[Serbia] BudMate is a Serbian stealth project which deals with personal finances. The name is effectively a cut-down from “Budget Mate”, which is the working title of the project. The guys behind it are hoping to provide behavior-based personal finance advice and more for the South Eastern European region – although an English/international version may also happen.

Some key features will include: automated personal budget planning, tracking and optimizing personal budget goals, user-generated hints and advices, easy expenditure management with alerts, and advice based on your behavior.

[Ireland] Social media consultants Simplyzesty started using Twitter Lists to list blogs. However, a brainwave has lead them to take Twitter Lists to their logical conclusion: creating lists of Twitter users in entire countries. They’ve launched a Twitter list for the UK and the list of users in Ireland is currently going crazy. They call it “crowdsourcing populations”. Who knows – this could end up being a sort of crowd-sourced yellow pages/people directory.

A couple of hours ago they launched a USA version with a script built to make the listings automatic. The plan is to do is to cover the USA in 72 hours.

[Sweden] The Swedish government is following in the footsteps of the Finns (well almost), as their IT-ministry is now promising that 90 percent of all Swedish homes will have access to a 100 mbit/s broadband connection before 2020.

According to Swedish IT-minister Åsa Torstensson it isn’t possible to function in the information society of today without a fast internet connection. You hear that? This is the information society, people!

[France] The list of French tech firms that have raised over €1 million in 2009 that we published last week is already obsolete, and that’s great! French company Aquafadas have announced that they’ve raised 1.2 million euros with Credit Agricole Private Equity and Soridec.

Following an investigation that lasted over a year, Turkish authorities are fining Internet giant Google a total of 71 million Turkish Lira (approx. €32 million or USD $47 million) for supposedly dodging the national tax system.

Local media reports (links in Turkish) teach us that the Turkish government claims it is entitled to additional taxes because of the fact Google operates its online advertising in the country and even boasts offices and a registered subsidiary there while bills and payments originate from Ireland. That latter part rings true, since the search juggernaut’s European headquarters are located in Ireland’s capital and most of its support and financial services are centralized there.

But Turkish authorities say Google is required to pay national taxes for revenue generated through its registered company based in Turkey, and asserts that an extensive audit shows that the American company owes the government nearly $50 million in unpaid taxes.

[UK] Ipadio has secured its first blue chip customer – the UK’s Virgin Media. The quad-play provider (broadband, TV, phone and mobile) will utilise ipadio’s phonecasting service to improve the communication amongst its field workers who install and maintain the company’s products used by almost 10 million customers.

Ipadio offers similar functionality to AudioBoo but with additional features such as live phonecastng and audio to text translation through SpinVox’s API. Both iPhone and Android clients are available, though it seems that Virgin Media staff out in the field won’t be going the smartphone route but will use a regular telephone to interface with the service.

[Finland] Last week marked the end for Nokia’s unsuccessful games service N-Gage. Nokia announced that they will be closing down the service at the end of September 2010. About four hardcore fans protested mildly in the N-Gage blog as the rest of the world yawned.

Seems like N-Gage was a project doomed to fail. Who was the target audience again? Oh who cares.

The service was launched in 2003 as an attempt to tap into a growing games market. Anyone remember the clumsy N-Gage phone? No didn’t think so. Unless its hideousness and general usability difficulties stuck on your mind.

[Denmark] The Danish startup YouCalc launched their realtime analytics for SaaS in December last year. Today they say they get a new user every hour. It’s that success that means they are now considering more funding and that – often inevitable for successful European startups – move to Silicon Valley and the big US market.

Sunstone Capital has invested $5 milion in YouCalc since 2007, and with 5,000 company sign-ups and a further 170 new users per week – YouCalc is focusing on partnership with SaaS providers – the company reckons it’s best bet now is to seek expansion in the US with a US VC.

[Croatia] Croatian startup Trillenium is to launched their web-based 3D shopping mall and social network with financial backing from a local angel investor and partnerships with a dozen local and international brands that will offer their products.

While the hype over 3D experiences started by Second Life has passed, Trillenium is betting its future on what they see as a more realistic shopping experience, closer to real shopping malls. Users will be able to move freely between shelves and products as well as talk to salesmen and each other, but since the project hasn’t launched yet, we’ll have to wait a while to see the user experience. With web shopping still in its infancy in the region, a 3D shopping experience goes leaps and bounds in terms of technology.

[Germany] Yahoo is claiming it has “displaced” Google search in Germany. Let’s just check that again. What has happened is that Yahoo has entered into an exclusive, multi-year, partnership with O2 Germany to become the preferred partner for mobile search and services. Who was the previous partner? Google. So that’s not actually the same thing at all.

The deal means O2 users there can now access to Yahoo!’s mobile-optimized search engine on O2s mobile portals. Users also will be able to sync their PC and mobile homepages. Yahoo! will also deliver sponsored search results for O2. It also includes links to and content from other Yahoo properties.

[Update] Yahoo tells me that it is not paying O2 through the nose for this deal and it’s not the continuation of a any kind of contractual arrangement. (In 2007 Yahoo made a deal with Telefonica, which owns O2, that put Yahoo search on Telefonica phones in Latin America and O2 in the UK. O2 Germany had at the time just signed a deal with Google). So O2 consciously chose Yahoo over Google as O2 Germany was not part of any over-arching Telefonica deal. It’s also fair to point out that T-Mobile has also more or less displaced Google’s search for its mobile services in Europe for Yahoo’s.