve the product and make enhancements that can benefit everyone.

Online footwear store Sapato.ru, which is essentially a Zappos clone, has raised $5m in a second round of funding from eVenture Capital Partners, Kinnevik and Fast Lane Ventures, all three of whom are previous backers.

The Russian startup, which was launched only as far back as June 2010, intends to use the funds to “increase assortment” and to improve its customer service in a bid to emulate Zappos, along with launching an “aggressive” marketing campaign. The footwear market in Russia is estimated to be worth over $15 billion, although this is currently almost entirely offline.

There’s no doubt that collaboration software is an incredibly crowded space, yet many small teams often fall back on Skype group chat for their realtime conversations, perhaps supported solely by email and the likes of Google Docs. But IM conversations are hard to track, archive and turn into something actionable, especially when compared to more asynchronous and structured collaboration software. That’s something that Finland-based Flowdock, which exits Beta today, aims to address.

A sort of Evernote-for-conversations – although that’s an admittedly narrow comparison – at the heart of Flowdock is a nifty realtime browser-based group chat window, which resides on the right hand side of the screen, a little reminiscent of one aspect of Google’s now defunct Wave. But unlike your typical IM client or Skype’s group chat, messages can be tagged, hence the Evernote comparison, either on the fly or retrospectively.

Navigating the choppy waters of ad-supported music, We7 hasn’t been afraid to change course. The UK startup began life as an innovative free music download service before transitioning to an on-demand browser-based offering. While most recently the company, which is backed by Peter Gabriel, Eden Venture and Spark Ventures, made a premium paid-for play with a desktop and mobile version sans-advertising.

Today, We7 is shifting focus once again in the belief that the route to mass market requires a lean-back experience more akin to Internet radio services like Pandora in the U.S. rather than a pure on-demand play such as European competitor Spotify. It’s also a model that sits more comfortably with We7′s ad-supported aspirations since music licensing fees for Internet radio are about a third of that charged for non subscription on-demand services.

Bebo just launched Meebo’s web-based instant messaging client across the social network and the company says a million messages have been sent already

This is Bebo’s first step towards a much more real-time, interactive platform since they sold to AOL for $850 million in 2008. Right after that AOL let the platform languish, eventually shutting it down for tax purposes and selling it for about $10m to Criterion Capital Partners. True story.

The new team of 20 or so employees has – surprise surprise – made the site profitable and it’s now coming back in user numbers.

Mike Arrington’s recent interview with CTO Akash Garg suggested they’d be going for “Self expression, mobile and video will be strong components.”

Clearly IM and Meebo is part of that.

When I visited Dublin recently for the F.ounders event, I didn’t even get around to attending the bigger event that was happening alongside it, the Dublin Web Summit. I did, however, get a chance to meet one of the co-founders of DataHug, which won the event’s Spark of Genius startup competition (and a prize package worth €30,000).

Founded in late 2009 by former consultants Connor Murphy and Ray Smith, DataHug essentially enables clients to “better understand and exploit” the collective company network. Or as one of the judges at the startup competition put it more eloquently: it’s like “LinkedIn on steroids as it not only answers who knows whom, but also how well they know them”.

The Europas, the European Startup Awards, will be held on November 19 in London. Right now we’ve sold out. Boo hoo. But over 250 of you are coming. Hurray! To a luck hawk-eyed few we’ll be releasing a small amount of remaining tickets (here, if you’re quick, just before the event.

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).

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 join them and get in front of the cream of Europe’s startups, VCs and entrepreneurs, please email events director Aléna Dundas ( alena [@] techcrunch.com ).

Cue fanboi wars.

According to an incredibly opportunistic survey carried out by mobile comparison website MyPhoneDeals.co.uk, Android owners are four times more likely to covet an iPhone than vice versa. Specifically, a third of Android owners polled admitted to suffering severe iPhone-envy, whilst just seven per cent of iPhone users said that they’d prefer an Android-powered smartphone.

I say smartphone but actually the survey also found that quite a few respondents didn’t know what the term meant. And who can blame them, such is the blurring of feature and smartphone definitions. Noteworthy perhaps is that there was a marked difference based on gender. Only seven per cent of men were unaware of what the term ‘smartphone’ meant, compared to 18% of women.

BT has announced that its UK WiFi network now boasts over two million hotspots, making it the number one provider in Blighty. Additionally, the Telco says that it’s added more than 780,000 hotspots in the last six months to meet demand of users of smartphones, laptops, tablets, iPods and e-readers. Yes it seems that we Brits love our WiFi.

It’s worth noting, however, that BT was largely able to reach this milestone through its investment and tie-in with FON, the WiFi network that invites broadband customers to share part of their own bandwidth in order to offer and benefit from FON-powered hotspots. BT’s contribution to the crowdsourced WiFi network accounts for 1,955,000 hotspots. Specifically, these are public Wi-Fi hotspots broadcast by BT Home Hubs.

Touch interfaces for content and social media are, thanks to applications like Pulse and Flipboard – the ‘new new thing’. They are presenting streams of information in a far easier to digest manner and generating lots of engagement. Think how long you might spend on an app like Tweetdeck and then work out what would happen if that way of consuming went even more mainstream, especially on tablets like the iPad.

Well this appears to be the ambition of a new free Android and iPhone app which launches today, MyTaptu, and will appear on iPad in due course. It’s also part of the re-invention of its maker, Taptu, which has until now specialised in mobile search and touch-based interfaces for mobile, but is now bringing that expertise to bear on an app which promises to organise your social and content streams in a highly scalable way. And they appear to have the firepower.

Currently Pulse only lets you add 20 streams to the app, while Flipboard allows for 21 ‘sections’. MyTaptu will let users have have 5000 mixed streams. That is a huge difference. Taptu could well have a chance against Flipboard and Pulse with its new app when it eventually launches on iPad in December.

When social networks first appeared they looked like they would completely change the recruitment industry. I mean, a profile was exactly like someone’s CV, right? Wrong. Despite LinkedIn doing very well as a hub for recruiters that put the time and effort in (and upgraded to the Pro version) or others using Facebook as a recruiting ‘back door’, it remains the case that social networks tend not to be set up for real day-to-day recruitment purposes. The whole thing is just a bit of a mess, especially where people’s public and private streams start to cross.

Some startups are trying to address this issue. Notably, the newish BranchOut is a Facebook application that works out where your friends, and friends of friends, have worked. It has secured $6m from Accel, among others. Then there is JIBE and Emp.ly. However, while many of these startups are doing the classic Silicon Valley modus operandi of trying to scale as fast as possible and get headspace among users, there is one thing most seem to be missing from the equation: Employers. This is a group who are massively cautious and usually need hand holding. They are even now only just getting used to the idea that traditional recruitment consultancies or job boards are may be affected by ‘social recruiting.’

BraveNewTalent is a startup which has taken an approach from the other end of the telescope. It’s spent time building a network of corporate clients starting in London which has brought in revenues and pushed the startup towards profitability already, but clearly that doesn’t qualify it as a startup which can scale.

What does qualify it is its new Facebook app which just went live here.

If you were wondering how organisations and brands might take advantage of Facebook Places, a new Facebook application from the UK tourist agency VisitBritain provides a good example of things to come.

Developed by Ireland-based Betapond, the Facebook Places application is described as a ‘global guest book’ for tourists to share their experiences of the UK and to recommend attractions to their friends and family. In its first phase, the app, which resides on the LoveUK Facebook page, consists of a leaderboard of the 50 most popular attractions in the UK ranked by the number of Places check-ins, as well as tying into a user’s social graph so that they can see which of their friends have previously visited the attraction.

Team Europe Ventures (TEV), the German-based early stage fund powered by glorious bastards Lukasz Gadowski and Kolja Hebenstreit, is literally cooking up something. According to various reports and sources close to their current deal flows, TEV has initiated two new ventures that are both operating in interesting spaces – food delivery and local listings. However, first let’s get up to speed with the back story.

This a guest post by Tim Ocock who first worked at Symbian when the consortium was created in the summer of 1998. Returning in 2001, he worked in a dual commercial/technical role that necessitated almost unrestricted access to both the ‘shopfloor’ engineering teams and upper tiers of Symbian’s management. He left in 2004 to found Symsource, one of the few dev houses specialising in Symbian still in business today. He is currently Technology Director at Steely Eye Digital Media, a full service digital agency in London’s Soho, leading the webification of mobile and appification of desktop web.

Symbian is the biggest smartphone operating system by market share, the oldest smartphone platform still in use, used by almost every major OEM at one time or another. Yet one could be forgiven for thinking Symbian is dead and buried, with news of layoffs at Nokia, management departures at the Symbian Foundation and rough reviews of the latest flagship N8 device. How does a platform powering 9 million new devices every month have almost no credibility with developers, analysts and press alike? This is the story of one of the most successful failures in tech history.

This is a guest post by Julia Krysztofiak-Szopa, product manager at Inflavo and former community manager at Adtaily. On Twitter she is @julencja

If you happen to be a smart, English-speaking programmer in Poland, there is a good chance you will work in a start-up.

An American one.

Ryan Janssen, CEO of New York based SetJam.com started his company 18 months ago. His first challenge was to build a team of quality developers but, according to how he sees the tech scene in New York, finding the developers who work in lighter, agile frameworks was not so easy. The startup-oriented Django/Python/Scrum skill sets are hard to find in a city where majority of programmers work in more enterprise-friendly methodologies, with .NET, Java and C++ as core languages.

Today SetJam employs six full-time developers and three quality assurance specialists, all of them based in Poland.

The debate about the government’s latest announcements, intended to help stimulate the high tech startup sector, has been raging in our comments. Just to re-cap: the governement plans to effectively “brand” East London as a “Tech City” high tech hub of technology companies, re-work the Olympic Park after the 2012 games as a space for tech companies, introduce a Startup Visa, review IP laws to make it easier for the new wave of tech companies which rely less on patent law, and a number of other initiatives including £200m of equity finance (though the devil is in the detail on this last point).

This is a guest post by Tom Allason, founder & CEO of Shutl, a web-service that enables retailers to offer shoppers immediate/convenient delivery of online purchases. In 2003 Tom also founded eCourier.co.uk – the online courier company with the purple vans. In 2009 eCourier.co.uk reached #6 on Deloitte’s list of UK’s fastest growing technology businesses with 5291% growth since ’04. Tom is currently the Shell LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur for London.

Yesterday I had the curious pleasure of being invited to join a panel at an event put on by No.10 to announce the launch of Tech City and the Government’s commitment to supporting technology based innovation. If I am honest, the highlight of the event was undoubtedly Bookingbug’s Glenn Shoosmith giving a forceful pitch/lecture to David & Boris, seated only a few yards in front of him, encouraging government to open up procurement to start-ups with his proclamation: “There is no tender process for innovation.”