The Europas, the European Tech Startup Awards, were held for the second time December 2010, in London, supported by TechCrunch Europe. It was the culmination of a month of online voting by the European tech startup industry for the finalists, where some 33,126 votes were cast, judges deliberated over the results and over 350 people joined the cream of Europe’s startups, VCs and entrepreneurs at a huge awards event. This year it’s getting bigger to get the community even more involved, create an even bigger event, and find the best startups in Europe. You can enter here and tickets are here. We are still taking sponsors for categories. For sponsorship opportunities please email Mike Butcher ( mike [@] mbites.com ) for further details or see here. Also follow the event on Twitter @TheEuropas and on Facebook.

Slowly, but surely, Vienna is building its own reputation as a startup hotspot and eventually there might be a fight between Berlin, London, Copenhagen and Vienna, although London and Berlin are ahead at the moment. There have been a number of large exits driven by Austrian-born founders (exits from UCP, Jahjah, 3united and last.fm exceed 1 billion USD). Companies such as Wikitude, Runtastic and Lookk. However the growing startup community, especially with founders emerging from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries, faces a lack of adequate investors. Now Speedinvest, an early stage Super Angel fund, has just announced that they’ve closed their first $10 million dollar fund targeted towards early stage mobile and web startups coming out of CEE.

Social media analytics company Socialbakers, previously known as Facebakers, has raised $2 million in funding in a round led by Earlybird Venture Capital. The funding will enable Socialbakers, which was founded in 2009 and says it is already profitable, to extend its offerings for social media monitoring.

Ever had cows instead of users? You’ve probably never thought about building software for farmers, but Farmeron just raised a round of investment as well as support from 500 Startups, a seed fund and startup aggregator led by Dave McClure. Farmeron is basically buidling an analytics package inspired by the numerous apps you might have used, such as Omniture or Google Analytics, but built for farms.

Farmeron’s solution is a slick web based application in which you, as a farmer, can keep track of your animals, their feeding, deaths etc. Like we all have profiles on Twitter or Facebook, each animal in Farmeron has its own profile as well.

While startups in the US, especially in the Valley, tend to be able to find funding at different stages of their life-cycle, there remains significant funding gaps remains in Europe, a disparate market of multiple countries. While the seed stage is gradually being addressed by programmes like Seedcamp, SpringBoard, StartupBootcamp and others, the stage just before venture capital kicks in remains problematic. Often that first round of VC is designed for a significant marketing push or expansion. But a new German initiative looks like creating an exciting model for other countries to follow. It’s really worth watching how this pans out. The newly created GMPVC German Media Pooltakes a “media for equity” approach.

There are two sides to the story of Google’s move to create a massive, seven storey startup / developer hub slap bang in the middle of of Shoreditch, where so many London/UK/European startups seem to be congregating. Drawn by the cluster effect and the plethora of events in the area aimed at developers, Google’s move surely makes sense.

But behind the scenes I happen to know that Number 10 has been lobbying for this kind of move for some time. In fact, rarely have I seen a government quite so pro-tech / startups as this one, to be frank. After the announcement last year by David Cameron to brand East London “Tech City UK”, I expect a lot people thought the whole thing would be forgotten. I didn’t hold out much hope myself. But, incredibly, once every couple of months since then there has been a major meeting either at Number 10 or in Shoreditch itself involving senior government advisors, large and small tech companies. Where possible, I’ve also attended and listened in.

We’ll all been there. You are craving that delicious sandwich from that place a couple of miles from your home for lunch, when you realize your wife took the car to go shopping (again). So you hop online, looking to compare prices for the best private aircraft and nearest available flight, and begin to search frantically for a website where you can quickly charter a helicopter or small private jet so you can get that smoked salmon and avocado sandwich pronto.

PrivateFly.com feels your pain, and has established a private aircraft booking service that lets you find, compare and book your private charter jet or helicopter flight all in one, online place. The company has just raised £2 million from a number of private investors to roll out internationally.

What if Mad Men’s Don Draper has presented Timeline instead of Mark Zuckerburg? Would we be worrying about privacy, or instead balling our eyes out at the nostalgia generated from our past lives, leaving us wanting more?

That’s the idea behind a video put together by Chicago-based Eric Leist. The original presentation saw Draper present the Kodak Carousel slide machine – a smash hit in the 1950s – but Leist has cleverly adapted the idea.

As he says: “Reminiscing is a social activity. It always has been, and now Facebook is bringing that activity online.”

This is a guest post by Philip Petersen, CEO of ad infinitum.

The seed for this article was sown by Sarah Lacy when she stated she was not writing enough about “admittedly boring infrastructure or enterprise software names.” Boring? How can anyone think that about data centre energy management software! Then Mark Goldenson discovered that “only 2% of TechCrunch stories are about enterprise companies.” And that did it – time for action. So, this is for enterprise software and some other boring sectors, too!

This is a guest post by DueDil, the free UK company information startup.

First: Ask family and friends

The first stage to raising finance is through family and friends, getting off the ground can be the hardest part. The thing with this is that it’s probably the easiest access to finance. If you go to an angel investor with just an idea they will obviously want way too much equity to fund it, and you end up working your ass off for peanuts. Families and friends are your biggest allies early on, even if it means asking for enough to make a MVP- minimum viable product. By building a MVP, at least you can prove to potential investors that this could work, instead of just given them a theory, build them a website with example scenarios or create a prototype.

Since 2008 we’ve been covering the gradual emergence of a cluster of technology startups in East London. Hell, we’ve even made films about so-called Silicon Roundabout. But it wasn’t until the Prime Minister suddenly appeared in the area to declare it a focus for government policy that larger tech companies started to take notice of what some random policy advisor decided to brand “Tech City“. Since then there has been a litany of pledges pledged by corporates like Cisco, BT and Facebook to keep Number 10 Downing Street happy, but not a huge amount of, well, action. All that changes today with the news that Google is to rent, lock stock and barrel, for the next ten years, an entire seven-floor building in the area.

It seems premium streaming music service Spotify just inexorably linked its future to Facebook. Fresh from integrating so deeply with Facebook’s OpenGraph that users’ Ticker stream are teaming with their friends’ listening tastes, it is now requiring new users to have a Facebook account first in order to sign-up for the service.

Visitors to the sign-up page are now greeted with “You need a Facebook account to register for Spotify. If you have an account, just log in below to register. If you don’t have a Facebook account, get one by clicking the ‘create an account’ link below.”

The issue has ignited savage debate on Twitter, with one artist management company saying Spotify has “sold its soul to the Devil”.

We’re not exactly surprised. As we predicted in May, according to Twitter is setting up its European HQ in Dublin (in fact this is its third international office outside the Valley). The reasons are simple: money.

Following the long- tradition of US companies in Europe (joining Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, PayPal, LinkedIn, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Apple, HP and Zynga) Ireland’s 12% corporation tax, and 45 minute flight from London (where corporation tax is 28%) is just too tempting not to take advantage of. One annual board meeting later and you can be back at you Mayfair pad in one day.

This is a guest post by Mike O’Neill, Technical Director of Baycloud Systems, which develops scalable cloud based systems that address privacy issues, such as CookieQ, a web application that delivers a Cookie Consent button to any web page.

The Internet, driven by technological innovation and the free market, has brought huge benefits. But freedom without responsibility or accountability simply leads to chaos and lawlessness. People are losing trust in on-line commerce as increasingly they find their personal information being harvested and sold without their knowledge or consent, and realise that the “free” services offered to them are in exchange for becoming the product, not the purchaser.

Back in May, a sort of revolution started in the London tech scene. You see, London is a special place. It has massive industries in the shape of the financial sector and the media industry (like the BBC) right on its doorstep, so any fresh new talent is often attracted to these established industries and their nice cozy salaries. But in May a leading startup of the area Songkick brought together 45 startups the first “Silicon Milkroundabout”, a job fair organized by the startup community in East London. The event was a great success. And now it’s back.

This is a joint guest post from security camera tech entrepreneur / startup finance blogger Nick Pelling and “sweat equity” investor/consultant Andrew Lockley. They report on The UK government’s ongoing consultation on to the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), which could well reshape the UK startup investment landscape during 2012.

The UK government has spent most of 2011 whacking the same pro-enterprise rhetorical stake into the ground. It wants to turn the UK into ‘Venture Central’, “the best place in Europe to start, finance and grow a business”; and it claims that it will do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this.

10/10 for ambition, but… what’s the plan? Aside from Tech City grandstanding (a bit shallow, but decent enough PR) and the whole Enterprise Zone fiasco-to-be (more offices? Why?), what the government wants to happen now is for business angels and VCs to start funding lots of high growth startups – fast.

London’s nearest coastal city of Brighton and Hove has probably the worst beach in the world. Full of rocks, the only sand visible is a small patch remaining from a beach volleyball event when sand had to be trucked in.

But what it lacks in sand, it has always wanted to make up for in Silicon, joining most of the Western World in trying to brand itself a Silicon Something. Thus the term ‘Silicon Beach’ was coined more than a decade ago as local quango Wired Sussex attempted to tempt companies down to the South Coast of England to create a cluster of companies that would reinvigorate what was then a town.

Two months ago, I wrote this:

“If there’s one thing I keep hearing over and over when it comes to the European startup scene, it’s that investors who are not seriously looking at the Turkish market may be missing out on some of the continent’s biggest digital companies in the next 10 years.

My plan is to go to Turkey some day and investigate this burgeoning startup ecosystem up close, and I hope that trip will take me to some of its marvelous cities and beautiful beaches.”

I didn’t want it to be an empty promise, so I’m heading down there in a couple of weeks to attend Turkey’s most influential Internet conference, the Webrazzi Summit, which will be held on October 19 in the beautiful city of Istanbul.

Nokia this morning announced that it has appointed Henry Tirri, formerly Head of Nokia Research Centre, as its new chief technology officer and executive vice president.

He’s replacing former CTO Richard Green, who took a leave of absence for personal reasons last June (in fact, Tirri already took on Green’s day-to-day responsibilities at that time).

Interestingly, Tirri will be based in Sunnyvale, California, one of the major cities in Silicon Valley.