I’m just going to get this out and see what occurs after.
So Facebook newsfeeds have been intermittently interrupted today and it looks like the story runs like this.
Today Facebook allegedly tried to shut down the ad-serving operations of Social Cash, an ad network that operates inside Facebook applications.
However, it appears that in shutting down SocialCash, it’s also shut out all applications running SocialCash adverts.
When I first heard that there was a new project to make London’s Technorati bare all for a charity calendar I was a tad skeptical it would actually happen, but the organisers are getting their act together fast, as you can see from the video below. (WITN = Why Is This News).
To anyone stumbling on this post from Silicon Valley or beyond, let me explain. Britain, the home of Benny Hill, still thinks it’s titillating to have people appear semi-naked. Hey, it takes all sorts. But from this culture was born Calendar Girls, a project by some normally straight-laced British women to pose for a calendar in the name of a cancer charity. The project eventually became a movie and is now even a West End play. The calendar they shot had them posing, in reality only semi-nude, but with little cover other than strategically placed objects. Ok, so that’s your history lesson over.
Anyway, the London Nude Tech Calendar now has a Ning group, and explains all here. And they’ve even done a teaser video:
London Nude Tech Calendar Teaser from Leap Anywhere TV on Vimeo.
FOWA’s known for being a launching platform for startups. The joy of being surrounded by 600-odd web people though is that there are bound to be a few other startups in the house apart from the ones that make it to the stage.
One that caught my eye yesterday is RunAlong.se, which as the domain suggests is a Swedish venture, founded by former user interaction designer Heidi Harman.
Currently in beta, it’s an online health community targeted at female runners who don’t necessarily want to run or walk on their own. Users can map a route using Google Maps, and then invite fellow runners to join them. The benefit to users is increased safety on runs, especially in the dark, and more motivation to actually put on those running shoes at the end of a long day.
The site launched in March 2009, and received some funding from the Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems, Vinnova. It’s a Ruby on Rails development which takes a “user-driven” innovation route in feature development, i.e. users define and prioritize the features they want most. Read More
Ipadio, a service which lets you upload and share audio from an iPhone or Android app or a voice call, in a similar manner to competitor AudioBoo.fm, has secured funding from Sussex Research Limited, the investment vehicle of Stewart Newton, a London-based financier who had enough clout to save English Hockey from bankruptcy a few years ago. Newton made his money through Newton Investment Management, a company he formed in 1977.
The amount was undisclosed but understood to be part of a commitment towards a £500,000 target. The company plans to see additional financing in first quarter of next year. The money will be used to further develop the service.
Having spent the past couple of days in Finland visiting some of the country’s most interesting startups, the omnipresent Nokia and attending the great MindTrek conference, I’m starting to get some insight in the Finnish tech scene. In short: it’s relatively tiny but surprisingly fascinating.
Apart from Dopplr, Jaiku, Floobs and some others, I wasn’t really all that familiar with the web startup scene in Finland, but I’ve met a couple of companies I’m going to feature here on TechCrunch Europe over the next couple of days.
First up: Muxlim, a media company that is all about ‘enhancing the Muslim lifestyle’.
Looking at the Twitter stream of Day 2 at FOWA 2009, it’s clear that Canonical’s Simon Wardley hit all the right buttons with his levelheaded and wryly humourous take on the ongoing evolution of cloud computing, and what it means for the future of innovation in the tech space. He gave a tip of the hat to Ubuntu’s Enterprise Cloud, which supports the emerging EC2 standard, and finished on the sombre reminder: “Either the cloud is based on open source or you’ll risk losing internet freedoms.”
I’m delighted to announce that this year’s Startup Competition at LeWeb, the annual gathering of global technology luminaries and startups in Paris, will be organized in partnership with TechCrunch Europe. We’ve been running startup events all over Europe for some time now — so I hope to be able to inject our experience into this great event.
Like last year, the LeWeb Startup Competition will have a dedicated room and stage. A total of 20 startups/applications will be selected to demonstrate a new product live on stage at the event. The winners of this competition will then have a chance to present their companies on the LeWeb main stage during a special session the following day. More after the jump.
All the details are on the submission page here, so please go and enter the new product you’d like to launch. The format of the competition will be a 6 minute presentation on stage. The application deadline for the The StartUp competition is OCTOBER 10th, 2009. Good luck to all.
Today we say ‘au revoir’ to a couple of regular TechCrunch Europe writers who’ve been, well, awesome contributors.
I met Basheera Khan first when she moved to London and threw herself enthusiastically into the tech scene here. “Bash” was the first person other than me to blog here since TCE’s re-launch in September 2007 . She took me and TCE completely on face value and just went for it. Over the last year or so she became one of our regular and most analytical of contributors.
But it’s finally happened. All this writing about way cool software has finally lured Bash over to the side. So as of today, Bash will be transitioning to the UX (User Experience) industry in a full time capacity. I can’t for the life of me understand why she wants to earn thousands a day as a hotly sought after UX consultant, something I often argue with my pet rat in my cockroach-infested garret about, but there you have it.
However, she will no doubt be returning to TCE occasionally guest blogger, and you can continue to read her Telegraph tech blog and catch her on Twitter as @Bash.
Bash is at FOWA London today and tomorrow, so if you want to pitch your startup for coverage on TCE or talk to her about UX stuff, keep an eye out for her.
Secondly, Milo Yiannopoulos, a prolific TCE contributor and former Daily Telegraph blogger, is off to Cambridge this weekend to start a Master’s in English Literature. As he blogs today, it’ll be pretty intense.
BREAKING: Well, look out iTunes. We’ve said previously that Spotify didn’t look like it was going to compete with the Apple iTunes Store. It’s streaming, freemium music service after all, not a download store.
It also recently launched an iPhone app that only subscribers can use.
But perhaps the hint of their strategy lay in the fact that on that app you could save playlists and tracks for offline playing (if, say, you were on a plane), though you can not access any kind of MP3 file for sharing of course.
All that changes today because later today Spotify will extend the ‘Offline mode’ that is available on Spotify Mobile and bringing it to the desktop version of Spotify.
