[UK] Taking responsibility for one’s own health records, let alone storing then online, is a pretty alien concept to most Brits, considering the National Health Service (NHS) and the centrally stored patient database that’s being rolled out on our behalf. That isn’t stopping Scotland-based MyVaccs, however, which is hoping to persuade parents, students and frequent travelers in the UK to upload their vaccination history and utilise the site’s ability to help them stay up to date with any required jabs.

[UK] The latest benefactors of Cambridge-based Red Gate’s startup incubator have been unveiled. But before we get to this year’s teams, a quick reminder of how Springboard works.

Over the course of ten weeks, Red Gate provides startups with office space, money to live on, food and mentoring, including weekly talks from successful entrepreneurs. In return, they don’t take equity or seats on the board but instead hope that the program will benefit the tech eco-system in Cambridge in general and help Red Gate forge useful relationships for the future. Anyway, without further ado, here are this year’s Springboard teams.

[UK] This is a guest post by Doug Richard, the American-born but UK based entrepreneur and formerly of the BBC’s Dragon’s Den show. Doug is the Founder and Vice-Chairman of the Cambridge Angels and Chairman of the Conservative Party Small Business Task Force. Between 1996 and 2000 he was President and CEO of Micrografx, a US publicly quoted software company. Prior to that he also founded and subsequently sold two other companies: Visual Software and ITAL Computers. Doug is a long time proponent of startup culture in the UK and to that end has recently created the School for Startups. Their next event will be on November 18th at the Royal Institution.

I have been writing a series of articles recently entitled “The Price of Money” that grew out of my unease that people neither understood how great the cost of capital is nor the enormous difficulty involved in pricing capital. I was further dis-enchanted by the rhetoric amongst government ministers reciting mantras of entrepreneurship and access to capital as though their wholesale theft of the language of the Schumpterian community absolved them from actually doing anything effective in support of small business growth.

[Serbia] BudMate is a Serbian stealth project which deals with personal finances. The name is effectively a cut-down from “Budget Mate”, which is the working title of the project. The guys behind it are hoping to provide behavior-based personal finance advice and more for the South Eastern European region – although an English/international version may also happen.

Some key features will include: automated personal budget planning, tracking and optimizing personal budget goals, user-generated hints and advices, easy expenditure management with alerts, and advice based on your behavior.

[Ireland] Social media consultants Simplyzesty started using Twitter Lists to list blogs. However, a brainwave has lead them to take Twitter Lists to their logical conclusion: creating lists of Twitter users in entire countries. They’ve launched a Twitter list for the UK and the list of users in Ireland is currently going crazy. They call it “crowdsourcing populations”. Who knows – this could end up being a sort of crowd-sourced yellow pages/people directory.

A couple of hours ago they launched a USA version with a script built to make the listings automatic. The plan is to do is to cover the USA in 72 hours.

[Sweden] The Swedish government is following in the footsteps of the Finns (well almost), as their IT-ministry is now promising that 90 percent of all Swedish homes will have access to a 100 mbit/s broadband connection before 2020.

According to Swedish IT-minister Åsa Torstensson it isn’t possible to function in the information society of today without a fast internet connection. You hear that? This is the information society, people!

[France] The list of French tech firms that have raised over €1 million in 2009 that we published last week is already obsolete, and that’s great! French company Aquafadas have announced that they’ve raised 1.2 million euros with Credit Agricole Private Equity and Soridec.

Following an investigation that lasted over a year, Turkish authorities are fining Internet giant Google a total of 71 million Turkish Lira (approx. €32 million or USD $47 million) for supposedly dodging the national tax system.

Local media reports (links in Turkish) teach us that the Turkish government claims it is entitled to additional taxes because of the fact Google operates its online advertising in the country and even boasts offices and a registered subsidiary there while bills and payments originate from Ireland. That latter part rings true, since the search juggernaut’s European headquarters are located in Ireland’s capital and most of its support and financial services are centralized there.

But Turkish authorities say Google is required to pay national taxes for revenue generated through its registered company based in Turkey, and asserts that an extensive audit shows that the American company owes the government nearly $50 million in unpaid taxes.

[UK] Ipadio has secured its first blue chip customer – the UK’s Virgin Media. The quad-play provider (broadband, TV, phone and mobile) will utilise ipadio’s phonecasting service to improve the communication amongst its field workers who install and maintain the company’s products used by almost 10 million customers.

Ipadio offers similar functionality to AudioBoo but with additional features such as live phonecastng and audio to text translation through SpinVox’s API. Both iPhone and Android clients are available, though it seems that Virgin Media staff out in the field won’t be going the smartphone route but will use a regular telephone to interface with the service.

[Finland] Last week marked the end for Nokia’s unsuccessful games service N-Gage. Nokia announced that they will be closing down the service at the end of September 2010. About four hardcore fans protested mildly in the N-Gage blog as the rest of the world yawned.

Seems like N-Gage was a project doomed to fail. Who was the target audience again? Oh who cares.

The service was launched in 2003 as an attempt to tap into a growing games market. Anyone remember the clumsy N-Gage phone? No didn’t think so. Unless its hideousness and general usability difficulties stuck on your mind.