Conversocial is a real-time social media management system allowing companies to run marketing and customer support through Facebook Pages and Twitter. Today it launches an enterprise package focusing on large consumer and media brands which will let its customers manage large numbers of Pages and Twitter accounts, with individual user permissions, allowing customer support teams and moderators to work alongside marketing and PR departments. One of the first big customers is UK TV broadcaster ITV, which is in the process of rolling out Conversocial across all of their Facebook properties.

While competitors like coTweet, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Context Optional and Socialite also let you manage Facebook fan pages, Conversocial’s emphasis on enterprise tools somewhat mark it out from the pack. The startup was spun out of iPlatform, UK-based Facebook application development companies, set up by Conversocial CEO Joshua March and co-founder Dan Lester in 2008 and is now planning to set up offices in New York and San Francisco to further drive US sales.

Seems like France is kind of full of dating sites. And that’s probably not so surprising given that the country is often considered one of the most romantic. Hopefully everyone has now heard of Meetic, the French online dating giant listed on the Euronext stock exchange since 2005 who scooped-up Match.com’s European division last year. And then there’s a couple newcomers that are making headlines, like SmartDate (who scored €2 million earlier this year so that you can date the friends of your Facebook friends) and AttractiveWorld (the name says it all, you have to be “accepted” to join the online community).

And then there’s Adoptaguy. Let me just preface this with the company’s tagline: “Ladies, find great deals at the supermarket of love.” Yes, it’s cheesy and who knows, that’s probably why it works. Essentially, what sets Adoptaguy apart from a lot of the other sites is that it reverses traditional roles.

Switzerland-based SmallRivers made headlines earlier this year when it scored funding with Kima Ventures and Econa to turn your Twitter feed into an online newspaper via Paper.li. And now for anyone who wants something looking more like Twitter meets Le Monde or Der Spiegel, Paper.li has just announced the launch of its French and German versions – with Spanish to come next week.

There are currently some 99.7K registered users on the site publishing some 1,000 new newspapers daily. The US currently accounts for 40% of users, however, non-English speaking users also make-up roughly 40% traffic with French and German users leading the way. Currently, some 207 countries are represented in the company’s userbase.

The Europas, the European Startup Awards, will be held on November 19 in London (tickets available here).

We cannow reveal that 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)

Sponsors so far included Moonfruit, Bootlaw, Latitude and TechHub. If you would like 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 ).

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 (pictured). For those of you unfamiliar with this (I know there may be one or two of you), this actually translates as “Red October” (or Красный Октябрь in Russian). Our event will be part of the official launch of the building, which hopes to become Moscow’s leading digital / media / technology hub.

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.

Ok, maybe not all of Europe just yet – but definitely 2 of its most important markets. The Nantes-based startup specializing in e-commerce optimization solutions is announcing its official launch in the UK and Germany.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with Lengow, the company founded back in July 2009 provides a centralized interface allowing e-retailers to sell and promote their products across 180 plateforms, including affiliation and cashback sites, social networks, price comparison sites, various marketplaces – the works – starting at 99€ per month. The company also recently launched 2 applications on Facebook : Wishlist and Shoppingbox. Shoppingbox competes with the likes of Boosket (which we covered on TechCrunch France when they launched in September), allowing pretty much anyone to add a boutique to their Facebook Fan Page for 19€ per month.

When The Guardian newspaper introduced its paid-for iPhone app to rave reviews, we questioned how long its upkeep could be sustained by a one-off payment. Although, in once sense, any income derived from a dedicated app can be viewed as additional since The Guardian’s content is already being produced for its daily newspaper, online is eating away at those revenues, so it’s logical that overtime money needs to come from elsewhere.

And so it’s no surprise that today we learn that The Guardian will indeed introduce a recurring charge for a new version of its iPhone app.

In another example of Europe’s bureaucrats leaving themselves open to accusations that they’re meddling in issues that are best left to the marketplace, the European Commission has announced the launch of MOSQUITO (Mobile software and services, Standardisation, Quality, Interoperability, Testing, Open source), a €700,000 research project to “develop a better understanding of the issues and consequences of mobile app fragmentation”.

MOSQUITO, a collaborative project comprised of six companies, inno, ETSI, France Telecom, Telecommunication Metrology Center of MIIT, Funambol and IBBT, is part of the 7th Framework Programme, a European Union “initiative” responsible for research and technological development. It will undertake a two year programme to document fragmentation issues that prevent the development of mobile internet apps and services.

MOSQUITO will look to endorse “an open standards approach, including open source, to address mobile fragmentation”, says Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, one of the companies involved in the project.

He also notes that “this issue is likely to get worse before it gets better”, which, I would argue, is exactly why a state-backed research project like MOSQUITO is completely unnecessary.

The British Prime Minister is expected to announce today that the East of London, which in the last three years has seen a 700% growth in tech companies starting up there, is to become an officially sanctioned startup ‘hub’ for the UK.

Although he will make a speech saying that London will be transformed into a “world-leading technology city to rival Silicon Valley” – a worthy but rather over-optimistic claim – there is some meat here. The government appears to have secured several commitments from companies including Google, Facebook, Intel and McKinsey & Co to invest in the long-term future of the area.

As is the way with PMs’ speeches, the media has been circulated an advanced copy. So among other things he is expected to say:

Two former senior executives form eBay Europe have joined forces to secure a significant angel round for their online shoe store which hopes to become the ‘Zappos of Switzerland’.

Valentin Cogels (previously Senior Manager Europe International Expansion at eBay) and Matthias Fröhlicher (previously Advertising Revenue Optimization Manager Europe also at eBay) raised 460,000 Swiss Francs in a seed round for Koala.ch, lead by Kima Ventures, which put in 250,000 Swiss Francs, and the difference a friends and family round.

Is this the Zappos of Europe? No, but it is an attempt to become the Zappos of Switzerland.

Q&A platforms are in and popping up all over the place. Weblogs SL, by far the leading Spanish blog network, has rolled out its own Q&A system, Respuestas, along the lines of Mahalo or perhaps Quora. Weblogs SL was launched in 2004 by co-founders Julio Alonso and Antonio Ortiz, and today boasts 38 vertical blogs and 15 million unique users.

NavFree, the free Sat-Nav solution for iPhone (and iPad) from Navmii, has seen more than half a million downloads in its first month and is growing at a rate of 10,000 new users per day. That’s not too shabby considering that it’s a UK & Republic of Ireland-only offering, although perhaps not so surprising considering the app’s free-ness and the expense of some of its rivals.

More impressive, however, is the way in which users are embracing NavFree’s do-it-yourself model. The app is powered by the the ‘Wikipedia of maps’ OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, meaning that, where necessary, users are required to fill in any missing gaps in the maps themselves, literally. That’s something that I’ve been pretty skeptical of. I mean, you get what you pay for, right?

The Bank of Ireland Kernel Capital Fund has announced that it’s invested €2m in Dublin-based, DecaWave Limited, which provides real-time location and wireless sensor solutions. The investment was co-led with International Investment and Underwriting (IIU).

It follows the recent sale of another Irish semi-conductor company, ChipSensors, a developer of innovative silicon sensor chips to detect temperature, humidity and gases, which The Bank of Ireland Kernel Capital Equity Fund had invested quite heavily in (€1.95m). Presumably today’s announcement sees some of that money being recycled pretty quickly.

Something has been happening to the European startup scene in the last couple of years, and it is starting to manifest itself in an upswell of networking the likes of which I have not seen since I started blogging full time for TechCrunch way back in 2007. From the primordial soup of the developer community have sprung up events for startups, entrepreneurs and investors until, finally, last weekend Europe stumbled on the natural evolution of all this networking: an event which resembled and will perhahps come to rival The Lobby event in Hawaii. That’s an event where tech entrepreneurs gather to talk just amongst themselves for a change, and hang out. And that’s exactly what F.ounders, a new invite-only event in Dublin, did this past weekend. But let me unpack this trend.

In the last few years a number of conferences have happened in Europe which make me say things like “My God, I think they are finally starting to get it,” to myself. After Loic Le Meur led the way with Les Blogs, which became the now vast Le Web, it seems every European country has wanted to have its own version. “Next” appeared in Berlin about four years ago. The Next Web in Amsterdam has gotten bigger and bigger and more international. Slush appeared in Helsinki last year. SIME recently revived it’s dotcom glory years for a new generation in Stockholm. GeeknRolla turned up in London. WhiteBull Summit launched. There are others. I’m now off to the Webrazzi Summit in Istanbul which again will have 800 or so attendees, like so mant others. And now TechCrunch France is planning it’s own event, Remix. In other words, there is a lot of activity now happening, and we’re barely into November’s conference season.

I have a love-hate relationship with PayPal. I love the fact that the service makes it possible to send money to anybody who has an email address. But, having been paid my wages via PayPal in a previous job, I hate the charges that are sometimes inflicted on the receiver or sender (I could never work out which and why – something to do with being forced to upgrade to a Pro account, apparently).

So it’s with mixed emotions that I bring news that one million Brits have used PayPal to make a payment or send money on their mobile phone as the proliferation of smartphones is accelerating the take-up of mobile payments.

The first time we talked about Leetchi on TechCrunch was back in February – only 3 months after its official launch in November 2009. At the time, the young company created by 27-year-old Céline Lazorthes had just raised funding with Kima Ventures and 360 Capital Partners. Some of France’s hottest business angels, like Oleg Tscheltzoff and Xavier Niel, are also investors. And now the company is about to celebrate its first birthday on November 19th with 1.2 million euros in the bank.

Along the same lines as YCombinator‘s WePay, Leetchi’s platform facilitates group payments and purchases. And coincidentally, WePay – who raised $7.5 million back in August – is also backed by some rather well-known angel investors, including Max Levchin, Ron Conway and Dave McClure.

Quotables, which soft launched in August, is aiming to become the destination for finding and sharing quotations online by embracing social media and crowdsourcing to organise its, largely, user generated database of quotes and to weed out misquotations and misattributions. The Glasgow, Scotland-based startup is backed by Channel 4 and the Arts Council England, while the site itself was built by Mint Digital.

A sort of social take on the traditional quotations dictionary, adding a quote can be done manually or via the newly introduced ‘bookmarket’, which lets a user highlight a passage of text on any website and with one-click add it to Quotables, along with attribution and a link back to the original source. It’s fun and quick, as well as being potentially useful for recording those little gems of wisdom or idiocy online.

London-based startup VisualDNA (formerly Imagini) has announced that it’s taking its “audience network” to the U.S. today, along with appointing digital media industry veteran Leighton Webb to head up its operations across the pond as Senior Vice President and Managing Director.

Webb has held senior level roles with major media companies in both the U.S. and Europe, including 20th Century Fox and AOL, and joins VisualDNA from the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), where he is said to have helped build OWN’s digital media group in preparation for its launch scheduled for early 2011.

In addition, the company says that Robert Tercek, who most recently served as President of Digital Media at OWN, has joined its Board as a non-executive Director.

In a post back in July we asked, “Is Flattr the new Facebook Like, but this time with real money?”. With 342 comments, that post got a LOT of discussion going. And it’s even being used by the controversial Wikileaks whistle-blowing site.

Now they are releasing data which suggests the service is starting to pick up at a clip.

Flattr started testing with alpha users back in February, but went public in August.

Now, two months after going public, it says it has garnered over 46,056 registered users with over €114,057 ($158,438) of “flattrs” passing through the system. It now also has Twitter and Facebook integration which should really start to get the platform motoring.