Last.fm, the UK-based music startup acquired by media giant CBS in 2007 for $280m (£140m), made a loss for 2009 of just under £2.84 million ($4.45 million), reveal new accounts for the company. The loss posted in 2008 was £17.11 million, reflecting the high costs of streaming music, which the company has now cut. It just goes to show how expensive streaming can be…

Financials published on the UK’s Companies House show the company ended last year with net liabilities of £22.24 million, but parent company CBS is still effectively subsidising the company and will “make available such funds as are needed”. We’re hoping that CBS is getting some value out of this relationship.

Over 54% of Last.fm’s revenues in 2009 were from the UK, 33.5% from the US, 9.4% from EU countries, and 2.3% from the rest of the world.

That’s a gain on US users but the question is, is it enough to sustain CBS as a sugar daddy?

This is a guest post by Alan Gleeson is the General Manager of Palo Alto Software, Ltd, creators of Business Plan Pro. He holds an MBA from Oxford University and an MSc from University College, Cork, Ireland.

The phrase ‘business model’ has grown in use in recent months. However, there seems to be some confusion as to what exactly the term means, why it is important and how it relates to more established concepts such as business planning. This short article aims to address these deficiencies as well as to describe where business modeling is most useful and what the main types of business models are.

Britain’s a nation of Facebook-ers, that much we already know. But now new research from technology experts Travelodge — OK, it’s a chain of cheap and not so-cheerful hotels — has revealed that almost three-quarters of UK adults check Facebook in bed (72%).

Specifically, the survey of 6,000 adults reveals that Brits spend an average of 16 minutes each night on the uber-social network, with the peak time being 9.45pm.

It’s always ‘a good thing’ when mainstream media outlets get behind the tech startup community, often in the form of a “Top 100″ listing or similar. Hopefully their picks reflect the scene well. But at their worst they end up as a rather out of date list of tech companies (some doing well, some not so well) or a list which is way off the mark.

However, we’ve decided to join The Telegraph, a UK quality daily, in its endeavour to create a “Tech Start-Up 100″ which will take a shot at creating a new guide to European start-ups. This is the first tie-up between TechCrunch Europe and a UK national newspaper (but we open to working with newspapers and mainstream media outlets in each European country).

We’re working with the awesome annual DLD Conference in Munich, on a new event for startups. The DLDGarage startup program will provide a forum for presenting new startups to the influential DLD influential (originally called Digital, Lifestyle, Design, but now just referred to as DLD).

The Garage session will be during the DLD Conference, January 23-25, 2011, and as usual DLD attract startups and investors alike. Some of the startups will also be integrated into the main DLD conference program.

It will be chaired by legendary investor Yossi Vardi, assisted by Sonali De Rycker (Accel Partners) and your truly. Stefan Winners of Tomorrow Focus AG will also support the initiative.

Yandex, the Russian juggernaut of a search engine that is thought to be considering an IPO for up to $1.5 billion, has partnered with VKontakte, which is the largest social network in Russia. How big? The so-called Facebook-clone accounts for more than half of web traffic in the CIS region.

Under the arrangement, the public-facing elements of VKontakte user profiles will show up in Yandex searches in realtime. So far, this has resulted in Yandex indexing over 25 million user profiles, essentially creating a people search engine since results, where publicly available, will link to and/or display a person’s date of birth, place of birth, university or place of work.

Mixlr, which we previously described as a UStream-for-audio, has exited Beta and with it a wider remit: No longer is the live audio streaming service aimed at just DJs and musicians but now targets the likes of conference organisers, journalists, podcasters and public speakers too.

It’s a pivot not dissimilar to that made by SoundCloud recently, a service that Mixlr both competes with and complements since Mixlr recordings can be sent to SoundCloud. But that’s not all that’s changed.

Trampoline Systems, specialists in “social analytics” for companies, launched in the UK and the US a couple of years ago and recently turned to “crowdfunding” to pull in follow-on funding, raising £330,000 from tens of high net worth individuals around the world.

CEO Charles Armstrong is adamant that tech startups can operate outside the norms of the venture industry, and last time we caught up with them they were after a full £1m round. But today its announced a more traditional angel round from 10 leading figures in the software and financial industries, though terms were undisclosed.

The investors include:

H-Farm, the Italian VC-slash-incubator-slash-holding company based in the countryside near Venice, just announced the opening of their new Seed Program.

H-Farm will provide financing for three months worth of development, in which teams will work in their new Startup Village, and claims it will take a minority share in each company, but doesn’t add specific details. We’re guessing around 15-20%. The first batch will include 5 startups.

Well, it’s a strange world out there. Channel 4 News has revealed that the man accused of passing thousand of secret US documents to WikiLeaks was a tech geek who set up a primitive ‘social network’ at his school, years before Facebook appeared.

Private Bradley Manning joined the US Army in 2007 and was posted to Baghdad, where he worked on classified army networks. He has been linked to the publication by WikiLeaks of a video showed a US Apache helicopter attacking Iraqi citizens and two Reuters journalists (“Collateral Murder”), the Afghan War Diaries (76,000 US military documents published by WikiLeaks in July 2010), 400,000 US war logs from Iraq, and 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables. He’s currently languishing in a US jail, awaiting a military court marshall.

But before all that, back in 2001, he was a 13 year old boy, newly-arrived in Wales

Some 150 people attended the inaugural party of EnLabs (Entrepreneurship Laboratories) yesterday evening. The new 40-desk incubator based in Rome, is open to all entrepreneurs with early stage and start-up aspirations.

The initiative was founded by Luigi Capello, a serial entrepreneur turned business angel who, through investment opportunities, was able to experience and try firsthand the effectiveness of such structures in the U.S., particularly in Silicon Valley.

While none of my friends and family would dare to buy me a gadget for Christmas – they’d only get it wrong – for as long as I can remember, technology has taken its fair share of present space under the tree. Not this year though, predicts an opportunistic survey carried out by Opinion Matters on behalf of the UK’s Mobile Fun, which sells mobile accessories online.

It found that over two thirds of UK adults are not planning to buy a single gadget in a bid to cut costs this Christmas. Although part of the discrepancy between this year and previous years is that the gadgets that shoppers do want are far too expensive: Yes, I’m looking at you iPad.

If you’re getting into the holiday season, then maybe check out 24waystostart an advent calendar largely aimed at European entrepreneurs.

Each days for 24 days in the run up to Christmas there will be a post about startups. The first post is by @maxniederhofer of Qwerly.

The site was the brain child of tech mischief mackers @davestone and @joshr.

TechCrunch Europe will be contributing at some point…

RendezVous353.com, the social network for Irish expats, saw its UK launch last week with a typically Irish party in London.

And at a time when Ireland has little to celebrate and many of the country’s working population are said to be heading elsewhere, a dedicated community online for the 80 million-strong “global Irish Diaspora” is perhaps fitting. That tiresome expression “never let a recession go to waste” also comes to mind.

Today, SoundCloud, an audio platform that has concentrated on music makers so far, makes a significant pivot into the wider sphere of audio sharing. Up until now SoundCloud has done a pretty incredible job of attracting well known artists to its platform such as The Foo Fighters, Kylie, Deadmau5, Moby and Caribou, who have used it to effectively socialise their music. But today Soundcloud releases the ability to record sound direct via the site, and via it’s updated iPhone app. That puts it into the realm of pure audio sharing platforms such as Cinch and Audioboo. In other news SoundCloud has also passed two million users.

SoundCloud’s new record facility on the site or iPhone apps lets users capture sound anywhere and put it into their waveform player to share it across social networks, websites, the SoundCloud community or privately between friends. The iPhone app also has the ability to add an image and location to the sound recording. This is exactly what Audioboo and Cinch do already for instance, but the social features on SoundCloud may well trump any existing player right now. Check out the screen grabs below. Having looked at the app I can see that I may shift my own audio recording to SoundCloud because the experience is really very good.