You might notice many of your favorite websites look different today. Wikipedia is down. Wordpress is dark. TechCrunch has adjusted it’s homepage logo to look even weirder than usual. So what’s the big deal?

Right now in Washington D.C., Congress is considering two bills that would censor the web and impose burdensome regulations on American businesses. Over here on the European version of TechCrunch we think that’s a fantastic thing. Utterly fantastic. No, really.

The PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House PIPA & SOPA will indeed censor the web. For you guys in the US!

Nine teams from the new Ignite100 accelerator based in the North East of the UK, which launched with a £1m fund that invests up to £100k per team – are presenting to investors in London today. Their own descriptions of themselves are below:

A Spanish startup SocialBro aims to run the numbers on a brand’s twitter community and those of its competitors, thus distilling the results. Now with Real Time Twitter Analytics one can also see which users are online, what languages they predominantly speak, and how many followers they have as a group.

What I like about SocialBro the most is the ability to find target groups of users and easily follow, unfollow or add them to a list. One can do that with pretty much any Twitter account or a list. I have been playing with the tool for quite some time, and have summarized below the main questions SocialBro helps to answer.

Northzone – best known for being a Series A investor in Spotify, but also inside hot companies like BraveNewTalent, Videoplaza and VisualDNA among others – has until now confined itself (mostly) to regional investing in its Nordic stamping ground from its bases in Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen. But that all changes with the opening this month of a brand new London office and the simultaneous appointment of Jeppe Zink as a General Partner to spear-head the operation. Zink (37) is better known as 14 year partner at Amadeus Capital Partners, but I’m told the move was entirely amicable between both firms. Amadeus has stayed in the traditional VC role in recent years, with big rounds for companies with revenues, such as its the $25 million round it lead in Shoreditch-based Unruly Media last December. Zink joins Lea Bajc who, as Northzone’s investment director, has been holding the fort in London till now.

I’ve been fascinated by social mobile location services since at least 2006 when, three years before Foursquare and year after Google acquired Dodgeball, a UK entrepreneur created BuddyPing, now sadly defunct, and right up to the launch of Pin Drop the other day. The rise of the iPhone shortly after created an ecosystem of location-aware apps which has continued to mushroom ever since. But there’s one thing that has frustrated me. Seeing where people are right now is all very well. But I what really want to know is – where will they be next? And note just the future, but in the next few hours? It’s something I’ve decided to call Near-time Location Planning. Now, in ‘Global Planning’, Dopplr had an amazing vision of where the future and location could be mixed, but Nokia’s acquisition effectively killed its development. Plancast has been interesting but it’s not location aware. Ditto and Foreca.st have come close. But not quite.

Now I think I may have found potentially my Nirvana: Uberlife (an alpha iPhone app is here).

Beepl is a questions and answers service, which launches today. Co-founder/CEO and ex-TechCrunch blogger Steve O’Hear actually left TC to do this startup is convinced that Beepl can take on the the so-called Q&A field better than Quora. But how?

We’ve been watching online video advertising startup Brainient for a little while, given that the online video market looked poised for a lot of growth. Just how much growth was revealed at CES last week when YouTube stood up and predicted that 75 percent of all future channels will be born on the Internet and it had logged a trillion hits in 2011. That’s a lot of potential advertising inventory and someone out there is going to have to come up with some answers to make this work.

To that end Brainient has brought round a few people to the same idea, given that today it lands $1.8 million in funding from a number of strategic investors. The round was led by Prague-based Credo Ventures. The other backers include Atlas Venture and Estag Capital. Existing investors Sherry Coutu and Dave Mclure’s 500 Startups incubator also participated in the round. Atlas is already doubling down on ad plays such as AdSafe Media and Estag Capital in RevenueMax, Germany’s leading yield optimisation platform.

Various German media outlets are reporting that Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher, has invested once again in a startup in Berlin, after doing so with SoundCloud and Amen. What is it with Ashton and Berlin? Post-Demi, is he planning to move or something?

At any rate, the lucky winner of his humungous Twitter attention now will be Gidsy, which is a community marketplace for authentic travel experiences.

We’re looking forward to our very first TechCrunch Baltics event on February 9th, 2012, in the lovely city of Riga, Latvia.

We’ll be holding a min-conference and pitch contest to show off the best that the Baltic startup and technology community has to offer. Below you’ll find the agenda. Up to 8 select Baltic startups will able to pitch to a jury and audience that includes many key investors in the region and beyond (please apply here).

You can grab a ticket here and also follow @TCBaltics for information.

Appearing at the event include Aldas Kirvaitis (CEO, Cherry Media Group) who leads the Baltic daily deal operator that has grown from zero to a monthly run rate of 1.7m Euros and Baltic market dominance in less than 2 years; Jon Bradford (Managing Director, Springboard Cambridge); Carlos Eduardo Espinal (Partner, Seedcamp); , Priit Salumaa (Co-Founder and Member of the Board, Garage48); Margus Uudam (Ambient Sound Investments); Lars Hinrichs (Executive Geek & Founder, HackFwd); Kris Hiiemaa – CEO, Erply; Stephan Uhrenbacher – CEO, 9flats.com; Andres Susi – CEO, Flirtic; Vitaly Rubstein – Co-Founder and Partner, RubyLight.