This week’s TechCrunch Europe Job of the Week is for a Lead Architect with ChannelFlip Media.

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Please help me everyone, I’m confused.

Today the WITsend blog on ComputerWeekly, a blog called ‘A place for women in IT’, asks “Will tech companies ever learn?” Apparently Microsoft, in making girl band The Sugababes the new face of Windows 7 (at least in the UK), has made a mistake. WiTsend says that The Sugababes are aimed at tweeny-bopper eight-year-old girls who are “not exactly the biggest consumers of computer operating systems”. Thus the campaign will not appeal to grown up women who do actually buy PCs.

Admittedly the blog admits that in using a pop band (it quite easily have been a boy band I guess) who are not known for their intellectual capacity so much as their ability to kick out a pop track while looking good, Microsoft is cleverly showing that just about anyone, wow even bubble-gum pop bands, can use Windows 7.

[UK] If you are a technology startup and want to network with Silicon Valley type then one way of doing it is to go to South By South West Interactive. Those who attend in the past have informally called it ‘Spring Break for Geeks’, but it is a little more significant that that suggests. Twitter took off in the US by launching there in 2007, Foursquare launched there last year and it’s generally a pretty interesting platform to test the waters of American geekdom.

Organised by Chinwag and the UKTI, the Digital Mission (a kind of punk trade mission) to SXSWi is back for it’s second year after a successful trip to Austin in 2009. There are 35 slots available on the 2010 mission (12-16th March, 2010) and applications are now open – but the dealine is Friday, 27th November so you better hurry. TechCrunch Europe is a media partner because to get on the mission all you have to have as a company is a UK headquarter, so in other words any European company with a UK HQ counts. Thus, this year, Zemanta, which is really built in Slovenia but has a UK HQ, came along. The rest of the selection criteria is below.

[Russia] Russian online game developer Nival Network has closed a $5 million round from an undisclosed investor but will use the funds to develop Prime World, its online strategy game with social networking features aimed at the Russia and former Soviet countries.

Nival Network is currently majority owned by founder and CEO Sergey Orlovskiy. Software vendor 1C Group owns a 30% stake in Nival Network, reports Quintura.

LeWeb has published its schedule for the upcoming global conference for tech in Paris, and it’s looking pretty good. TechCrunch Europe is a media partner and is helping to organise the startup competition, so that’s our interest declared. That said Loic and Geraldine Le Meur have clearly finessed the event back towards tech companies and brought a new focus on Europe I think. Here are some highlights they’ve just published:

-Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan will speak at noon on Dec 10th

-The Real Time Web theme will be present in the form of Jack Dorsey (inventor of Twitter) opening the event, followed by announcements from Microsoft, Facebook, MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn and Ustream.

-Mobile applications will be quite high on the agenda with a panel including Shazam, Tapulous, SGN and others.

- Google’s Marissa Mayer returns to keynote again as is Skype founder and partner at Atomico Niklas Zennstrom and YouTube’s founder and visionary Chad Hurley

Congratulations to the Financial Times. It’s taken them 10 days and three reporters to confirm our previous story that Microsoft and News Corp, along with plenty of other newspaper publishers, are in actual, formal discussions to encourage them to de-index from Google and will incentivise them with premium positions on the Bing search engine, revenue share and, in all likelihood, cold hard cash.

The interesting thing about this story is that it is typical old media. It says talks are at “an early stage” but doesn’t even mention the fact that we had cast iron information that the actual meeting took place on November 10.

Also: The FT also doesn’t link to our story – plus ca change. Why? because it’s an “article” not a blog post. As is usual with traditional media, articles very rarely link, while their blog posts (increasingly, but it’s a taken a while) do.

Apparently “the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers”. Yes, we know. We listed them in our story: Associated Newspapers, Germany’s Axel Springer and publishers from Poland and Italy, among others. We even know the name of the man at Microsoft heading up the discussion: Microsoft’s Peter Bale, Executive Producer of MSN UK.

The FT has no other new information that hasn’t been previously reported.

I’m sure I’ll get accused of trying to score points, but that’s not my aim. And I have the utmost respect for my colleagues on the FT. But there is a serious point here.

[UK] This week Stephen Fry – British actor, journalist, celebrity ‘Tweeter’ and self-confessed technophile – appeared alongside Biz Stone, Founder and Chief Executive of Twitter and Reid Hoffman, Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn. They discussed the future impact of social media.

The discussion was not very ‘tech’ or ’startup’ oriented, but it did touch very much on the cultural and social impact of social networks, and Twitter in particular. Stephen Fry in particular mounted a robust defence of social networks as culturally positive, not negative.

I asked a question toward the end about what Twitter does when Skype and, perhaps Facebook, enable status updates to be as public and open as Twitter, but Biz Stone simply said they ‘don’t look in the rear view mirror’. Which was not exactly a fullsome answer, but hey.

The event formed part of the Silicon Valley comes to the UK programme. The video comes from NESTA.

Here are some random upcoming events

• CloudStorm event in Paris, December 1
CloudStorm provides a showcase of cloud computing solutions covering a wide range of areas including application development and deployment, infrastructure, storage, video management and SAAS from leading European technology vendors. It is free for attendees to go to and it is paid for content – i.e. each sponsor/vendor pays for their 5 min presentation slot. These are not really startups paying to pitch, but it is actual larger CloudComputing vendors paying to promote themselves to an audience of probably startups and others. So from that point of view it could be useful. The presentations are followed by a panel discussion with visitors invited to a mini expo and networking party.

This is why I love this medium. You put something out there. Sometimes you have all the holes pluggged. Sometimes you don’t. But blog comments and latterly, Twitter conversations, can be just incredible, and go on to form a patchwork of great information around a story – even creating new stories.

That’s what’s happening on the comments on my post yesterday about the @Dinner_Guest Twitter user who is tweeting like he’s a murderer in Brighton. I figured it was interesting enough to do a quick post on it. Maybe I’ve been sucked into a dumb marketing campaign, maybe I haven’t – I’m not overly worried. I’d rather put something out there that I think is interesting than not, and I knew for sure that in this case the community out there would be great at looking into this.

German media giant Burda has used its digital arm to purchase a 25.1% share in XING, the business social network that is biggest in Germany and competes with LinkedIn. The 1,323,041 shares were sold to Burda by Cinco Capital, the investment vehicle owned by the former XING co-founder Lars Hinrichs. Priced at €36.50 per share, the deal is therefore worth €48.3 million. This makes Burda Digital the largest shareholder in XING. Burda already has positions in Glam Media, the GameDuell startup and Zooplus.

Hamburg based business social network XING 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).

[UK] Today in London a couple of hundred delegates turned up to Jeff Pulver’s 140 Conference to jaw-jaw over the nature and impact of business and society of, well, Twitter. But as various startups and social media pundits took to the stage to debate the mostly positive impact Twitter will have, a much darker side has appeared on the social site in the last few days.

@Dinner_Guest is tweeting some extremely dark stuff. Most if it is decidedly not suitable for work, and read like passages from the novel about a killer, American Psycho. Of course, this is no surprise – Twitter is big enough now to attract all sorts of crazy people.

Hacker News, the now influential news aggregator about tech startups born out of Ycombinator, has been of huge value to a community not only keen to learn but to track the latest development on the Web.

But the conversation there is distinctly Silicon Valley oriented. So I am excited to learn of a new aggregator called Uni Startups. Clearly it’s aimed at people creating startups while they are at university, but being built on Slinkset, it’s already up and running and pulling in stories. It’s also got a widget you can embed, which I’ve done below.

Tonight is the launch of the project to raise money for the charity Take Heart India, which teaches IT skills to blind and disabled people in India and helps them get skills that will employ them for the rest of their life, taking them out of the cycle of poverty. You can find out more about an LDNnudetech event to support them below, but I just want to say something first about startups, entrepreneurs and the Spirit of Punk. Yes.

This week is Global Entrepreneurship Week. This actually started out life as an initiative by the UK government, internally to the UK. But cleverly they have extended it globally and brought on partners. So all over the world there are events going on to promote the idea of entrepreneurship.

At the same time, governments all over the world are bailing out banks. Either that, or the banks are allowed to fail, taking startups and small businesses with them. It’s an impossible situation, but that’s what’s happening. Many say we are in for even more pain. Already millions are unemployed across the planet. None of this is going away anytime soon.

It’s my great pleasure to announce that I’m going to be joined by Steve O’Hear on TechCrunch Europe. Some of you may have noticed Steve’s work appear on the blog over the last month. Steve will be my Contributing Editor, and will be working closely with me on our continuing coverage of the tech scene in Europe and acting as my “wingman”. In fact, I did try to convince him that Wingman was a great title, but for some reason he preferred something with the word Editor in it. I can’t think why.

Steve has some awesome credentials. Aside from starting up the well-regarded independent gadget blog last100 (formerly a part of the ReadWriteWeb Blog Network) which he’ll continue to write, he’s written for some of the best titles out there including The Guardian, Macworld UK, Mobile Industry Review, TES, ZDNet and of course ReadWriteWeb. In particular he wrote the excellent ZDNet blog ‘The Social Web’ from 2006 to 2008. And to top it all off he previously wrote and directed the documentary film ‘In Search of the Valley’, which interviewed many leading Web 2.0 people in Silicon Valley and was released in September 2006. It was highly recommended by Mike Arrington, FYI.

As Microsoft shed its beta tag for the launch of the UK version of Bing today, TechCrunch Europe has learnt that it held a secret meeting with a group of big European publishers, mainly newspapers.

The meeting came literally days after Rupoert Murdoch said he was considering withdrawing his vast newspaper empire from Google’s index, despite the possibility of losing a lot of traffic.

What was discussed provides a glimpse of what newspaper publishers may do next, and how Bing will collude in this new war on Google.

Dave McClure has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for almost twenty years as a software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, angel investor, blogger, and internet marketing nerd. He currently runs a seed-stage investment program for Founders Fund. He is an advisor or investor for several companies including Mint, RichRelevance, Simply Hired, SlideShare and Twilio, among others. He’s also founder of Startup2Startup and GeeksOnAPlane, a tech tour that connects global tech entrepreneurs. I spoke to him at the recent global geek meetup, Rethink Hawaii about his impressions of the European startup scene following his recent travels here.

IMImobile has closed a $13 million round of financing. The financing round was led by Sequoia Capital India and includes participation from existing investor FirstMark Capital.

The significance for European venture is that IMImobile is the largest portfolio investment of SPARK Ventures, the UK-based early stage VC. SPARK did not participate in this round of financing but already holds a 28% stake in IMImobile, with a book value of £13 million. Sequoia already has interests in india including SKS Microfinance and Naukri.com.

Well, after a tonne of entries and a pretty intense sifting process, Le Web, the annual gathering of the tech tribes in Paris, has announced the names of the 16 startups that will present during the startup competition — organised for the first time this year in partnership with TechCrunch Europe.

The companies selected are either existing companies launching new products or new startups entirely. As you can probably tell from the list, Le Web is very much going back to its roots. This is Le Web’s 6th edition and the startup competition has been going on since 2006 (the 4th edition is this year). So we’ll be using this platform to help some of the earliest stage companies get traction with their ideas. I think it’s going to be exciting to watch.

Today Saul Klein, chairman and co-founder of Seedcamp, the pan-European programme for early stage startups, blogged a long post about Seedcamp’s structure and history. But over the last few weeks I’ve been meeting Saul to tease out, over long conversations, where Seedcamp is at and where it’s going. The debate is an important one, in part because Seedcamp, as the only Pan-european YCombinator-style organisation, now has a position that is largely unmatched at this level. That is at once a great thing for Europe – afterall, there was nothing else like it before, and Europe really needed a pan-European Seed fund which could also educate young startups. It’s also a potential challenge both for Seedcamp to explain how it operates – afterall, despite its laudable openness to date, let’s not forget it’s a business – and for those that want to sit outside the burgeoning Seedcamp ecosystem. The below is a lightly edited transcript of our recorded conversations so is subject to the usual caveats, though I’ve tried to keep it as faithful to our actual words as possible.

[UK] Collaboration startup Huddle has secured something of a first for a company of its size, and location. It’s signed a two-year deal with Hewlett Packard to enable direct access to its service on the 25 million business PCs HP sells annually.

Huddle will be in a suite of five trial applications included on every HP business computer, starting in the U.S. and extending to the rest of the world. That’s quite a big deal for a startup this size – and relatively unusual for one not even based in the U.S.

The deal is based on a revenue split with HP on new signups to the service, which effectively offers a discount for HP customers on Huddle’s tools. The other programs will include three HP- services and antivirus software from Symantec.

[Germany] The new version of Babbel, the language learning startup, is released today, but there’s a sting in the tail for the existing 500,000 users who thought it was a Freemium service: they will now all have to pay to use it. “Babbel is now a paid service. Freemium doesn’t work for us,” confirms managing director Markus Witte. Now only the first part of any given course can be taken for free, as a trial demo. Full access now costs between $6.65 and $11.95 per month.

I’m betting the touch-paper has been lit on a round of mobile acquisitions and consolidation with the news that Google has bought AdMob, the mobile advertising network for $750m in stock. The network was founded by Germany-based British expat Russell Buckley and CEO Omar Hamoui, among others. Admob was one of the few serious players in the market of any scale to be of interest to the likes of Google and it looks like their long-play of building and scaling their reach has paid off.

Ever since an exclusive gathering of startups and VCs at a Hampshire Hotel last year, Kristian Segerstrale, CEO and Co-founder of Playfish, has made no secret of his desire to take the social gaming fight into the very heart of the established gaming industry.

At the Founder’s Forum at the Four Seasons Hampshire last year, Segerstrale stood up in front of the assembled crowd and, as part of his presentation, showed a slide with a picture of a dinosaur, referring explicitly to Electronic Arts. He’s also reputed to have said he was going to “kill EA”.

So the PRO Founders Capital web site just went live. Since we broke the news last Summer that this new Seed stage fund for tech startups was launching on the European scene they have kept pretty quiet. Until today there was literally no Web site for this fund. Now they have one. So what can we learn about them?

Well, we know where they live now, though entrepreneurs desperate to get funding would be advised not to stumble in with a business plan unannounced.

More interesting is their strategy. Here’s their take on things: