As part of the deal, terms of which are undisclosed, Softkinetic-Optrima (the JV known as SKO to avoid confusion) will port its 3D gesture recognition middleware called iisu directly onto TI’s intelligent digital signal processors. It’ll also provide direct support for OptriCam, SKO’s 3D imagers product, to TI-based development boards.

So app developers get the tools and APIs they need to develop advanced gesture-based applications without having to muck about with the technicalities of the 3D depth sensing cameras.

Essentially, it’s an SDK offering a rich set of interfaces and predefined gesture-based patterns, letting TI’s customers focus their effort on the game play itself — or whatever 3D gesture-controlled app they’re building.

I recently spoke to Softkinetic’s CEO Michel Tombroff about the upcoming deal, and though he couldn’t at the time name the as-yet-unannounced partner, he was obviously brimming with enthusiasm for SKO’s goal of getting affordable gesture recognition apps into homes across Europe and the US by the end of 2010.

Which just happens to be when Microsoft’s much-anticipated Project Natal is due.

SKO sees a thin competitive marketplace at the moment. It counts among its top rivals interactive displays creator GestureTek and — surprise, surprise — Microsoft.

Softkinetic’s software has already been integrated into a TV remote control system for Orange Vallée, a division of the Orange Group which helps the company identify and leap on new trends. Here’s a video of Orange Vallee’s gesture controlled TV, demoed at CES 2009:

The software also helped the Dutch physical therapy game for elderly people, SilverFit, to first prize in the category ‘Innovation Application Methods and Environments’ at the European Innovative Games Award 2009 held in Frankfurt earlier this month.

Between SKO and TI (resisting the urge to make ‘beam me up’ jokes…), there’s a clear commitment to ride the building wave of 3D imaging, which Tombroff says is entering a phase of rapid growth. He estimates it’ll be a billion-dollar market by 2013. Another partner announcement is expected imminently – watch this space.

One that caught my eye yesterday is RunAlong.se, which as the domain suggests is a Swedish venture, founded by former user interaction designer Heidi Harman.

Currently in beta, it’s an online health community targeted at female runners who don’t necessarily want to run or walk on their own. Users can map a route using Google Maps, and then invite fellow runners to join them. The benefit to users is increased safety on runs, especially in the dark, and more motivation to actually put on those running shoes at the end of a long day.

The site launched in March 2009, and received some funding from the Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems, Vinnova. It’s a Ruby on Rails development which takes a “user-driven” innovation route in feature development, i.e. users define and prioritize the features they want most.

RunAlong’s business model is a blend of freemium and advertising/sponsorship agreements with brands well-loved by the running world. It’s a service I can imagine could expand very rapidly across any region that is well-served by Google Maps. It can also be easily adapted for any sort of route-based sport, so has the potential for cyclists, skaters and the like.

Given RunAlong’s advisory board, which includes some of the hottest entrepreneurial, technical and academic minds in Sweden, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this startup hit the ground running. (Sorry.)

Harman is also a co-founder of GeekGirlMeetup.com in Stockholm, an all-female conference about web, code and start-ups, with the objective to create more female role models in the European tech industry.

I caught up with Simon in the break and got him to explain exactly why tech startups need to pay attention to how vendors are shaping cloud computing frameworks and standards, and why open source is the way to go if you don’t want the rug pulled out from under your cloud-based web service.

As I wrote on my Telegraph post on the subject:

To understand the delay, we need to understand the app. 0870 turns 08* numbers — such as 0870, 0845 and 0800 — which cost 35p per minute to call (on top of what you’re already paying for your contracted minutes) into 01* or 02* numbers, which come out of your allowance or are very cheap on Pay As You Go.

Essentially, 0870 makes it a lot cheaper for iPhone users to call the 08* numbers that a lot of organisations use as one way to generate revenue off their call centres. It costs more to call an 08* number than it does to call a geographic landline number, so understandably, there has been consumer backlash in the form of SayNoTo0870 – a website that collects landline alternatives to 08* numbers.

The 0870 app searches this database for the 08* number you’re trying to call, and if it finds an alternative landline number, you’re given the option to call it from directly within the app, using the allowance you’ve already paid for.

It’s been available for Android users since January this year, and Maddox estimates that it’s saved users around £84,000 since then, basing the figure on the number of successful conversions * 0.35 * 5 minutes per call.

I wasn’t surprised when I heard in June this year that Apple had rejected the 0870 app when Maddox first submitted it. After all, Apple is notorious for banning apps from their store for reasons that sometimes make perfect sense and sometimes make no sense at all.

In this case, it was the latter. Apple rejected 0870 “for attempting to ‘circumvent carrier features and policies‘”.

In August, Maddox contacted Apple to find out if there was any way to get 0870 into the App Store. And this is where it gets really interesting. His contact within Apple told him:

I was told that when we originally brought this up to O2, they had an issue with this. However, based on your message, I’ve tried to contact O2 again, and hope to have an answer early next week.

[A week and a half later]

I’ve finally gotten word from O2 that neither they, nor anyone at BT, would be happy about this service.

So it looks like Apple rejected 0870 because the app stepped on Apple’s network partner’s anti-competitive toes. It’s not clear what changed O2’s mind in this instance – all Maddox says is that there was some to-ing and fro-ing after which O2 finally decided to allow the App in the App Store. Apple then approved the app within hours.

My guess is that O2 realised that they didn’t have much of a leg to stand on if they couldn’t specify exactly which of its carrier features and policies were being circumvented by an app automating a look-up that any human could do using Safari on the iPhone.

It sounds like a storm in a teacup but to me it speaks of something with potentially tons of impact on developers and any companies focusing on the mobile web. Here is proof that you need to develop your shiz for as many platforms and networks as you can, because if you have only one route to market and the incumbent player decides they don’t want the disruption and the competition, you’re screwed. I doubt Maddox would have had half the attention or interest in 0870 on the iPhone had he not had the Android stats to use as leverage.

On that note, I’m not sure if other European markets have a similar approach to non-geographic numbers, but I’m sure our readers do – tell all in the comments. If you want to see 0870 ported to other platforms or would like to see a version of 0870 that works in your region, you can find Simon on Twitter: @simonmaddox.

The app has to date been a free to use, not-for-profit endeavour. The latest iPhone version is still free but ad-funded, which I don’t really have a problem with – a freelance developer’s got to eat. Still, I do think a donation style approach would be more appropriate to this sort of ‘public good’ application.

The deal is significantly 4iP’s first investment into a later stage company with a fully formed product and a proven business model. 4iP’s Daniel Heaf says it’s representative of Channel 4’s strategic aims to diversify its own revenue streams, and as such, this could be the first of many similar investments which further the broadcaster’s remit in public service digital media.

MyBuilder.com aims to solve two simple user needs; the difficulty homeowners have in finding good builders; and the problems builders face in getting the right work when and where they need it. Not unlike eBay buyer and seller ratings, tradesmen are rated on their workmanship by those who hire them, making it easier for consumers to find high quality builders and avoid cowboy builders and other rogue traders.

Former stonemason Ryan Notz founded the company as Buildersite in 2004. The site relaunched as MyBuilder.com, attracted angel investment and turned its first profit in 2008. Today, MyBuilder.com is getting in excess of 6,000 jobs posted monthly, and the company says it is more than doubling revenue every quarter.

Notz says the company will use 4iP’s investment to ramp up its marketing efforts and forging commercial deals with relevant partners. They’ll also be hiring soon, and focusing on product development.

Online radio is very much a digital media orphan; languishing in a fragmented space while innovations in other aspects of streaming media have come thick and fast over the last few years. Mixcloud’s vision is to be the YouTube of radio with on-demand radio shows spanning music and talk and truing to make it make it more social, personalised and ‘democratic’.

Melodica 03 August 2009 by Chris Coco on Mixcloud

Anyone can upload to the site and the listeners decide who gets exposed. Of course, it has social tools built in, so users can share and discover radio through friends. There’s also a radio recommendation algorithm to help users find shows they love.

The startup was founded by Nikhil Shah and Nico Perez, who met when they studied at Cambridge University (maths and engineering, respectively, since you ask). Like many tech startups, the idea came from trying to scratch an itch.

The guys, both radio presenters and DJs, were frustrated by how hard it was discovering and promoting radio online. They realised more could be done to help connect this content to listeners. So they quit their jobs, got developers Mat Clayton and Sam Cooke on board, and built an invite-only beta which they marketed primarily through Twitter, signing up around 100 new users a day.

More than 1,000 content creators use the site now. The shows currently lean towards club music and DJs, given the founders’ background in organising clubnights and warehouse parties. However they are in discussions with big hitters in the broadcast world to expand the breadth of content.

The revenue model is part ad-funded, part freemium, part based on white-label partnerships that allow content creators a means to distribute and monetise their content on-demand to an online audience. Shah is keen to emphasise the fact that Mixcloud operates in the intersection between radio and online. It’s a good place to be; traditional radio advertising is a $31.5 billion market. But it is being cannibalised, with a lot of the spend moving to the nascent online audio ad market.

The founders have bootstrapped the company so far, helped along with a £100k grant from the Technology Strategy Board, on the back of which they’re leading a project with Queen Mary University’s Centre for Digital Music, working on innovative recommendation technology.

Perez and Shah say that while they’re proud of far they’ve got with relatively such little cash, they’re definitely looking to raise a funding round later this year, to take full advantage of the momentum they have in the industry.

We’ve got 500 exclusive passes for the pre-launch preview for TechCrunch readers – click quick! http://www.mixcloud.com/accounts/register/?code=techcrunch

The idea is to help charities that don’t have the resources or know-how to make better use of technology to promote their cause, with the intention that any apps born over the weekend can be used by any charity under an “open source style” licence.

JustGiving and MissionFish will be opening up new APIs at the event and PayPal will debut its new ‘adaptive payments’ APIs, which, for example, would allow for donations to be shared between multiple recipients in one transaction.

The hack day, organised by Rewired State, was held at Google’s London Victoria offices over the weekend. It brought together 50 young developers aged 15-18 (of which, only three were girls), giving them access to experienced mentors, non-personal government data and as is customary at events like this, an unlimited supply of sugar and caffeine.

A total of 16 hacks were presented. The winners were:

Most likely to be bought by Google: TFHell

This mobile web app solved the problem of knowing whether or not your London bus is running on time, using the data that buses relay to bus stop display screens indicating how long before they arrive. It relied on screenscraped data from Transport For London, which is notorious for walling off its data. Google Maps already supports this feature in the US, making this app the strongest contender in this category.

“Wish I’d thought of that!”: Will Work For Peanuts

This website to connect teens looking for tech work experience with companies in need of talent garnered much praise from the audience, but it definitely rankled for me. The UK labour market is already horribly skewed towards the exploitation of unpaid interns in the name of “something impressive to add to your CV”. Working for peanuts, I can understand, especially if it’s for charities and non-profit organisations – but this site advocates working for no nuts, as it were.

Most likely to antagonise the CIO council: How’s my Train?

This nifty hack created very informative visualisations of statistics for individual train routes, based on an archive of existing train punctuality data. This made a more relevant service for commuters than the officially published statistics which only show the performance stats for a route per quarter.

Best in Show: School Routr 2.0 Beta

This project aggregates news reports about street crime from Google/Yahoo, extracts road and town names and then mashes them up with Google Maps to help users plot the “safest” route to school, avoiding places where stabbings, muggings and other assaults have been reported.

A few hacks gained special mention:

Theory Test: ‘liberated’ the driving theory test data to create an open/free practise site;
Blogotics: plots public opinion of Parliamentary bills based on blog posts mentioning the bill;
Unicloud: creating a better search interface to UCAS data; and
Blab to Betty: SMS-based sexual health Q&A service.

The hacks were judged by Mark O’Neill, CIO at Department of Culture, Media and Sport; Ben Hammersley, associate editor of Wired UK; Craig Elder, communities manager for the Conservative Party; Helen Milner, CIO of UK Online centres; JP Rangaswami, MD of design at BT; Diana Johnson, MP Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools; Mike Hoban, who recently took up the mantle of communications and engagement at Directgov; and Dan Heaf of Channel 4’s 4iP innovation fund.

The agreement will see Flirtomatic initially launched with major carriers using existing ninemsn content relationships. Ninemsn’s digital sales team, the largest in Australia, will handle all advertising sales, whilst its 5th Finger subsidiary will take care of SMS messaging.

Flirtomatic’s launch in Australia is its third international launch in the last year. The company says its services in Germany and the US are growing quickly and building momentum both through ‘off deck’ and ‘on deck’ marketing.

The expansion into Australia is a clear sign that Flirtomatic is seen as a proven mobile product capable of generating revenue from the get go. Its 1.4m strong user base of flirtatious young adults with disposable cash sends over 25m messages a month and generates over 100m WAP page views a month.

The service makes money through advertising and selling customers premium services. Customers buy ‘Flirt Points’ paying either by credit card or by adding the cost to their mobile phone bill. They can then spend their points on premium features such as sending virtual gifts, promoting themselves and finding out exactly who has rated them. Users are sending over 1m virtual gifts to each other per year.

There’s also an advertising component to the business model, with standard banner ads and integrated ad campaigns such as Strongbow’s free pint offer in June 2008. Users sent each other more than 385,000 virtual pints of cider, which could be turned into redeemable vouchers for a real pint. Strongbow saw a 10% click through rate on the virtual pints for people to redeem their coupon.

Flirtomatic has received undisclosed venture funding from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures and Seraphim Capital.

Nokia’s Ovi Store has hooked up with mobile music discovery app Shazam to offer a try-before-you-buy version for its handsets running Symbian OS, S60 5.0 and Symbian OS S60 3.1 and 3.2.

These include the new N97, the 5800 XpressMusic, the E71 and the N95 range. A fully featured version of Shazam which integrates with the Nokia Music Store is available for free until 30th November.

After Nokia users spend what’s left of the summer tagging music, sharing tags by SMS, learning more about the tracks, albums and artists, finding what’s hot from the Shazam Tag Chart and buying it from the Nokia Music Store, they’ll have 30 days to decide whether or not to shell out £4 / €5 for the upgrade to keep all features intact. If not, they’ll still be able to use Shazam on a limited feature and tagging basis.

Slight snag: not all Shazam’s additional content and sharing features work on the S60 5.0 devices. But tagging, purchasing and music discovery are all in place.

Shazam has 35 million users worldwide, which they’re predicting will grow to 50 million by the end of the year. At the moment, around 8 percent of those users go from tagging music to buying it.

In the red corner, representing Routemaster buses, Beefeaters and chicken tikka half and half, we have:

Audio blogging app, Audioboo
Location-based search and discovery tool, Rummble
Online collaboration hub for architects and engineers, Woobius

In the orange corner, representing clogs, tulips and windmills, we have:

Social networks collaborator My Name is E
Photo and video sharing service MobyPicture
Mobile augmented reality browser Layar

Cast your votes at www.vodafonemobileclicks.com/vote and follow the action on Twitter.

The winner will receive €75k, while the companies in second and third place get €50k and €25k respectively. The results will be announced at the PICNIC event held in Amsterdam on 25th September.

Given the European funding drought we’ve been hearing about, it would be great to see more big companies reward innovation with cold hard cash with effectively no strings attached and no equity cost. And let’s be honest, it’s probably easier and less painful to make it through the knockout rounds of a competition than it is to deal with a typical investor and land VC investment.

In an unrelated competition, Vodafone UK is also offering £1,000 and 11 HTC Magics in a Google Android app ideas competition. The company says it will develop the winning app and offer it in the Android marketplace. There’s no indication yet of whether they’ll be charging for it, and if so whether or not any revenue split will make it to the idea originator. Best read that fine print if you’re going to apply.

Answer a few questions about your business and buildabrand will provide a selection of brand identities: logos, fonts and so on. You can then apply that branding (after customising it, if you choose) to downloadable graphics, stationery, website templates and even – eventually – merchandise like pens and beach towels. You just pay for the items you order or download. The service requires no creative skills from users.

How does it work? Well, once you’ve entered a bit of information about your company at the “create” stage of the process – your “brand values” – buildabrand’s algorithm will exclude all the brands, including logos, in its extensive (and ever-growing) catalogue that aren’t appropriate or relevant and just show you the ones that are right for your business. You can choose from the selection it gives you, tweak the logo a bit – say, if you want it in a different colour – and you’re good to go.

CEO and design director Justin Champney was formerly head of brand innovation for McCann Worldgroup. Justin brings 15 years’ branding experience to the start-up, but he’s going to need every year: buildabrand must get the algorithm right, because it’s the quality of the recommendations that will determine whether buildabrand stands or falls. If Champney pulls it off, buildabrand has the potential to be one of the most disruptive elements in the start-up ecosystem for years.

buildabrand was formed in 2008 and completed a round of angel investment from a sole investor last November.

Update: a blog post from the company founder here explains a bit more about the service in response to some commenters’ questions.

We have 200 beta invitations for buildabrand for TechCrunch readers, available on a first come, first served basis. If you want one, leave a comment below. You’ll be notified when buildabrand’s open beta launches later this year.

Arnold, MD of public affairs agency PoliticsDirect, will join Tweetminster as chairman. Alberto Nardelli, a co-founder of Tweetminster, says the company plans to use the investment to build on its capacity and develop premium analytics and data services around the Livewire. These will be released in the next couple of months.

One planned premium service will be a way to use social media tools to survey users around specific political issues – sort of like ‘YouGov 2.0′. Not bad going for something that started life as a side project for a bunch of politics geeks.

GQ.com

It’s a potentially good move for GQ; though the magazine’s enjoying healthy print circulation relative to its competitors, its web performance doesn’t appear to stack up that well against competitors like Esquire.com or the more downmarket FHM.com. A service like we7 that makes the site stickier could change that.

Famously backed by Peter Gabriel, We7 has grown to more than 2m unique users since it launched in 2007. The service now has 4m licensed tracks from a selection of major labels and independents. Last week, web analysis service hitwise rated we7 as the UK’s no.1 music site by page views, overtaking last.fm.

Whether the we7 listening experience compares that well is another story altogether; I tried listening to various we7 playlists while writing this story and got nothing but silence.

Update: Streaming (for me) now works on Safari but not Firefox. Anyone else having similar issues? Drop Gareth [at] we7.com a mail so he can troubleshoot.

6:35 PM: Our roving reporter Mike Butcher has been Twitpiccing:

6:47 PM: Starting in one minute….

6:50 PM: So, here we go! We’re starting with a pitch competition featuring six startups from across Europe. Pitch sponsored by UKTI.

First pitch: Bernhard Niesner from busuu.com – an extremely European company (they’re Austrian based in Spain!)

(Not unlike Babbel) Busuu is an online language learning community, with interactive tests and the chance to practise your new skillz with native language speakers around the world. Currently have +130k users around the world. Feb 2009 started monetising the freemium model, currently the largest language learning site in Spain.

6:57 PM: Next up: Heikke Haldre from Fits.Me – This is some crazy sh…. Robots + fashion = online clothes shopping without fear of buying things that don’t fit you. It’s a virtual fitting room which helps people see what clothes will look like on their body shape. Raised €1.3m, developed the prototype for which a patent has been filed.

7:01 PM: Philipp Mohr from Comufy. Taking communications to the next level. This looks like something we could all do with – going further than just aggregation – it lets you hook all your comms into the Comufy platform and then set levels of permission and filters to make sure you either a) receive exactly what you want in the right context. Target markets: corporates, SMEs, individuals – so, everyone then! Web app and mobile client already available, public launch in September.

7:04 PM: Mark Fletcher from Pitchero. Mike distracted me, but as far as I can tell, this is a social networking community for football, rugby union, rugby league and cricket clubs, 40k members, freemium model in a £10m market in the UK and £35m in the US. Want to find the next heros of the sports.

7:11 PM: James (who’s just 18!) from GigLocator. Focused on making live music more accessible to all by tying into the leading social networks.

7:14 PM: Ravi Sharma of emarket.com – online exchange for the FMCG industry – >€1 trillion marketplace, due to the nature of the goods. Making it quick and easy for companies to trade – i.e. manufacturers, retailers, wholesalers. (This sounds like what the eprocurement/SCM movement of the early-to-mid 90s was trying to do.) Close to reaching target of 300 of the top companies in this industry as member. 9 September public launch, started trading 4 weeks ago, done £2.5m of trade in that time.

7:18 PM: Mike has an announcement: as of today, TechCrunch Europe launches the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 – a constantly updating index of the top 100 companies in the European tech scene – mobile, web, clean tech, gadgets and hardware. Tracking provided by YouNoodle, the people that power Crunchbase.com. Scores are based on verified facts, ranking can be improved by improving your company. Positive reinforcement FTW.

And so, on to the judging! Panellists: Tariq Krim, Sarah Lacy, Brent Hoberman, Michael Birch and Stefan Glaenzer.

My bad, it’s not the judging at all. The question is, where are we (i.e. the European tech startup scene) headed?

Stefan: Will be devoting the next few years to built a European hub to act as a base for launching global startups. What’s needed is education, money to school European startups in the way of global domination.

Tariq: When you’re in Europe you don’t really believe that you’re taken as seriously as you would be in San Francisco. But there is a network of European entrepreneurs thinking big, super smart people who understand how to engineer startups to scale.

Sarah: Telling us about the book she’s authoring at the moment, looking at startup activity in the emerging markets around the world. Looking at trends that are transforming economies. Her advice to European startups – don’t look to the US as usual, look to China, India, Africa. Rwanda, in a year, is going to be better connected than the US. A lot of bridges being built between emerging economies excludes the US.

Brent: One of the main frustrations is that today, one of the big determining factors of success is how good a company is at spanning Google’s search algorithm.

Michael: Getting booed (goodnaturedly) for suggesting that SF is better than the UK/Europe. Announcement: Michael and Brent’s new investment fund – comprised of people who have themselves founded successful startups – has gone live this week. They will go earlier stage than VCs, viewing themselves as a fund central to the ecosystem, working with VCs. Though they haven’t officially launched they have seen 250+ pitches to date, a clear indication that this sort of fund is needed.

Questions/comments from the floor:
How can we work well together in Europe given how diverse the market is?
Stefan: Citing Last.fm, international rollout in 12 languages in 8 weeks – which saw a pretty significant improvement to the uptake of Last.fm at the time. Looking at Oxford, Cambridge and other great tech universities, we do have a good chance. But we need to look at Asia, not all innovation will come out of Silicon Valley.

Sarah: If London wants to be more successful as a tech scene, don’t even call it Silicon anything – play to the city’s strengths.

Tariq: Traditionally most companies try to be good in their country of origin first before expanding globally. But starting with international expansion as your goals in mind is an interesting way we’re seeing a lot of startups go.

** And now, a short intermission **

LocalPeople beta-launched 20 community sites targeted at small towns and neighbourhoods across south-west England yesterday, with a further 30 planned for rollout in the next month.

The sites focus on communities of between 10,000 and 50,000 users, and blend Northcliffe’s local news and traditional media assets like classifieds and job ads with TrustedPlaces’ local business directories and social media elements, to create an ad-funded community publishing platform.

Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO and co-founder of TrustedPlaces told me the partnership is big news for the three-year old startup, and takes it a big step closer to profitability. Additionally, with Northcliffe’s established sales channels to rely on for market penetration in regions outside TrustedPlaces’ usual big city stomping grounds, the company is free to focus on the technology and product development.

As per the existing TrustedPlaces experience, users can discover, review and recommend businesses in their area, while the value to businesses is a ready-made way to engage with communities around them. There’s a user-generated content aspect to the deal as well, as LocalPeople users will be free to publish stories about their communities – for more on this angle, check out paidContent’s interview with Northcliffe’s director of digital media, Mike Rowley.

Newspaper Club will let users tag online content, collect and curate the content they want and turn it into a really good-looking printed product. The team behind it, Russell Davies, Ben Terret and Tom Taylor, started development earlier this month, and are charting their progress in their hilariously frank Newspaper Club blog.

The idea is that any group of people with a shared interest can use rights-cleared content from the web and print it in a basic full colour newspaper format. 4iP’s Daniel Heaf says the ideal audience could be a group of birdwatchers, the residents of an estate campaigning for improvements, or a printed product rounding up the best of the internet. Ben Terret was instrumental in this last project, which could be considered as a prototype for the Newspaper Club concept.

The business model is based on taking a cut off the printing price as well as selling bespoke solutions to corporate clients such as the internal newsletter it produced for its first customer, the BBC. 4iP is also keen to combine Newspaper Club with its other initiatives such as Talk About Local to give communities a more effective voice both online and offline.

It looks like 4iP’s onto another winner with this model, which combines the collaborative lifting power of digital with the accessibility of a non-threatening tangible product. It also means that online content could find newer audiences among the 30% of people in the UK who don’t yet have access to the web, or the multitudes more who live by their RSS feeds but still take pleasure in handling printed paper.

Content junkies who live to bookmark, tag, annotate and share might see this as a retrogressive step — but until we have networked electronic paper as standard, Newspaper Club seems like the next best thing.

Ariadne has in the past advised Skype, Espotting, voice-to-content leader Spinvox, P2P lending and borrowing startup Zopa, and mobile banking and payments service provider, Monitise, which lends confidence in these virtual reality sites being worth a look.

NearGlobal builds high fidelity 3D replicas of real cities which form an atmospheric backdrop for shopping, entertainment, social networking and education.

As part of the deal, Marc Worth, co-founder of fashion information channel WGSN.com, joins NearGlobal as investor and non-executive chairman. Worth and his brother Julian founded WGSN.com in 1999 using funding secured by Julie Meyer. They sold the company to publishing group Emap for £140m in 2005.

Worth sees in NearGlobal a virtual world that looks great, works effortlessly and offers a clear proposition to business, making it easier for fashion and entertainment industries to take it seriously. The first NearGlobal city will be NearLondon, scheduled for a pre-Christmas launch.

RealLife is a social networking application which gives school and college leavers a virtual world in which to experiment with possible careers while linking them to recruiters. At launch, users can expect a 3D avatar-driven MMOG also centred on a virtual London.

Paul Flanagan, an executive-in-residence at Ariadne Capital since 2004, is launching a private beta of RealLife on Facebook soon, with a full launch scheduled for July.

The first career option will be trading, with brokers able to deal on the major global markets via gnuTrade. Successful traders can purchase a range of virtual goods such as villas on the Riviera, fast cars or great clothes to enhance their virtual lifestyles.

Julie Meyer, Ariadne’s CEO says the company wasn’t convinced that virtual worlds were an attractive investment opportunity until the emergence of what she terms “Virtual Worlds 2.0″ – where the user experience has a purpose and is driven by a robust business model.

This is the fifth funding round that Ariadne Capital has advised on or introduced new investors to successfully in the last six months.

The Beeb’s Children’s Department has licensed the technology to develop a peer-to-peer card trading game based on its hugely popular mixed reality show BAMZOOKi, which is sort of like Robot Wars meets Knightmare. This (slightly dated) video should elucidate:

Adam Khwaja, a producer working across BBC interactive and multiplatform projects with a particular interest in user experience, says the appeal comes from the casual approach to gameplay that Hemlock allows; being able to dive straight into a realtime multiplayer game without having to register or face a steep learning curve. The kids love it, apparently.

Mint developed Hemlock to solve a problem they had in developing Football3s, an interactive fantasy football game designed to be played in real-time alongside actual football matches. The problem is that most real-time interactive web experiences are not real-time at all. It’s all simulated, with the front-end site constantly polling the back-end database for changes to the data. Or as one of the Mint team says on the Hemlock blog, “the web’s current top notch technology is like an impatient and really annoying child“.

For apps that attract thousands of users, all this interaction becomes very processor-heavy and the application itself is subject to high latency, which  the user experiences as a sluggish or unresponsive app. Hemlock’s approach is to combine Flash and XMPP, the protocol that powers presence notification and real-time communication.

It works in a similar way to push email; Hemlock registers a client with the server to receive messages. The server then notifies the client when there is a new message — no polling required. It also means that multiple users can interact with the same data in real-time.

The framework paves the way for web applications of a different calibre, making it easier for developers to get started on building cool apps without having to worry about the low-level foundation stuff. Hemlock was soft-launched last week and received with excitement by the web development community.

The potential for commercial applications is vast. Game play is obviously a winner; think how much fun Lexulous or any other Facebook app could be if you were playing in real-time, rather than taking asynchronous turns. There’s also a market in educational software, with the potential for collaborative canvases to get students working together. I’m pretty sure the digital marketing agencies will pick up on it as well, as the next level of viral marketing.

Founded by Errol Damelin and Jonty Hurwitz, Wonga provides cash advances to UK consumers, helping solve occasional cash flow problems. It’s provided nearly 100,000 flexible cash advances of up to 30 days since it launched eleven months ago.

The killer USP is that Wonga is the first consumer finance company to fully automate the lending process, providing a completely online credit solution around the clock. Via a Web interface applicants select exactly how much cash they need, up to £750. They can then determine their own price by then selecting how many days they want the money for. The company’s risk and decision technology means applicants receive an instant answer, and if they’re successful, Wonga deposits cash into their bank account within an hour, at any time of day or night. However, it’s not cheap. Interest on a £100 loan for 10 days costs £1 a day. So including fees, a £100 loan for 10 days would have to be repaid at £115.91. APR is generally more than 2,000pc. The maximum loan is £750 and the maximum term is 30 days.

Damelin attributes Wonga’s rapid profitability to its technical innovation and desire to “amaze” its customers. He says Wonga has been built to scale, and plans to expand very rapidly now that the funding is in place.

Accel has a track record of backing some of the fastest growth companies of the last two decades, Facebook included, while Greylock Partners is a long-term investor. Between these approaches, we can expect to see rapid development of the service offering, and expansion into global markets.

Given the global economic situation and the need for a collective rebooting of the lending models that make the world turn, it’s good to see VCs supporting a disruptive lender that makes no bones about focusing on responsible lending and a sustainable business model.

Tech startup Woobius is trying to solve this problem with its collaboration tool for architects and engineers, built to suit the specialised workflows of the construction industry.

To set the scene: your typical building project involves hundreds if not thousands of drawings, depending on the size of the project. Each drawing has multiple revisions and comments from consultants on the project. Multiply this by 15-20 companies involved in a typical building project, and it makes for a pretty big collaboration headache.

Woobius is taking on existing tools in this space, such as BIW, Asite and 4projects, which have been criticised for being slow, expensive, hard to use and often introduced only in the construction stages of a project, rather than starting from the design process.

The service is centred on two tools: the dropbox, a light-weight inter-company file sharing tool, and the vault, which includes document control functionality. It’s been in beta for a year and has evolved in response to feedback from architects using it on live projects in that time.

The business model is a straightforward freemium one; projects are free up to 200MB, and £10/GB/month thereafter. The privately funded startup was founded in 2007 by architect Bob Leung, who designed the product, and technology lead Daniel Tenner.

They plan to officially launch and market Woobius now that proof of concept is in place. Given the site’s reported growth through word of mouth alone – from 15 initial users to over 2500 registered users across 100 construction projects in 27 countries – I’d say they’re on to a winner.

The site uses Twitterfall to keep track of tweets about the match, with an added enhancement; a tool developed by thruSITES will track which of the players are generating the most chatter on Twitter at any given moment, with sliders for each player showing who’s the most talked about.

Fans will also be able to share their armchair commentary (and really bad jokes) using AudioBoo, a service which is rapidly becoming a darling of the mainstream media for making it so easy to transform an audience from passive consumers to active participants.

After the match, fans will be able to scrub along a timeline in the thruSITES buzz tracker to see which players caused most response at crucial moments – a sort of crowdsourced, visual post-match highlights package which, from the other perspective, will give the clubs a direct tap into public sentiment around their players.

A viewers’ backchannel is not a new thing – just watch the hashtags trend when Britain’s Got Talent or The Apprentice is on. However, this is possibly the first time a British broadcaster has attempted to integrate the backchannel into its online coverage. It’ll be interesting to see if any cross-channel promotion will be in place, i.e. if the TV commentators will direct viewers to contribute to the FA Cup Buzz site.

Dominic Cameron, MD of ITV.com, says that if the FA Cup Buzz experiment is a success, the broadcaster will be looking for more “new and interesting ways” to engage football fans.

Meanwhile, if all this engagement isn’t enough to slake your ADD-driven thirst for social media sports apps to distract you from the match, you can play along with Football3s, a realtime fantasy football game developed by Mint Digital, which also integrates with Twitter, Facebook and Chatzy.

Enjoy the match!

It does this using the company’s VisualDNA concept; working out people’s personality types based on the pictures they choose. Imagini draws the data from its consumer facing personality test site, Youniverse, which has profiled more than 15 million people since 2006.

VisualDNA Shop presents visitors with a few visual questions, and delivers real-time product recommendations from Amazon.com based on their responses. At the moment this means visitors can choose from mobile phones, digital cameras and gadgets. The company plans to include a broader range of products from sites like eBay and Shopping.com in the near future.

Imagini secured $13.5m in funding in February this year, a chunk of which no doubt went to getting Stephen Fry to explain the VisualDNA concept (doing a rather succinct job, too):

Anyone can try the concept with a free, limited VisualDNA Shop. There’s a Pro version for $2.99 a month which comes with  advanced analytics that tell site owners what their audience is like — coining titles like ‘funster’, ‘gamer’ and ‘active adventurer’ — and what appeals to them.

With the Pro version, site owners can make their own suggestions for new products to be advertised to different types of shopper, and show visitors other sites visited by people with similar preferences.

If you want to try it out, TechCrunch Europe has 50 access codes to give away using the invitation code ‘techcruncheuropevisualdnashop’.

It works like this: you sign up as a publisher via the AQA website. Once approved, you set up topics ending in 2U which your ‘fans and followers’ subscribe to by texting that topic to 63336, at the cost of 98p.

Thereafter, any time you feel like you have something of value to share, you publish it from your phone or online, and your subscribers receive it as a text — at cost to them of 25p per aphorism, observation or other nugget of information. The maximum a user will be charged is £3.50 per month.