It’s their third joint investment in Panfu, former rounds were done together alongside other investors including Lukasz Gadowski of Team Europe Ventures and Oliver Jung from shopping club Brands4Friends.

Since its launch in December 2007, Panfu has become Europe’s leading website for kids between 6 and 14 years with 15 million registered users and is profitable since early 2009. The company claims a turnover growth of 25 per cent every month during the last half-year. Its neat multi-player online games in eleven different languages are educational and deal with the adventures of cuddly panda bears, bunnies and hippos.

Germany’s dreaded testing organization TÜV has officially approved the Flash website to be childproof and safe from violence and advertising. Every dirty word is filtered when kids are chatting with their avatars. This year the company plans to roll out in nine more languages.

Panfu and its new spin off Oloko, started in April 2010, follow a freemium model. Every child can join and play for free but the real deal is the Gold Package, which allows special access to additional games and functions not available to non-paying members like learning games at the Panfu school or dressing up your avatar, adopting a pet, decorating your tree house and lots more. Sounds like Second Life for kids to me, only that each and every character is a panda bear.

Under the slogan “Game Changers” the next10 conference will discuss how the currently emerging economy of mobile applications is influencing companies’ digital strategies. The schedule looks quite promising and gets regularly interrupted by elevator pitches from startup companies.

The leading lights among the speakers include Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley and Louis Rossetto, who launched Wired magazine back in the days and now is a game changer in chocolate production with his company TCHO. Other highlights include appearances by futurist and hacker Pablos Holman, who helped to develop the smallest PC in the world, and John Rogers, who is reshaping the automotive industry with Local Motors. MP3 inventor Karlheinz Brandenburg will hold a keynote on the second day and a separate conference track is dedicated to the booming apps economy.

So how do you win one of those two next10 tickets – worth €940 each – given to us by organizing company, e-business solutions provider SinnerSchrader? Simply leave a comment on this post explaining why we should choose you. We’ll announce the lucky winners in one week, on May 3, 2010.

UPDATE: The winners are Thibaut Rouffineau and Michelle Owen.

CEO Helmut Hoffer von Ankershoffen presents the WePad. | photo: MG

But here’s the meat: What we saw was actually quite impressive. For instance a WePad version of Stern, one of Germany’s biggest magazines, with videos and web content in it. That’s not just an uninspired rehash of the print product as we have seen from other established media on Apple’s iPad. (I am looking at you, New York Times and Wall Street Journal).

The widget-oriented user interface runs smooth on Intel’s Atom Pineview-M chip with 1.66 Gigahertz and the underlying Linux allows real multitasking as well as the pre-installation of Open Office on every WePad for a quick note, taking on the touchscreen or the external keyboard. At least that’s what I believed until I had to realize that the entire demonstration was just a screencast.

The only demo device in the room was running Windows 7 and a fullscreen video to give an impression of the WePad UI. It had to be polished every minute since so many journalists laid hand on it. So, in fact, there’s is still no information about how snappy the WePad will be in real life. Its first presentation was not a real-world demo, but a video of its UI.

The first WePads are set to arrive in stores from June and the prices will range from €449 to €569 for the fully equipped version with 32 GB, Wi-Fi, 3G, GPS and full HD video. Other than the iPad, the 3G version of the WePad accepts normal SIM cards instead of the new microSIM cards that Apple requires and which no German carrier provides even now. Some 20,000 devices were already preorded, said Hoffer von Ankershoffen.

If you want, you can knock yourself out with the latest product sheet of 14 pages. Or you can just read our post on Crunchgear.

As is generally widely known, Germany has a very environmentally sustainable economy. There are recycling bins everywhere. So it’s nice to see the recycling has extended to the layout and functionality of Friendticker. The website and the iPhone app resemble Foursquare with only minor changes and the browser bar’s favicon looks very much like Facebook’s – only in purple. Even the company name is recycled: The founders bought it from the deadpooled German Twitter clone Frazr which used it as an alternative.

Nevertheless, despite the obvious comparisons, look under the hood and Friendticker has features you won’t find in Foursquare and Gowalla that mainly allow users to earn badges like points earned in a game. At Friendticker, a user with the most check-ins does not only become President of a location, he also gets real value in exchange.

Friendticker is focused on loyalty rewards and users can change their badges into vouchers that are worth money. The first partner is the Grand Hotel Esplanade in Berlin. For five nights in its Harry’s New York Bar you get a complimentary upgrade on your next stay, which means a suite for the price of a simple room. Other rewards come from clothing company März München, students’ online shop unimall.de or the night clubs MMX and Goya. More partnerships are on the way.

The brands get an interface from their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to Friendticker and thus change which reward items to offer as well as where and when they are available. That’s another advantage over Foursquare where items must be generated by six company employees, as Friendticker CEO Florian Resatsch explained to TechCrunch. The brand may not even be tied to a permanent set of locations. For example, a band that wants to reward fans for coming to multiple concerts on its tour could offer reward items like skipping the queue at the venue or meeting a member of the band.

Friendticker founders Uwe Sandner, Florian Resatsch and Martin Pischke

Interestingly, the usual German concern over privacy means Friendticker has strict privacy controls, something which will appeal to German users over Foursquare. While Foursquare has a new analytics dashboard, local businesses which use Friendticker get only anonymous user information which is automatically deleted after 24 hours. The lawyer costs for these privacy rules have already been €20,000 and so its understandable that Friendticker, with 15 employees, is looking for funding. After smaller investments from a handful of Business Angels, Friendticker is now working on raising a €3m or €4m series A round. But VC financing in Germany is too damn’ slow, says Florian, and so his plan B is to try and break even by year end.

The business model with loyalty rewards guarantees a revenue stream from day one and most of the development was financed by Friendticker’s mother company Servtag – already known for their mobile tagging and NFC solutions, started long before Foursquare. A first iteration of the Friendticker iPhone software was presented at CeBIT in March 2009, but people had to take photos of QR codes that were manually attached to specific locations to check in. That was too complicated and location-based social networking still hadn’t taken off. Therefore, Friendticker had to throw it all away in August and turned itself into a location-based loyalty game. Remind you of anyone?

While Apple is still racing to the wire to secure enough media content partnerships for the iPad before its launch this week, the WePad has already bagged Europe’s biggest publisher, Gruner + Jahr.

Bernd Buchholz, CEO of Gruner + Jahr, presented the first German-born slate PC at last week’s annual press conference for his company. Unfortunately, there is only a very dark photo of this event on Facebook (see above), but you can find new professional shots on sites like Areamobile (below).

Axel Springer, publisher of Europe’s biggest newspaper BILD is also in talks to use the WePad, says the latest rumour quoted by German newswire DPA.

But Buchholz must have jumped the gun, because the WePad’s creator Neofonie had scheduled all official announcements about the WePad’s hardware and media partnerships for April 12.

That didn’t hold Buchholz back from presenting a WePad version of Stern, one of Germany’s biggest magazines which sells 900,000 copies. Other similar versions of Gruner + Jahr magazines like Geo or Gala are in the making. They will be marketed at similar prices like their print versions and the launch date is just some months away. Apart from the text and pictures of their print issues, the WePad versions will be full of audio, video and Flash and also interwoven with the magazines’ websites.

It seems that Gruner + Jahr is not the only publisher who believes in the WePad’s success. Neofonie CEO Helmut Hoffer von Ankershoffen is “happy about the first big advance orders from companies”, he wrote on the WePad Facebook site (5,709 fans). Gruner + Jahr has officially announced a plan to license the WePad’s epaper software, that Neofonie developed on their behalf, to other publishers. The WeMagazine publishing software is platform independent and apparently works with several devices or user interfaces, including the iPad and normal computers.

The underlying strategy is clear: “We insist on our sovereignity of products and contents”, Buchholz said in his Thursday’s speech, clearly hinting at recent problems. Apple removed the Stern iPhone app in November without warning from the App Store due to objections over photo galleries featuring too much nakedness. The Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) warned that such intrusions might represent a move towards censorship.

German publishers are also disgruntled with Apple’s pricing policy. Buchholz said they need to “get in charge of pricing”. Apple’s regulations have the absurd side effect that an iPhone version of Germany’s most important news magazine, Der Spiegel, will cost more than the print version. Its price will soon jump to €3.99, after the €2.99 introductory offer is over, while the paper sells for €3.80.

Therefore Gruner + Jahr appears to be at the helm of establishing a totally competing platform to the iPad. “We are in talks with nearly all big and small German publishers, also with [our big competitors] Springer and Burda”, Buchholz said in a press conference after his speech.

Oddly, Gruner + Jahr has jumped the gun before the official April 12 event, and the WePad’s hardware spec is now getting out there. Gadget geeks have posted interesting links, such a possible WePad prototype running Windows. It also appears that the WePad will be made by OEM Pegatron, a company connected to the iPhone, ironically.

So far Neofonie isn’t very helpful on what ebooks formats will be supported. Its latest product sheet says again that the iPad uses a “proprietary Apple format for iBooks store” while, they claim, the WePad is better for supporting “all open formats, additionally premium formats”. This repeats their statement which was criticised after our latest TechCrunch post.

The Neofonie WePad has similar form and function as the wet dreams of our Crunchgear editors, but facts are that the German Android device has a bigger multitouch screen and a faster CPU than the iPad. Also it runs Flash, has USB ports, an inbuilt card reader and expandable memory. Additionally it allows complete multitasking and has a webcam. Beat that baby.

The WePad is set to arrive sooner to German stores than its Apple counterpart and will be significantly cheaper than the iPad, says Neofonie CEO Helmut Hoffer von Ankershoffen. Preorders and deliveries are planned for next month and that’s no April Fool’s joke, he insisted in a small chat on the WePad’s Facebook site. At first I thought it was a fake, because some specs feel too great and the choice of OS sounds just weird: a Linux derivate with Android on top. That’s Linux with Linux inside, which makes it possible to install apps from the Android Market as well as special Adobe Air software from Neofonie.

The company from Berlin, although unknown, is no newcomer. The 12 years old Neofonie GmbH is a software company that also runs a search enginge called WeFind and sells an epublishing platform by the name of WeMagazine. It makes newspapers and magazines readable on computers and smartphones, and that’s also where they see the real business for their WePad tablet PC.

The WePad provides elderly users in the core target group of newspaper and magazine publishing houses, who generally have little to no experience with PCs with intuitive and fast access to the digital world of their children and grandchildren (Internet, e-mail, social media, etc.).

For publishing houses, every reader gained with the WePad represents a direct and long-term customer relationship, the foundation for paid content, extensive customer knowledge and new forms of customer communication. While platforms like Apple iTunes and Amazon Kindle force publishing houses into the role of a simply a content supplier, the WePad allows publishing houses to retain access to and knowledge of their audience.

So the WePad doesn’t want to do away only with Apple’s iPad but also with the Amazon Kindle, reveals the latest factsheet. That’s a tall order. Publishing houses should acquire the device and brand it with their own labels to “move traditional print readers into the digital world in a targeted manner. Print brands can then become online brands, thus minimising the contact with established Internet players like Google Amazon and Apple.”

First commenters do already suspect an alliance between the WePad and Germany’s biggest publisher, Springer, which is also based in Berlin. The many screenshots with Springer’s Hamburger Abendblatt on the WePad would be a hint.

Springer is the strongest proponent of paid content in Europe. Since November, the company blocks users with iPhones and Android devices from reading most of their newspapers’ websites with the phones’ browsers. Instead they shall buy the apps for newspapers like Europe’s biggest daily, BILD, or Springer’s B.Z. Maybe we just saw the birth of a German newspaper tablet. A working prototype was on show at the world’s largest computer expo, CeBIT, two weeks ago.

In December, Germany’s most prolific startup founders pumped millions from France and Sweden into their Internet companies. Now the three brothers have secured a €5 million second round for their Groupon clone Citydeal, which they only founded in December.

The new investment comes from an international group made up of the Swedish Investment AV Kinnevik, along with Germany’s Holtzbrinck Ventures and eVenture Capital Partners and, of course, the Samwers’ own incubator Rocket Internet.

In January, the same set of investors already provided €4 million of funding and a third round is said to be in the making.

Berlin-based Citydeal claims to be the market leader among the 15 or more Groupon clones in Germany. The site offers daily bargains of up to 50 per cent discounts on stuff to do, see, eat and buy in 40 cities across Germany. The offers 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.

Citydeal plans to use the new investment to fund further expansion and related marketing activities. With plenty of money in the bank and the Samwers’ SEO connections, the company looks destined for future growth. It already claims to have increased its user numbers “by 1,000 per cent from January to February”, with the Internet measurement firm Nielsen allegedly counting “ten times more users for Citydeal than for its next smaller competitor” – a likely reference to Dailydeal from Last.FM’s first investor Stefan Glänzer, which also comes second in Google Ad Planner’s unique user numbers.

While hastily launching in 40 different cities in Germany, the company has also quietly started to roll out internationally. Citydeal already has local websites and bargain offers in six other European countries: UK, France, Italy, Spain, Austria and Switzerland.

And although Germany’s Mr Startup, Lukasz Gadowski of Team Europe Ventures, recently declared that he doesn’t believe in the Groupon model for Europe because it’s very capital intensive and we simply don’t have the American coupon culture, the market here seems to be getting hotter and hotter. German Groupon clones are blossoming like mushrooms and even regional newspapers are launching their own copycats.

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. Customers 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.

Although Germany’s Mr Startup, Lukasz Gadowski of Team Europe Ventures, recently explained that he doesn’t believe in the Groupon model for Europe because it’s very capital intensive and we simply don’t have this American coupon culture, the market is hot right now. At least four German copycats were launched in the last week of December – CoupoMania, DailyDeal, Heimatpreis and MyCityDeal – shortly after Groupon announced a hefty $30 million series B financing.

For the Samwer brothers it seems to have been easy to found MyCityDeal. The nosy startup blog Gründerszene detected that they recently reshuffled a number of personnel inside of their incubator Rocket Internet. The founders of one of their recently busted startups – Beautydeal – simply got a new assignment. Beautydeal offered high class perfumes and cosmetics at discount prices but had to close in December, allegedly after their only supplier ceased working with them under pressure from brand producers who didn’t want to see prices diluted.

A sorry loss for Beautydeal’s other main stake holder, DuMont Venture, who probably has to write off his investment, although the VC company claims it’s only in “winter sleep“. Meanwhile, the Samwers start over and continue with what they do best: Invest other people’s money through their startup assembly line.

December began with a capital injection of an undisclosed amount in Rocket Internet’s Swoopo clone Dealstreet from Crédit Agricole Private Equity, one of Europe’s biggest VC funds which manages more than €400 million. The French VC firm is not only interested in Deal Street’s penny auctions site but also in a long term partnership to “construct and develop of innovative web business models out of Germany”. A weird justification for an investment in a startup clone, but they’re not alone.

Three days before Christmas, the Swedish holding company Kinnevik announced a €35 million investment and a name change for Rocket Internet. Kinnevik will own a mix of equity and warrants that in total gives it a right to acquire 25 per cent over time if all warrants are exercised. The new name is European Internet Holding.

Rumours say that Rocket Internet had to buy out their former investment partner before they could accept the Swedish money. United Interned is one of Germany’s biggest DSL and e-mail providers and also the mothership to one of the UK’s and US’ cheapest web hosters 1&1. They jointly invested with the Samwer’s European Founders Fund (EFF) since 2007.

It strikes us as noteworthy that that the three brothers are now concentrating on partners from outside the industry, to not say that it’s “dumb money”. Crédit Agricole is a retail banking group, owned by 41 rural banks, and the 73 years old Kinnevik also lacks a startup track record. The Samwers had already taken money from mail-order company Robert Klingel GmbH & Co. KG, a vendor of choice for the 50+ generation, to invest in two of their startups Plinga and Ladenzeile.

Controversially, a well know German startup founder recently trashed the Samwer brothers as “ringtone mafiosi”. He alluded to sales practices in their former company Jamba / Jamster, which got sold to Fox Mobile Entertainment, and warned of doing business with them.

Yet in 2007, the companies founded by the Samwers made turnovers of more than €1 billion per year.

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.

Admittedly, Google Ad Planner doesn’t measure the number of active members of a social network, but only the number of website visitor. Nevertheless it broadly mirrors a trend that Comscore is seeing in the US: Twitter is faring slightly better there, seeing some growth in November, but going from 19.2 million to 19.4 million unique visitors can hardly be called a huge win.

Twitter clearly isn’t gaining traction outside of the German tech crowd. While Facebook is appealing to a much wider demographic, I’ve even seen 60-somethings pop up in my friends’ social graph. Twitter’s latest rollout of a German version is unlikely to change that trend. The website consists of only a few words anyway and most Germans speak good English.

But Twitter is gaining traction among old school media lately, as newspapers open accounts and fill their dead tree pages with Tweets, especially Springer newspapers like Welt Kompakt. For CEO Matthias Döpfner, famous for his ramblings against “web communists” and content theft, Twitter is a great way to save on journalist wages. A half page of printed tweets doesn’t require any remuneration.

German politicians are discovering Twitter too. We had our first Twitter-related scandal in parliament this week. A debate in Lower Saxony had to be called off amid the chaos that a sole Tweet caused. A Greens MP tweeted that his conservative opponent was an “insufferable agitator” who was “shamelessly on the right-wing fringe”. When another assemblyman made his tweet known to the chamber, all hell broke loose. The allocation of the €25 billion state budget was immediately forgotten as an outraged conservative parliamentarian, Hans-Christian Biallas, sprang to his feet and gave the opposition the finger. As the Greens ruled out an apology, Lower Saxony premier Christian Wulff was forced to call off the debate.

That’s a nice story for newspapers, but Twitter was just the medium. Of course, the row likely wouldn’t have developed without the realtime web service. But even if all MPs and journalists turn to Twitter, its user numbers won’t necessarily grow any further in Germany.

A study from Ingolstadt even recommends installing specific Street View prohibition signs on private properties. Although local politicians apparently don’t like it, they can’t make the photo service illegal. Every single house owner has to ask Google themselves to get their removed from Street View. A complete ban would violate article 12 of Germany’s constitution which protects the freedom of occupation.

Therefore the city of Ratingen yesterday took an interesting decision: If you can’t kill it, then bill it. The finance committee ruled with 12 to 7 votes that Google has to pay €20 per kilometer to take pictures of the city. The head of Ratingen’s law department, Dirk Tratzig, had found out that a photographical capturing of the entire town is a “special usage” as defined in article 18 of the streets law of the province of Northrine Westfalia. Thus Google can be charged.

Ratingen’s streets consist of only 309 kilometers, so the fee is just €6,180 and quite easy to swallow for Google. But the city’s aim is not getting the money, but “to make it at least a little more uncomfortable” for Google, as city speaker Ulrike Elschenbroich put it. If other German cities follow the example, and maybe they impose higher fees, it could spell trouble – even for the Google.

Nuremberg is already considering similar charges for “special usage”.

The CIA World Factbook estimates that our country has 644,480 kilometers of roads. At €20 per kilometer, Google would have to pay €12,889,600 for Germany alone and the entire world would cost more than €640,000,000.

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.

The new StudiVZ apps are based on Google’s OpenSocial set of APIs. So theoretically they could also run on other networks that support the standard, like MySpace, Friendster or LinkedIn. But in practice every platform has different requirements, says Wooga founder Jens Begemann, and needs its own version of each app. That’s why his company, which he founded in January, concentrates exclusively on the VZ networks and on Facebook. Wooga’s first social game, Brain Buddies, is free but they plan to release four games per year and will charge for virtual goods in games. The company behind StudiVZ,  VZ-Netzwerke, will take 30 per cent of every app’s sales or advertising revenue.

Playing Wooga's Brain Buddies on StudiVZ.

CEO Markus Berger-de León has applied tight security policies to third-party apps to avoid the type of scams that TechCrunch recently dug up on Facebook and MySpace. Not only because he needs to regain confidence after all three of the company’s social networks got hacked and were subsequently blackmailed in October with the intruder finally committing suicide in jail. But also because the German online privacy laws are among the strictest in the world, even Google Analytics is in danger of being banned in our country. “Most Facebook apps are basically illegal under German law”, says Berger-de León, because they pass too much private data to third parties without the users’ consent.

To address this, VZ-Netzwerke works with so-called “business cards”: For every app, users have to complete a form with the information they want to share. False names and incomplete data are also possible. This is contrast with the approach that other social networks take where all apps are given access to profile data, photos and buddy-lists etc. Most users will probably only work with two or three business cards, depending on their desired degree of anonymity. Every app gets thoroughly reviewed before approval and 3rd party ad networks are forbidden. All advertising sales are handled by VZ-Netzwerke, with revenue shared with the app providers. This obviously helps VZ-Netzwerke generate additional revenue but it also avoids scammy ads that trick users with private photos or personal information to make them look like messages from friends, says Berger-de León.

Users can share their own data with an app, not that of their friends. For app providers it’s also impossible to converge a user’s data from one app to another into a unified profile. When an app gets uninstalled, the provider loses all the user’s data. And finally, the social network regularly erases all app user data. After 24 hours the app provider has to re-download the user’s data from VZ-Netzwerke’s servers.

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.

One option could be the continuation of make.tv as an independent project but with a new structure, new partners and probably tied to another company. Another possibility is that the company will be absorbed by another video service provider. But as a standalone platform, make.tv is apparently unable to survive. The service had only 60 paying customers but a lot more users of the free version.

To broadcast live, users need nothing more than a webcam or video camera connected to a laptop running a web browser. No extra hardware or software is necessary. Make.tv’s pricing, from €0 to €199 per month, attracted small businesses, musicians and event organizers, but also renowned users like the German Liberal Party (FDP), the Catholic church or one of Germany’s biggest tv stations, ZDF. But since its inception in November 2007, make.tv has appealed to far less users than planned. Paying customers were clearly sparse.

The 15 strong company received an undisclosed sum from public-private VC High-Tech Gründerfonds in November 2008, which combines investments from the German Federal Ministry for Economy and Technology, the KfW Banking Group as well as industry companies BASF, Robert Bosch, Carl Zeiss, Daimler, Deutsche Telekom and Siemens.

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.

Dailyplaces on iPhone.

The pitch of Dailyplaces is centered in their so called Points of Interest (POI). Here’s their pitch:

Share your world with dailyplaces:

With the dailyplaces-iPhone application you are able to capture all moments in your life with the dedicated locations either to save it for private purposes or to share it with other dailyplaces-users. With only few clicks you can create your individual POIs with a photo and a short description.

Whether you want to recommend a restaurant just around the corner, to remember the parking lot of your car, to share a beautiful outlook during hiking or just to present a funny or intersting moment of your life – You can use the dailyplaces-application to save all kind of those location-based information with just a few clicks.

All POIs will be published at the individual daiyplaces-website of the user and are available for other internet or mobile users as well.  All POIs can be send to the Twitter-network to also communicate with the followers. POIs of other users can be commented and users are able to search for followers within the dailyplaces-network. The POIs of those followers will have a dedicated area within the application.

Feature overview:

• create POIs with a dedicated position
• add photos and description to the POI
• save POIs at the individual website
• administrate POIs including status (private / public)
• show POis at the map
• search for POis nearby
• search for latest POIs
• comment POIs
• identify other users as “follower”
• search POIs of your “followers”der POIs der “Freunde”

This doesn’t have the gaming element of Foursquare or Gowalla, no mayors to overthrow and no badges to earn. But the feature list is longer.

Every user can get their own webpage like USERNAME.dailyplaces.net and customize it with photos and profile information. The page shows all the user’s POI and makes these recommendations searchable for others. Already existing locations, that have been created by others, can get timeline updates from every Dailyplaces user. That’s especially handy for Saturday night: Clubbers can check out parties in realtime on their iPhone and see where the crowd is at that very moment. Party photos are uploaded straight from the iPhone.

The integration with Twitter is very deep. Every public update gets published as a Tweet that contains the corresponding location in a special shortlink like http://dlpc.es/4xb for Zurich or http://dlpc.es/p7b for the famous Boticelli exhibition in Frankfurt’s Städel Museum. More examples are here. If you post from your iPhone, the Dailyplaces app leverages GPS to automatically add your comment to the right POI near your location. Of course you can also tap another point on the map to update it.

Every photo and every message from the Dailyplaces website or iPhone app gets tagged with geodata, so you can see its location in advanced Twitter software like Seesmic. Of course it’s also possible to search on the iPhone for POI near your location or to show only the newest ones. Other people’s POI can receive your comments and you can follow interesting users’ updates like you already know it from Twitter.

That is, if you have the app – which no-one does right now. So we’ll have to get back to you when Apple releases the app…

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.

A key advantage of Conferendum is the pay-as-you-go model. In contrast to big web conference players, there is no subscription fee for the host but a prepaid solution for charging attendees. Conferendum only makes money if the trainer does by taking a 25 percent service fee. Trainers can charge between €0.01 and €0.50 per minute or €1 to €30 per event for every student.

That’s cheap enough to appeal to freelancers or small businesses, like tutors or accounting experts, looking to make extra money with evening courses over the web. An underpaid teacher from Montevideo could double their income by teaching math to pupils in Madrid. The user interface is already available in 21 languages so there’s quite a bit of potential – parents pay up to €3 billion for private tuition every year in Germany alone.

Conferendum payments are based entirely on Paypal. The participants use it to pre-pay at least €10 that can be spent on the various trainers offering courses via the platform. At the end of every month, trainers get their Conferendum account balance transferred paid through Paypal.

Taking the product for a spin, I was surprised how polished Conferendum looks and how well it works, given that everything is programmed in Java to make it run on virtually every OS. Neither teachers nor pupils have to install any software. Having clicked the invitation link to a training session, the browser opens and a small window pops up to configure sound and microphone. And off we go.

CEO Wolfgang Berger sees 50 to 70 training sessions every day, held by nutritionists, marketing coaches or financial advisers. That’s still not enough to fly on a VC’s radar, he admits. After meetings with potential investors the feedback was that Conferendum is great, but that he should come back when it makes €1 million in turnover. That’s a feasible objective in a few months, Berger thinks, still an offer from one business angel had to be turned down because he wanted to invest a ridiculously small amount. That’s so typical for Germany.

Having proven the concept and ironed out bugs since March, Conferendum already makes a small profit. But the system can easily support several concurrent e-learning sessions with 1,000 or so participants. That’s why Berger is looking for investor money to spend on marketing. If he was in the US, he would probably just need a small endorsement by a prominent user like Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki or Jason Calacanis. They’ve already made other startups fly. Any such figure here in Germany?

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. Content can always be reshuffled for the next day’s edition. Even Russia’s Komsomolskaja Prawda is a partner as well as blogs like Cult of Mac, Slashdot and Netzpolitik.

Niiu licenses blog posts and complete newspaper pages to print them at night on a super-duper digital printing engine from Océ. Delivery is done by the German postal service or OHL Logistics. During the first six months only the newspapers get paid for their content, bloggers have to wait for Niiu to figure out their revenue share model. They’re not being discriminated against, says co-founder Wanja S. Oberhof, but it’s a practical issue: Newspaper pages have a known size and established prices while blogs have a more variable output. Their articles are longer or shorter and on some days a blogger writes nothing if he/she doesn’t feel like.

Niiu aims to get 5,000 subscriptions in six months for their €1.80 newspaper, this number is needed to break even. Students pay only €1.20 and revenue also comes from targeted ads, depending on the readers’ residence or university. As of today, Niiu reportedly has more than 10,000 registrations, although it must be noted that the first edition is currently free.

The service is being run as a six month pilot, with delivery only in Berlin. If it flops, 23 year old Wanja and his partner Hendrik Tiedemann aged 27 can go back to university where they still have to finish their business studies. Niiu’s launch was 2.5 years in the making and the two of them have invested a lot of money, says Wanja, that’s why they are planning for the long term.

However, as always execution matters: At 4 PM I was still waiting for my Niiu newspaper to arrive. That’s too late for breakfast, even in bohemian Berlin.

Plinga’s new investor is quite old school. The 89 year old mail-order company Robert Klingel GmbH & Co. KG from Pforzheim took over 13 percent via a capital injection. As a vendor of choice for the 50+ generation, Klingel is especially famous for glossy paper catalogues with stunning lingerie models in pretty old-fashioned underwear (I’m told). But it has also run one of Germany’s biggest online shops for the last ten years.

Now Klingel has become the second biggest Plinga stakeholder, after the Samwers’ incubator Rocket Internet (63%).

Plinga's Fun Cards at Facebook

The German GameBizz blog, that broke the story, sees social games investment as case of “dumb money”. In other words, an older, non-tech company can diversify its business together with an experienced incubator that breeds one internet startup after another.

Klingel’s timing looks good as the industry is shocked after the October bancruptcy of Europes’s once biggest mail-order retailer. German company Quelle had to lay off 7,000 people after 82 years in business. Under these circumstances social games companies, with yearly revenues of $250 million at Zynga alone, look much hotter than somewhat dated underwear catalogues.

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″.

Q3 revenues were also up 27% from the previous year to €11.7 million (Q3/2008: €9.18 million), and 8% over the last quarter (Q2/2009: €10.79 million). The EBITDA margin was increased over the last quarter from 23% to 25%. Operating six-month EBITDA also improved slightly, from €8.7 million in 2008 to €8.8 in 2009.

      Xing shares since September.

As of September 30, Xing had 8.3 million members. Most of them (43.4%) are still living Germany, Austria or Switzerland, where Xing is the market leader. But lately the social network is boosting its member growth in Turkey and Spain. The Company reported its strongest quarterly results to date in these countries, gaining market share from its competitors.

This September’s buyout rumours on TechCrunch, which were based on a small €3 jump in Xing’s shares but caused a much higher spike after analysts refered to them, don’t seem to materialize. LinkedIn founder Konstantin Guericke has given a good explanation why the long awaited takover offer from his company doesn’t come: It’s just not necessary. LinkedIn grows “by the size of one Xing in every three months”.

The free web application searches online video platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, MyVideo or Sevenload for music and displays the results by artist and album. Everything is programmed in Flash, with Adobe Flex as the development framework so that it works on nearly every modern browser. Users simply drag their search results into a playlist and see the videos immediately without leaving Semsix’s website. There is no registration or login required, a small button on the upper right plays the videos in full screen and all playlists can be saved or sent to friends via a link.

Semsix' video app plays Lady Gaga

In addition, Semsix evaluates the quality of music videos and lists the best version available for a specific song. For instance, an official music video will always be preferred to a mobile phone recording. The two computer science students of Stuttgart Media University, Martin Jakobus (23) and Ingo Schock (28), developed an algorithm which takes the user ratings on video websites into account and compares the recording’s duration to the original.

Semsix is also useful if you can’t remember the name of a song or an artist. The built-in lyrics search finds a song by entering just a few words from the vocals. For Karaoke fans it displays the lyrics alongside the song. Also web radio can be searched by station name, music genre or by the city in which a station is based. To top it all, Semsix will suggest other songs that fit the music taste of the user. Suggestions come from LastFM and the radio databank Radio Time is used for the web radio search. Meta information for albums and artists is drawn from the music database MusicBrainz and Lyrics are provided by lyricsfly.

That’s a really great mashup for a side project started by two students as recent as March. In only weeks Ingo developed the user interface and the server application while Martin coded interfaces to third-party video websites and the search algorithm. The result looks better than the music searches from Google, Yahoo or Bing. And of course it has less annoying ads than forefather MTV: just one skyscraper banner beside the Semsix player to cover the server costs.

Although their website looks like a professional project (with 5,000 unique users daily), Ingo and Martin have not funded a company. Only now are they beginning to think about the issue because the first investors have knocked on their door. “We have turned down all offers because investors were only acting upon only their own interests and not the interests of our users”, says Martin. “Semsix shall always be free and usable without login.”

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 Axel 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.

   Guinea pig: BZ Berlin for iPhone

Until now, Bild.de was Germany’s second most visited news site with 5.6m unique users and 1.36bn page impressions per month. It’s catching up fast with the market leader Spiegel online which is only on 20,000 unique users away. But this growth could suffer a setback as the site’s holding company, Axel Springer AG, plans to implement this pay per use model.

Springer announced in August that in the long run every smartphone user will have to pay to access their content. The iPhone is the first device because its users are “especially ready to pay“, as CEO Mathias Döpfner puts it. The first guinea pig was the €0.79 iPhone app for Berlin’s biggest newspaper BZ that was released in October. Admittedly he has a point – iPhone users do pay for apps.

But blocking iPhone users, which in the US now make up 50 percent of smartphone web traffic and blow everyone else away with their data usage, is a dangerous move.

Döpfner himself says that today the iPhone makes up more than a half of Springer’s mobile users. As long as competitors give their news away for free and iPhone users can read the two newspapers on their laptops without a charge, his company can only lose, at least in theory.

Of course, the strategy may well back-fire, even when it could use more readers, unimpared by pay walls. BILD gets constantly censured by the German Press Council for sensational journalism and Springer’s prestigious title, Die Welt, has been losing money for most of its life since its foundation in 1946.

This bizarre strategy from Axel Springer is in marked contrast to other European newspapers, which are in the main a lot more generous to iPhone users.

The UK’s Guardian newspaper has a full iPhone browser version as well as a great generic mobile website. Even the prestigious Financial Times has a gratis iPhone app to access most of its content for free.

Incurable news junkies can get their fix from the €1.59 iPhone app World Newspapers which provides free access to 4,000 newspapers in almost 200 countries.

Seems like Axel Springer either didn’t get the memo – or it thinks its cunning plan will work.

Olivier Faurax had asked for a proper version of Skype for Mandriva Linux and was told:

We understand that many users complain that there is no Mandriva version at present. We are happy to be able to inform you that Skype will from now on be part of the open source community. Therefore Linux developers will be enabled to influence the development of the Skype client for Linux – which will most certainly result in specific versions for the different distributions.

As incredible as this sounded, the wording was unclear so Faurax asked for a release date. He was told that “the Linux Skype version will become open source in the nearest future”. Pretty amazing if it referred to the complete Skype source code. As many devices with an embedded OS run some flavour of Linux, those devices could also be made capable of making and receiving Skype calls.

An example are WiFi routers like the VoIP capable Fritz!Box that millions of German customers got for free with their DSL connection. Not only does the router run Linux but it’s issued with regular firmware updates that add new powerful features by maker AVM. The latest free additions are a print server, answering machine and music streaming functionality. It’s also an analog telephony adapter which means that I can connect a phone to make and receive VoIP calls without the need for a computer.

I use it with ten different VoIP providers and therefore I am reachable under German, British, US and even Peruvian numbers on the same phone. The only thing that’s missing is Skype, that’s why I rarely use it. And it will probably stay that way, judging from the latest Skype blog post. After Olivier’s story got Slash Dotted and everyone went crazy, Skype declared officially:

Yes, there’s an open source version of Linux client being developed. This will be a part of larger offering, but we can’t tell you much more about that right now. Having an open source UI will help us get adopted in the “multicultural” land of Linux distributions, as well as on other platforms and will speed up further development. We will update you once more details are available.

That doesn’t sound so euphoric anymore. The statement only refers to an “open source user interface” not the entire Skype source code that, crucially, includes the needed protocols for voice transmission through firewalls, for example. As I understand it, an “open source user interface” alone won’t be sufficient for developers to utilise Skype as a service inside of other software or devices. That’s probably to avoid becoming “the dumbest pipe of all”, as I once called it in a blog post.

When people can make their Skype calls on other software, normal phones or wherever, they could potentially use Skype for inbound calls and for the free Skype-to-Skype calls only. Paid outbound calls to phone networks would be channeled over Skype’s competitors who offer cheaper prices. Companies like Sipgate or Voipbuster always stress this point in their advertising. In August, I got this email:

As it is now becoming more and more clear that Skype’s services will not be available much longer because their software license will expire, it is now the time to switch to VoipBuster. [...] To make sure everyone can still use Voice Over IP at even cheaper rates than Skype, Voipbuster has lowered loads of destinations.

Sipgate basically said the same in a press release from August. Everyone wants to eat from Skype’s lunch. That’s why they’re treading so carefully with open source.

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. Clearly he was talented at something I guess. He even made a YouTube video of it.

However, he wasn’t so great at the blackmail thing. Bizarrely he asked for just €80,000 and threatened to sell the information to gangs in Eastern Europe. The plan didn’t come off 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 tragic, and perhaps sinister, turn.

It’s being reported today that the suspected hacker has committed suicide in jail. He was found dead in his prison cell in the juvenile detention centre Plötzensee. Berlin’s justice administrator didn’t give more details and said only that the detainee hadn’t shown any indications of wanting to commit suicide.

StudiVZ has now switched off the comments in their post about the incident on their company blog to avoid any damning speculation.

However anonymous commentors at other places [in German] say that the company has “blood on its hands”.

Not a great quarter, then.

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).

Articles sit alongside personal contributions from political heavyweights like European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, German car producers association’s president Matthias Wissmann or bishop Margot Käßmann.

Right now articles will be published in German, but an English version is planned for later. When the authors deal with tricky subjects like Afghanistan, Guantanamo or the state of the European Union it’s not to break news but to explain what the issues are. News can be found all over the web for free, that’s why it’s so difficult to make money from it. The European therefore positions itself as “first online magazine”, in the words of chief editor Alexander Görlach. The website aims to be an Economist or Slate Magazine for the internet generation which barely reads on paper anymore.

That’s not necessary a secret sauce for big revenues – but three weeks after launch Gadowski and Görlach, who each hold 50 per cent of the company The European Magazine Publishing GmbH, seems quite satisfied with their numbers. Without giving many details, they revealed to us that the first day had 5,000 readers and 30,000 page impressions. Follower numbers on Twitter, Facebook or StudiVZ are skyrocketing and the first month’s revenues from website sponsoring are three times bigger than originally scheduled in the business plan. Banner advertising is another revenue stream and later they may introduce a premium membership for €10 or €15 per month.

“Profit is not my key intention at The European”, says Lukasz Gadowski. The website of his VC company, Team Europe Ventures, lists the project as strategic investment while other companies are called lead or co-investments until they finally appear under exits. Of course he will strive for an exit as he does with all his startups, but an option could be a trade sale to an established publisher like Holtzbrinck. Meantime, break even is scheduled for mid 2010.

“Maybe The European is the future of publishing?”, Alexander Görlach muses. He aims to make it an independent market player which doesn’t need to be sucked up by an oldschool media house. At least The European is already quite different from the new media of our era. Other than all these WordPress blogs the website has its own esthetic, which looks more like a glossy paper magazine, and in contrast to the famous Huffington Post it even pays its writers. And from this writer’s perspective, the fees are quite good for an online publication.

Görlach is launching this new home for journalism during the most disastrous time for newspapers and a very promising one for online publishers. Good journalism can’t be had for free, he insists, it’s a craft which must be learned and paid. Not everyone can do it, that’s also his answer to the German bloggers’ Internet Manifesto which rocked the online world last month. Their declaration of dead of journalism is just not true, the 32 years old with two PhD titles remarks. It’s just a self perception of a small caste of bloggers who are much less important than they think, he says.

Of course he won’t make a lot of blogger friends with this kind of talk. The first German blogger reactions criticized The European for an elitist style and even a neo conservative spin in their articles. But as Görlach sees it, this is the “envy” of those who weren’t asked to write for The European. At least the website’s well paying advertisers like Volkswagen or Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft, a large-scale industry thinktank, seem to like it.

And I daresay investor Gadowski is happy with such a backing.

The startup has originated over €10m in loans this year alone, and over €16m since its inception in 2006. The company makes more monthly business than its US competitor Prosper, Artopé calculates. Although the US market is bigger and Prosper got five times more VC funding than Smava (a whopping $40m), in September 2009 Prosper originated $1.22m in loans (€818K) while Smava made nearly twice that amount: €1.5m.

One obvious growth driver is the current credit crunch. Banks in Germany hesitate to lend money, leading to a tight credit situation, especially for small and medium sized companies and the self-employed. Smava lets its users conduct their money business directly with each other — no bank involved. This leads to lower costs, more transparency and more self-determination for all participants.

Berlin-based Smava generates revenue by collecting a one-time fee of 2.0 or 2.5 per cent on funded loans from borrowers. Lenders can use the service for just €4. Over 2,500 borrowers have already taken a loan. Also, over 10,000 lenders show that a good return can go along with a meaningful investment. Lenders can read in each loan listing what happens with their money, providing a ‘feel-good’ sense of supporting people in projects they otherwise couldn’t afford. This so called “social return” is increasingly appealing for lenders in times of the financial crisis and complex financial products.

The man had used crawler software to harvest detailed user information (residence, date of birth, relationship status, hobbies, favourite music, favourite movie, …) not only only from the group’s networks for adult people, StudiVZ and MeinVZ, but also from Germany’s biggest social network for pupils, SchülerVZ. The 20 year old man asked for €80,000. Kind of a pathetic amount, don’t you think?

If the company had refused to pay, he threatened to sell the information to gangs in Eastern Europe. The true number of the stolen records remains unclear. But in a blog post from May he had already bragged how his bot could copy 48,000 profiles in just four hours and even posted a video on Youtube.

The case developed very fast since last weekend, as you can see in the post at the StudiVZ company blog which is full of strike-throughs and updates. What started as a white hat attack on SchülerVZ, a network with 5m members from 12 to 21 years, turned into a crime story.

At Friday the whistleblower blog Netzpolitik.org received data of more than 1m minors from another anonymous source that only wanted to point at a security hole in SchülerVZ. He had no intentions to sell the records and also has used a crawer software to obtain these data. No hacker skills were necessary, although IP number checks and the website’s Captchas should have prevented the harvest.

The Netzpolitik.org post about this leak drew out the other hacker, known only as Mathias L., who obviously had less noble intentions. He bragged in his now defunct blog that his bot “sVZ Crawler”, based on PHP, JS, Ajax and different shell scripts, was better and that he could download much more detailed user information. As a proof, he uploaded some of the data to a Hacker and Cracker internet forum where at least 17 other users downloaded it.

On Sunday he paid a visit to the social networks’ office in Berlin upon invitation by VZ-Netzwerke, and was welcomed by the waiting police. He has already admitted the attempted extortion, the public prosecutor’s office declared on Tuesday.

Mobilinga plans to invest the money to grow their iPhone software business. The two man company will create ten new jobs in product development, marketing and content generation in the next few months. Mobilinga claims to sell more than 10,000 apps monthly, which puts them among the top sellers of the App Store. Only 19 percent of iPhone/iPod Touch applications have more than 10,000 users and a mere 5 percent see more than 100,000, mobile advertising company AdMob revealed in its May 2009 metrics.

From this week on, Mobilinga programs can also be downloaded in the US and Canada. For $2.99 the Germans teach you how to speak Latin-American Spanish, French, German and Italian with their “mobilinga for Your Trip” line. Each learning application contains 1,000 sentences from different areas of life and there is a recording of every sentence which can be played out loud. This means that your cell phone can also help to ask for the bill or directions.

CEO Matthias Kose says further apps as well as internationalization will follow now. After more than ten years in mobile commerce, with different companies and varying success, he is now a big fan of the iPhone. The App Store has taught users that they have to pay for attractive mobile apps, Kose claims. Mobilinga’s small prices can attract impulse buyers, they are loaded completely to the iPhone and don’t cause follow-up costs for data transmission or further modules.