TechCrunch Europe threw a dedicated startup pitch event yesterday in London and – if we do say so ourself – it was a great success. We plan to do more of these kinds of events and, as I pointed out at the time, we will NEVER charge startups to pitch. They are selected by editorial, on merit only.

The winner of the pitch competition was FestBuzz (pictured). The other startups to pitch were Kyubid, Aware Monitoring, Social Safe, Yoomoot, Fiabee, Notion Learning, Audioboo, Kohive, En-twyn and mywidz.

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This year’s Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition was a battle between Dutch and UK startups with 3 finalists from either side of the Channel. The prize money was ramped up to €150,000 this year so it was all to play for in the fight between the cloggies and the rosbifs. The prize was awarded based on a combination of votes from the public, Mobile Monday members and an expert jury. The jury gave the finalists a hard time on stage (in particular Rummble and MyNameisE) with most questions focusing on the money.

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Hot London-based live music startup Songkick launches a new feature today allowing users to share their experiences of gigs. Users can now connect their Songkick account to their Twitter account and auto-tweet any gigs they plan to go to. That’s not that big a deal. What is pretty interesting however is how they’ve integrated Twitter to bring a realtime stream to their service.

When a user goes to a show, Songkick automatically pulls in tweets that they write during the concert as realtime, live reviews. The tweets are from actual gig-goers, making this way more valuable than just pulling in generic artist searches. This looks like the first time anyone has done this.

Since Songkick knows which gigs you’re attending via your Songkick gig calendar, once you’ve connected your account with Twitter it searches your twitter stream during the day of the gig for a mention of the artist, the venue or the hashtag #songkick.

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Seedcamp, the European startups programme a little (though not entirely) like YCombinator, has announced the winners of its year-long programme to find the best startups in Europe, finally judged over an intense week of mentoring by a long line of fellow European entrepreneurs.

Each startup has won €50,000 to develop their product, in return for Seedcamp taking a stake worth between 5-10% of the company. In each case the exact stake has not been released. Each winning team will spend the next three months in London working intensively on their startup. As we wrote earlier this week, overall the standard was strong this year and many of the VCs and CEOs I spoke to during this week have remarked on how much the quality of startups in Europe has improved, especially as reflected in this year’s Seedcamp vintage.

So the winning teams are:

[Update: I forgot to mention that it’s actually eight in total. Seedcamp already invested in Kwaga (see here) and Platogo (see here) via it’s mini-seedcamp days in Europe.

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Today, 0870, a fantastic free iPhone app from freelance mobile developer Simon Maddox is at last available in the UK App Store, after a whopping 429 days in the approval process. And it appears that O2 was largely to blame for the hold up. Read More

This is a guest post by Paul Fisher a Venture Capital investor with Advent Ventures in Europe Portfolio companies include Zong.com, Qype, Adeptra and DailyMotion. Paul blogs at The Coffee Shops of Mayfair and Twitters at @paulfish.

I have watched with interest as the Apple backlash intensifies* (see below). It seems the App Store has broken the camel’s back. There is massive resonance here for both entrepreneurs and VCs.

This quote from Chris Messina is my favorite . He thinks that the Apple App Store is a “flash in the pan” because it is a proprietary platform and, hey, wait a minute, proprietary platforms are counter to consumers’ interests. That’s why Microsoft accrued haters. And why folks are starting to feel the same about Apple?

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Vodafone today launched Vodafone 360 (its replacement for Vodafone Live) which brings together mobile phone contacts,  social networking accounts, email, IM, etc.  so they can be accessed seamlessly on phone or PC. It currently covers Facebook, Live Messenger and Google Talk. Twitter will be added soon. Vodafone has also added a range of new apps, games, music and mapping services as part of the launch and a 360 shop where content and apps  can be purchased. 360 will be downloadable to 100 different mobile phones in Germany, Greece, Ireland,  Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the UK as well as being pre-installed on a some  new 360 handsets from Samsung to be launched by the end of the year. Finally, 360 will be available to non-Vodafone customers as long as they have a suitable phone.

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Europe has no real equivalent to the big hothouse that is Silicon Valley, but it does have lots of tech clusters and networks. As recent research from the startup Seedcamp startup programme has shown, clusters of innovation are spread far and wide across Europe.

One place everyone agrees is a key cluster is London. It now hosts offices belonging to all the top-tier pan-European VCs, several new Seed funds, has a very active Angel investor market and hosts many major tech events.

However, largely because of its cost – everything is still expensive here – London remains hard for European startups to access and get into, even in a recession. It’s incredibly cheap to rent an office in Berlin, for instance. In London it can be double the price. And although European and US entrepreneurs often need to take meetings and work in London, they don’t always need permanent office space, which can be extremely restrictive to startups. Who wants to sign a huge lease before you’ve raised any funding? The preference is for working out of anonymous clubs, cafes, and perhaps sub-letting a single desk here or there.

To some extent events and conferences are great for networking. But when you can actually rock up to a space and see people in your community — well, it’s unbeatable. That’s what the vibe is in the Valley, where you can literally walk into potential partners, investors and co-founders. That’s what’s lacking here in London, a key, lynch-pin city on the European scene.

So there’s clearly a problem that needs to be addressed if the startup eco system is to develop in Europe.

TechHub (@TechHub on Twitter) is new project put together by Elizabeth Varley which will address just this issue. Elizabeth has been involved in the London scene for a number of years, organised London Twestival and has recently been developing the concept of a physical space aimed specifically at the tech community and particularly at startups.

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So before we get into this, let’s build the case for the defence. Nokia has been acquiring lots of small startups lately (Plum, Cellity and Bit-Side this year) and TechCrunch.com now has a source that says they’ve bought boutique travel social network Dopplr. This appears to have occurred while Dopplr was fundraising – something which often happens when deals are being thrashed out. Dopplr is not commenting on the story.

Dopplr is headquartered in London but owned and operated by Dopplr Ltd. in Helsinki, Finland. The service is based on the idea of “intention broadcasting” where you publish your intention to visit somewhere in the future, thus making happy coincidences in your social network less and less coincidental (and thus happier, more efficient). Where or from whom the original idea came from is lost in the mists of time (perhaps someone can enlighten us in the comments?).

Anyway, the purchase price is said to be between €10 million and €15 million. We first covered Dopplr in 2007 when it closed on seed funding.

Supposedly it has raised just €1.25 million or so in total funding although exact figures were never announced, even though they assembled a stellar groups of backers who have much deeper pockets than that.

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