At The Next Web conference in Amsterdam I caught up with Guillaume Decugis, CEO of Scoop.it, a news curation startup coming out of France, but which is rapidly gaining traction and is poised to put down roots in the US. We’ve previously covered Scoop.it on TechCrunch France

Sharing what mobile apps you have in a social network has been tried various ways. Appsfire hit on the idea of socialising apps.

Zwapp is coming at it from a slightly different angle. Its iPhone app (iTunes link) auto-discovers what apps you have on your iPhone and connects up your contacts, Facebook and Twitter friends. You then follow people who’s opinion’s you respect when it comes to apps. It even has a live feed where you can see what apps your friends are using and downloading (privacy is now most definitely over it would seem).

Onavo, as we just reported, is a magical iPhone app which literally shrinks the data your phone uses and thus your roaming data bill when you are travelling. It launches today and I caught up with CEO and co-founder Guy Rosen at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam.

I’ve actually been using Onavo for weeks, since a trip to Tel Aviv and a random meeting with Rosen. Although the compression happens on Onavo’s servers, it’s changed nothing about my iPhone use – other than the fact that it’s saving a noticeable amount on roaming costs when I am travelling in Europe. It may even be between 20-30%.

When Color came out with its $41m play, a rather lesser known startup had planned to launch around the same time – as these things go. How often does that happen? Pretty darn often no doubt. But while Color got all the press – not least for its funding – the lesser known Pixamid has had to wait for its time in the sun. But while I have struggled – really I have – to get into Color, Pixamid has given me pretty much exactly what I wanted out of this kind of app [iTunes link] from the word go. Today at the (sixth annual) Next Web conference in Amsterdam, I met CEO and founder Bart Denny who demo’d the app to me.

Teamly, the collaboration and time management tool for businesses and employees, has exited beta today and with it is announcing what it’s calling a “significant milestone”: 9 months in, Teamly users have created 100,000 “priorities”.

The term “priorities” perhaps reflects the company’s key differentiation compared with similar offerings in the “performance management” software space which, says Teamly, aren’t designed to benefit the employee and are overly-complicated and encourage micro-management. In comparison, Teamly keeps things simple with a realtime stream where you can see both priorities and goal setting for the individual in the manner of a kind of “real-time appraisal”. To-date, 6,000 individuals in “hundreds of companies world-wide” are using the Software-as-a-Service.

Flattr, the social micropayment startup founded by ex-Pirate Bay associates, is announcing a significant change today.

In a move that represents less altruism and more capitalism, from May 1st onwards Flattr will no longer require new users to add credit to their accounts in order to run the Flattr button on their sites and start receiving payments. In other words, users won’t be required to give to receive.

Sedo will announce shortly that it has sold the most expensive domain name of this year so far in its third biggest public sale ever handled behind sex.com ($13 million) and vodka.com ($3 million). The company has brokered the sale of gambling.com for $2.5 million in cash.

UK-based Media Corporation sold the domain to an unnamed company also based in the United Kingdom for £1.5 million in cash. According to the seller, the transaction formally completed on 27 April, with the receipt of funds and transfer of the domain name.

This is a guest post by Alex Barrera. Alex is Partner and Associate Director at Okuri Ventures, CEO and co-founder at Tetuan Valley, founder at Inkzee.com and mentor in several accelerator programs including Tetuan Valley, StartupBootCamp and Springboard.

The newest edition of the Spain-based Tetuan Valley startup school kicked off in Madrid and Barcelona a few weeks ago. But, what’s Tetuan Valley and what’s the Startup School? Tetuan Valley is a mindset we want to bring to Europe, especially to countries where entrepreneurship isn’t always inherent in our DNA. This is the case for countries like Spain or Poland.

Now I know what you’re thinking: leave it to the French to come up with a dating site for extramarital affairs (er, cheating?). After all, local entrepreneurs have come up with some rather original ideas in this space before. Remember Ladieshoesme? Or Adoptaguy? There’s event Loue une petite amie (literally translates to “rent a girlfriend”). Yet oddly enough, I haven’t found anything along the lines of Cougarlife…

But actually, believe it or not, the idea behind extramarital dating site Gleeden isn’t unique to France. In fact, Canadian-owned competitor, Ashley Madison, counts over 9 million “anonymous” registered users that are seeking a bit of…well, you get my point.

With all the larger acquisitions that have taken place in France within the last year – like Exalead, PriceMinister or DailyMotion – it’s easy to almost forget that Alcatel-Lucent bought Sophia-Antipolis-based OpenPlug in September. It was the company’s 2nd acquisition in 3 months.

Well my dear mobile app developer friends, Alcatel-Lucent has now released a free version of OpenPlug’s development platform.

Seedcamp, the pan-European micro seed fund and startup accelerator, has announced the winners of its recent startup showcase in Berlin. The two companies beat off competition from 20 finalists, while Seedcamp Berlin had the most applications to-date. Both will join its existing 38 portfolio companies.

So, without further ado, the winners are:

Peecho, the Cloud-printing startup based in Amsterdam, has launched a new service that it’s calling the ‘Print Button’.

The idea is that with just a few lines of code, any website or web app can embed Peecho’s Cloud-based printing service, making it easy to send and print content to the company’s network of professional printers. Best of all they can add a markup to the cost, turning that content into a revenue stream.

And in a clever bit of marketing, Peecho is pitching its ‘Print Button’ as a Facebook ‘Like’ for Cloud-printing. That’s a neat analogy, though for now it falls a little short.

Bigpoint, the German online gaming outfit, has taken a $350m majority share investment from Summit Partners and TA Associates in what’s described as a recapitalization of the company. Representatives from both firms will join Bigpoint’s Board of Directors.

The new capital is said to position the company for “continued strong global growth” and will support Bigpoint’s international expansion, which has already seen it open new offices in the US and Brazil.

The deal also sees original investor Comcast Interactive Capital’s Peacock Equity Fund sell their stake, while founder and co-CEO Heiko Hubertz (yes, the company has two people in the top job) will retain his 30% share in Bigpoint.

We recently brought your attention to the scandalous delays BT Openreach is capable of when being asked, in simple terms, to connect a central London building up to a fibre broadband connection. At the same time the UK government – and the local Greater London Authority – has been convening meeting after meeting to try to work out how to help the emerging technology cluster in East London, we have, in effect, a monopoly lumbering on, blind or just plain stupid when it comes to the level of service most modern businesses expect of eachother.

When we wrote our post (“There will be no Tech City in London if BT is not brought to heel”) we were still waiting for a response to the charges that BT had dragged its feet incessantly on connecting startups to fibre broadband in London. In particular, Songkick, whose battle we detailed at some length . We waited and waited. Eventually, the statement came through from BT’s spokesperson:

It was inevitable. Nokia this morning announced plans to ‘align its global workforce and consolidate site operations’. That means significant layoffs and reorganizations across the board, of course, so here are the details:

First off, Nokia will be cutting its workforce by roughly 4,000 employees by the end of 2012. The giant phone manufacturer has partnered with Accenture to transfer all its Symbian software activites, including about 3,000 employees, to the latter company.

Mobile VoIP remains a hot space with a plethora of startups trying to conquer behemoth Skype. Typically these offer the ability to make international calls over 3G or Wi-Fi on a smartphone in a bid to circumvent existing mobile telcos who generate large revenues based on high roaming costs. And although the European Union is pushing hard to reduce the cost of roaming in Europe, it’s still got a long way to go.

Enter forfone, a recently launched startup based in Germany and Austria which sits somewhere at the intersection of Skype and the likes of Viber. The service, which is currently only available in German, is founded by Michael Schöpfer and seed funded to the tune of €500,000 from a group of angel investors, among them Alexander Lónyay, a former shareholder of one of the largest advertising agencies in Europe, LOWE GGK.

Kobojo, a social games developer based in Paris, France, has landed 5.3 million euros (roughly $7.5 million) in its first round of funding. The financing round was led by Endeavour Vision with IDinvest Partners participating.

Kobojo is one of Europe’s leaders in publishing and distributing games for mobile phones and the Facebook platform. The company was founded in 2008 and counts games like GooBox and PyramidVille among its most popular applications.

Mobile application developer Outfit7, maker of the hugely popular Talking Friends series of apps, has announced that its iOS and Android apps have hit the 100 million downloads milestone, roughly 3 months after hitting the 60 million downloads milestone.

Notably, Outfit7 launched its first Talking Friend app less than ten months ago (July 2010).

The great thing about building successful software applications is that you don’t really need a proper education, but rather a good understanding of markets and obviously knowledge of how to program.

Meet Julian Zehetmayer, who in 2010 as a 17-year old high school drop out quietly launched MobFox, a mobile advertising network, much like Admob, but with a simple and clear USP: Higher CPCs/CPMs for developers working with MobFox as their mobile advertising solution of choice. The startup, which is currently self funded and according to the founder “only interested if the deal is interesting enough”, is already being used in around 1,500 applications worldwide, with several renowned apps such as Friendly for Facebook or IM+ making money through MobFox’s ad engine.