I have the hugest respect for Loic Le Meur. Years before anyone was organising a major tech conference in Europe (outside of the dull corporate IT ones) Loic was charging ahead with first Les Blogs, which became the juggernaut of Le Web. It’s the biggest tech event in Europe (although, now not the only one, which I will touch upon later). When he moved to the Valley a few years ago, he continued with Le Web and brought the A-listers of the Valley back with him to Paris, France. We are all grateful to him for shining that light.

That said, with the greatest respect, I’m going to have to call him out following his interview with Andrew Keen yesterday.

His characterisation of Europe as a market entirely stuffed with clone startups is, well, obtuse, to put it mildly. I’ve even helped develop the startup rally at Le Web at couple of years ago and I simply don’t recall any blatant clones even getting through to the competition. This would be hard if all we had was clones.

What I think has happened – and it’s not really his fault – is that Loic has simply been unable to track what has been happen day to day. Interestingly, there is someone who tracks day to day what is happening with startups and VCs in Europe and he even happens to be on the TechCrunch staff. So maybe one day you may even see my mug opine about the scene in glorious technicolour video. We shall see.

Multimedia juggernaut Naspers has entered the Turkish internet market with a bang by acquiring approximately 70 percent of the shares of markafoni, a Turkish private shopping club, through its subsidiary MIH-Allegro. Our source in Turkey says the investment values markafoni at around $200 million.

Markafoni is the third biggest ecommerce company in Turkey, and has ambitions to become a global brand. The acquisition includes markafoni’s operations in Turkey (3.5 million registered members) and Ukraine in addition to Zizigo, the largest online shoe retailer in Turkey.

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in April the UK’s Technology Strategy Board unveiled a new £1m fund to support “digital businesses” in the Tech City area around Old Street and Shoreditch in east London, which has come to be known as ‘Silicon Roundabout’).

It was an unusual move. Startups anywhere in the UK are always interested in sources of funding – but here was one source actually geographically targeted at one area of London, and one where there has been existing organic growth of the tech community for the last few years. In other words, the TSB had managed to convince their overlords that the government should ‘double-down’ on the existing tech cluster there. This is highly unusual, and frankly to be welcomed. Often government initiatives are targeted in totally the wrong places.

Applicants can get up to £100,000 in match funding, with the other half coming from a private inestor(s). So, get the private investment first, and then double it with government cash, if selected. Win. (Here’s more detail).

Today they’ve decided to add another £1m to the pot, enabling the project to provide £100,000 grants to twice as many companies, or 20 instead of the original 10.

This is a guest post by David George-Cosh, a freelance journalist based in Toronto, Ontario, who is the former technology correspondent for a national newspaper based in Abu Dhabi.

If there’s one place in the world that may be fretting over Facebook’s announcement it had partnered with Skype to launch video chatting for its users, it may be the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The UAE is one of four countries in the world that has opted to block access to Skype’s services or website, primarily because its state-run telecoms operators stand to lose millions of dollars each year on long-distance charges.

Cubic Telecom – best known for its MaxRoam product enabling cheaper mobile roaming – has secured €500,000 from Irish government-backed fund Enterprise Ireland to continue its expansion. In total Cubic has raised €5m in venture funding to date.

Cubic’s Gerry McQuaid says it’s investing heavily in R&D and integrating with international Partners’ platforms to create the hallowed “always on” roaming experience. It’s also created a bunch of new jobs and is growing 9-fold in monthly mobile Data revenues and 5-fold in voice.

Streaming music service Spotify, which is gunning to compete with iTunes, just put up a holding page for it’s US service which will presumably be launched soon. Users are being asked to enter an e-mail address on its U.S. site to get an update.

Date, pricing and partners are not yet specified but it looks like they landed the final music label deals they were after to launch the service.

Reviewing term sheets from investors can be time consuming and not a little confusing, especially for first time entrepreneurs who may have never seen one before. That puts them at a disadvantage against the investor. Across Europe, the picture is even more confusing. What we needed was a sort of Rosetta Stone term sheet. So today a group of 21 early European stage investors have decided, under the SeedSummit umbrella group, to standardise on two “reader-friendly” term sheet templates. One is being dubbed the SeedSummit Term Sheet and the other an Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) friendly variant, tailored for the UK market. See here. This is the first time European investors have co-operated in this way, on this scale.

SeedSummit, a 50+ group which convened first in 2009, hopes that the benefits to startups will include reducing the time it takes to get deals done, reducing legal costs and greater transparency. They were inspired, they say, by the Series Seed docs of the USA.

The participants in the initiative consist of some of the leading early stage and Seed investors in Europe:

Been a while since we’ve heard from Touchnote, the mobile app startup which allows you to snap a picture and send it to someone as a physical postcard. Last year they signed a deal with Sony Ericsson to get to the app pre-instaled on handsets.

Now they’ve appointed former Microsoft exec, Oded Ran, as new CEO. Oded was previously head of consumer marketing for Windows Phone in the UK. Co-founder and current CEO Raam Thakrar is stepping into a business development role.

As we noted recently, a fairly substantial startup called Huddle (with $14.2m in VC) has been legally pondering the part of the new Google+ service also called Huddle. Essentially, Huddle.com is about group messaging and collaboration in an enterprise sense. Google+’s Huddle is a group texting app available to consumer Android users.

Today Huddle.com released a blog post outlining its feelings on the matter. They also told us their lawyers have sent a letter to Google, but had not yet had a response. They went on to say:

The Sandpit, a new London-based “sales accelerator” for new technologies, says it is taking a 25% stake for “up to £500,000″ over the next two years in SoDash, a web-based tool that helps organisations to manage their activity on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The Sandpit has an option to purchase a further chunk and also has the exclusive commercial rights to the product, enabling the tech team to focus on development. SoDash is a spin-out from Artificial Intelligence specialists Winterwell.

But who are these Sandpit guys?

As we’ve said before, there is a veritable explosion of private tech accelerator programmes springing up all over Europe. The latest to join the wave is GammaRebels, a new program based in Warsaw, but aiming to attract international startups, with the focus on CEE (Central and Eastern Europe).

What makes this worthy of note is that the people involved have been stalwart startups for the last few years. Most notably is Chris Kowalczyk, who was previously a cofounder with Codility, consults with UbikBC.pl, knows all the Seeedcamp guys and is a referrer at HackFwd.com. In addition there is Piotr Sienkiewicz, who was the the cofounder of the first commercial software distributor in Poland, and Kamila Sidor, the lead organizer of first Startup Weekend in Poland. The official language for the programme will be English, not Polish etc.

Here’s the gen on the programme:

Former TechCrunch 50 company Burt www.burtcorp.com, which creates software for ad agencies, has closed €1.6 million ($3m) in funding. Swedish investor Industrifonden, which took QlikTech to IPO, lead the round. Burt founders, Gustav and Gustav Martner, along with the investment firm Tornstaden are also throwing in €2.2 million. The funds will be used for international expansion and developing Burt’s ad analysis platform, Rich.

In the last 6 months Burt has grown from 5 people to almost 30, and will be adding another 15-20 people in Sweden, UK and US later this year.

Another day in Europe, another accelerator launched. The Difference Engine – an accelerator programme in the North of the UK we covered last year which borrowed heavily from the YCombinator/TechStars model – has itself ‘pivoted’, announcing a rejuvenation and a new name. The new Ignite100 will be a startup accelerator programme with a £1m fund that will invest up to £100k per team for ten teams later this year in the North East of England. The programme set for a September launch and will take applications from across Europe anywhere.

Technically speaking that beats Seedcamp – currently the leading accelerator in Europe – in per-team funding, although it has a larger £3m fund (so far, and the fund-raising on that is not yet finished), plus it tends to attract a pretty stellar array of A-list founders and VCs as mentors. That’s not to say Ignite100 won’t, however, and from listening to the ‘word on the street’ I know there is plenty of appetite for more accelerators in the UK amongst investors, so it shouldn’t be lacking in willing mentors.