We had two pitching competitions featuring seven 3 minute pitches (plus Q&A) from startups specifically in the ‘realtime’ space; and twelve 60-second ‘free for all’ pitches.

As is the tradition at our annual Festive event the pitches were judged by the audience via votes on Twitter and an innovative new method – hand clapping.

One Minute Pitch Competition

Winner: Catwalk Genius, crowd-funding fashion site

Runners up: nurphy, replacing email with conversations; Fat Student, location-specific part-time job board for UK students; and social media aggregator Friendbinder (who also pitched at Le Web 09)

Three Minute Pitch Competition

Winner: kuwalu.com, realtime RSS feeds curation

Runners up: nsyght, realtime social search engine; and koogaloo, a location-specific social calendaring app that notifies you of events and deals near you.

Our rocking video partners Newspepper recorded the whole lot for posterity. Here’s the archived video for you to stream at your leisure:

James Whittaker, UX & UI Architect at TweetDeck (at 00:01:00).

Jennie Lees, founder of realtime sentiment analysis tool FestBuzz (at 00:05:30).

Marco Kaiser, director of engineering at Seesmic (at 00:04:50)

Realtime Services Panel from 00:11:30

Keynote: “The future of Realtime Content and News” by Nick Halstead, founder of TweetMeme, from 00:44:30

“The realtime effect on entertainment content” by David Maher Roberts, CEO, The Filter from 00:21:02

“How Google Wave affects the future of realtime collaboration” by Daniel Tenner, co-founder of Woobius (from 00:34:00)

Realtime content panel (from 00:54:12)

Featuring Alberto Nardelli from Tweetminster; Ian Hogarth from Songkick; William Fischer from Twitter Jobsearch; and Tim Morgan from Mint Digital.

Pitches! (from 01:30:00)

Watch Shutl’s pitch at 00:33:30

Launching in London first, the service is targeted at multi-channel retailers and their customers, promising delivery within 90 minutes of purchase in urban areas — and all this at a lower cost to retailers than their standard delivery charge. The company is keeping quiet on delivery time or cost if you happen to live in the ‘burbs or the boondocks.

The Shutl platform will initially plug into retailers’ websites, enabling the retailer to offer its customers immediate home delivery of goods, delivered directly from their local stores. All the couriers have GPS units and this data is aggregated so customers can watch their delivery en route in real-time on a map.

Shutl uses a proprietary algorithm that considers past performance and consumer feedback to select the appropriate carrier for each delivery, down even to the type of vehicles the courier has available. Independent courier companies will be able upload pricing to the portal to automatically bid on deliveries from Shutl’s retail partners.

This pricing can be flexed in real-time enabling carriers to capitalise on short-term changes in capacity across their fleet. The end result, they say, is that better performing carriers will be able to justify higher prices and attract more work than their poorer performing competitors.

The platform and distribution network can be applied to a number of additional markets. The company announced £0.5m in European Angel investment in October.

The model blends the old with the new. It’s not that long ago that local grocery stores delivered your purchases at a time that suited you; and even more recently that large logistics enterprises started the trend of cutting costs and boosting efficiency by pooling resources and capacity across their fleets. It also throws a lifeline to courier companies operating within a declining market as it currently stands.

Shutl is founded by Tom Allason, who is a founder and former CEO of eCourier.co.uk, an online same-day courier service which allows clients to place delivery orders online with little or no advance notice.

Watch the Storific pitch at 00:22:30

It’s your classic ‘opt-in for great rewards’ model that drives the plethora of email newsletter services which most companies still rely on as their mainstay of direct communication with consumers. In the social media space, this communication loop is scattered and disorganized, which is the problem the company is trying to fix. Co-Tweet provides a similar service which focuses only on Twitter.

Storific amps this up into a ‘real-time conversation’ between stores and customers, riffing on the hyperlocal theme by offering “local businesses the right set of tools to manage and optimize their real-time communication strategy” — including custom printed cards that the company calls StoriPacks.

Founders Michael Cohen (ex-Netvibes) and Gregoire Cachet say Storific will offer both freemium and white label versions of the service. The beta will launch in January 2010.

Storific’s service differs from other social media tools to engage consumers such as GetSatisfaction (which the company itself makes use of), or Facebook Fan pages and Twitter lists thanks to the built in support for geo-location specific offers which again tie back into encouraging local uptake.

Watch the Sokoz pitch at 00:10:55

Each auction starts with a top price which begins to fall until either the reserve price is reached or all units of the product are passed. Like a shopping channel TV show, live sales begin at a scheduled time — you snooze, you lose.

The schedules within each sales category are made visible 48 hours in advance and each sale runs for a maximum of 10 minutes. Buyers never have to register a payment method with the site, as Sokoz offers 1-click payment via transaction partner Ogone.

Sokoz vets all participating companies to make sure they provide a certain level of quality and after-sales service standards. There 135 professional sellers on the platform, including event-driven sellers in the travel and leisure sector.

Sokoz was founded in 2007 by CEO Tanguy Lesselin, and launched its patent-pending live sales platform in May 2009. The company says its model gives sellers a few new alternatives to traditional sales methods, in that they can spin specific sales promotions out of more traditional strategies, or even facilitate a fire sale without prejudice to their brand.

It makes for a good spectator sport, apparently: the company’s survey of the first few users reveal that 97% of participants want to return to purchase and those who do not intend to buy still enjoyed the performance. Interestingly, like honesty boxes, the products sell for slightly higher than the best market price.

Watch the CloudSplit pitch at 00:01:05

You may remember this company from their pitch at TechCrunch50. Based in Dublin, Ireland, and founded by Joe Drumgoole and Eamon Leonard, the service has VCs and cloud computing customers agog with the potential for cost savings on this essential operating expense.

In addition to giving clear graphical breakdowns (including by application type and node) of where users’ cloud spend is actually going, CloudSplit offers a real-time control and budgeting service via alerts and cut off mechanisms. The company has received €100,000 seed funding from serial tech entrepreneur Ray Nolan and is on the hunt for $2m in VC funding to maximise the window of opportunity across the US and Asia that will open in 2010.

Although it doesn’t yet do so, Drumgoole says the high end version of the product will ultimately provide buying advice based on businesses’ cloud computing costs.

[RUSSIA] Here’s something that ought to get personal productivity geeks a little bit hot under the collar. Task.ly, not yet launched, approaches to-do management with the same re-engineering focus that Google Wave’s creators took to email.

Watch Task.ly’s pitch at 00:39:30

The prototyped product looks very exciting. It incorporates some fairly obvious features that make a task management app kick butt, like having a desktop-like user interface even though it’s web-based, supporting SMS reminders and communication with the app via IM, and having an accompanying iPhone app.

Task.ly co-founder and developer Dmitry Gorshkov says there are three principles shaping the company’s ideal for a truly fluid and unique user experience:

1. Über-easy and fast data entry, powered by natural language processing.

2. API integration with popular tools such as Evernote and Basecamp, as well as emerging services like Vark.com and RedBeacon — meaning users don’t have to ditch tools they’re already invested in.

3. Making the user’s to-do list social to increase productivity. A user is able to leverage her network to get help by publishing tasks to LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

Task.ly is currently registering interest via email subscription and Twitter account. The company has a slew of existing competition, but it definitely looks like Task.ly is different enough to attract significant market traction. The product will be offered “in a few months” on a freemium basis, with the likely fee being around the $4/month price range.

Watch Tigerlily’s pitch at 00:28:50

In essence, the tool set encompasses flexible contest and quiz widgets to customize a Facebook Page, and is targeted at media groups, large brands and their agencies and marketers. The FPMS uses ‘Share’ buttons on the individual items, encouraging conversation around posts.

There’s a free and pro version, with the latter sold on the basis of an annual licence fee. Orange France is among the early pro users, and the founders say they have signed 500 partners since launching just a week ago. The agency plans to aggressively develop the French market, before expanding across Europe via a network of business partners in the next  6 months.

Watch Stribe’s pitch at 00:17:40

The B2B offer is simple — site administrators can copy and paste a bit of javascript, and hey presto, they have a customizable, freely branded social network for their sites accessed via a small footprint toolbar that pops up at the bottom of the screen. The differentiation happens on the Stribe network service, which allows a site’s community to interact with other communities on all Stribe-enabled sites.

Stribe’s business model is based on selling premium modules including analytics such as the Stribe Back-Office, which provides all key metrics on the site’s community including social metrics, breakdown of users and their engagement times, comment analytics, metrics on ‘hidden activity’ including private chats and messages, and the community’s overall activity.

Moving forward, the company plans to open its API for website developers and provide more premium modules. At their Le Web startup pitch, founders Kamel and Gaël demonstrated how Stribe integrates with Facebook using Facebook Connect using a white labelled version of the service as used by Toys “R” Us.

The company describes itself as a new, multidimensional social layer interface which brings together local communities in a globally shared environment.

In the big picture, the site founders see Stribe as a tool to create new behaviours and participative interactions, with the potential to reap revenue from, for example, precisely engineered advertising campaigns launched across several websites at the same time.

Watch FriendBinder’s pitch at 00:06:54

One of the latest such offerings is FriendBinder, an aggregator launched in beta in September that combines all your friends activity across multiple social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, Last.fm and RSS/Atom. Videos and pictures are displayed in-line, making the overall experience tidier and more coherent than a raft of freshly spawned tabs would.

FriendBinder also supports cross-posting of status updates and replies/comments/likes. The tool is available in desktop and mobile web flavours, with other options coming in the future. Founder Richard Cunningham promised an exciting new announcement, and he made it today: FriendBinder now offers searchable trending topics from your friends across all their social networks:

In terms of revenue streams, Cunningham says there’s a plan to introduce a freemium model around longer history (i.e. providing a service that Twitter itself does not), as well as exploring potential commercial partnerships. The service is also going to be introducing an interest level indicator, to weight your search results accordingly, and a filtering system to hush any tags you find too noisy — like the #leweb tweets, for example.

WhoSampled.com has been in public beta for a year, and officially launches today. Founded by Nadav Poraz, the community-driven site focuses on sampled music and cover versions providing side-by-side embedded video for comparison. WhoSampled users can buy the songs or albums featured on the site, either as a download, CD or vinyl. Interestingly, most people buy the original track, rather than the new one.

Poraz has the ideal background, it seems – he’s a software developer and a one-time producer/DJ who ran what he describes as a tiny independent record label. Originally from Israel, he moved to London nine years ago and ended up doing an MBA at London’s Imperial College, which pushed him down the entrepreneurial path.

Poraz started WhoSampled.com a year ago with a few hundred samples. With the help of the hardcore music geeks that flocked to the site, that database is now sitting at the 10,000+ samples mark. Like most crowdsourced community-driven sites, there’s an active core of around 30 volunteer moderators responsible for quality control.

The site has been bootstrapped thus far, though it has small but active and growing affiliate revenue streams. Poraz says that WhoSampled exposes music lovers to previously unknown back catalogues, which has great potential for ‘long tail’ sales.

Although there is potential for commercial syndication of the service or data, Poraz is still exploring these avenues, and sees the long-term best-fit solution is for WhoSampled to feature as a complementary add-on to existing music sites.

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 **