Breaking: The web site of The Sun newspaper, part of News International which has been embroiled in the phone hacking scandal in the UK, has been hacked, apparently by hacker group Lulzsec, which tweeted “@LulzSec: We have owned Sun/News of the World – that story is simply phase 1 – expect the lulz to flow”. (See updates below)

The hack is a redirect to “http://www.new-times.co.uk/sun/” and contains a (clearly false) story about Rupert Murdoch being found dead. Ironically the domain ‘new-times.co.uk’ is registered to one News International Newspapers Limited.

The ‘story’ begins:

Rupert Murdoch, the controversial media mogul, has reportedly been found dead in his garden, police announce. Murdoch, aged 80, has said to have ingested a large quantity of palladium before stumbling into his famous topiary garden late last night, passing out in the early hours of the morning.”

No doubt this is in reference to the tragic news tonight that a pivotal informer in the phone hacking scandal, Sean Hoare, was tonight found dead in his apartment, though Police are reporting the circumstances as ‘not suspicious’.

UK-startup GroupSpaces, which last year secured a $1.3m Seed round from a star-studded roster of investors including Index Ventures, Dave McClure, Chris Sacca and Simon Levene, has become a ‘Silicon Roundabout’ stalwart. Cofounders David Langer and Andy Young met at Oxford university and quickly realised they could build a better way for University groups to interact, so post-graduation they packed their belongings into a van and headed to London to join the Moo Studios crew on “The Roundabout” a couple of years ago.

They are now on well over 1.6 million group memberships with their simple online management and administration tool for real-world groups. Simpler than Yahoo! groups for mailing lists or member records in Excel, the site has a payments collection system built in and is free for groups with less than 250 members. Revenues come from a combination of premium accounts, targeted advertising and transaction commission from payments made through the site.

This is a guest post by Fred Destin, a Partner at Atlas Venture based out of Boston. Previously Destin was, for years, an active VC in Europe, working on DailyMotion, Seatwave, Zoopla and a number of other high profile European startup investments.

Nick Halstead at Datasift seems to have ticked people off the wrong way with a candid assessment of his experience fundraising in Europe. He might might not return emails but he’s also raised money from one of the smartest dudes around (Roger Ehrenberg and his Big Data Band) so if you allow me I’ll pay some attention to his opinion, and in fact expand on it.

Nat Wei (@natwei), is a social entrepreneur. As Baron Wei of Shoreditch he has an interest 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 third in in a series of guest posts on the use of technology in re-building civic society. The first is here, the second here.

There are dramatic changes happening in the way public services are evolving to become more citizen led and people driven. In the UK there is a huge amount of activity currently underway to reform and open up public services so that decisions are made more locally and on the front line, so that workers in public services have more say in how their services are shaped and can respond better to citizens who are being armed in turn with more data, and in how providers will be rewarded (or not) for their outcomes. A forthcoming White paper on public services will shortly set out the framework for this change.

Disruption. It’s been playing on my mind since something happened at the eG8 Forum in Paris. Since then, I’ve been to many events involving startups and seen many pitches. Then recently, Nick Halstead re-ignited the ongoing debate about whether startups get enough support from VCs in Europe to ‘think big’, with a bevy of VCs weighing in on the matter.

Nic Halstead threw a rabid cat amongst the pigeons this week when he spoke to TechCrunch Europe about his disappointment in those European VCs who, he says, remain risk averse compared to thir US colleagues (Datasift just raised $6m from two US VCs).

Towards the end of our video interview Nick said:

“We’re still doing something quite high risk at Datasift. We’re trying to disrupt the data business. There’s no other company doing this so it’s hard to prove. The European scene is still very set on the attitude of what are you revenues, what have you proved to date. With Tweetmeme we made probably a million dollars last year, but that’s not Datasift, which is unproven. So the reality was we had to go to the US [to fund raise]. People ‘got it’ in Europe but the valuation difference with the US was not even close. It comes down to price. In the US you will get a higher valuation. It is changing here – but VCs are still risk averse at the Series A level. But it’s a self fulfilling prophecy if they [don't take risks]. My investors expect a billion dollar company, with over a 10+ exit. In Europe, VCs go for models that are proven. US VCs will pick up something hot much earlier. I’d like to see European VCs moving forward on risk.”

Nick followed this up with an interview in the Wall Street Journal Europe, pretty much repeating this.

So I decided to canvas the views of VCs, Angle investors and entrepreneurs in Europe to ask what they thought of the situation and Nick’s comments. We’ve had a guest post on the matter from Jos White of Notion Capital, which is upbeat.

But many would only comment off record:

This is a guest post by Jos White, a partner at Notion Capital. This is in part a response to recent criticism of European VC by Datasift which raised money from US VCs.

All you ever hear about these days with European venture capital is either that it is miles behind the US or that it can contribute greatly to economic growth and should be subsidised by governments. While I mostly agree with both these statements I think they are missing the central point. By investing in early stage European technology companies you can make a lot of money if you get it right.

I don’t understand why people shy away from this. Perhaps people feel unable to make this case and quietly step around it. Or, in these austere times, maybe us Europeans feel uncomfortable being outspoken capitalists. Yet I feel strongly that the evolution of virtually any successful market anywhere in the world was fuelled by the opportunity to make money, and I don’t believe European VC is any different.

Don’t like the new TechCrunch.com re-design? Some enterprsing person has created “TCFast“, a site which parses TechCrunch content through one of four diferent design.

You can choose TechCrunch laid out at the New York Times, Hacker News, A Google+ account, or the Classic Design of old.

It just goes to show, beauty is in the eye of the beholder – and so, it would appear, is the beauty of blog design.

This is a guest post by Monty Munford.

These are supposedly heady days for professional social networks. (At time of writing, 12/07) LinkedIn shares are now trading at $100, more than double its IPO price of $45 and valuing the company at more than $10 billion.

But there are significant headwinds ahead for LinkedIn in its post-IPO form. Its reliance on third party platforms and the recent closure of its APIs to platforms such as BranchOut as well as a refusal to even open them with Salesforce leave it vulnerable.

Moreover LinkedIn may find itself under considerable pressure from Google later this year when that company launches Google+ for Business. Consequently the company needs to look for other markets to raise revenues and as ever, that market is China… but LinkedIn may have left it too late.

The biggest professional social network in China is Tianji, which has seven million members and is now garnering more than 350,000 new users per month, a figure that is up 300% over the past quarter.

Interestingly, Tianji is 100% owned by Viadeo, the Paris-based professional social network that has more than 35 million members worldwide and is increasingly challenging the hegemony of LinkedIn.

Back in January GoSquared arrived on the scene to attempt an assault onChartbeat’s realtime analytics territory.

While Chartbeat has raised an impressive $3 million Series A financing with a glittering array of backers including Betaworks and Ron Conway, GoSquared has had a more modest seed funding round from Passion Capital.

Founders James Gill, James Taylor and Geoff Wagstaff range between 19 and early 20s, so pretty young founders. Even so, their product has been attracting plenty of attention, especially amongst startups in London, their home turf.

Spotify, the European music startup which has garnered 10 million users in the last two years, finally launches in the US today.

The packages are: An invite-only free, ad-supported service, a $4.99-per-month ad-free package and a full “premium” experience costing $9.99 which also syncs with mobile.

Unlike the European service it will not be integrated with Facebook initially.

Via a combination of an odd approach to PR, off record briefings and a fairly chatty CEO in the shape of Daniel Ek, Spotify has been threatening to launch in the US since 2009. No matter. Not the rubber hits the road and Spotify will comete with Rhapsody, MOG and Rdio in the US.

Spotify’s approach is to use a very nice desktop client, not unlike iTunes, but which contains much more information about the music – look out iTunes.

Here’s their release, just out:

MLOVE has been something of an underground movement the last couple of years. Billed as a ‘confestival’ it’s more like the kind of three-day off-the-wall workshop with a few (excellent, mind) keynote speeches that you might have found happening in the Mission district during the 1960s. There is a lot of high concept thinking about not just the future of mobile and its effects on society, but the future of society itself.

In part because MLOVE entertains just 250 people (only 150 in 2010) and its 200 miles form Berlin, you get to interact with the speakers in a way you might not at other conferences.

Held in an 18th century castle in the former East Germany, participants, drum to a beat set down by organiser Harald Neidhardt (interviewed below), but he is a benign curator, bringing in speakers from all over the world to share their knowledge of mobile and creativity.

The classified jobs market – indeed classifieds themselves – are sharded across many different providers from Gumtree in the UK to newspapers to Craigslist. It therefore seems a no-brainer to create a search engine which looks across all these sites in an intelligent way, and hooks the listings into social platforms. And Adzuna, which launched today, does seem a fairly uncomplicated no brainer. To that end it’s secured £300,000 seed investment from Passion Capital and angel investors to take this jobs search market.

The market they are after consists of 300,000 live UK job vacancies, or £7 billion in salaries. The site pulls job ads in real-time from major job boards as well as Crunchboard and LinkedIn.

So far so obvious. The smart move is that an “Adzuna Connect” feature lets you connect your LinkedIn or Facebook accounts which shows contacts and links to current vacancies at the companies of your friends and contacts.

This is a guest post by Keld van Schreven, CEO of Diary.com

Everyone has the same headache of deciding how to build their apps. Native or HTML5? Everyone is thinking about HTML5 Apps and talking about it if they should invest in it for their own app development, but there isn’t much practical help on how to do this. There are so many questions to answer. What device am I going to target? What’s the product function, does it rely on the handset features heavily? What framework to use? Are they well supported? Whats the performance going to be like? Will it affect the user experience?

We chose HTML5 ahead of native. The iPhone and Android apps were built with PhoneGap and Sencha Touch, and uses Flurry for analytics, via a PhoneGap plugin we developed. The performance of the Diary Mobile App, with swiping, scrolling creating and moving around in the app was the biggest challenge.

AutoUncle, a startup which is trying to disrupt the used car market initially in Denmark, has raised 1.3 million DKK (€175,000) from Hampus Jakobsson, a Swedish entrepreneur/angel who just sold TAT to RIM. The founders are brothers Johan Frederik Schjødt and Niels Kristian who have built a site which is not unlike a Skyscanner for used cars.

It collects data about the used car market to extract insight, then visualizes the information to allow people to make decisions – although the crammed, messy design could probably do with a make-over.

Once you click on a car it goes to the original site where the sale is made. They claim you don’t have to be a used car expert to find a good deal as site’s algorithm is supposed to find the best deals based. The business model is that private and professional users will pay for premium services and support tools.

Martini Media Network, an online ad network targeting affluent consumers, announced this morning that it has acquired TDP Media Group, a European digital media company based in London.

Martini Media says the deal creates a new pipeline to the people with “the most influence and money” online.

When I first met and interviewed Nick Halstead in a tiny, unassuming office an hour’s drive from central London in October 2008, I realised I was meeting someone who was passionate not just about startups, but had the kind of deep technical knowledge that would stand him in good stead.

Unlike some non-technical, paper-thin ‘MBA entrepreneurs’, Halstead could see what was happening with the underlying trends of the Internet ecology and its drift towards realtime. Long before Twitter’s firehose was released, Halstead was trying to fix the broken problem of RSS feeds and commenting systems with “Favorit”. But with with Twitter’s emergence he pivoted away from to create Tweetmeme, the consumer curated Twitter portal, which really took off and remains popular to this day.

But that experience let to him building a team to deeply analyse Twitter’s underlying data, and not in Silicon Valley, but from Reading, in the UK county of Berkshire. Thus was Datasift created, one of only two companies globally licensed by Twitter to re-syndicate its content.

This is a guest column by Monty Munford, who blogs here and tweets here.

Some people have all the luck. Alex Lofton is 26 years old, bright, handsome, has moved to London from the US and isn’t struggling to make a living in Zone 3 or 4 on the outskirts of the Tube network, he is living in a flat in Mayfair.

Oh, and he also works for a public social network that helped to elect a President and is building up and hiring a team from the Hub in King’s Cross as his company hopes to replicate in the UK its success in the US.

Lofton works for NationalField, a public social network formed by Aharon Wasserman, Justin Lewis and the UK’s very own Edward Saatchi, scion of Maurice Saatchi, the legendary ad man. The company was founded in the light of Barrack Obama’s campaign to be President, but let Lofton tell the story.