So far Twitter users have gotten by with Direct Messaging when they want to be more intimate with their friends. But what if they could do Facebook-chat style instant messaging? That’s the offering today from Bonfire.im, a brand new disruptive startup which promises to change the Twitter experience in quite a fundamental way, by adding IM-syle Presence. Suddenly you could now know if your friends were online or ont. However, they hope Twitter will like this new plugin since it keeps users stuck to the web site. That means ad dollars for Twitter.

In Accra, the capital of Ghana, it’s not about who you know, what you know, which member’s club you belong to or even which school you used to go to. It’s all about which church you belong to.

Ghana is nearly 70% Christian and on Sundays anybody who is anybody heads off to church, not only to worship their God, but also to be part of the country’s biggest networking event. This is where business is done… and business is booming.

The country also has a sizeable Muslim minority, but relations between Islam and Christianity, unlike surrounding countries such as Nigeria, are cordial and are often mixed in with tribal beliefs. The country is also home to diverse religions such as Shintoism, Jehovah’s Witnesses and even Rastafarianism.

Movie and TV streaming service Netflix is to launch in the UK and Ireland in early 2012, according to the company today. Pricing will be announced closer to launch but the company says it will launch on a range of consumer electronics devices capable of streaming from Netflix, as well as on PCs, Macs and mobile tablets and phones.

In the UK it will go head to head with Amazon-owned Lovefilm, the well established streaming service. Amazon acquired LoveFilm in January for £200m, having previously held a 42 per cent stake in LoveFilm from since 2008 when Lovefilm acquired its European DVD rental business.

Last night London’s technology startup community – entrepreneurs and startups were invited to Buckingham Palace, the official home of Queen Elizabeth The Second. To say this was an unusual event wold be a significant understatement. But it is better understood in the context of the incredible outreach the UK government has made to technology entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in the last 18 months. There is more context to this in terms of Europe: at EG8 recently, I happen to know that the French Government had to scramble to find French startups to attend. They simply didn’t know who they were – despite a thriving scene covered by my colleagues at TechCrunch France. By contrast, Her Majesty’s government managed to come up with a guest list which pretty much mapped to the startup ecosystem in London. No small achievement.

If the mountain will not come to Mohammed then Mohammed will come to the mountain. The team of the London-based accelerator Seedcamp is on the go, visiting various locations in Europe to select best tech startups for investment and mentorship. If there is one thing other European accelerators – HackFWD, LeCamping, Springboard, you name it – could learn from this operation it’s this: Get out there! Startups aren;t happening under your desk, right? So get on a plane.

We don’t often enough shine a light on Spartoo.com, an online retailer of shoes and footwear.

This ‘Zappos of Europe’ was founded in France by three young entrepreneurs in 2006, and is now active in 20 countries, including United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.

Today, the company revealed that its internationalization efforts have led to significant growth.

Nordeus, makers of the extremely popular web-based football manager Top Eleven, have released their first mobile application: the Android version of their main product. Top Eleven for Android offers the same features and gameplay to Nordeus’s more than 3 million players in a user interface made for mobile gaming. Like its “big brother”, the Android application is free to play.

Players can buy addons and both versions of Top Eleven use the same user profiles so players can easily move from the desktop to their mobile device, at least if they use an Android phone.

Up until now Moonfruit has been known as a nice and easy web site builder. Although a long time player in the game (this company is 12 – count ‘em – years old) they’ve done very well at iterating their products onto other platforms, raised decent funding, got some serious names involved, some (like 500 Startups) from Silicon Valley, and seen their user base hit some serious traction of late. But today they enter a new realm which ultimately, in my opinion, makes them a player in the realm of owning what I call the “shop identity”.

Bogdan Iordache, the founder of How To Web, the eastern European web technology conference, is busy promoting it across Europe. He is presenting at the events in Germany, Bulgaria, Croatia and native Romania, where the conference about web technology and entrepreneurship is to take place on November 9-10, 2011.

Over 30 speakers will present at the conference, which aims to help entrepreneurs build better web applications. Among them are successful entrepreneurs such as Adam Somlai-Fischer, the co-founder of Prezi, Branko Milutinovic from Nordeus and Vladimir Oane, the co-founder and CEO of UberVu.

Social enterprise software Buddy Media has launched an addition to its social marketing suite today: it enables clients to share and manage their content anywhere on the open web. The new product, dubbed ReachBuddy, is meant to break down the boundaries of social networks and to power connections between customer and industry on a new level.

The Buddy Media suite has so far consisted of messaging tool ConversationBuddy, content management tool ProfileBuddy and interaction tracking product ConversionBuddy. All those tools were based on content distribution via Facebook and Twitter. With the update, content can now be deployed across the web easily through an embed code, too.