Maxroam’s company, Cubic Telecom, has signed a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) agreement which means Cubic’s global customers can use voice, text and data while in the UK using the Vodafone UK network. So, Cubic customers living in the UK get to use the Vodafone network and local rates plus Maxroam’s competitive roaming rates in 230 countries on one SIM Card on a prepaid account you can top up.

This enables Maxroam users to be treated as if they are using calls and data as locals, using Cubic Telecom’s IMSI technology.

Vodafone was the first mobile network in the UK many years ago, and Maxroam is only its tenth partnership.

And if you’re wondering if the SIMs fit into an iPad/iPhone/Android you’ll be glad to know they can, as they are adaptable as normal or micro SIMs (see image).

Does all that mean it’s competitive with Vodafone’s rates? Hard to say with the massive variety of packages they offer, but here’s Cubic’s:

Data:
250MB for £5.02
500MB for £8.36
1GB for £15.05

Calls:
13p locally per minute and 13p to other countries.

Founder Pat Phelan tells me “Lots more MVNO”s are coming. We are looking at the global picture.” He says The Olympics are a big marketing moment for Maxroam.

The so-called #BalticMafia – startups people from the region – gets another boost in the form the StartupWiseGuys

They are now offering cold hard cash of €500 to anyone who refers a team to their startup program (which invests up to €15.000 per team) of 13 weeks in Tallinn, Estonia. That referral fee sounds a little low – until you realise exactly how much €500 gets you in Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia…

Herty Tammo, co-founder and investor, says that international startup mentors have been invited to participate to share their experience. He’s drawing people in from across the region to do that.

Jonathan Bradford, a founder and executive director at Ingite100, co-founder and MD at Springboard Cambridge is also one of the co-founders for Startup Wise Guys.

Advisor board members include Kristo Ovaska from Startup Sauna, Andris Berzins from TechHub Riga, Rokas Tamošiūnas from StartupHighway – Lithuania, Chris Kowalczyk, Gamma Rebels – Poland, Raido Pikkor, Tehnopol – Estonia.

The partners for Startup Wise Guys are Garage48, Ülemiste Technopolis, Tehnopol, Estonian Startup Leaders Club. Among international supporters are Amazon, PayPal and Microsoft.

The startup companies are supported by 13 angel investors who actively participate in the selection process getting experience in co-work and confirmation to continue their individual investments.

The application process for Startup Wise guys is open from 9th of February until 11th of March and the program starts on 25th of April.

The web-based application needs no programming or design skills, and works in the same way that you can snap a photo and share it on your social networks. Users make a statement or an argument graphically and then share it. An infographic can be embedded on a page or shared as a link or an image directly.

Uldis Leiterts, Infogr.am co-founder told me at our meetup event today TechCrunch Baltics in Riga, Latvia, that a a gallery of designs and a marketplace for professionally designed info graphic templates is also coming.

HackFwd is unusual in that it takes a 27% in a company and invests up for £200,000 per team, but that hooks the startup into its extensive international network of mentors and ‘uber-geeks’.

Here’s an inforgramme of train times from Riga to Tallin, should you wish to know such a thing…

Clusterpoint has built a database platform designed for cloud computing infrastructure which they claim is highly scalable. They are competing against open source solutions such as MongoDB.

Clusterpoint’s database software is aimed at providing better performance on modest hardware – this means bigger cost savings and energy-efficiency in data centres. The company says it has initial customers and revenue and will use BaltCap’s investment to expand internationally, including hiring senior management in the US.

Speaking at our TechCrunch Baltics event today in Riga, Latvia, Gints Ernestsons, Clusterpoint’s co-founder and CEO, says customers like Clusterpoint because reduces the number of search transactions required to access relevant data.

The platform comprises natively scalable NoSQL database software with integrated full-text search in structured and unstructured data.

Mārtiņš Jaunarajs, Investment Director at BaltCap, says they think Clusterpoint can scale into an international business. We’ll be watching.

Here is the live stream (right now it’s lunchtime but we’ll be kicking off shortly):

Appearing at the event include Aldas Kirvaitis (CEO, Cherry Media Group) who leads the Baltic daily deal operator that has grown from zero to a monthly run rate of 1.7m Euros and Baltic market dominance in less than 2 years; Jon Bradford (Managing Director, Springboard Cambridge); Carlos Eduardo Espinal (Partner, Seedcamp); , Priit Salumaa (Co-Founder and Member of the Board, Garage48); Margus Uudam (Ambient Sound Investments); Lars Hinrichs (Executive Geek & Founder, HackFwd); Kris Hiiemaa – CEO, Erply; Andres Susi – CEO, Flirtic; Vitaly Rubstein – Co-Founder and Partner, RubyLight.

Our sponsors are Mail.ru, Rubylight, Nokia, Veritweet and logistically speaking the event organisers were TechCrunch Europe and the newly-launched TechHub Riga (as is obvious on my bio and Twitter profile I’m a co-founder of TechHub in London).

Netvibes had an early lead back in the era when ‘personal start pages’ were the new new thing, but (and we won;t go into the long story here) a large pivot towards enterprise saw it moving into more of a dashboard for Fortune 500 brands, enterprises and agencies (including Coca Cola, HP, L`Oreal, US Dept. of Energy, Digitas, McCann Worldgroup, Edelman, Lufthansa, Sage). Although you’d be forgiven for not tracking its growth in that other world, it’s in fact turned into a decent enterprise story, serving over 250,000 Web apps directly into businesses and connecting internal enterprise systems (like Salesforce, SQL, ERP, etc.) with the real-time Web.

Dassault Systèmes has 135,000 customers across many industries and virtually every commercial jet gets touched by their design software at some stage.

Netvibes will remain free to its corporate users

Here’s more in their release below:

Netvibes Acquired by Dassault Systèmes, Accelerating the Future of Dashboard Intelligence for Brands and Enterprises

Netvibes brings Dashboard Intelligence to Dassault Systèmes’ 3DExperience platform, enabling companies to Listen, Learn and Act in real-time—on the Web and inside the Enterprise—like never before

San Francisco, CA—February 9, 2012—Today, Netvibes, the leading dashboard intelligence platform, announced that it has been fully acquired by Dassault Systèmes (DS) (Paris:DSY) (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions.

“With the birth of the real-time Web, companies need to adapt to everything and everyone inside and outside their borders. To accomplish this, we need a way to connect and combine different products and uses, internal and external data sources, personal and professional apps, and human curation and algorithms—across all devices and departments, in real-time and in context,” said Bernard Charlès, President and CEO, Dassault Systèmes. “Netvibes Dashboard Intelligence technology makes this possible.”

Netvibes helps Fortune 500 brands, agencies and enterprises understand the real-time Web and everything inside and outside the organization with Dashboard Intelligence: dashboard technologies that connect everything together for better decision-making. Netvibes’ award-winning dashboard publishing platform and Universal Web App (UWA) technology enable Social Enterprises to integrate all internal Enterprise platforms, databases and systems together with external cloud apps, social feeds and live sentiment from across the real-time Web, and deploy it seamlessly across all desktop and mobile platforms with native-like UI.

This move brings Netvibes’ Dashboard Intelligence technology to Dassault Systèmes 3DExperience platform, empowering Social Enterprises and users at all levels to:

· Listen to everything: Aggregate enterprise data (structured and unstructured, processes and platforms) with the real-time, social Web (news, social feeds and apps)

· Learn from everyone: Analyze all layers inside and outside the Enterprise, by combining individual and social intelligence with algorithms and data intelligence for smarter results

· Act in real-time: Adapt to make better, faster decisions with intelligent alerts that respond to internal data or public sentiment and trigger automated business actions

Dassault Systèmes enables companies to experience the world, from parts to products (e.g. planes, medical devices, buildings), from individual workers to supply chain and distribution (e.g. stores), from designing to experiencing usage scenarios. Netvibes specializes in understanding the Web in new ways, to reveal customer sentiment, brand identity and emerging influencers. Together, Netvibes contributes to Dassault Systèmes’ vision to Experience Everything in the world and on the Web.

“This partnership was born out of our mutual vision to bring Dashboard Intelligence to the entire world and all platforms and processes. To achieve this ambitious vision, we need an ambitious partner like Dassault Systèmes, whose deep authority as global technology leader will rapidly accelerate our efforts across the Enterprise world,” said Freddy Mini, CEO, Netvibes. “Imagine understanding how syncing product design and global brand sentiment would enable the ultimate end user experience. This vision will become our reality.”

Netvibes customers and users will benefit from the global resources, deep technology and algorithms Dassault Systèmes is known for around the world. Netvibes’ website, products and team will continue to provide the same award-winning dashboard experience the Netvibes brand is known for by millions of users and hundreds of agencies, brands and enterprises around the globe.

“If you like Netvibes, you will love the new Netvibes. Our brand, business, website and team will stay. What will change is that all our products will innovate even faster thanks to our deep relationship with Dassault Systèmes,” said Mini.

“With the acquisition of Netvibes, a Web 2.0 leader, Dassault Systèmes will provide the most advanced cloud offer for enterprise,” said Tariq Krim, Founder, Netvibes, Founder and CEO, Jolicloud.

To learn more about Netvibes Dashboard Intelligence products and get a private demo, visit: enterprise.netvibes.com

####

About Netvibes

Founded in 2005, Netvibes pioneered dashboard publishing, user personalization and universal Web apps (UWA). Today, Netvibes is the leading dashboard intelligence platform for the real-time Web, with offices in San Francisco and Paris.

For consumers, Netvibes Basic is the most awarded dashboard engine that helps millions of people around the world instantly dashboard everything that matters to them most. For marketing professionals, Netvibes Premium is the complete dashboard intelligence platform for brand monitoring, social analytics, campaign management and much more. For large agencies, brands and enterprises, Netvibes for Enterprise adds advanced collaboration features and offers custom deployment and development. For more information, visit: http://www.netvibes.com.

About Dassault Systèmes

As a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, Dassault Systèmes brings value to more than 115,000 customers in 80 countries. A pioneer in the 3D software market since 1981, Dassault Systèmes develops and markets PLM application software and services that support industrial processes and provide a 3D vision of the entire lifecycle of products from conception to maintenance to recycling. The Dassault Systèmes portfolio consists of CATIA for designing the virtual product – SolidWorks for 3D mechanical design – DELMIA for virtual production – SIMULIA for virtual testing – ENOVIA for global collaborative lifecycle management, and 3DVIA for online 3D lifelike experiences. Dassault Systèmes’ shares are listed on Euronext Paris (#13065, DSY.PA) and Dassault Systèmes’ ADRs may be traded on the US Over-The-Counter (OTC) market (DASTY). For more information, visit http://www.3ds.com.

Now the word on the street appears to be that he’s working on something pretty interesting. I’ve heard through the grapevine that he’s told people about a new project called Liquid Labs. I reached out for comment but he politely declined.

Still, I hear he’s been hanging out with one Michael Backes, formerly of eVenture (the Otto venture fund in Hamburg) and is now working internally at the Otto Group. Otto is the gargantuan German retailer.

Liquid Labs is registered in Pauls name and Liquid Labs GmbH is in the German company commercial register and is fully owned by the Otto Group.

So we have a former investment manager from one fund (Backes) and a Managing Partner (Jozefak) from another fund. Interesting.

Putting that all together, this looks like some sort of skunkworks for the Otto Group.

Otto has already invested in a classical venture fund (eVenture) as well as Project A Ventures, the guys who bailed on clones kings Rocket Internet. Perhaps Liquid Labs is rounding out their portfolio?

Whatever the case, we hear it’ll all be happening in Hamburg, which may buy it slightly easier terms against white-hot Berlin where it seems every engineer wandering into Alexander Platz is being hired.

LLSocial uncovered the practice, whereby if a post on Pinterest happens to link to a commerce site with an affiliate program, Pinterest uses Skimlinks – a third party service – to modifiy the link to add their own affiliate tracking code. Anyone making a purchase from that click through sends affiliate revenue, via Skimlinks, back to Pinterest. Kerching, everyone benefits.

This is very old news in the word of affiliate schemes. What is getting some people hot under the collar is that Pinterest hasn’t made this very explicit. And fair enough, they should, though I seriously doubt it would send their users running elsewhere, and – as BetaBeat candidly points out – most users would simply shrug and carry on. After all, on free services, we are the product, right?

What is more interesting is the effect this will have on Skimlinks. This could be the moment – which I for one have been waiting for – when people realise just how powerful Skimlinks’ business model could be. It puts a great deal more power and control in the hands of traditional content generators, but when applied to a social network where users are creating the content by the bucketload it could be very, very powerful.

With clones of Pinterest proliferating all over the planet, suddenly Skimlinks could be sitting on a goldmine, and that is good news for its investors.

Skimlinks has so far raised a modest $7 million, the latest from Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments late last year which put in $4.5m. Dave McClure of startup accelerator 500 Startups also participated. Other early investors include Angel investor Alex Hoye, Sussex Place Ventures, NESTA Investments and TAG.

Skimlinks’ main competitor is Google-backed VigLink, although VigLink hasn’t iterated as fast as Skimlinks, which has formed much deeper relationships with publishers a lot faster.

With offices in London, New York and San Francisco, Skimlinks is in most of the right places to talk to media owners and – increasingly – the startups that will be watching the Pinterest model with interest.

No doubt this new Pinterest story will mean Skimlinks’ phones will now start ringing off the hook.

The other slight hilarity is that – shock horror – Pinterest is actually making money on its Beta because of its relationship with Skimlinks – that is news on its own.

That Skimlinks could well be a monetization engine behind new social platforms is, for my money, the real news.

The group has been treated to tours of co-working spaces like General Assembly and HiveAt55, and trips to InterActive Corporation, TheLadders and Gilt Groupe among other tech companies.

Throughout the tour I’ve been asking the question: if they had the choice, why would a European tech entrepreneur set up their first US office in New York over Silicon Valley?

The answers have actually surprised me, as it gradually became clear to me that New York’s ecosystem is not quite the “also-ran” to the Valley than I’d first thought – at least to a complete outsider like myself who is normally chewing over the tech scenes in the likes of London, Paris, Stockholm or Berlin.

On a panel discussion opening the event, David Tisch of accelerator TechStars, pointed out that New York’s established industries, such as finance and media, can actually work to the tech community’s advantage.

Whereas tech is a default career choice in the Valley, in New York, because you can ‘get rich’ easily enough in finance etc, the people who choose to be in tech are by default passionate and don’t take the scene for granted.

“Becoming rich in NYC is easier via other routes. People in New York are in tech because they want to be. That’s created a very collaborative culture. May are rebelling from other industries” Tisch says. Suddenly I was reminded of media and finance-obsessed London, where similar things have happened to the tech community in the last few years.

The list of successful New York startups is also growing: Kickstarter, Tumblr and Foursquare have all thrived in New York, in part, Tisch says, because of the highly social and networked nature of the city (18 million people). It may well be the case that Foursquare would not have enjoyed the same success had it started in a less densely populated place like San Francisco (7.5 million people). Imagine a SXSW festival every day and perhaps you have a glimpse of how New York’s population has the potential to power new social apps like Foursquare – though to balance that, it’s clear many of those in SF are early adopters.

In theory may even be easier for European companies to get visibility in New York than in the Valley. After a couple of days of asking around it’s become clear to me that although smaller, New York’s tech scene is growing at a furious pace, and any newcomer is welcomed with open arms and brought into the fold of tech companies that “believe’ in the city’s future.

In particular New York makes sense for startups in traditional industry niches like fashion, media, music, sports and retail. I was reminded of London’s own startups trends which seem to ‘map’ to these themes, such as Songkick, Editd, Lyst, MyDeco and others.

Steve Rosenbaum, NYC “Entrepreneur at large” and member number 12 of the New York Tech Meetup which now numbers 21,000 members, pointed out that “10 years ago the Valley was the right place to do the web. But the new phase is what I call ‘hyphen tech’ – as in tech-media, tech-fashion, tech-social, etc.”

He says there is a simple path to joining the tech community in New York, which – at least to me – contrasts the often byzantine nature of Silicon Valley which can be daunting to an outsider. “You join by arriving,” he says.

Raising funding in New York has also improved. Anything under $5m is “relatively easy” although “over $10-$15m” remains easier to do on the West Coast.

New York’s tech VCs such as First Round capital, FirstMark Capital, Founder Collective, Thrive Capital and Union Square Ventures have also done much to boost the city’s tech credentials, though I was told that Fred Wilson at Union Square still sees “98% of deal flow in NYC.” But the advice is simple: “Don’t go to Fred Wlison First. You don’t get to see him twice.”

I was told there were 20-40 active angels, plus a lot of “less experienced” money flowing into the system at the moment. That sounds true of any bubble where some boiler-room stock trader feels pumped up by the Facebook IPO enough to slap down some seed funds on a startup.

But isn’t NYC too expensive as a city? As with most cities, it depends. You can live as cheaply as in SF if you are prepared to compromise, of course. But New York is not a cheap city, let’s be clear.

As for talent, last year’s influx of large, engineer-led offices to New York from Google (1,000 engineers in one downtown building) new offices from Facebook and Twitter, plus the increasing scale of locals like Foursquare and Tumblr means engineering talent is becoming thicker on the ground. Of course, many of those will spin out and join or create new companies, thus adding to the ecosystem.

But is New York’s tech upswing sustainable, or will it fizzle out? I heard that although there may well be a “flush out” and “there are too many companies right now”, New Yorks’ closeness to traditional industries means there is plenty of disruption to feed off over the next few years. Then there is the huge project to create a new university campus on the East River.

I was also told some tips about New York scene: If you do join the tech community here, check you aren’t hanging out with “the guy everybody hates”. Aligning yourself with “advisors” who have a bad reputation is not a good idea. As always, it’s the founders that remain the core of the scene.

Below, you’ll find a series of interviews I did with some European founders, David Tisch, Chris Fralic of First Round Capital and Kevin Ryan of Gilt Group.

It’s never going to be Silicon Valley. In fact, nowhere is ever going to be quite like Silicon Valley, let’s be honest.

But as you can tell, with a much shorter flight over, a time-zone which is conducive to staying in touch with your European home team and a booming, self-sustaining tech eco-system, New York is starting to look a lot more attractive for European startups looking to break into the US market.

(Disclosure: Travel costs to NYC were covered by TakeOut).

I’ll be co-curating the Summit along with Paddy Cosgrave and chairing the start up competition, which you can apply to enter by clicking here.

The first speakers for the event are below. We’ll be announcing more shortly.

Shervin Pishevar is something of the VC of the moment, backing startups like Uber. Ben Milne is disrupting payments with Dwolla. Morten Lund is one of the early backers of Skype and now is in Tradeshift and Everbread, disrupting travel and invoices. And Lars Hinrichs created Xing and now runs European accelerator HackFWD. Reshma Sohoni is a Partner of SeedCamp, the hugely influential seed fund.

You can grab a ticker here and the ’2 for 1 voucher’ closes today.

It should be an interesting event.

Fits.me lets customers “try on” clothing before buying from online clothes retailers. They can see how different sized bodies fit the the clothes on sale – like in real-world fitting rooms. One barrier to fashion e-commerce growth is ensuring that customers can accurately select their body size and shape. The Fits.me robotic body does it for them.

The startup has now closed round of financing led by Entrepreneurs Fund and moving its new corporate headquarters from Estonia to London. Engineering, operations and production will remain in Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia.

Fits.me is so far used by Ermenegildo Zegna and Thomas Pink (part of LVMH Group).

CNBC Business chose Fits.me among the Top 20 breakout brands for 2011, and more recently Vogue included Fits.me among the Online Fashion 100 – the list of the Top 100 most influential names in fashion ecommerce in 2012.

Entrepreneurs Fund is a London-based venture capital fund with €100 million under management.

Strata Partners, the London-based investment bank providing capital raising and M&A advice to technology businesses, acted as financial advisers.

Heikki Haldre, co-founder & CEO, told me: “Real customer satisfaction in clothing retail happens when the clothes fit both the body and the customer’s sense of style. We strengthen their business by increasing sales and reducing returns.”

First of all, it could mean that a staggering 90% of a site’s visitors would run a mile rather than saying yes to accepting a simple Google Analytics cookie. This is what happened when the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) implemented the EU advise on their own web site (see above image).

Now, while that doesn’t mean you would lose the actual people. They may still be on your site. It’s just that you wouldn’t know, because – and it stands to reason – most ordinary people get scared off by the idea that they might be being “tracked” for advertising or analytics purposes even though that data is anonymous. Since cookies almost always refer to anonymised data, this is a long-held practise online and has helped online businesses to thrive.

Prior to the new EU cookie law, site owners just had to provide users with information about how the cookies were used and explain how to opt-out if they objected, usually in Terms and Conditions. Under the new rules, cookies can only be stored on devices where the user has given their consent.

Now, this is a big enough issue for large content publishers and technology companies. Imagine being a startup in Europe where you have to implement this law? Suddenly all those other startups, in other jurisdictions, like the US or China, are looking prety good, because when a user visits them they are not confronted by a huge “DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT OUR COOKIES? PLEASE READ THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS” warning sign first. Personally if I was your average Joe and saw that I would just revert to the US competitor site. Simple.

This could have been so different. The EU Commission could have simply brought four people round a table and asked the main browser company owners (Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari, Microsoft Explorer and Mozilla Firefox) to implement a simple tick box in a browser distributed in the EU. Do it in a friendly way even: “We have detected you are in the EU – would you like to be served a more personalised browsing experience via anonymised cookies or not?”. Or similar. You get the drift.

We pointed out in March last year what a bad idea this would be for European technology companies. Entrepreneurs have held up their hands in protest at the idea.

Yes, there are privacy issues, we recognise that. But European companies are going out onto the field with their bats snapped and their legs broken.

The crazy thing is that consumers actually don’t mind being tracked anonymously if it improves their experience. One USA Today/Gallup poll showed that although 67% of consumers surveyed said that advertisers shouldn’t track them, that figure collapsed when 47% came back saying they would actually accept tracking as long as they could choose the advertisers.

In an era where economic growth in Europe has never been more crucial, do we really want to shackle our online businesses in this manner?

A few weeks ago I realised that Neelie Kroes, who is responsible at the European Commission for its Digital Agenda, was following me on Twitter.

I Direct Messaged her asking for an interview. She put me onto her press people. I contacted them. I’ve yet to hear a reply.

Perhaps its high time someone returned TechCrunch’s overtures, before there’s no European tech industry left to write about.

StylistPick has now raised an $11million B round led by Fidelity Growth Partners Europe. The subscription-based fast fashion brand, kept existing investors Accel Partners and Index Ventures on board, who invested $8 million in a Series A in April 2011. The board of directors is now Davor Hebel (Fidelity), Sonali de Rycker (Accel), Robin Klein (Index) and Eileen Burbidge (Passion Capital).

The startup is moving quickly. It has 600,000 members after a year of operating and is claiming a tripling of quarter on quarter revenue to the final quarter of 2011.

Users establish their fashion profiles and for £39.95 a month get a monthly online showroom tailored to their taste packed with shoes, bags and jewellery. These are created by celebrity stylists like Cheryl Cole and MTV’s Louise Roe. Cole’s own range comes in at an eye-watering £79.90 to £119.85 a month! But members can skip a month’s subscription or cancel at any time, so it’s flexible but highly retentive. CEO Felix Leuschner says he wants to build “the next generation online fashion.”

On the face of it it is underfunded again the field.

Stylistpick’s total fund raising to date is approximately $20 million (it also has less than $1 million from angels (including Stefan Glaenzer, Robert Dighero, Mark Zaleski (former CEO/Chairman of Dailymotion, and also of QXL before that).

It’s competitors include Shoedazzle, Shoes4You, JustFabulous and BeachMint.

Of those, Shoedazzle raised $60 million total (from big name VCs including Andreessen Horowitz and others) and has Kim Kardashian as a lead celeb. But Shoedazzle shut down after only 4 months of running in the UK.

Justfabulousraised a total of $62 million so far (from Matrix and Technology Crossover Ventures, two tier1 big-time US VC firms) all in September 2011.

BeachMint raised $75 million total (from big name VCs including Accel in this last round and others), and last round was announced of $35 million was only recently announced. It has the Olsen twins, Jessica Simpson and Rachel Bilsson.

Shoes4you (Brazil only) has raised money from top VC firms like Accel.

So, what can we take from this?

Accel is nicely exposed and hedged in this market.

The sector is super hot.

The UK is hot but harder than some think.

Meanwhile, you can see via LinkedIn that there is a member of the Stylistpick team whose title is “France Country Manager at Stylistpick”, noting she joined in December 2011.

Conclusion? StylistPick might just be in a good place right now.

Update: Some existing EU players include ChicChickClub.de, StylistClick.com (France, by Spartoo) and the Samwers’ clones. The Samwer brothers’ German clone Glossy Box Style just closed.

Its sounds almost boringly simple but the sheer amount of online content means the eco-system for these apps is rising. Formerly known as Trimit (which we covered back in July), Summly was developed by D’Aloisio from his bedroom in South London over a Summer break from school.

Nick then managed to attract the attention of billionaire Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing and his investment vehicle, Horizons Ventures and secured a $300,000 seed round. The boy Om Malik calls “the Internet’s new boy genius” has now built a startup team to exploit Summly’s potential.

Summly can condense content into 1,000, 500, or 140-character summaries, offering a world of simpler browsing and search experiences. Indeed, researchers at MIT, D’Aloisio says, found Summly outperformed the “highest academically published results” by a factor of 30 percent.

Check out Summly on the App Store here.

Given Qualcomm has a big stake in the future of the chipsets for video, this is a smart strategic investment.

Sorosh Tavakoli, CEO of Videoplaza says the money will go towards expansion and R&D efforts. The TV has a global value of around $160 billion according to some estimates, so there remains plenty of opportunity online as people switch viewing habits to IP delivered content.

Videoplaza says it has grown its international client base and delivered five times more ads in the last year across 17 markets, while opening new offices in Madrid, Berlin and Singapore. Bruno Dizengremel, Partner, Innovacom believes Videoplaza’s technology is “at the heart of the monetization strategy” for broadcasters and premium publishers.

The company’s technology platform delivers Flash, Silverlight, HTML5, iOS devices, Android, Sony Playstation, Samsung Smart TVs, and closed IPTV environments. By 2013 it expects more than half of its traffic to come from non-PC devices – based on the fact that by Q4 of 2011 some 8% of the company’s traffic was generated from non-PC devices.

Videoplaza has competition from multiple avenues including YuMe, spotXchange, among others, however its laser-like concentration on remaining a ‘sell side’ platform appears to be standing it in good stead, while others diversify their products.

Oscar Kneppers, founder of Rockstart says the program is for startups from the whole of Europe. Based in Amsterdam, it’s looking for 10 teams of founders and will subject them to 99 mentors for 100 days, and combine that with an additional three-month summer program that culminates with a 25-day Silicon Valley road trip. That last point is probably not a bad idea, for obvious reasons, though Seedcamp takes its teams for four weeks and has done it for the past three years.

Teams will stay a the Startup House in San Francisco as a base and will vist Google headquarters in Mountain View for a few days, meeting the Google developer team and meeting Don Dodge, Developer Advocate at Google. The usual Microsoft BizSpark sweeteners are being offered and the Mozilla WebFWD people will be offering one-on-one mentoring with “Mozillians”.

Seed investment in the startups includes up to $20,000, six-months of free office space, and a three-week road trip to Silicon Valley. Rockstart Accelerator asks eight percent equity in the startups that are selected. It starts on March 22, 2012 and is now open for applications and closes today.

How does this compare with the some of Europe’s leading accelerators?

Well GammaRebels in Poland offers a predefined equity investment of up to €12,000 (PLN20,000) in exchange for 10% equity, mentoring support and office space during the program.

This is a low stake and a high percentage compared to Springboard in the UK and Seedcamp, but then the costs (staff, offices, living) in Poland are much, much lower.

With Springboard each team gets a low £15,000 of investment capital and they take 6% in ordinary founder shares. Office space etc is free.

The well known Seedcamp meanwhile puts in around €50,000 (Euros) per team and takes a variable stake of around 8%-10% of its startups.

A brand new UK one, Ignite100 in the UK, puts in up to £100,000 per team and takes a set 8%.

HackFwd takes 27% of a company it invests in, but funding amounts to up to €191,000 (depending on the size of the team) and the programme runs for a whole year.

In the US, Ycombinator takes around 6% but can do anywhere from 2%-10% while TechStars take around 6-10%.

StartupBootcamp has 3-month programs in various European locations and caters to startups which are much earlier than the Seedcamp stage (seedcamp takes startups which already have an initial product). Teams have access to office space and other resources in each of their country locations. SBC takes 8% of the company and gives 12,000 Euro and free office space upfront. They tend to do follow-up investments of around 40-50K€ (although Magma was 250K€). Rainmaking (a Danish company and type of “startup factory”) created Startupbootcamp and put Alex Farcet in charge of the initial program in 2010. Since then, Bandwidth (Dublin) and Okuri Ventures (Spain) have come on board and are run by Eoghan Jennings and Luis Rivera respectively.

There is also LeCamping in Paris, a 6 month program created by the non-profit organization, Silicon Sentier. It funds 12 startups, has a network of mentors, provides free workspace and offers €4,500 per team without taking equity. Large companies such as Google, SNCF, BNP Paribas, L’Atelier and GL Events are sponsors and supporters in conjunction with public sector bodies like the European Social Funds and the Regional Concil of Île-de-France. Seven of its startups have now raised between €150K and €700K each.

Commenting on the Rockstart launch, Reshma Sohoni of Seedcamp said: “Seedcamp at the core has always believed the US is important to the startup story so US mentors visiting Europe and in US have been a big part of our mentor base. So a new accelerator promoting that isn’t something new I guess.”

Jon Bradford of Springboard said: “Im very comfortable about new acceleraotrs coming on strem, as there is absolutely no lack of talent in Europe. In fact, the appearance of new accelerators appears to be increasing the number of startups over-all as more people join startups.”

Thus, GeeknRolla and the Dublin Web Summit, are merging to create the London Web Summit. It’ll be on March 19th in The Brewery Venue, in London’s “Tech City” area.

I’ll be co-curating the Summit along with Paddy Cosgrave of the Dublin Web Summit and chairing the start up competition, which you can apply to enter by clicking here.

We think the Summit will provide great opportunities to hear from international speakers, networking with leading start ups, investors, media and digital leaders.

Tickets go on sale in the coming days, until then, you can apply for a voucher for 2 tickets for the price of 1 below here.

I hope to see you there, and we can keep on rocking Europe!

Meanwhile, for fans of our GeeknRolla atmosphere and general hell-raising, stay subscribed to the Twitter, Facebook and Lanyard. It’s not the end of the tech punk rockers just yet…

Curiously, Salesforce has released only a partial mobile app that is is quite limited. Future Simple is aiming directly at eating into small business users of Highrise and Salesforce. Indeed, so many users of Highrise are switching to Future Simple that the startups says had to build an automated import tool.

This release is a part of a broader strategy to reach as many platforms as possible. Previously the company had two small business products: PipeJump, a small business sales tracking and CRM application, and QuoteBase, a project/job quote generator. They’ve now been merged into a super-intuitive, drag and drop interfaced product named Base.

The company is currently in the process of raising a second round of funding. Founded in 2009 by Uzi Shmilovici, and joined by Polish maven Ela Madej (who leads business development), last year it raised a $1.1 million round led OCA Ventures with participation by the I2A Fund, as well as angel investors.

Founded by Anders Pollas, Jon Froda and Kasper Hultin, the Danish startup brought on Ahlers (best known for selling ZYB to Vodafone in 2008) as a CEO and investor in August last year, and has brought in $4.5M in funding.

With Podio you an manage everything from expense reports to hiring, and you don’t follow users but “Spaces” where these things happen. On Podio you see Frequently Used Spaces, Contacts and Calendar on the right, with an activity stream of all actions on the left. From here you can get to anything, even adding or creating your one task-specific app.

In the Podio App store 45,000 apps have been created by users. Most choose to make those apps private to themselves but over 600 of them have been made publicly available, covering everything from CRM to Project Management etc. Podio doesn’t disclose user numbers.

So instead of using a a combination of Yammer, Box.net and SharePoint, you could, in theory, just use Podio.

Operating on a freemium model, you can also get an iPhone app and Android Apps and an Air App. Last year Podio won the European version of The Crunchies, The Europas Award for Best Business Startup.

Coelho last gave an interview to Mike Arrington in 2008 where he said “MySpace Is My wife, Facebook Is my mistress”.

Coelho has oft-repeated his view that artists and artistic works do no suffer when they are copied, quite the opposite. Their distribution becomes greater and the artist comes off better as a result. Coelho has even taken to pirating his own books on The Pirate Bay.

What is interesting about our interview is his continuing vehement repudiation of the traditional book publishing industry’s response to the new platform of the Internet.

He discovered this when in 1999, a novel of his was first published in Russia. The publishers didn’t have enough paper to publish his books and meet the demand so the book ended up being shared on the Internet by enthusiasts.

He initially sold 3,000 books. After the pirated copy came out online in 2000 he sold 10,000 books, then 100,000 in 2001 – and in 2002 over one million were sold in Russia.

“You cannot be greedy, ignorant. Good content does not need defence. People want to support you,” he told me.

He said people bough the printed books after sampling the electronic pirated versions. But, I asked, what if e-readers like the iPad became as good as paper to read from?

He explained:

“This will happen sooner or later… it’s not about quality. The book business is in a transition point, they should realise. They keep having reunions, meetings. Content is hanging for every writer. But you write books, you write blogs, you write tweets, posts for Facebook. And this is a new way of seeing literature, and not only printed books. The problem with the industry is that they still don’t realise that. They try to stop something that is happening naturally.

“They [traditional print publishers] can’t [stop technology], because at the end of the day what gave us the Renaissance? It was technology. It was Gutenburg with a new technology. The same is happening now – a new Renaissance. And people are scared like the Church was in the 16th century with the invention of the book because the first the people did was to print the Bible. From the moment that the Bible was printed, well – there are no more hidden secrets. Everyone can read, everyone can interact with the Bible, everyone can have his or her own interpretation. So, a gigantic revolution in arts and the way that you see the world was thanks to a technological invention.”

“What I’m not sure [of] is that people are realising this… They try to romanticise the past and live in a very romantic present. We are living in a turning point where technology can really make a difference for culture, for art, for a lot of things.”

He referenced his recent blog post: My thoughts on S.O.P.A. where he talks about the legislation’s threat to the Internet.

He says people say he is rich enough now to have such views on online piracy. His response is that he does not write for the money. He writes because, an an artist, he must write.

“People say ‘you are rich enough.’ But I say ‘No!’ – when I write I do not think about making money, because nobody thinks about making money when they write a book. We want to be heard. [In the] Soviet Union they used to publish their books for free because they wanted to be read and to express their values. The artist wants to be understood.

“The artist is going to be paid as a consequence. But this is not the main goal, the main goal – why you paint a painting or why you write a book or why you create music – you ant to express your soul. Then if it is good, it is going to prevail.”

Interview with Paulo Coelho by mikebutcher

Now they can reveal what they’ve been building. Evi is a new iPhone (iTunes link) and Android app in Beta (link) which might just give Apple’s Siri a run for her money. She – we’ll call this Artificial Intelligence a she – returns amazing results when consulted. Given that Siri is just not very good at giving answers which aren’t about the US, Evi might just be the Siri for the rest of the world, especially since Evi wil run on any Andoid or iPhone, and not just the 4S. I’ve seen her in action and Evi is very, very smart.

Based on very deep, patented technology around language and knowledge understanding, the iPhone app couples a licensing of Nuance’s voice recognition technology (the small charge is to cover this license) and True Knowledge’s engine.

Taking speech and turning it into text is tough, so is natural language text and understanding what the user means, as well as their intent. Evi does all three of these together so is often imperfect, but I’m told it’s improving all the time, despite being in Beta.

Evi has an ontology of tens of thousands of classes into which everything that can be talked about falls. She also knows almost a billion ‘facts’ (machine understandable bits of knowledge) and, says True Knowledge, she can infer trillions more when needed.

She also integrates lots of other sources, such as Yelp for local searches, external mobile friendly websites, APIs, traditional search etc.

Yes, Evi can’t do Siri’s trick of adding things to your iPhone Calendar or hook into reminders. However, it probably only a matter of time before it can.

Install Evi on an iPhone 4S and compare it to Evi. Ask “How do I make apple pie?”. Siri is unable to provide a direct answer and so asks whether you want to search the web. Evi provides a list of recipes with web links.

Ask “Who was President when Queen Elizabeth II was born”. Siri is unable to provide an answer and suggests performing a web search. Evi determines who Queen Elizabeth II is, when she was born, the dates when she will have been a teenager and then compares this against which US presidents were in office over that time, delivering the results of both serving US presidents during those years. Not bad huh.

Obviously Evi is a mobile ap right now. But she could be integrated into television, the web, games consoles, you name it.

I’m excited by Evi, and frankly, I think Siri has new competition in town for the boys’ attention…

They had about 3 million in January 2011 and announced five million users that June, eventually hitting seven million by September. It’s now on track to put on a million new members in January.

However, its moving into interesting new territory today, unveiling a new feature it calls Story Wheel.

This SoundCloud Labs project allows anyone to record their own narrative around a series of images to tell a personal story. To illustrate how it works, the co-founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss have demonstrated with a conversation about their journey to date, which is reminiscent of an old fashioned slide show. Very ‘Kodak moment’.

If you’re unaware of Soundcloud, here’s the skinny. It was launched in October 2008, has had over five million official SoundCloud iphone/android apps downloaded and over 10,000 third party apps have been developed on SoundCloud’s open platform (recent additions include integrations with professional music creation software Pro Tools and Cakewalk).

Today that intense interest has been confirmed with a first round of funding led by top tier venture firms Accel Partners and NEA (one of the key investors in Groupon) to enable it to build out engineering and expand into new cities other than London. With NEA co-leading the investment, clearly there is a big opportunity to scale in US cities and elsewhere. The investment is based on a convertible note not equity, which is standard practise when investors want in fast and the round is hotly contested.

It’s understood that 15 high profile angels from the world of fashion, music, celebrity and tech investing have also participated in the round but Fantasy Shopper is not releasing those names as yet.

Fantasy Shopper allows users to spend fantasy money on virtual representations of fashion items, then share those items – or even whole wardrobes of outfits – with their friends and also buy them either online or, more importantly, in real, physical stores. Retailers then use that information on users’ tastes to offer deals, discounts and specials. That’s a pretty new take on so-called “social shopping” and it’s proving to be a smash hit with UK women.

Figures aren’t available on numbers of users, but the startup claims to have increased its user base by 200% month over month, with members spending an average of 28 minutes on the site per visit.

“Fantasy Shopper brings together everything we love about social gaming and e-commerce and will generate real-time, real-world data that will be priceless to retailers,” said Harry Weller, General Partner, NEA.

Founded by Chris Prescott and Daniel Noz in the regional UK city of Exeter (yes, really), the startup has a small team it will now expand significantly. The team certainly knows its code. Shortly after its UK beta launch in October 2011, the startup became the first non-US based business to win the Amazon Global Startup Challenge, in a contest that featured more than 1500 startups from 78 countries.

In an interview at DLD, Sonali de Rycker, Partner at Accel Partners told me: “From what we understand, about a third of all offline retail is influenced by online activity. Anyone that can better enable that or develop a proposition that drives online to offline is going to be big. We think Fantasy Shopper has a shot at being that company.”

Prescott chimed in: “The big play is ‘web to store’ – especially with the emergence of Near Field Communication in mobile phones, which is coming along. The big problem right now with offline stores is the cost of dealing with returns. ” He says that because users – women especially – can build outfits online and share them with friends first (and remember, they are encouraged to do so via the game), they are more likely to settle on an outfit they actually want to buy and keep. “Fantasy Shopper make the returns rates almost redundant.” So focusing on physical stores is a a big deal with the site.

Right now the focus is on London but it makes sense to expand quickly to New York and then LA, SF, Paris, Tokyo, Singpaore etc.

After that the startup could even be applied to the long tail of local stores and shops.

The site has over 100,000 virtual items from 40 retailers in clothes, accessories and sports goods. Users collect up to 20 “Paydays” every day, which are boosts that keep the users’ notional wallets healthy.

Reding is looking at bringing in rules which would require European governments to enact privacy by default in online networks, European standards for storage of data (i.e. very high and very private), the ‘right to be forgotten’, and transparency in how data is used. That first point might sound like the death-knell of home-grown European online social startups, though one would hope it wouldn’t enacted quite so literally. We shall see.

More encouragingly, she said: “In Europe, we have too many rules, too many conflicting rules,” and outlined how the European Commission would prefer it if these rules were harmonised between European governments. This of course is a doubled-edged sword for tech startups. On the one hand, some jurisdictions in fragmented Europe are ‘freer’ than others, enabling a sort of competitive advantage. On the other, if everyone was playing by the same rules, technology companies could compete on merit.

There are are least 27 separate kinds of regulations governing privacy in the EU, which cost about 2.3 billion Euros a year to enforce. This is cash which European governments can ill afford to spend these days. So maybe it’s not a bad idea to merge these functions under one body?

I know for a fact Facebook has an almost impossible time in Germany compared to the UK when it comes with dealing with both federal government on privacy and – inexplicably – the regions governments of the german federal system who have a number of privacy commissioners who quite like to make a name for themselves now and again by starting the odd war (as happened recently).

As a result, Reding was today talking about personal data as if it was a sort of currency (a dangerous subject in Europe these days!) “Personal data is the currency of today’s digital market. And like any currency, it needs stability and trust,” Reding said.

This was enough to raise the hackles of commentator Jeff Jarvis who blogged his distaste for government’s meddling in people’s data. Well, yes Jeff, but the biggest breaches gently have been in the private sector (Sony Playstation network for instance) so maybe this isn’t such a bad idea?

Besides, Reding isn’t saying governments are perfect – she’s saying there is basically too much governance in Europe where privacy and data rules are concerned. Quite something for an EU commissioner to say in fact.

Jarvis also has something of a North American misunderstanding of terrorism problems in Europe. Reding wants a greater exchange of data among police authorities in the EU members to fight terrorism. Jarvis says this could be a threat to privacy, in practice, this is no different than Federal law enforcement, like the FBI, being able to track terrorist driving between US states. The problem for Europe is that not enough is happening on this front, and it’s borders are highly porous.

Reding is also arguing for companies to appoint data protection (privacy) officers. Here we can probably agree with Jarvis – this is over-kill. This is a compliance issue, and could probably be addressed with existing structures rather than a government-mandated “officer”.

The “right to be forgotten” and to “withdraw permission” from companies holding data on you is also on Reding’s agenda – though she stops short of sanctioning censorship of the media. Again, more North American misunderstandings from Jarvis. Try living under Stasi during the 1980s and then come and tell us that we don’t have a right for the state or companies to delete the data they hold on us… Indeed, TechCrunch’s Andrew Keen raised similar points in his later panel.

Europeans have deep memories about how data can be used for evil. Maybe their interpretations aren’t so bad after all.

Uwe Horstmann (former CEO of Rocket Internet), Thies Sander (former CEO of TopTarif) and Christian Weiss (founding CEO of Rocket Internet) are now working on the Oryx Project also a kind of incubator. But this is not just any incubator. It just happens to have landed significant funding – we’re hearing tens of millions in Euro – from giant German high street and online retailer Otto.

Fascinatingly, Otto has been feeling the pressure lately from e-commerce startups created by none other than Rocket Internet, so perhaps now the fight will be a little fairer? This is a little like Best Buy giving YCombinator a few million to take out Radio Shack with some fast-moving startups.

The Oryx Project is now currently hiring like mad, as you can see from their holding page.

Meanwhile, something else has come along to tax the patience of famously irascible Oliver Samwer, the enforcer behind Rocket Internet’s huge success over the last few years. No, it’s not the fact that he had to apologise for using over-the top language like “Blitzkrieg” in a memo to staff, leaked to us.

No, this time it’s a dance track with the infamous Blitzkrieg memo set to a dane music track. Penned by an outfit calling itself Terrible Inc, we hear it’s doing wildfire business in the Berlin internet scene and we have to say, it’s pretty damn catchy. Have a listen for yourself.

Blitzkrieg, the new single by Oliver Samwer (beta) by terrible inc