Music streaming services are are becoming a dime a dozen, and that’s before we factor in the expected launch of Apple’s own cloud music offering. Today, Best Buy-owned Napster, the Old Skool player of yesteryear (by brand name only) has unleashed its mobile apps here in the UK.

Like Spotify, We7 and a raft of European and U.S. music streaming services, Napster Unlimited plus Mobile, available on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android devices, gives users on-the-go access to the company’s 15 million track-strong music catalog for a monthly fee of £10. And again similar to Spotify et. al. the apps include off-line playback so that playlists can be cached negating the need for a persistent WiFi or 3G connection.

All very me-too.

Plizy is an interesting new startup which wants to bring personalized video content to the iPad [iTunes link] the company has also announced a $1.2m angel funding round from undisclosed investors.

Plizy wants users to discover, share and watching online video based on your social graph, history, and interests. It sounds like a few other startups we could mention, and competitors might best be described as ShowYou or Pandora. In fact, there is an element here of “Flipboard meets Pandora” for video.

Back in January Amazon acquired the remaining shares in the pan-European movie rental and streaming service LoveFilm for what was rumoured to be around $312 million. Amazon already owned 42 percent of LoveFilm which acquired Amazon’s DVD rental business in 2008. But it’s not resting on its laurels.

Today it signs a deal with a key film and cinema distributor in the UK, Optimum Releasing.

The Next conference in Berlin is an international, English language conference covering of the latest in “digital”, and serves as a useful platform for German startups to present themselves. One of the best – and the one that won the startup competition this year – was Wahwah.fm. I actually really liked this company, but the downbeat presentation of its founder belies quite an innovative idea. Imagine being able to get your iPhone and start broadcasting a local radio station that other people nearby with the same app could pick up, live.

Wahwah.fm lets you listen to and broadcast music simultaneously, putting your location on a map. Out in a few weeks, the iPhone app currently streams sound via from Soundcloud. Now, there are interesting implications in allowing you to stream the tracks on your iPhone, and creating a playlist which can be found by your locations. You can follow broadcasts, post wall messages and track the number of listeners you have. Does it have implications for broadcast licensing? Hell yeah. Is there a brand new space being created around sound and music based on location? You bet.

Just two weeks after launch, ViewsHound, the crowd-sourced news site with daily prizes, has introduced a revenue share option for contributors.

Instead of just being in with a chance of winning a part of the site’s daily prize fund for the best articles, photos and cartoons contributed, in a move similar to UK competitor Blottr, users can now get a share of advertising revenue – I just hope they didn’t take my advice.

E-commerce platform company Rearden Commerce has appointed former Nokia CFO Rick Simonson as its new chief financial officer and president of business operations. Simonson is known for serving as Nokia’s CFO for six years before taking over leadership of the company’s Mobile Phones business in November 2009 – and for quitting less than six months after his appointment.

Simonson is also the man who declared in January 2010, shortly after taking over the reins of Nokia’s – obviously key – mobile phones business, that Nokia would be “at par with Apple and RIM in smartphones” by 2011. Yeah, but no.

Exclusive - Amsterdam-based startup Silk, which offers a platform that allows content creators to distribute their work on the Web in a more structured manner, has raised €320,000 (approximately $475,000) in early-stage funding from Atomico and a number of individual angel investors, TechCrunch has learned.

Silk, which was originally founded back in 2009, will use the proceeds to finally bring its technology to market.

Netcycler, the online swapping site, has seen its UK launch. Up until now the service, which is a European competitor to US-based Swap.com, has been available in Finland first in March 2010, followed by Germany a few months later.

As of this month, however, Brits can use the site to start recycling unwanted items for things they do want – and apparently we’re pretty good at doing the former. Citing its own research, Netcycler says that adults in the UK spend over £2.5 billion a year on items they do not use and over half of those polled say they would utlilise an online swap service if it saved them money. But enough of the PR-friendly survey. Besides, online swapping isn’t exactly a new idea and has seen varying degrees of success. However, this is where Netcycler thinks it’s got the model just right.

Many have talked about the explosion of tech startups in the East of London, which has come to be known colloquially as “Silicon Roundabout“. But who are they? We’ve been writing about the emerging tech cluster there since it’s first stirrings in 2008, so we’ve decided to start documenting them for TechCrunch TV. And with the help of our video crew in the shape of producer (and startup founder, even) Chris Leydon and camera guru Olly Newport, we’ll be releasing the videos over the next few weeks.

Our first interview was with Azeem Azhar, CEO and founder of PeerIndex, which moved into the area recently.

ShareMyPlaylists, the music social network built on top of Spotify with the specific purpose of sharing playlists, has landed on the iPad. Interestingly, this is before the European music streaming service has its own dedicated app for Apple’s tablet.

That’s perhaps a little odd (or preemptive) considering how closely the two services are tied, although ShareMyPlaylists founder Kieron Donoghue says that the company didn’t want to hold out given that the experience of browsing and discovering playlists using the iPad app won’t be prohibited by the lack of a dedicated client on Spotify’s side – the Spotify iPhone app works on the iPad either way.

Recently, Wikio has been picking up the pace. The European media group merged with Nomao and Overblog in the fall of 2010 and hasn’t been been slowing down since. Rumors of a hefty round of funding are yet to be confirmed. And even though the company may’ve taken a hit from Google’s Panda, it’s just announced yet another merger; Trigami is the latest addition to the Wikio family.

Founded in 2007 in Switzerland, Trigami provides social media ad solutions for German-speaking markets. The company counts over 500 clients that are able to benefit from the network’s 15K bloggers for innovative ad solutions and seeded content.

A month has passed since I stood on stage and announced Spotify as winner of The Telegraph newspaper’s inaugural Startup 100 Awards. Since then, something has been playing on my mind, and I just can’t remain quiet on it any longer.

Despite being named the winner, Spotify didn’t win the Startup 100 Awards. Wonga did. I reached out to The Telegraph an hour ago for comment, they say they will get back to me, and I will carry their response in due course.

[Update: A Telegraph spokesperson sent me the following statement about this whole thing: "Our role in the awards was that of a media partner, responsible only for publicising and hosting the event. The voting process was overseen by Wrong Agency Ltd, a company owned by Milo Yiannopoulos, the organiser of Start-Up 100.”]

So here’s the story.

Dragontape, which lets users create ‘mixtapes’ of their favorite YouTube videos and SoundCloud recordings, has landed on Apple’s iPad, a device which benefits the service’s realtime editing functionality.

As other video editing or remix style apps on the iPad have shown, a large touch screen device and accompanying OS has the potential to make the cutting, editing and rearranging of clips that bit more fluid with a tactile drag ‘n’ drop user experience. The same features that the browser-based version of Dragontape supports are also present and correct, such as the ability to share finished ‘mix tapes’ via Facebook and Twitter.

Simfy, the so-called German Spotify, has raised an additional €10m from existing investors, including Earlybird, NRW Bank, Dumont Venture and Klaus Wecken. That brings its funding to date to €18 million.

The new funds will be used to consolidate its leading position in German-speaking countries – the music streaming service operates in Germany, Austria and Switzerland – as well as for “expansion into other European countries”, says CEO Gerrit Schumann.

Vienna, Austria-based semantic web technology company uma has raised $1.1 million in funding from TheMerger.com and multiple private European investors.

The company has also appointed new board members, including Heinrich Schuster, former founder and now retired chairman of EPAMEDIA, and Oliver Holle, CEO of TheMerger.com and occasional TechCrunch guest blogger.

9flats, the peer to peer apartment rentals site (or Airbnb-clone), has secured a “major investment round” led by Silicon Valley VC firm Redpoint Ventures. European-based eVenture Capital Partners also participated.

Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed although 9flats says this brings its total funding to $10m just six months after the startup was founded. The new round will be used to expand 9flats’ management team and service across Europe as it aims to become a “global player” in the online travel industry.

Tradeshift, the free invoicing platform and wider play to become the de facto social network for “B2B communications and processes”, has raised a $7m round from Notion Capital.

As we’ve previously reported, the Denmark and London, UK-based startup was rumoured to be courting VC funding at an $80-100 million valuation after scoring angel investment from former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos and founding investor in Last.fm Stefan Glaenzer. PayPal, which is integrated into the platform, is also an investor.

The first name that comes to mind when we talk about social games in Europe is probably Wooga. But the German-based social games publisher has a number of local competitors dispersed throughout the continent. In France, one of the names that has gotten a lot of attention is Kobojo, who is behind PyramidVille and Goobox.

Well, now there is a new kid on the block: Pretty Simple. And the company has just raised €2.5 million with Idinvest Partners (formerly AGF Private Equity) to produce 2-4 new games per year.

This is a guest post by Monty Munford, blogger at Monty’s Outlook and freelance Mobile/social consultant is (also a Bollywood actor, next movie out April 2011). He tweets @montymunford.

Eighteen entrepreneurs from around the UK recently spent a week on the West Coast of the US as part of Webmisson. As part of the visit, the group attended the TechCrunch offices in San Francisco and were part of an impromptu Q&A with TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy.

In a good-natured discussion, the question was posited to Lacy that perhaps business people in Europe, and especially London, were ‘nicer’ than their Silicon Valley counterparts. Lacy, somewhat witheringly, replied that maybe that was so, but which London-based companies had $10+ billion valuations?

Ask.fm, a European Formspring competitor, has added video answers to its conversational Q&A service.

Rather than answering questions in text, the browser-based feature lets anybody with a webcam record and upload an answer in video to questions sent to their Ask.fm profile, which can be from other Ask.fm members or submitted anonymously. It’s pretty straightforward, with the ‘Record video answer’ sitting right next to the regular answer button, while the video recording functionality itself is powered by Flash.