Honours and medals from Queens and Kings may be an alien concept in Silicon Valley, but they are a delightfully steam-punk tradition, still continued in a Britain which long ago said goodbye to its Empire, yet still has Knights and ‘Commander’ orders to hand out. Thus, Apple’s chief designer, Jonathan Ive, has been knighted in the Queen’s New Year’s honours list, principally for his work in industrial design and championing British talent abroad. Ive was already made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2006. Being a Knight means he is now Sir Jonathan Ive – a moniker which should, at the very least, bump him to the front of the average restaurant queue when he’s in London.

This is a guest post by Richard Holdsworth, Wapple CEO.

Flash is on the endangered species list, already extinct on mobile, and Silverlight has been all but aborted. HTML5 is being heralded as both the cause and the solution but what is it and are we getting caught up in a game of buzzword bingo that has spiralled out of control?

Point Nine Capital has made a seed investment into Cibando, an Italian startup which operates a popular iPhone application that makes it easy to find the best restaurants in Rome, Milan, Florence and other cities in Italy. Fabio Pezzotti, one of Italy’s more successful Internet entrepreneurs and angel investors, also participated in the round. Terms of the investment were not disclosed. The deal is significant since it’s the first investment by Point Nine in a startup in Italy, a market traditional vastly under-served by risk capital. Outside of traditional e-commerce style businesses, there remains very few Italian startups compared to the rest of Europe’s major countries.

We’re all familiar with the pain of having to share photos with people. I’m not talking about the staff party album on Facebook, I’m talking about moments that matter – the family holidays, the weddings, big days like those. And this remains an ongoing issue. We can share Dropbox folders all we like. Everything still has to be downloaded and the interface does not suit viewing, especially on tablets. We can ask friends and family to sign up to a private Flickr group, but that’s still another hurdle. Lots of photo and file sharing services are rubbish and many people remain afraid of Facebook’s now quite public nature. Now, a new startup out of Berlin has come up with something it calls the ‘Dropbox for photos’ where you can privately exchange photos in a group: 7moments.

According to some press reports today the British Prime Minister, David Cameron is to get “his own personalised iPad app” to stay on top of Government business.

Cameron is known to use an iPad to read newspapers and catch up on media generally, as evidenced by this photo taken at a party conference last year. But this report sounds just a little like a slow news week combined with some idle chatter over the Christmas party season amongst the Whitehall press gang and the ‘spads’ – insider shorthand for Special Advisers.

On December 5th, 2011 TechCrunch Europe came to Moscow again. Co-organized by TechCrunch Europe, Digital October and Kite Ventures, the second TechCrunch Moscow showcased several early stage startups and hosted panels on emerging technology trends in Russia and abroad.

The event, held in English, proved to be a smashing success, bringing together over 700 participants and attracting several thousand viewers online. Videos of the event can be found below including the amazing interview between Andrew Keen and Anton Nossik (media director of LiveJournal) on a pivotal day for Russian politics following the Russian Duma elections of the previous day. It’s a must watch.

HackFwd, the pan-European accelerator created by Lars Hinrichs, the founder of LinkedIn competitor XING, recently held its open PitchInBerlin session, where startups are invited to enter the programme. It’s a sign that HackFwd, one of the few accelerators in Europe to stress the need for technical co-founders, is opening up to new teams. I went to the event in Berlin and interviewed all the startups pitching on the day, as you’ll see in the below video.

Well, it’s that time of year again when families come together to stare moodily at each other over lunch and, in theory at least, we’re supposed to be thinking about others less fortunate than ourselves. To that end, stay you hand before you switch off the office PC and head off for some seasonal shopping. For those CPUs could be put to good work for charity, no less.

The Charity Engine is a non-profit volunteer computing grid. Based on Berkeley University’s BOINC software for grid computing – as used by dozens of famous ‘citizen science’ projects such as SETI@home. Charity Engine’s version of BOINC simply donates what it makes from research projects on its grid and donates the cash to charity, while incentivising users with randomly generated cash prizes. Profit from the commissions from science and industry is shared 50-50 between the charities and prize winners. You can use the invite code for the beta: CRUNCH.

Language learning is arguably still a hot topic in the realm of internet startups and with a market that is said to be reaching more than $90 billion it is even more interesting. But only few manage to attract users, such as Busuu, who is now seeing 10 million signed up users. Bratislava based Startup Lingibli, also wants to help you learn a new language, strictly speaking one of 18 languages that are currently offered through the site. The concept however is pretty new since it’s not tighed to online courses or subscriptions but rather on a mobile app (on Android and iOs) and print material (sic!). At first, that might sound awkard, but the startup claims that 50% of all conversations are made up of approx. 100 words and at first knowing these 100 words is essential for understanding a language. Starting to learn a language is surely a difficult barrier to cross.

If there’s been a theme for the year it’s that Berlin has emerged as a full-blown startup hub to rival London in terms of sheers number of companies. I know for a fact that all the major VCs, from Accel to Index to Balderton and others are in and out of the city on a regular basis. There’s also a rumour Wellington will open an office there.

It makes sense therefore that Earlybird Venture Capital, which currently manages €430 million in assets and already had a base in Berlin, is to close its Hamburg office and move the staff to the capital.

Rocket Internet, the Berlin-based incubator best known for German-language clones of US startups like Zappos and Groupon, now has big ambitions, especially in the online furniture space according to information passed to TechCrunch Europe.

In a confidential email sent by Oliver Samwer which we have confirmed is genuine, the head (with his brothers Marc and Alexander) of European Founders Fund and the driving force behind Rocket, says their strategy is to become “number one” in the ecommerce sector for furniture over the next year. But the language he uses – including the world “blitzkrieg” – indicates an aggressive and potentially insensitive management style which appears to be a ‘modus operandi’ of Rocket Internet culture. Samwer has since apologised for using the term.

A little over a year after its subsidiary PayPal bought a minority stake in German software company BilLSAFE, eBay this morning announced that it has acquired the provider of purchase-on-invoice technology in full.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

LeGuide.com Group, a pan-European publisher of online shopping guides, comparison websites and the like, has acquired online shopping portal Ciao from Microsoft.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but LeGuide.com says it paid for the Ciao assets in cash and didn’t need to take on debt to finance the transaction.

Paris-based VC Partech has announced the announces the €100M first close of its new venture fund, Partech International VI. The fund will be primarily dedicated to investments in internet / IT in Europe and Silicon Valley.

Partech had a eight exits in 2011, including one IPO (InvenSense), and seven trade sales (notably Brands4Friends to eBay, Dailymotion to Orange, Inquira to Oracle, Digitick to Vivendi and JobPartners to Taleo).

Allmyapps has grown a lot since we last covered them. They had 100,000 users back in April, but recently hit 2.5 million. But with the news that Miscrosoft will develop its own Windows Apps store, they will have to “pivot”, as they say. Thus they are repositioning as a “Personal App Manager” to go beyond the Windows world. What does that mean?

Amazon has acquired a minority stake in Ciceksepeti, which operates an online flower and gifts store in Turkey. Founded by CEO Emre Aydin in 2006, the company delivers flowers, jewelry, gourmet products, toys and other gifts to customers across the country, including same-day deliveries in most metropolitan areas.

Headquartered in Istanbul, CicekSepeti currently employs 160 people.

Atomico, the venture capital firm founded by Skype founder Niklas Zennström, has invested 350,000 euros in Denmark-based Ge.tt, which offers an eponymous Web-based file sharing service.

Ge.tt is simple, clean, and useful. Like many file-sharing services, Ge.tt makes it easy for people to shoot files to the cloud so they can be shared with others, all from a browser-based application.

Airbnb has been battling Wimdu, it’s arch nemesis clone, in Europe and particular in Germany and surrounding German-speaking countries. However, it looks like it might have over-extended itself. A message from it’s Vienna office has been passed to us saying by the end of the year they will have to close the Vienna office and everything will be handled from Germany from January onwards. Admittedly Austria is a much smaller market, but it is indicative of the fierce competition going on. We’ve reached out to Airbnb for further comment.

Starting in early 2012, when Netflix is set to make its debut in the UK and Ireland, registered members will be able to instantly stream available content on their television sets, tablets, game consoles, computers and mobile phones.

In the beginning of November, the video streaming giant signed up MGM as its first content provider for the regions, and this morning Netflix announced a new digital licensing agreement that will add a host of BBC series.

Eeve is an iPhone app [iTunes link] that allows people to create location-based photo albums that sort of clump together to document events. There are hits and misses in this space. Gowalla tried to get people to tell stories with check-ins and photos. Color, and largely failed, to group location with photos. The EyeEm app introduces a location-based element. Few apps have really captured the imagination, other than maybe Instagram, but that won’t let you ‘join’ a location-based group. Eeve does.