At Le Web I ran into Rodrigo Sepúlveda Schulz, serial entrepreneur and now investor. I asked him about the startup market in France, a market which – despite his reputation as a huge globe-trotter – he is intimately acquainted with, being based out of Paris. What was interesting was the extent to which he was quite down on the market, even as we often hear from TechCrunch France that there has been a lot more startup activity in the last 18 months. Unfortunately for these French startup heroes, the over-riding business culture of France is not helping them. Here’s Rodrigo:

The holy grail of real social graph is the phone, they say. Phonedeck is a call management application which attempts to connect the mobile phone with the computer. When you get a call the app shows who is calling and offers various options to react, like send to voicemail. You can also make calls form the computer. If you want to call someone you can browse the phone book conveniently on your computer and start the call with one click.

Described as a fan-funded record label, My Major Company has launched in the UK with a mix of traditional A&R and crowdfunding.

It differs slightly from similar sites, such as Sellaband or the UK’s Slicethepie, in that the acts featured on the site are sourced by the startup’s own talent spotting department first. In addition, fans who choose to invest are essentially buying shares in any future profits made from the artist’s launch campaign as a whole (physical and digital music sales, merchandise, tours etc.), which My Major Company oversees, should they raise the £100,000 stipulated to get off the ground.

Deways claims to be the the first peer-to-peer car-sharing community. Unfortunately it isn’t, although it may well be an early player in France. Other startups like Whipcar and GoCarShare in the UK are addressing this area as well and at a pretty sophisticated level.

How Deways approaches this problem is that it gathers and makes connections between its members to generate easy and safe car-sharing. Members can be car-owners willing to share their cars and make them available for other members, and those who are willing to pay.

Yourpinpoints from Ireland’s Cauwill Technologies addresses the question: how do people find locations? The benefits are to allow people to find and share location easily. With PinPoint, any location can be created and shared. Sure, sounds familiar. However, A PinPoint is basically a URL that can be delivered to phones by SMS, Email etc. It’s a bit like a URL-shortener for location.

Clicking the PinPoint displays the location in a phone’s navigation software and it doesn’t require any additional software to be downloaded/installed. An example might be that you can convert “221B Baker Street, London” into something like http://directions.to/sherlockhomes – this can be inserted into emails, SMS, forum posts, blogs, tweets etc.

RateSetter, the UK peer-to-peer lending site that competes with Zopa and, less directly, Funding Circle, has announced that it has seen £1 million lent through its platform since the site launched just two months ago. That’s a fairly big number, although perhaps a reflection of the lousy interest rates offered by high street banks at the moment and the hard times people are facing.

Badgeville is a badge system for web publishers allowing them to reward their users for checking-in and participating on their site. The idea is to get users to game their activity on the site. They have a had a $2.5 million series A funding round so far.

The startup has come out of the Netherlands but has also put down a base in Palo Alto, CA. It has a white label social loyalty, rewards, and analytics platform.

We did a fairly extensive review here, since Badgevill has already appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt, but the skinny is that if users do things on your site, like comment or Like a page, they get badges and eventually rewards. And the site gets more traffic and can thus selling more ads.

Badgeville already has 10 customers signed up representing 400 million monthly pageviews.

WikiLeaks, which publishes anonymous leaks of secret material (most recently 250,000 previously secret US embassy cables) still has a trick up its sleeve. In the last few days its sources of funding have been gradually cut off. MasterCard, PayPal and now Visa have all suspended payments to the organsation and founder Julian Assange has been remanded in custody in London without bail (so far).

However there remains one source of funding so far untouched, and that is a small startup, Flattr, created by Peter Sunde, co-founder of torrent site Pirate Bay, who has been reminding Twitter users today via his personal Twitter account that it’s still possible to “help” Wikileaks.

Who are the superstars of this year’s LeWeb? We’ll it’s hard to pick from the pretty awesome line-up. However, one startup has attempted to sift the list, coming up with the top 10 “titans of LeWeb”. PeerIndex has a technology similar in some respects to Klout to do this.

However, more interestingly they are now pulling together a Twitter list of the top 200 attendees here. This you’ll be able to check their Whuffieas you trawl Le Web’s halls. Mine’s 69, what’s yours?

Meanwhile, here’s the top 10 speakers at Le Web according to Peer Index:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told a London court today that he will fight his extradition to Sweden on sex crime charges. Assange has been refused bail and will be remanded in custody till 14 December. It appears the reasons given by the court were that he has a “nomadic life”, refused to give his address and there is no record of his entry to the UK.

This means there will be a long drawn out legal battle, during which, potentially, any number of other actions might be filed while Assange is way-laid in London. Assange turned himself in to Scotland Yard – the HQ of London’s Metropolitan Police – earlier today to face the Swedish arrest warrant.

Semetric, the startup behind the Musicmetric analytics service, has secured a “significant round” of funding led by Pentech Ventures. Although the actual amount isn’t being disclosed, when pressed Semetric says it’s substantial enough to give the company a “well funded two-year runway”. The new investment will enable Musicmetric to expand its data collection infrastructure and applications, as well as grow the team.

In addition, Marc Moens, senior partner at Pentech will join the Board of Semetric, while Spencer Hyman, previously COO of Last FM, will join its Advisory Board.

Following on from the recent addition of IM powered by Meebo’s web-based client, Bebo has rolled out a video chat feature called bChat. Think Chatroulette “sans-private parts” was the line given to me (phew!). It’s provided by Vchatter, the social video chat service that is already available on Facebook and as a standalone offering, and is part of a wider strategy by Bebo to become relevant again by making its platform more realtime and interactive. And about time too.

A quick re-cap: After Bebo sold to AOL for $850 million in 2008, the platform was left to languish, with AOL eventually shutting it down for tax purposes and selling it for about $10m to Criterion Capital Partners. However, as we recently reported, the new team of 20 or so employees (and growing) has already made the site profitable and it’s now coming back in user numbers. Today’s news is another sign that the social network has a new spring in its step.

Like a European AngelList, Seedcamp has put together the new Seedsummit site to showcase largely European Angels – although it does include US ones as well. It’s a sign that Seedcamp is becoming more international and less geographical. The initiative has grown out of a “Seedsummit” event which the programme put together in London last year where Angels chewed the fat about startups. Angel gate? Hardly – more like the first time European Angels had properly met eachother in a dedicated conference. The idea behind it was to help to create a forum for active European seed investors. Quite why it’s taken this long for them do a site off the back of the event is a mystery but those Seedcamp guys do travel a lot.

CitySocialising, the subscription-based social network that lets members find local and likeminded people to socialise with in the real world, has secured £1m in a Series A round led by PROfounders Capital, the European VC fund backed by the likes of Brent Hoberman and Michael Birch.

PROfounders’ previous investments include Made.com, TweetDeck and Keynoir, while CitySocialising’s original early-stage funding in March 2009 was provided by the London Business Angels network. The new investment will be used for product development and expansion, including mobile, along with recruitment of “key Executives” including Marketing and Business Development Director and Product Manager.

Paper.li, the startup out of Switzerland which has gotten potential investors hot under the collar after garner a lot of traction for a Twitter app in a short amount of time, has gone and added Facebook status updates to its armoury. Currently it’s best known for auto-magically curating a daily newspaper from the links shared by the people you follow on Twitter. This time it’s public Facebook status updates.

We know that a lot of mobile search is increasingly driven by local search. According to research from Google and the Kelsey Group last year, as much as 35%. Heck, isn’t this the future we keep hearing about? Delivering information about things around you, direct to your mobile phone? However, good geographic data is not normally attached to mobile search. So real-time local data is going to be incredibly important going forward.

Sunstone Capital has made something of a name for itself as an investor in geo-related startups with positions in trailblazers like Layar and Cloudmade, and today it is adding to that with a seed investment in InfoHubble (terms were undisclosed) alongside angel investor Tommy Ahlers. Ahlers is best known for exiting Zyb to Vodafone for €31.5m.

Music recognition and discovery service Shazam has reached somewhat of a milestone today: growing its user base to 100 million, of which 25 million users were added in the past six months. At first glance that sounds pretty impressive, though not entirely surprising.

Back in May we reported that the ten-year old London-based ‘startup’ had grown its user base from 50 million to 75 million members in the previous six months, and that its service had identified more than one billion songs to date. Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher predicted at the time that the company would hit the 100 million member mark by the end of this year and today he was sort-of proved right. However, these aren’t necessarily active users just those that have tried the app. So take that as you may.

WYGU (When You Grow Up) has launched as a “Facebook for careers advice” – that’s their words not mine – and offers a mix of “social careers guidance”, development and e-mentoring. It’s founded by Alun Baker and is backed by £350,000 of Angel funding, which Baker says he’s matched.

The UK site’s noble aim is to help people avoid the trappings of what WYGU calls an “accidental career”, a familiar situation for many whereby they fall into a particular job or career without it being something that they’re passionate about but, ultimately, end up being stuck doing.

The iPad might be one of the most sought after gadgets this Christmas but for many, its high price is a definite deal breaker.

That’s before you factor in carrier subsidy, says a new report from global research and technology firm Vision Critical which reveals that subsidised iPad offers, such as those recently announced by three of the four UK mobile operators, are likely to “significantly accelerate adoption”.

According to the survey, which polled 2,004 British adults, this will be particularly true amongst younger consumers who will be most keen to take up the offer of a ‘free’ iPad, even if it is in return for a lengthy and costly mobile broadband subscription.

TechCrunch Europe is helping a major research project which will be carried out in London over the next 6 weeks. We can’t say who’s doing it right now but here’s what it involves.

The researches want to shadow a tech startup based out of London, but especially ones which are based around Old Street, Shoreditch, Hoxton or the wider East London.

In addition ones which have have either already done, or are in the middle of a financing round and are happy to be “shadowed” next week by researchers. If you fall into that catagory then email TechCrunch Editorial under ‘contact’ here and we’ll pass you along in a confidential manner, thanks people.