Field Agent, a new iPhone app that launches in the UK today, is bringing the Amazon Mechanical Turk model to field research, although the company, a licensee of the Field Agent brand and model already launched in the US, probably won’t entirely appreciate the comparison. The location-based app lets companies crowdsource their field market research and related activities so that instead of employing a dedicated field research team, they source and pay users via Field Agent to complete those tasks.

The minimum price per job is £1, which to be fair is more than the micro-jobs typically deployed through Mechanical Turk, though the model isn’t dissimilar with the aim to drive down the cost of field research. So what kind of tasks might ‘agents’ be asked to carry out?

Location-based social network Geomium is getting an official UK roll out today, having launched in London-only last month. Although in actual fact, the GPS-powered app is accessible from anywhere, it’s just the amount of supported local information that differs. The UK startup also says that it’s seen more than 100,000 downloads of the Geomium iPhone app since launch and that the early signs are that users are relaxed about sharing their location.

Leading Dutch social network, Hyves, which for a long time held out against the encroachment of Facebook, is selling the entire company to Dutch media group TMG (Telegraaf Media Groep) for an undisclosed sum.

Hyves has a 68% penetration in the Netherlands, but lately we’ve been told that more and more people are talking about moving to Facebook.

Hyves was founded eight months after Facebook in 2004 by Raymond Spanjar, Koen Kam and Floris Rost van Tonningen. It has 10.6 million member accounts.

The move follows rumours of another European social network, Nasza Klasa in Poland, being put up for sale. Are Europe’s home-grown social startups finally cashing in their chips before the Facebook juggernaut rolls over their markets? Almost certainly. In the last few days we’ve also heard ‘European MySpace’ Netlog is aso having a tough time against Zuckerberg’s legions.