This is a guest post by Shane Hayes, founder of Daily Deal Aggregator Siftie.co.uk. He reports on the UK Daily Deal market size and speculates as to whether a major acquisition is imminent. Siftie.co.uk is a graduate of the Launchpad accelerator programme at the NDRC.

In a Techcrunch article in April of 2010, Tim O’Shea, founder of Blurtit, wrote about his experience of trying to launch a Groupon Clone in a Hyper Competitive London market in the first quarter of 2010. At that time, MyCityDeal (who were later to be acquired by Groupon) had just launched and a variety of players ranging from cash strapped start-ups to spin offs from major companies were all hoping to become the next Groupon. Livingsocial was still based in the US and would not arrive on the scene until Q2 that year.

What if we could combine top-notch hackers with leaders from across different companies? What if we could bring talented developers from all over Europe to create innovative solutions for organizations or sectors that desperately need them? Could this format potentially form great new startups that address untapped needs?

Those are the three rhetorical questions asked by Seedcamp, the well-known European early-stage seed investment fund and mentoring programme. In its quest to get answers to those questions, the company is organizing a new, totally free event called seedhack, which will be sort of like a hackathon – like the one we organize during TechCrunch Disrupt – but not just for programmers and designers but also for business people (with or without ideas).

Namaste, a games startup which is poised for launch, is building a platform called StoryBricks to enable casual users to create their own games and share them on social networks. The twist is that it’s not for professional game designers but users who want to create their own games. The company is understood to be be in discussions with several top VCs.

Why is Namaste in a sweet spot? Companies like Zynga still need hit games to survive. Their customer churn is very high – a customer used to last four months in a Zynga game and now it’s just 2 months. That means they lose about 100m users in a month. Anything that produces more games is a good thing.

Back in June last year Lars Hinrichs, the founder of LinkedIn competitor XING who exited for €48.3 million created a new startup investment vehicle dubbed HackFwd.

At the time it was announced that HackFwd would tale a 27% stake of a company (US-based YCombinator takes around 6%) and a run a year-long programme for selected startups. Funding amounts to up to €191,000 (depending on the size of the team) for the year. Founders keep 70% equity, with 3% going to advisors (this is compulsory) and 27% to HackFwd. However, that said, they then take care of “legal and admin stuff… so you can focus on your product.”

In the wake of news recently that software and computers are being compromised by hackers and rogue states left right and centre (not to mention the recent attacks on Citibank and Sony) it’s clearly going to make sense that your systems are well checked out, whether you’re a large corporate or a startup.

So it’s timely that software testing marketplace uTest is today expanding to offer security and localization testing services. That means it will have an end-to-end suite of testing services for web, desktop or mobile apps, adding to its existing services like functional, usability and load testing. uTest CEO, Doron Reuveni says the startup is aiming to become a ‘one stop shop’ for real-world testing.

No-one really knows what Spotify’s US growth has been since launch a month ago month, but it appears to be making an impact on American iPhone users. Onavo, a service which shrinks your data use on the iPhone, can track what data people are using, and has thus produced some interesting stats.

Spotify’s app is very aware of its data usage allowing plenty of control such as the ability to disable the sync of playlists over 3G and offline listening, among other options.

In the wake of the UK-wide riots and the growing evidence that mobile applications like the BlackBerry Messaging system had helped rioters organise and amplify their activity, the UK government is considering a review of social media. Specifically, Home Secretary Theresa May plans to sit down with Twitter, Facebook and RIM, to discuss the issues. That’ll be an interesting chat.

She hasn’t minced her words: “Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and messaging services like Blackberry Messenger have been used to coordinate criminality, and stay one step ahead of the police… I will convene a meeting with ACPO, the police and representatives from the social media industries to work out how we can improve the technological and related legal capability of the police.”

She also said: “Among the issues we will discuss is whether we should disrupt messaging services when trouble is being planned.”

With riots and looting breaking out all over London earlier this week, media outlets have been poring over how the violence spread. We were amongst the first to identify the BlackBerry mobile handset and its unique, private Blackberry Messaging service (BBM) as a method whereby rioters and looters, many of them teenagers, broadcast and swapped information in a way that effectively crowd-sourced the riots. Today, in 2011, the BlackBerry is by far the most popular handset amongst Britain youth.

While it was not the only culprit, the BlackBerry BBM service lay at the core of how word of the riots spread. The Guardian also found plenty of evidence of BlackBerrys being used to “organise” the violence. So what role has BlackBerry BBM played in the violence?

I met up with a contact, who we will call Paul. Paul grew up in North London, amongst the kinds of people involved in the riots, though he himself was not involved. But he remains intimately connected with his community.

He told me about the mobile culture amongst London’s urban youth and how obsessed it is with the BlackBerry. The recorded interview is also available below.

Online group buying startup Groupalia has secured another $26 million in financing, bringing total capital raised to roughly $63 million, after landing a $15 million capital injection earlier this year.

The company, which has growing operations all over Latin America as well as in Spain and Italy, has raised the fresh capital from all its existing shareholders: Nauta Capital, Caixa Capital Risc, private investors Lucas Carné and José Manuel Villanueva as well as VC firms General Atlantic, Insight Venture Partners and Index Ventures.

As we’ve seen in the last couple of days, a combination of technologies appears to have helped rioters and looters in London, and other parts of the UK, co-ordinate their efforts, just as these technologies were used to more noble ends in the Arab Spring. That’s the thing with tech – human beings are involved and they can use it for good or evil. The tech itself is neither good or bad.

But the picture that is emerging in London is that the private group messaging available on BlackBerry Messaging was almost certainly useful for spreading ‘targets’ for the riots, while Twitter and Facebook became an amplifier once a incident had got going, drawing others in. That’s attracted a statement by the Police that anyone inciting violence on social networks will have to deal with the authorities.

Well, just as looters have used tech to co-ordinate, Londoners have resorted to their own methods of reacting to the situation in a crowd-sourced manner.

I can’t quite believe I am writing this. London is my home town, where I was born. For whatever reason – a flashpoint around the shooting of a man by Police on Thursday, social deprivation, youth unemployment, boredom, good weather, easy access to the ability to organise online, frankly take your pick – London is turning into patchwork of riots and looting across the capital which appear to flare up at random. They started in the north over the weekend, but, like a virus – a meme even – have spread.

Over the weekend parts of London descended into chaos as riots and looting spread after a protest organised around the yet unexplained shooting of a man by Police. Of course, there was huge amounts of chatter on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, with the latter coming under enormous amounts of criticism from the UK press for fuelling the fire. But while Twitter has largely been the venue of spectators to violence and is a handy public venue for journalists to observe, it would appear the non-public BlackBerry BBM messaging network has been the method of choice for organising it.

The small coffee shop on the corner, competing with the Starbucks across the street with a lame leaflet. The local chemist that has to place a print ad next to a national chain in the local paper. Globally and every day small businesses destroy their credibility because either they don’t have access to professional designers, or the designs they have are simply bad. The current model of having to hire a designer to create good looking visual material in print just does not really work. It’s expensive for most small businesses and the average person. And it’s slow.

At the same time we know that consumers – assaulted daily by great design from companies with huge marketing budgets – now have a have a very high degree of visual literacy.

Thus, the concept behind Tweak, as founder Jerry Kennelly puts it, is to “democratise design”. Put simply, with an armoury of millions of pieces of design and a CMS three years in the making, Tweak plans to disrupt both the print and design industry, as well as a section of the magazine and newspaper advertising business. And Irishman Kennelly – who exited his previous image library business to the tune of $135m, in hard cash – plans to run the whole operation from County Kerry.

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

At the Century Club on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue they don’t take kindly to members or their guests using their laptops or mobiles in the rooftop restaurant, but they seem to make an exception for Augmented Reality demonstrations.

While in previous visits I have spoken softly into my phone or surreptiously used my laptop under my table, the waiters and management turned a Nelson eye while String Augmented Reality’s Yush Kaila and Simon Windsor showed off their extraordinary AR products.

Rather like a 3D insight into a Lewis Carroll fairytale and using an iPad as a looking-glass, what appeared to be a sheet of A4 paper was transformed when the iPad was lined up with the picture on the paper. Dragons, monsters, aliens and cars jump out in front of the viewer, exciting enough to make even the most vigilant waiter at the Century Club enquire as to what was going on.

Riga, Latvia-based Reach.ly is today launching its first product, coinciding with the announcement that it has raised an initial round of seed funding to jump-start the business.

The service that the fledgling company is debuting today is a Web-based platform that provides hotels with a curated Twitter stream and direct conversation tool so they can touch base with potential guests in real time.

Ciarán is a Principal at Earlybird Venture Capital and represents the first institutional VC to set up shop in Berlin. His current investments include Peak Games, CrowdPark, Madvertise, simfy and B2X Care.

When fellow Earlybirds Jason Whitmire and Hendrik Brandis published their report on European VC performance, strongly suggesting there are valid signs that European Venture Capital may have become and will probably continue to be a more attractive asset class than it has ever been before, and given that U.S. VC is considered the gold standard for comparison, we wanted to kick of a well-needed and overdue fact based debate on the whole topic. Not the simplistic “Europe can’t produce category leaders because it has no Google” debate, but a refreshing exchange of facts and views on them. Wow, we sure have that debate on our hands now.

It was a simple plan. We checked the weather. It looked good. We found a huge venue, with all the facilities. We told you to come. And you did. At least 300 tech people swamped London’s Southbank yesterday for our long overdue Summer #CrunchUp, and the festivities went on late into the night.

For an event with not much organisation – and not even name tags – it seems like everyone managed to have a lot of fun and find eachother. Random tourists may well have been bemused by the conversations about startups, venture capital, Google+ and APIs as they walked past.

With the iPhone and other smartphones gradually becoming the default point and shoot cameras we always have with us, photo apps have exploded.

One wonders how another startup could possibly come up with yet another app and hope to succeed. However, hot Berlin startup EyeEm, thinks it might just have stumbled up on a new approach, missed by the likes of Instagram and others: the content of the photos.

Now live on the iOS App Store and Android Marketplace after a beta trial with over 5,000 users, EyeEm is a smartphone camera and photo sharing app which monitors its users’ tastes in photography and uses the data to recommend albums of similar photos of friends and like-minded people.

EyeEm has also raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Passion Capital, Wellington Partners and well known Berlin angel investor Christophe Maire, who is also the company’s executive chairman.