[Germany] While others hunted for presents, Germany’s most prolific startup founders used the holiday season to collect even more investor money and to start another company. Shortly after Christmas eve, the Samwer brothers switched on MyCityDeal. The Groupon clone will offer daily deals with up to 50 per cent discounts on stuff to do, see, eat and buy in cities across Germany. But until now the site only covers Berlin.

The offers on MyCityDeal change every day. If enough people sign up before midnight they get a voucher by email for a €60 dinner at only €30 or a nicely discounted wellness treatment, for example. Monday’s deal was a hot stone massage with warm salt from the Himalaya. 200 people signed up to get it for €37 instead of €50. People have to reserve their coupon by leaving their credit card details but will not be charged if not enough people sign up and the deal doesn’t take place.

[Germany] Although its Twitter user numbers have grown by 2.500 per cent this year, Germany is now a Facebook country. Google research tool Ad Planner reveals that 10 million Germans visited Facebook in November. The second placed social network Wer-kennt-wen.de (6.2 million) is still growing, while the three websites of VZ-Netzwerke combined were down more than 9 per cent in the last month. Twitter’s numbers, however, remain stagnant since the summer.

While Twitter is the 9th biggest social network in Germany, with 2.4 million unique visitors in November, this figure is the same as in July. Twitter’s user numbers, which skyrocketed at the beginning of 2009, aren’t growing anymore. Facebook is now the big ascendant among social networks, its website has seen the number of German users go from 5 million to 10 million in only 8 months. New privacy controls will likely see this trend continue as more Facebook pages get indexed by Google and other search engines based on the latest default settings.

[Germany] We Germans are very picky when it comes to online privacy. Not only is Google Analytics in danger of being banned for storing user data on ‘foreign servers’, Facebook apps are probably illegal because they pass too much private information to third parties. Also Google Street View is a constant bone of contention. Several mayors of cities and villages like Molfsee or Pfaffenhofen have already tried to ban Google’s camera cars from their streets, until someone told them there was no law against driving around taking pictures.

[Germany] Two and a half years after Facebook, its German clone StudiVZ follows the US social network’s most successful move by adding support for third-party applications.

The 15.7m users of StudiVZ and its siblings MeinVZ and SchülerVZ can now play games from Plinga or Wooga, sing online Karaoke with Mikestar or order Italian food from Pizza.de. After 12 months of engineering and a trial with a music video app since October, nine apps are available as of Monday and several hundreds are in the making. The next step will be the implementation of a payment system in early next year, so that users can fork out money for in-game goods, pay for pizzas or make charity donations to the fund raising portal Spendino.

[Germany] Cologne’s streaming video startup make.tv, which filed for insolvency in September, can apparently avoid the deadpool. The company has been given a second chance with new partners and will survive, says founder Andreas Constantin Meyer.

Two weeks ago, he countered rumours via a blog post with a defiant WE WILL CONTINUE! Now we hear that make.tv’s insolvency will not be its end because Meyer is in negotiations “with interested parties and partners”. The talks seem so advanced that Meyer says with certainty that make.tv will continue in someway or another but conveniently doesn’t go into details.

[Germany] Ah, the Appstore approval process. It can destroy the news cycle. A week ago, our “Dear Leader” Mike Butcher started to ask startups on several occasions to come up with a worthy Foursquare competitor from Europe. Two days ago, I heard from a German company who said they might fit the bill. Dailyplaces sent a press release with Friday as release date. But when we fire up iTunes to install their app, what do we find? Nothing.

CEO Andreas Ebert says Apple still hasn’t approved Dailyplaces for the iPhone, although the app was submitted 4 weeks ago and approval normally takes only 14 days. But you know what? Screw Apple! We’ll tell you about it anyway.

[Germany] How would you like to make money from your expert knowledge? E-Learning is a $53 billion world market that requires lots of technology and therefore is mostly tapped by universities and bigger corporations. But now a small startup from Munich aims to make everyone a distance teacher. Yesterday I ran my first online course using Conferendum, the product of a bootstrapped early-stage company that consists of only a CEO and two freelance programmers. Still they offer a fully blown platform for delivering online training via a web browser and phone.

Anyone can set up a training session in a snap, invite people and start charging. Interaction is done by screen sharing or the presentation of Powerpoint, Excel, PDF and Word documents in the learner’s browser. Participants can talk to their trainer and amongst each other by voice or chat. Conferendum also offers dial in numbers in 30 countries for people who want to attend by phone. Basically it’s a tweaked web conference tool comparable to WebEx, Genesys, GoTo Meeting or Dimdim, but with better monetization options.

[Germany] Today I should have received my first edition of Niuu, a personalised print newspaper comprised of articles taken from various blogs and newspapers. Delivery time should be between 4 AM and 6 AM so that people can read it over breakfast. Niiu has contracts with mostly German newspapers like Bild, Frankfurter Rundschau and Handelsblatt but also with the Washington Times and The International Herald Tribune.

Readers can use the Niiu website to customise which page of a newspaper they want to read in the morning. Local news from Berliner Morgenpost can easily be combined with Sports from Bild and the New York Times’ frontpage with just a few clicks.

[Germany] It must be great to be in the social games business. Apparently anyone can jump on the bandwagon, even latecomers and copycats. Following Electronic Arts’ $300 million acquisition of Playfish, a $43 million investment at Playdom and €5 million ($7.5m) additional funding for Wooga, comes the fourth investment in the last week: The Samwer brothers’ copy of social games giant Zynga, called… wait for it folks… Plinga. Sound familiar? The clone has been funded with an undisclosed amount. Now that’s what I call an investment spree.

[Germany] Hamburg based business social network Xing, similar to LinkedIn in Europe, continued to grow revenue and EBIDTA in the first nine months of 2009 while profits were smaller than last year.

Total revenues from January to September amounted to €33.2 million – or $49 million – up 32 percent from the same period last year (€25.1 million). But the cumulative group profits were lower than those for the same period last year (€2.5 million for 2009 vs. €4.7 million for 2008), due to “investment costs and the assignment of €1 million in one-off tax reserves for Q3″.

[Germany] For years the music industry said that video killed the radiostar, but now the homework of two 7th semester students from Stuttgart could do away with MTV. Their website plays music videos too, but Semsix is more convenient than Viacom’s TV station that tortures with crappy tunes and annoying ads while you have to wait for one good song. A product of the 80’s, MTV still lacks the personalisation and interactive features fit for the internet age. That’s why at Semsix the user is the VJ and can choose the songs that play. It’s kind of like Last.FM but for music videos, or similar to Simfy or Spotify in that the user is in charge of the playlist. As of yesterday, Semsix is also available in English.

So much for the coming mobile nirvana of free mobile content – at least for iPhone users in Germany. Today Europe’s biggest newspaper, the German newspaper BILD-Zeitung intends to use, in effect, brute force to force users buy its new iPhone app. The paper tabloid is going to block anyone using an iPhone browser from accessing its website.

Now, readers will not only have to pay for the dedicated BILD iPhone app, but they also need to pony-up recurring fees for new articles. The same is planned for Springer’s quality paper Die Welt. Users of Nokia, Blackberry, HTC or other smartphone brands will not be blocked – but only for as long as it takes for Springer to develop an app for each device.

Skype’s Linux version will soon become open source software – and maybe run on every smartphone, TV set-top box or other gadget powered by the free operating system.

It could also become part of multi-protocol messengers like Pidgin or eBuddy or Meebo.

Or at least that was the hope for some hours today after a French user got the following answer from Skype customer support.

[Germany] You could say StudiVZ, the German Facebook clone has a few problems on its hands – and some unwelcome publicity.

Back in August Facebook officially became Germany’s biggest social network, increasing reach by more than 50% from March to July 2009 taking it to 6.2 million unique users in Germany. By contrast StudiVZ had 4.28 million uniques (though it continues to claim 6 million registered members). Even it’s spinoff aimed at post-university adults, MeinVZ, is ailing.

Then StudiVZ became the subject of some high profile hacks which showed up its lax attitude to security.

In particular was that by a 20 year old man who used crawler software to harvest detailed user information from all of the “VZ” sites (owned by VZ-Netzwerke), copying 48,000 profiles in just four hours. Bizarely he asked for just €80,000 and threatened to sell the information to gangs in Eastern Europe. The plan didn’t come of however. He turned up to the VZ offices to collect the cash, where the Police (doh!) were waiting.

But today the story just took a sinister turn.

[Germany] Serial founder and investor Lukasz Gadowski constantly taps new online markets. In his latest venture, the entrepreneur from Berlin ( who is best known for his part in the success of Spreadshirt, StudiVZ, Brands4Friends and many German startups) now has plans to emulate Citizen Kane and become a major league publisher.

The European is the name of his new online publishing venture for debate and opinion. More than 20 high class journalists will be using it to cover global issues. This could end up being the European Huffington Post (at least, for Germany).