Way back in 2009 there was no large event dedicated to technology startups in the UK. TechCrunch, under Mike Arrington, was busy trying to get its TechCrunch50/Disrupt programme going in the US, and outside of local meetups, the TC event juggernaut still had yet to arrive in Europe. My friend and colleague Robin Wauters was doing Plugg in Brussels, but there wasn’t a startup event in London. So I launched a personal project, an event I called GeeknRolla, the name for which I literally dreamt up in a London pub. Despite those amateurish beginnings, about 400 people turned up that year, and I ran it again for the next couple of years as a fun side project. But times move on and after running it single-handedly for three years in a row, I’m going to bring the GeeknRolla “mojo” to a new event (while we wait for the TC event machine to spin up in Europe, and more on that later so stay tuned).

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.

Chicago-based but Israeli-founded Future Simple, a startup that creates products aimed at small businesses, has released an Android app which hooks into their small business CRM. It’s the first Small Business CRM with a true full native Android app and appears to be the first CRM in the Android Market. They already had an iPhone app.

Olery, an Amsterdam-based startup that offers reputation management and media monitoring tools for the leisure industry, has raised 750,000 euros ($1 million) to boost its international expansion and develop new products.

Founded in 2010, Olery offers simple online brand, reputation management and performance benchmarking tools for hotels that help turn online reviews and social media feedback into actionable business intelligence.

Conceptboard, a virtual whiteboard startup, which was in the news recently with their G+ Hangout feature, just announced that’ve raised “a 6-figure funding round” from two German investors. Details of the investment have not been shared publicly, but TechCrunch has learned that it was around 500.000 euros.

It’s the startups series A round, and was led by Germany’s HighTech Gründerfonds and Seedfonds BW – both semi-governmental funding institutions that have backed numerous German startups.

Every status has its symbol, says an advertising slogan. When starting a business, creating this symbol is part of the foundation. Yet, as essential a part of their identity as it is, most companies leave their branding in the hands of design agencies instead of keeping the process internal.

Doesn’t sound ideal? A small team of entrepreneurs in Prague think it does not. In response they developed OpenBrand, a brand building platform they dream will soon become the industry standard.

Think of OpenBrand as the Google docs of branding. It provides businesses with a private space for their branding and marketing management, based on a set of smart tools guiding the user through the branding process.

Paulo Coelho, the world famous author of The Pilgrimage, The Alchemist and many other works which have in many ways become an inspiration for entrepreneurs, gave an exclusive and rare interview to TechCrunch at the World Economic Forum in Davos last night, the recording of which is published below. Coelho and I had previously been moderators at a dinner curated by Loic Le Meur on the future of social status and the interview took place in a taxi to another venue. (My write-up from the dinner will come later, suffice it to say that it was most entertaining and enlightening).

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.

Exclusive - Yes, even more Berlin startups with news to share.

MONOQI is today launching an exclusive online shopping platform where select designers can present their wares and buyers can purchase them at reasonable prices.

Exclusive - Yet another funding round for a Berlin-based tech startup. T-Venture, Deutsche Telekom’s venture arm, and IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft have co-invested in privately-held online video syndication and marketing company Clipkit.

The size of the round was not disclosed, but we’re told that it was a “mid-seven-digit euros” figure.

JustBook, a mobile app that allows you to book hotel nights at a heavily reduced rate, secured their first angel round, coming from a diverse group of german business angels. Among the group are Ferry and Fabian Heilemann, the brothers who co-founded Dailydeal and sold it to Google in 2011, Amiando founder Felix Haas, Torsten Oelke, Matthias Hunecke, Stefan Zoller and Manuel Nothelfer.

I don’t often get a chance to write about a startup from my home country (Belgium) that I’m super excited about, so consider me a happy camper. Meet CheckThis.com, a new micro-publishing service that lets you create and share a single, good-looking Web page in mere seconds.

CheckThis is designed for people who need a little more space than a tweet but don’t want to go through the hassle of setting up a new blog. In literally instants, you can use CheckThis to create a stand-alone page to sell your bike, hire a new developer for your startup, tell people what you’ve been up to today, set up a really quick poll, share an Instragram or Flickr photo, a party invitation with a map, a Vimeo video or whatever other casual need you might have. Quick, simple, beautiful.

This is a guest post by Liam Boogar of RudeBaguette.

When I first heard about 3DayStartup last September, it was being pitched by the organisers of 3DayStartup Paris at FailCon. Listening to the idea, I thought what most people probably think at first: “Oh great, another StartupWeekend knock off.” I quickly jotted down the differences in my head: not backed by Kauffman Foundation, no winners*, and you have to apply and get accepted – sounded like a losing combination, which is how I went into their end of the weekend pitch session this past Sunday.

When Siri arrived on the iPhone 4S I thought to myself, who else could do this? It would need to be a search engine with natural language processing, but also behave in the manner of artificial intelligence and respond to voice recognition. One company that sprung to mind was True Knowledge. I pinged them. Are you working on a Siri type application, I asked? Interesting question, was their response. And then they went quiet.

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.

SoundCloud still isn’t conforming our story that they recently raised a $50 million round led by Kleiner Perkins – but today at the DLD conference in Munich they have announced a pretty significant milestone – hitting 10 million users. SoundCloud is gunning to be a kind of YouTube for sound, but with a wide variety of apps that can plug into its platform, and a business model which encourages upgrades to a premium paid experience. It competes with the like of Audioboo to some extent, but that is on a much lower 300,000 users and focuses on speech.

Fantasy Shopper is a social shopping game where players discover and share the latest fashion from real-world online and offline retailers. It’s gained a lot of traction since it’s launch last October, especially amongst women and we’ve heard on the grapevine that it was piquing the interest of investors for some months since emerging from the European Seed accelerator HackFWD.

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.

Intelligent Apps, the Hamburg, Germany-based startup behind popular taxi ordering smartphone application myTaxi, has raised 10 million euros in growth funding from car2go, a subsidiary of Daimler, Germany’s third largest carmaker. XING and Hackfwd founder Lars Hinrichs also participated in the financing round, as did previous backers T-Venture (Deutsche Telekom) and KfW Bankengruppe.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Daimler took a 15 percent stake in the mobile apps developer.

It’s only day one of DLD, the annual TED-like conference in Munich thrown by German media giant Burda, and already we have a few misunderstandings brewing. Amid the furore surrounding the SOPA protests and lobbying form media companies, at the other end of the debate-spectrum, the European Commission, in the shape of EC vice-president Viviane Reding, has been looking at harmonising privacy and personal data in Europe.

Rocket Internet, the Berlin-based incubator most famous for slavishly cloning US companies like Zappos, AirBnB and now Pinterest in Germany, now faces a new competitor – in the form of some of its key employees. As we reported recently the core team of Rocket, led by Oliver Samwer and his two other brothers, left to set up something new, and now we know what it is.

As a social network aimed at helping you meet new people – don’t mention the phrase ‘hooking up’ – Tagged’s vice president of sales and marketing Steve Sarner claims other companies are only now catching onto ‘social discovery’ and the site is “by far the largest” in the social discovery space. Ex-squeeze me?

I’m afraid we’ll have to balance this, and perhaps educate Mr Sarner a little, in case he hasn’t heard of a little site called Badoo.

Adzuna, a startup with something it calls the next-generation job search engine, has raised a round of funding from Index Ventures, The Accelerator Group and existing investors including Passion Capital. The latest funding follows a seed round last year. It’s landed £500,000, taking its total funding to £800,000 (£300,000 from Passion Capital in July).

Launched in July 2011, Adzuna is aiming to be a global search engine for classified job ads, effectively aggregating ads, then putting a social layer over them. Yes, I know similar things have been tried before but here’s how they’ll do it.

You might notice many of your favorite websites look different today. Wikipedia is down. Wordpress is dark. TechCrunch has adjusted it’s homepage logo to look even weirder than usual. So what’s the big deal?

Right now in Washington D.C., Congress is considering two bills that would censor the web and impose burdensome regulations on American businesses. Over here on the European version of TechCrunch we think that’s a fantastic thing. Utterly fantastic. No, really.

The PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House PIPA & SOPA will indeed censor the web. For you guys in the US!