[Germany] You could say StudiVZ, the German Facebook clone has a few problems on its hands – and some unwelcome publicity.

Back in August Facebook officially became Germany’s biggest social network, increasing reach by more than 50% from March to July 2009 taking it to 6.2 million unique users in Germany. By contrast StudiVZ had 4.28 million uniques (though it continues to claim 6 million registered members). Even it’s spinoff aimed at post-university adults, MeinVZ, is ailing.

Then StudiVZ became the subject of some high profile hacks which showed up its lax attitude to security.

In particular was that by a 20 year old man who used crawler software to harvest detailed user information from all of the “VZ” sites (owned by VZ-Netzwerke), copying 48,000 profiles in just four hours. Bizarely he asked for just €80,000 and threatened to sell the information to gangs in Eastern Europe. The plan didn’t come of however. He turned up to the VZ offices to collect the cash, where the Police (doh!) were waiting.

But today the story just took a sinister turn.

We interrupt normal programming to bring you an issue that’s affecting our ability to create a better tech ecosystem in Europe. At TechCrunch Europe we’ve been trying to help really energize the startup tech community across Europe – which suffers from the difficulty of being disparate and spread out – with a series of organised meetups.

These are unlike casual networking events just in a bar. They feature speakers, lots of pitches from startups (no startups pay to pitch of course, ever) and live video streaming for those who either can’t make it or who want to tune in to get a glimpse of what the tech scene is like in that country. That live feed has gone onto TechCrunch.com and brought hundreds more to visit the place we’re in.

Now, we’ve done this so far in plenty of places, such as Helsinki, Paris, Stockholm, Barcelona and more recently Berlin and Munich. Frankly I didn’t think we’d be doing anything anyone on the local scene hadn’t already done at some stage. However, without exaggeration I’d have to say the reception in each place has been incredible. Clearly there is something about the the TechCrunch brand that brings all the right people together in the one place: entrepreneurs, startups, angels, VCs and other interested parties.

So we’d like to do more – visit more European cities, do more events. But – and here’s the point of this post – we are fighting against Europe’s high venue costs.

[UK] Stealth startup Zkatter is launching a real-time microblogging service in the next few months that could be a hit. Similar in theory to Twitter, Zkatter asks users “What do you see now?” vs. Twitter’s “What are you doing?”

The service, which has been in development since 2008, will allow anybody to broadcast and archive ‘live moments’ comprising location, media (image, video and text) to ‘friends only’ or ‘the public’ which can then be discovered instantly via search and friends time-lines. Zkatter’s focus is towards capturing information that you physically see live which offers a interesting addition to the real-time space.

Zkatter, which has received $1.5 million in Series A funding, is also developing iPhone and Android apps to work in conjunction with the standalone site, with the platform updated in real-time across all devices. So if you post an update on your iPhone, it will automatically show on the site. And Zkatter will be integrated with Facebook and Twitter, so you can publish you updates to both social networks as well. There are additional features to the site but this is the general idea of what the Zkatter will be able to do.

Guest post: We’ve given Europe’s tech video bloggers a mission to hunt down European startups every Friday and get them to give an elevator pitch. We’ll be rotating this slot with other contributors around Europe as well, so if you’ve got a video blog about tech startups, get in touch. Thanks to Tiburon TV for this post.

[Sweden] During the last 24 hours the cream of Sweden’s tech entrepreneur scene have exchanged jeans for yukatas (Japanese bathrobes), chairs for bean bags and isolated themselves in a zen style hotel outside Stockholm. Why? To come up with 60 new startups and then take over the world, of course! Well, maybe that isn’t what they think, but the location definitely has a Bond villain feel to it.

You have to hand it to the Swedes. Not only are they in amongst the forefront of web entrepreneurship in Europe, thanks to companies like Spotify and others, but they’re also hungry for more. This is the second 24 hour business camp of the year (the first ever event was held in January). During the last camp about 52 startups were created. And now they’re aiming for more. In bathrobes. In Autumn.

[UK] This is a guest post by communications specialist Antony Mayfield (twitter: amayfield) about C&binet Forum, the trendily named three day conference this week featuring the great and the good from the UK’s political, media and ‘creative’ industries. This ‘creative business conference’ was run by the Department for Culture Media and Sport, as a result of their joint publication (with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Department for Innovation and Skills) of a strategy paper for the creative economy called Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy.

If you liked ampersands, the Government’s creative industries conference, C&binet Forum was a great place to be. The logo sat everywhere, from the signs for dinner to massive “&” sculpture in one of The Grove’s lobbies.

Finnish startup Fruugo fascinates me to no end.

Founded in late 2006, the company set out to build a massive pan-European social e-commerce service, which it finally launched in closed beta at the beginning of this year. Their mission statement? To make Fruugo the equivalent of Google in search when it comes to social commerce on the Web.

The company reportedly raised dozens of millions of euros, at one point flirted with an employee headcount of 150 to 160 people (including contractors) and boasted a rock star board of directors that included people like former Nokia CEO and current Chairman of Shell Jorma Ollila as well as F-Secure Founder/Chairman Risto Siilasmaa. In 2008, they burned through about 14.5 million euros before they even put the closed beta product live and were ultimately forced to lay off almost half of its workforce as a result.

I’m currently blogging from a boat, rented by Belgian social network operator Netlog to host about a hundred of their closest business partners for a presentation about their freshly redesigned website and a roadmap of what’s in store for the future.

In their presentation, co-founders Toon Coppens and Lorenz Bogaert introduced something other than the newly revamped site. The company has also been developing a separately branded social gaming platform called Gatcha! which was talked about publicly for the first time today.

[UK] Online film and TV aggregator BlinkBox has gone all arty on us, signing a content partnership with the British Film Institute (BFI) — bringing the total number of British TV and film titles on offer to over five hundred and the total number of “premium” titles available on the service to just under six thousand.

Seeing BlinkBox, arguably, go a little up market with the BFI partnership sits a little at odds with the company’s recent credit crunch-busting Pizza Hut promotion or its long term ‘viral’ marketing strategy whereby users can create movie clips – referred to as ‘Blinks’ – to share with friends via email or SMS. But hey, more choice is always welcome.