Posts mean prizes. That’s how ViewsHound, a new soon to launch crowd-sourced news site from the team behind digital publishing platform Publisha, is pitching its wares. It hopes that volunteers will be enticed to contribute by the chance to win cash for the best articles, photos and cartoons posted to the site.

Once ViewsHound launches on the 2nd of May, a prize pot of $120 will be up for grabs every day, split into $50, $30 and $20 prizes for the best posts, along with $10 for the photo of the day. In addition, there’s a “pre-launch prize fund” of $1,000 for material contributed before the actual launch.

It’s been over a year since TechCrunch France has been back in business. We announced the relaunch at TechCrunch Paris last year in March and went on to launch a killer event called Remix in Paris in November. The event made it to the #2 Twitter hashtag in France with over 2K livestreamers watching our 300+ participants from behind their screens.

Now, we’re getting reading to launch yet another fabulous event: Recipes. And this time, all will be in English. Oui, oh oui !

As if you thought you could get away with switching off the TV, Google has announced that it will live stream the upcoming UK Royal Wedding between Prince William and Catherine Middleton via the Royal Household’s official YouTube channel.

From 9am GMT on Friday, April 29, the stream will follow the whole wedding proceedings. There will also be a live commentary (it doesn;t say who will be doing the honours). The whole thing will be made available to watch on-demand.

Although Google says a video guestbook has been opened, try commenting on the preview video. Comments disabled, guys. I wonder why?

In what is being billed as a first outside of the traditional Pay TV window, Amazon-owned Lovefilm has signed a streaming deal with Disney that covers both subscription-based streaming and pay-per-view digital rentals or ‘Transactional Video on Demand’ to use the correct industry term. In other words, just in time for the Easter holidays, the DVD in the post service is getting its streaming hands on Disney.

Talk about swings and roundabouts. In this case, Silicon Roundabouts. For Tweetdeck holds a special place in the growing galaxy of London tech startups and the news today that it is still ‘in play‘ as an acquisition target is fascinating.

Last night the WSJ reported that Twitter is offering around $50 million for Tweetdeck. This is after UberMedia had supposedly acquired Tweetdeck for $25-$30 million. UberMedia has $21 million in funding to Twitter’s $360 million. TweetDeck has raised a little over $5 million in funding.

Back in February we reported – pretty confidently – that UberMedia had acquired Tweetdeck for $30m, although no party had released any official statement. If true then this would have given Bill Gross’ company, after buying EchoFon, another popular Twitter client, 20% of the userbase of Twitter. Tweetdeck reportedly has 11% of active Twitter users.

Indeed, there were early signs that this was not a cut and dried deal. One was that the founder, Iain Dodsworth – who I’ve been tracking since I interviewed him for a podcast way back in 2008 – remained utterly tight-lipped about the whole thing.

Cardcloud launches (or relaunches) today as another take on the virtual business card. Its app, which runs on iPhone and in the browser, is built on top of the vCard standard so enabling cards to be exchanged across multiple platforms – a bit like ‘beaming’ cards to a Palm Pilot back in the day – but it’s the bespoke features of Cardcloud that potentially make it stand out.

In addition to standard contact details, users can visually customize their cards by adding profile pictures and/or their company logo, along with linking their account to over 50 online profile or social services, such as the usual suspects LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. So that’s social media covered. However, it’s the ability to add context and ‘memory’ to the exchange of business cards that has the most value.

Nat Wei (@natwei), is a social entrepreneur and adviser to the UK Government on their “Big Society” project. As one of the youngest people ever to have been made a Life Peer of the House of Lords, Lord Wei is the founding and former lead partner of the Shaftesbury Partnership, and a member of the founding team of Teach First. As “Baron Wei of Shoreditch” he is intensely interested in the emergence of the cluster of startup technology companies in the Shoreditch/Hoxton area of London which has come to be known as Silicon Roundabout and which has informed the UK government’s new “East London Tech City” initiative. This is the second in in a series of guest posts on the use of technology in re-building civic society. The first is here.

We are all familiar with the concept of open source software. It works on the principle of collaboration and on the idea that if we share information we are much stronger than if we pursue individual goals in a shared space. The success of the Internet has been driven primarily through open source technologies, both at the inception and in recent years.

The 90s gave us HTML – a simple mark-up language allowing people with zero programming background to post files onto open source servers, which users with no previous computer experience could access and read. And today, without the existence of PHP and MySQL, if you wanted to start something like Facebook or Wikipedia you’d need a large amount of corporate finance before you’d even got started.

Things like PHP, MySQL, Linux (which is behind pretty much every web server in the world), and the Apache web server (behind 60% of the world’s web traffic) are things that affect us daily (directly or indirectly) and yet would not have been possible without firstly a shared space like the Internet and secondly a collaborative ethos.

And of course, probably the best example is probably WordPress, which I’m writing this post on right now. It’s an open source web application, written in PHP, using MySQL for its database. The current blogging phenomenon wouldn’t have gotten close to where it is now without all these technologies being open source.

In this post, which is being cross-posted on TechCrunch, I’d like to talk about how this open source principle is now being transferred to the culture of government. The most dramatic realisation of this within the planning system will be the upcoming reforms which form the backbone of the Localism Bill, and a major part of decentralising power and strengthening local initiatives.

The Next Web Conference 2011 in Amsterdam is next week and as usual it’s, well, a gas. It’s startups, it’s good weather, it’s in Amsterdam – what’s not to love? Amazingly it’s in its sixth year and TechCrunch Europe will be there to cover the action as we have for many previous editions. And as you can see from the entertainment map the men in white suits (Patrick and Boris) have in store, it’ll be the usual fun event mixed with serious business. I just hope it doesn’t kill me.

Speakers this year include Pablos Holman, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, Dave Winer, Rudy de Waele, and Alexander Ljung among many others.

A web conference would be nothing without a good old startup competition, and the organizing team have sent us the finalists that will be pitching the audience on stage. I’m one of the jury members that will be deciding which European startup takes home the prize, so I’m looking forward to seeing what these have in store:

Metabar, a Russian competitor to browser bar builder Conduit, has raised $1m from local seed-stage VC firm Runa Capital.

Metabar’s platform is designed to enable publishers to create a browser bar-type app without having to write code. This can include content from their site, such as a news ticker or headlines, instant notifications to new content or even games. Additionally, the ‘bar’ can give access to search engines, which is also the way Metabar and its publisher partners can make money via an ad revenue-share option.

The comparison with US-based Conduit, of course, is an obvious one, although I won’t go as far as to call Metabar a Russian clone. But either way, right now Metabar is targeting Russia alone.

SilverRail Technologies, the passenger rail ticketing platform, has raised a further $5m in a round led by PAR Captial. Previous investors include Sutter Hill, Grandbanks Capital, Brook Ventures and Accel Partners, with the London and Boston-based company having already raised $9 million in a series A round.

SilverRail’s non-trivial mission is to consolidate the world’s rail ticketing systems into a single system and offer this up via an API, thus removing the complexity of selling rail tickets, irrespective of operators, geographies and currencies. It says it will use the additional funding to expand capacity by integrating with new rail carrier inventory systems.

SilverRail currently supports data from UK rail, Amtrak in the USA, Via Rail Canada and the rail system in the Benelux countries, with several more due to come on stream soon, says the company.

Russia’s leading search engine Yandex has announced that its now building its own maps courtesy of its purchase of mapping data provider GIS Technologies and associated licenses last year.

The first digital map built in-house is a detailed map of Moscow and the Moscow region. It shows two times as many buildings as its previous editions, while users can see recently built apartment buildings and shopping malls because the data is very up to date. Overall, the new map of Moscow and the Moscow region includes 204 detailed maps of towns and small communities, says the company.

Anti-piracy software maker Metaforic, based in Glasgow, California and Tokyo, has raised $8 million in a round led by Scottish Equity Partners. Existing backers Pentech Ventures and the Scottish Investment Bank’s Scottish Venture Fund participated in the round.

Founded in 2006, Metaforic offers two main products: MetaFortress, which helps software developers protect their applications against piracy, subversion and tampering, and MetaSure for secure information storage.

Alright, who is up for a round of Lily Allen Tetris? Yes, that’s right, now you challenge your friends to various games on Facebook and select the music as well. But this is about more than just background music. MXP4‘s new social music gaming app – called Bopler Games – uses the company’s “automated level design” technology to automatically synchronize the game with the song, based on its melody, rhythm and structure. Translation: the difficulty of the game will reflect your selection in music.

The application currently features 4 different games – including previously released Pump it, which hit 1 million users within its first month. MXP4 is also in the process of developing another 6 games, which should be released shortly.

If you’re one of those people that thinks that horoscopes are a load of nonsense and simply vague statements that could essentially fit anyone, you’re definitely not alone. But Astrolome is seeking to change that. The Israeli startup has just closed a seed round of $300K with Kima Ventures and some additional business angels in order to develop a real-time personalized horoscope platform.

The company’s secret sauce lies in using an individual’s birth chart (date, time and place of birth) and current location to provide a more accurate reading than the majority of horoscopes – which give strictly sun sign information. Therefore, each user receives a more customized astrological reading rather than generic information designed to pertain to as many people as possible. In addition, the platform is complete with social features, enabling users to rank forecasts for accuracy and share comments on various events with their friends and other users.

KupiVIP, Russia’s largest private members shopping club for designer fashion and luxury brands, has landed $55 million in third round funding, something that appears to be a record for the Russian e-commerce sector. Three new investors participated in the funding: Balderton Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Russia Partners. The new investors join existing investors including Accel Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners.

The site will use the funding to move into selling consumer goods as continuing with discount offers, mashing up Amazon’s and Vente Privee’s model. A white label platform will act as a way for Western retail brands to launch stores in Russia and the former Soviet states. This will be useful. Western firms have found it very hard to break into the Russian ecommerce market. 11 out of the 15 top internet sites are Russian.

Datanomic, a UK tech company, has been acquired by Oracle, according to a small announcement on Oracle’s site. Datanomic provides customer data quality software and related applications for risk and compliance screening and had $6.3m in funding from 3i and DN Capital. The rumours are that DN Capital owned up to 70% of the company. Terms were undisclosed.

Spotify is in a quandary. Unlike normal web business models, when it comes to streaming music, it actually gets more expensive the more you scale, not less, as we point out in our analysis today. The royalties charged by record companies see to that. In addition, despite the fact that many of the major record labels are known to be actual investors in Spotify, the startup is in a love-hate relationship with them of Shakespearean proportions, as today’s news hints at.

On the one hand record labels hate – and I mean hate – free streaming music sites which turn music into a service, not a product business limited by supply. Hence why the monthly play time for the free service has been capped so that you can’t suddenly replace your record buying habit with Spotify, as – in theory – you used to be able to do.

There’s a certain irony that just two days after the who’s-who of the London startup scene were out toasting Spotify as the Telegraph newspaper’s inaugural #startup100 winner, the music streaming service announces an about turn and all but begins ditching its non-paying users. It looks like free music doesn’t pay after all. Then again, it’s not like the UK startup community hasn’t got drunk on the kool-aid before.

But actually, Spotify’s announcement today that it’s drastically reducing the amount of free music that its non-paying users can consume as well as the freedom that comes with it, isn’t all that surprising. The dirty little secret that no one likes to talk about is this: free, ad-supported, unlimited, unrestricted music streaming doesn’t pay. It’s that simple. Worse still, even when the model is off-set with a paid-for version, the sums still don’t add up. When it’s applied to music streaming, the freemium model is clearly broken.

It turns out there really is no such things as a free lunch. Spotify is slashing in half the amount of free listening available to long term users of its service, with listening hours slashed in half from 20 to 10 hours from 1 May. New users will be moved over to this new restricted model in the next six months.

The details of the new service is this: The existing free advertising supported services will still exist as they are today. “Spotify Free” needs an invitation to work but is unlimited. “Spotify Open” – where anyone can just register without an invite – becomes limited to 20 hrs a month, no invite needed.

Brand new Spotify users still get to use the free service as it is today (either Spotify Free or Spotify Open) for the first 6 months, then the capping begins. But users who registered an account before 1 Nov who will see the changes from 1 May.

Russia’s leading search engine Yandex has launched a new investment program for Russian startups as well as those from further afield.

The Yandex.Factory will invest “up to hundreds of thousands US dollars” in startups from Russia, the CIS region or, basically, anywhere that have demonstrated potential in their seed or early investment stage.