Shazam, which now calls itself a mobile discovery company after broadening out beyond just music to also target the living room, has announced that co-founder of MTV Networks, John Sykes, has joined its board.

Sykes was instrumental in creating MTV some 25 years ago (makes me feel old, alright) as well as serving as President of VH1, which he rebranded and “lead to record audience ratings and profits, from 1994-2002″, according to the press release. He also spent time as Chairman and CEO of Infinity Broadcasting before returning to MTV Networks in 2005 as President Network Development. In 2008 Sykes left Viacom to join former MTV colleagues Bob Pittman and Tom Freston at the Pilot Group.

Arguably, in the age of Facebook and, to a greater degree, Twitter, the early excitement around so-called Citizen Journalism has been surpassed by social media. But that isn’t stopping London-based Blottr, founded by Adam Baker, which thinks it’s found the right formula – a mix of collaborative publishing, ‘authentication algorithm’ and revenue sharing – to give the idea a new lease of life.

That’s not to say that social media is absent, sharing of articles via Facebook and Twitter is actively encouraged and tweets are automatically incorporated into stories, but otherwise this is more akin to a traditional online news publication, only one that is written by non-professional “journalists”.

It kind of feels like it was only yesterday that we were all watching Loïc Le Meur parade across the stage at LeWeb dressed up in Angry Bird gear. Yet, Géraldine and Loïc Le Meur have already announced the dates for year’s edition of the infamous Paris-based tech conference.

While in previous years LeWeb has always been a 2-day event, looks like the team has decided add another day to the menu for 2011. So mark your calendars for December 7-9; judging from the previous events, you definitely won’t want to miss this.

Storific, the French startup that lets customers place orders in restaurants, bars and hotels via an iPhone, has raised $200k in a seed round financed by Kima Ventures.

The company offers a paid-for subscription service via a browser-based interface where businesses can provide full menus, list their tables and receive notifications from customers ordering by an iPhone. Whilst the consumer-facing iPhone app is, of course, free.

Madvertise, the Berlin-based mobile ad network, has launched a five million Euro fund for mobile app developers. Only it isn’t really a fund and it certainly isn’t €5m. This one takes a little time to unravel so we’ll save you the effort.

What they’re actually offering is to wave their commission on any ads sold for mobile app developers who apply to the program until a total of €5m in ad revenue has been generated via those apps or until 12 months are up (whichever comes sooner).

The specs for the new MacBook Pro appear to have been leaked ahead of the release later today, but only slightly. The Apple Store went offline and details were emerging across blogs who have pulled the specs from German sources, one of those is UK gear blog ElectricPig and 9to5Mac.

However, the release has now come out for the new MacBook Pros which will come in three familiar sizes: 13-inch, 15-inch and 17-inch screens.

The 13-inch new MacBook Pro will have a Intel Core i5 and Core i7 dual-core processor and the 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pro models feature quad-core Core i7 processors.

The FaceTime Mac app came out before the new MacBook Pro. This has a FaceTime HD camera which is triple the resolution of previous generations and it built in to the new MacBook Pro.

Thunderbolt has now been confirmed – a new Intel-developed port for high speed data transfer of up to 10GBps.

The aluminum unibody enclosure remains, so no change to design.

KashFlow, the feisty UK startup taking on incumbent players like Sage with its cloud-based accounting software for SMEs, has decided it’s time to step on the gas. But to do this, the company is actively seeking a “strategic investor” and isn’t ruling out selling a majority stake, according to a report distributed by Financial Times-owned Mergermarket.

That could entail pairing up with one of the “large traditional accounting services groups” that would benefit from its Software-as-a-Service offering or another software company that would bring both cash and new markets. The aim, according to the report, is to increase KashFlow’s annual turnover from its current £1m (£140,000 in profit) to £2m in 2011. The startup currently claims 10,000 paying users.

However, in an internal memo sent out to KashFlow staff by CEO and founder Duane Jackson seen by TechCrunch Europe, we’ve learned further details of the company’s thinking.

A London court has ruled that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange should to be extradited to Sweden to face further questioning on allegations of sexual offences. He has seven days to appeal. The judge said: “I’m satisfied that if a decision is taken to hold the Swedish trial in private that will not breach Article 6 or any human rights.”

He added: “None of the points raised by the #Assange defence establishes an abuse of process,” and that if there have been abuses in the legal process in Sweden, that “the right place for these to be examined and remedied is in the Swedish trial system”.

There’s been a lot of speculation in recent months about where Twitter would put down a European base in its efforts to expand its operation. Certainly I’ve been bugging them in the last few weeks about whether they would come to London. But now we have the answer: London it is – at least for five people whose jobs will be largely about sales and commercial partnerships.

Dailymotion, the French-born video site and YouTube competitor, has quietly launched a public Application Programming Interface (API) for third-party apps that want to integrate some, if not all, of its features.

Available as an SDK for JavaScript, PHP and Objective C (iPhone, iPad and Mac), with ActionScript (Flash) and Python also under development, Dailymotion’s initial API offering, however, appears to be a work-in-progress. The company says that it will “eventually” support the full gamut of Dailymotion’s core functionality, including video upload, playlists, channels etc. offering the ability to integrate “Dailymotion modules” into any site or application, such as on iPhone, iPad, Android, Bada, and Windows Phone.

Exclusive - Grey Area, a small Finnish smartphone games developer, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures, London Venture Partners and Initial Capital, TechCrunch has learned.

The startup is behind a mobile alternative reality game called Shadow Cities, which is a pretty fascinating location-based MMORPG that essentially turns the place you live into a full-fledged game scene.

Search and online advertising juggernaut Google announced a couple of months ago that it would be providing some $5 million in grants to non-profit organizations devoted to innovating journalism.

Around 40% of the total fund was recently allocated to the Knight Foundation in the United States.

It appears more than 50% of the fund has just been awarded to the International Press Institute, based in Vienna, which will be used to sponsor the IPI News Innovation Contest.

AppSense, which specializes in what it calls ‘user virtualization’ solutions, has raised $70 million in its very first round of funding. Interestingly, the entire investment comes from one backer, Goldman Sachs, whose managing director Pete Perrone will be joining the company’s board of directors.

AppSense says it will use the funds to “capitalize on its position as a market leader” in what it anticipates will turn out to become a $2 billion market in the next few years.

It seems we only mention Google Calendar here on TechCrunch anymore when things inevitably go wrong – which means we get to cover the cloud-based calendaring service quite often, unfortunately.

We’ve been getting a ton of tips from people whose scheduled meetings and whatnot have apparently all been eaten by Google (as has The Next Web, which covered the issue of wiped out user calendars earlier this morning).

SponsorPay, the European provider of advertisement-based payment systems, has raised further investment. This time the funding comes from Nokia Growth Partners, the $350m fund with close ties to Nokia itself and existing investors. It should comes as no surprise then to learn that SponsorPay intends to use the new capital to support its expansion to mobile devices, tapping the Finnish handset maker’s contacts along the way.

This morning, French publication L’Express published an article stating that “Skype doesn’t respect French law and operates illegally.” Except that this is kind of yesterday’s news. Or news from 4 years ago, actually.

Back in 2007, ARCEP, the “French telecommunications police” (or the communications regulations authority, if you want to be politically correct about it) went after Skype for 3 reasons: it failed to allow the inception of calls for security reasons following a court ruling, the way that it routed emergency calls and for distributing mobile phone numbers (SkypeIn). In other words, Arcep considers Skype to be a telco whereas Skype…well, doesn’t.

Don Draper, look away. London-based blur Group has officially launched its Creative Services Exchange, which in their words aims to disrupt the traditional Madison Avenue agency model for the advertising/creative industries. And in doing so, cuts down time to market and, of course, costs.

It’s the usual Internet take on an old industry: offer a platform that more or less cuts old the middle person (unless you’re the blur Group), matching buyers with sellers directly. In this instance, the middle person is expensive creative agencies, while the buyers are those with a creative brief – web design, copy writing, marketing campaign, viral video and such – and the sellers are professional creatives. All 9,500 of them vetted by the blur Group themselves.

European mobile payments provider Fortumo has extended its reach via a partnership with BilltoMobile which sees direct mobile operator billing available to Europe and Asia-based game developers targeting customers in the U.S.

Charging customers via their existing mobile phone bill, of course, is seen as key to making payments frictionless and increasing app and content sales. It keeps the carriers happy too since they maintain ownership over the customer relationship unlike, say, Apple’s iTunes or indeed Google’s Android marketplace. The other alternative for developers wishing to skirt around those platform specific centralised app stores is to use Premium SMS but that entails much higher transaction fees.

GigsWiz, the direct-to-fan ticketing service, which officially rolled out in the UK last month is trying to break America. It saw its U.S. launch last week at the future of music conference, New Music Seminar.

Originally conceived as a sort of analytics for bands to help them identify “fan hotspots” and therefore where next to perform, GigsWiz has since pivoted to help artists promote and sell tickets to gigs via social media, listings sites and their own web presence.

Following success on iPhone, MyVoucherCodes has launched its voucher app on Android, letting consumers locate local discounts via GPS. It’s the first of its kind on Google’s mobile OS, says the company, a claim that appears to fall slightly short.

A quick search of the Android market reveals a number of GPS-powered voucher apps, including vouchAR, a nifty Augmented Reality-powered voucher finder that aggregates offers from a range of sites. While MyVoucherCodes’ competitor VoucherClouds is said to have an Android offering on its way.