Spotify will soon branch out even further into Sweden – the market from which it emerged in the first place. The company has signed a two-year cooperation agreement with Swedish telecommunication service provider Telia. The partnership will, among other things, launch Spotify mobile phones and new services for TV and computers. That’s an interesting new sideline for the startup and is sure to boost revenues.

In a couple of months Telia plans to launch a specific mobile phone with Spotify for its customers. Currently the application runs on the iPhone, Android and Symbian S60. Plans to bring Spotify to Telia’s TV-customers and launch new computer services are more vaguely described as happening sometime in the future. [Update: TechCrunch reports INQ is building the specific handset, and that will probably roll out to other markets]

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As we just reported today, Foursquare, the location based social game from Silicon Valley, launched today in London. I’ve duly signed up to check it out, and tweeted out my username to see who’s out there on the system that I know.

First of all the site has no setting to stop receiving emails when someone requests to be your ‘friend’ on Foursquare. That’s not a privacy issue, but it is incredibly annoying. This is possibly their version of a ‘viral loop’. I call it spam/ham. Yes, I can set up a filter, but it’s not an ideal solution. That’s not my main beef with Foursquare.

My main beef right now is the utter lack of sophistication in the privacy settings on location. Let me explain.

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BREAKING: Location-based game Foursquare has just added London to it’s roster of cities. The news that the startup (which turns a city into one big game for users via an iPhone app) was poised to hit the biggest city outside the US came out on the company’s Twitter feed two days ago. Granted it’s already live in Amsterdam (the only other non-US city) but London is an order of magnitude larger. Paris is supposedly next on their list.

Foursquare is a location-based social network presented as a game where you “check in” at a location when you are out, thus turning the mobile app into a guide to the city and way to meet people. There is also a loyalty store card element.

I’m going to make a rash prediction about Foursquare in London, and particularly the Brit reaction: Either it will be a smash hit or it will fail miserably.

Brits have taken to points-based games on Facebook. But when it comes to location, most of the time, Londoners are more interested in piling into the nearest pub than worrying about who is the “mayor” of a particular physical space.
I’ve also been trying out Gowalla, which is similar. Now, since I have 12,00 followers on Twitter I thought I might find at least a few members there, but in fact I found hardly any. So whether Foursquare can beat this or not remains to be seen, but since they prep-populate their service with locations you can own, this may give them a head start. [Update: I just tried finding Twitter friends on Foursquare - sure enough, I recognised only three people in London. Still, it's only just launched].

It will be interesting to see how other local location-based players like Rummble will react to this move. They already have Tremors which ranks places by the number of Tweets coming out of a location, but this is not the same as a “game” in the way Foursquare is in terms of collecting points. IN that sense it may well lack virality.

Just before the Summer we launched the TechCrunch Europe Top 100. This is a regularly updated Index of the most innovative and highest-potential European tech companies. The Index is focused on mobile and web companies (although cleantech and gadget companies have a presence) in the broad EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) region. The index was created in association with Valley-based startup tracker YouNoodle. The scores and rankings are based on a sophisticated algorithm using information pulled in from thousands of online sources about early stage companies: traffic, mainstream media, funding information sources, the blogosphere, and other key factors.

And now we need your help. We’re going to re-fresh the Index, taking some companies out, putting some in and generally improving it. We’d like your feedback on who should stay and who should go. Leave your feedback in the comments. More after the jump:

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So, good luck to all those startup teams attending Launch48 in London in a couple of weeks. What’s Launch48 you say? Here’s the schpeel:

Launch48 runs events for people who want to try to learn and launch a web business. On Friday the 16th of October we are running a conference with some of the best web entrepreneurs from the UK speaking about marketing, PR, business, technical, and design in regards to launching a web business. From Friday 16th Oct in the evening to Sunday 18th October we are running the Launch48 weekend – a 48 hour event grouping people into teams to create new web businesses. During the weekend participants network, build a new business, and learn from a range of experienced mentors from the web industry.

In other words if you have a startup you want to find out will work or not, then hot-housing it for 48 hours may well help you decide.

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[Germany] The Samwer brothers, Germany’s most prolific startup investors, are on an e-commerce investment spree. While TechCrunch mourns the end of the funding party and 340,000 layoffs in Silicon Valley alone since August 2008, the three brothers with the Midas touch have used the same time to invest in at least 10 new online shops via their vehicle, European Founders Fund: 7trends (fashion), Beautydeal (cosmetics), DealStreet (penny auctions), Enamora (lingerie), Ladenzeile (shopping), Kinderwagen-Experte.de (baby buggies), Kirschkernkissen.de (cherry pit pillows), Lampen-Experte.de (lamps), Netzoptiker (eyeglasses) and Zalando (shoes).

These deals where done via the Samwer’s European Founders Fund. But five more e-commerce investments have been dug up by the German startup website Gründerszene by sniffing through the stakes of the Samwer incubator Rocket Internet: Kolibrishop for streetwear and sneakers, as well as its branches sneakersWorld.de und graffitiStyles.com, are now 50 per cent owned by Rocket. The Samwers also bought 20 per cent of Internetstores AG which runs the successful online shops Fahrrad.de (bicycles) und fitness.de (fitness). Rocket Internet also raised its stakes in Betreut.de, a website to find babysitters, dog walkers or private tutors, in August to 46 per cent.

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At an event I went to recently I asked the panel what book summed up the best way to startup. One of the panelists sung the praises of a new book aimed at startups: “Getting to Plan B”. I tweeted this out and, as if by magic, I was contacted by the authors offering a guest post. John Mullins is an Associate Professor of Management Practice and holds the David and Elaine Potter Foundation Term Chair in Marketing and Entrepreneurship at London Business School. Randy Komisar is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in California. Their new book, “Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model,” was recently published by Harvard Business Press. It strikes me that their iterative model is better suited to the way tech startups operate.

If the founders of Google or PayPal had stuck to their original business plans, we’d likely never have heard of them. Instead, they made radical changes to their initial models, became household names, and delivered huge returns for their investors. How did they get from their Plan A to a business model that worked? Why did they succeed when most new technology ventures crash and burn?

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This is a guest post by Sam Collins, one of the team members of Loc8 Solutions, a finalist in Seedcamp London 2009. Sam founded TechMeetup (@Techmeetup) in Edinburgh which has brought together the largest community of Scottish tech enthusiasts and is now running in Glasgow and soon Aberdeen. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh in June 2009 with a MEng in Civil Engineering and was awarded UK Graduate of the Year 2009 by the Institute of Fire Engineering. Sam joined Loc8 Solutions in April this year as Commercial Director, but left this year. He explains why below.

We went to Seedcamp, and spent three grueling days analysing our product. On the Thursday of the week we didn’t pitch for investment, and in fact, we completely sacked the product. That sounds bad – but this was a great achievement. If you don’t understand why, read on.

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Back in December 2008 Reevoo looked like it was running out of time.The B2B customer reviews site hunkered down on staffing amid pressure from the downbeat economic climate in an attempt to play out both its venture investment and give its revenues time to power up.

In March last year it secured an undisclosed round of investment from Banexi Venture Partners, the French leading venture capital firm that originally backed Kelkoo, while existing investors, including Eden Ventures, also participated. It was doing £500,000 worth of transactions a month with partners like Tescos, Orange and Dixons and had launched a French portal. But its SEO was terrible and it was, in my opinion, treading water.

Well today it looks like CEO Richard Anson’s slower burn strategy has paid off.

Reevoo is announcing further partners for its service including Hotpoint, Sharp and Toshiba (joining Brother, Cannon, Indesit, Kodak and Kaspersky) to supply genuine, post purchase, customer reviews for their European e-commerce sites. Although there are plenty of sites that let you review products, like Ciao and Amazon, only Reevoo confirms you actually bought the product.

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