[UK] Stealth startup Zkatter is launching a real-time microblogging service in the next few months that could be a hit. Similar in theory to Twitter, Zkatter asks users “What do you see now?” vs. Twitter’s “What are you doing?”

The service, which has been in development since 2008, will allow anybody to broadcast and archive ‘live moments’ comprising location, media (image, video and text) to ‘friends only’ or ‘the public’ which can then be discovered instantly via search and friends time-lines. Zkatter’s focus is towards capturing information that you physically see live which offers a interesting addition to the real-time space.

Zkatter, which has received $1.5 million in Series A funding, is also developing iPhone and Android apps to work in conjunction with the standalone site, with the platform updated in real-time across all devices. So if you post an update on your iPhone, it will automatically show on the site. And Zkatter will be integrated with Facebook and Twitter, so you can publish you updates to both social networks as well. There are additional features to the site but this is the general idea of what the Zkatter will be able to do.

Guest post: We’ve given Europe’s tech video bloggers a mission to hunt down European startups every Friday and get them to give an elevator pitch. We’ll be rotating this slot with other contributors around Europe as well, so if you’ve got a video blog about tech startups, get in touch. Thanks to Tiburon TV for this post.

[Sweden] During the last 24 hours the cream of Sweden’s tech entrepreneur scene have exchanged jeans for yukatas (Japanese bathrobes), chairs for bean bags and isolated themselves in a zen style hotel outside Stockholm. Why? To come up with 60 new startups and then take over the world, of course! Well, maybe that isn’t what they think, but the location definitely has a Bond villain feel to it.

You have to hand it to the Swedes. Not only are they in amongst the forefront of web entrepreneurship in Europe, thanks to companies like Spotify and others, but they’re also hungry for more. This is the second 24 hour business camp of the year (the first ever event was held in January). During the last camp about 52 startups were created. And now they’re aiming for more. In bathrobes. In Autumn.

[UK] This is a guest post by communications specialist Antony Mayfield (twitter: amayfield) about C&binet Forum, the trendily named three day conference this week featuring the great and the good from the UK’s political, media and ‘creative’ industries. This ‘creative business conference’ was run by the Department for Culture Media and Sport, as a result of their joint publication (with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Department for Innovation and Skills) of a strategy paper for the creative economy called Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy.

If you liked ampersands, the Government’s creative industries conference, C&binet Forum was a great place to be. The logo sat everywhere, from the signs for dinner to massive “&” sculpture in one of The Grove’s lobbies.

Finnish startup Fruugo fascinates me to no end.

Founded in late 2006, the company set out to build a massive pan-European social e-commerce service, which it finally launched in closed beta at the beginning of this year. Their mission statement? To make Fruugo the equivalent of Google in search when it comes to social commerce on the Web.

The company reportedly raised dozens of millions of euros, at one point flirted with an employee headcount of 150 to 160 people (including contractors) and boasted a rock star board of directors that included people like former Nokia CEO and current Chairman of Shell Jorma Ollila as well as F-Secure Founder/Chairman Risto Siilasmaa. In 2008, they burned through about 14.5 million euros before they even put the closed beta product live and were ultimately forced to lay off almost half of its workforce as a result.

I’m currently blogging from a boat, rented by Belgian social network operator Netlog to host about a hundred of their closest business partners for a presentation about their freshly redesigned website and a roadmap of what’s in store for the future.

In their presentation, co-founders Toon Coppens and Lorenz Bogaert introduced something other than the newly revamped site. The company has also been developing a separately branded social gaming platform called Gatcha! which was talked about publicly for the first time today.

[UK] Online film and TV aggregator BlinkBox has gone all arty on us, signing a content partnership with the British Film Institute (BFI) — bringing the total number of British TV and film titles on offer to over five hundred and the total number of “premium” titles available on the service to just under six thousand.

Seeing BlinkBox, arguably, go a little up market with the BFI partnership sits a little at odds with the company’s recent credit crunch-busting Pizza Hut promotion or its long term ‘viral’ marketing strategy whereby users can create movie clips – referred to as ‘Blinks’ – to share with friends via email or SMS. But hey, more choice is always welcome.

[Sweden] Voddler, the Stockholm-based online video offering that’s being described as “Spotify for movies”, has signed content partnerships with Paramount and Disney. A deal with Sony Pictures is also said to be eminent.

Voddler, Inc., the company behind the new service, was formed back in 2005 and has offices in Stockholm, Palo Alto, and Beijing. It’s thought to have taken around $16 million worth of funding from investors including Deseven Capital, Freja Ventures and Lotsa SA.

Right now the service, which offers add-supported streaming of movies and TV shows as well as premium paid-for content, is only available in a closed beta in the company’s home country of Sweden. However, perhaps now that more content has been secured, Voddler is beginning to open up.

Today, Netlog – the ‘European MySpace’ as they’re often referred to – is hosting a Partner Day at and around their global headquarters in Ghent, Belgium. The most important thing the company will be sharing is a look at their redesigned website, which has been in the works for about a year and is today being rolled out to a number of key countries. I got an exclusive preview of the revamped website from co-founder Toon Coppens, so here’s an impression of what it will look like and where they’re going with the social network.

Netlog currently sees about 250 million visits from 56 million unique visitors on a monthly basis and is handling half a million new sign-ups every week. Its main target has historically been young people (65% of its user base is between 14 and 24 years old) and with the redesign the company is clearly catering to that particular demographic, making the homepage much more visual and far less cluttered. You can see some screenshots of the impending new version below, along with a screen capture of the ‘old’ homepage.

[France] As my first post on Techcrunch Europe I thought it could be interesting to give you some insights on the French market, and especially the situation regarding fund raising. So here is a list of (almost all) French companies in the web industry that have raised more than €1 million in 2009.

Divided into three categories (Web, Mobile & E-Commerce), they are ranked by decreasing amount, and then by date. Despite all my research, I cannot guarantee that this list is 100% exhaustive, but I am pretty confident that this list covers 95% of transactions made in 2009. Don’t look for a source for each line, they were too numerous. But the main ones were company or investor websites, Journal du net or Neteco and blogs etc – and of course previous articles published on TechCrunch