Plakatt is a new free service launching today out of Serbia which allows users to share and find events in their own city or in the region. In other words it’s an online event manager meets social network. The startup is joint venture of two companies from Novi Sad — Rendered Text and Sprawsm.

Plakatt users are able to post events they are interested in, browse existing ones and have an overview of the happenings in their or any other city for that matter. Also, the guys from Plakatt are hoping to provide a new way of communication between users on one side, and venue owners, PR managers, and event organizers on the other side.

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How can you engage employees to come up with ideas and take ownership of corporate innovation? Usually startups don’t have that problem because ‘employees’ are part of the innovation engine. But plenty of other companies would like that mojo. So Nosco has built an online suggestion box to support Idea Exchange management within a company, and hopefully answer that question.

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Meet MuZoid. She’s a very clever bot created by some even cleverer people; she’s all about killing all humans helping you find more music to love, CDs to buy and gigs to attend, and she does it all through Twitter, naturally.

Twitter users sending a tweet with the name of a band or artist to MuZoid receive a reply in less than 2.5 seconds with a link to a bespoke webpage containing gig listings, a discography, a recommendation of similar artists that the user might like. If MuZoid doesn’t know an artist, she makes a note of it and gets busy learning. Once enough information’s available, she’ll tweet back to the original querant with an update.

The app speaks to peoples’ love of instant gratification; it works with the fact that Twitter is a platform built around real-time messaging, and serves up a slew of aggregated relevant content a sight more zippily than the disparate results a simple Googling would return.

MuZoid’s proud parents, MusicMetric, can be found in London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout‘. The angel-backed startup is in the trends analysis business, using machine learning methods combined with text mining to track trends in the music industry and perform in-depth analysis of music fans’ online preferences. The company is currently working toward rolling out subscription-based analytics and trend forecasting software for the music industry.

In the meantime, they launched MuZoid, who co-founder Greg Mead says was born as a by-product of this process, i.e. large amounts of data such as gigs, genres and releases indexed into the MusicMetric data warehouse. The data is also used to infer similarities between artists, but what sets it apart from Amazon or Last.fm, which use consumer preferences and crowdsourcing respectively, MusicMetric’s inferences are all down to machine learning classification — which means that the information becomes more accurate as more sources of data are found.

It’s a fiendishly clever idea, so it’s probably no surprise that the folks behind it are all, well, wickedly bright. Greg’s background is in physics and computational physics. The other founders are Matthew Jeffery, Marie-Alicia Chang, Jameel Syed and Andrew Walker. Jameel has a PhD and 10 years experience in analytics and text mining for the life sciences industry. Matthew is a computer scientist, Marie-Alicia’s background is in financial software marketing and Andrew is co-owner of creative agency Thin Martian and co-founder of Tweetminster.

MusicMetric plans to release a suite of widgets, social network apps and free public APIs making the data available for people to build their own apps. They’ll also be adding more music stores in the near future, which will allow for price comparisons on albums across the board. There aren’t any standards for music or ecommerce APIs, Greg says, so the more problematic ones (like HMV) will take longer than others.

Developing this technology is a creative journey, and it helps to give the AI more personality if it has a gender.  There’s so much male-dominated language associated with technology that we thought it would make a nice change to anthropomorphise this software bot as female.  If we called it a “cute little guy” that would be way too predictable. The Cylons are cool, I saw one walking the earth down Great Eastern Street the other day, Shoreditch is full of them.

SellaBand, the social music startup which encourages music fans to invest in up-and-coming artists, is expanding its offering to the US in a deal with Amazon.com company CreateSpace.

The deal relies on CreateSpace’s Disc on Demand service, an inventory-free solution in which discs are manufactured only after a customer places an order. It’s an elegant and affordable solution to a common problem – you go to a gig, see an up-and-coming band, fall in love with their music – and then have to live with bootleg recordings or crappy quality MySpace streams or YouTube vids because the band’s so up-and-coming they can’t afford a CD run.

SellaBand’s model turns the recording industry model on its head; leaving it to the audience rather than the label to invest in talent in an IPO-stylee share sale. Any artist can sign up to the site and showcase their music to the general public. As part of signing up, the artist issues 5,000 ‘parts’, which sell for US$10 each. When someone buys a part, they become a ‘believer’. With enough believers behind them, a band can raise the $50,000 it takes to get into the studio and produce an album.

To date, SellaBand believers have helped 30 artists from 13 different countries raise the full $50k, and invested over $3m in unsigned artists. Investors receive a limited edition copy of the resulting album. On top of that, the artists and their fans share in album sales revenue.

SellaBand has collaborations with Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de, and recently appointed Public Enemy frontman Chuck D as ambassador for the company, supporting its US expansion.

The mobile content service which Yahoo previewed at Mobile World Congress in February launched today across eight countries, available both as an iPhone app and a mobile content site optimised for 300 devices ‘with HTML-enabled mobile browsers’.

Yahoo Mobile, available at http://new.m.yahoo.com or from the App Store, combines what you’d expect from Yahoo’s services — search, news, social networks and email — with other web content which users can select to personalise their experience. The ordering of that list of services, taken from the official press release, is a clear indication of Yahoo’s priorities.

The service and app launched in the UK, Germany, France, the US, Canada, India, Indonesia and the Philippines, with additional localised versions expected to launch over the next several months.

Yahoo says the launch, which comes a scant eight months after Google launched its iPhone app in the UK, is all about continuing the company’s mobile leadership and capitalising on its market potential, which it plans to do through rich media display advertising that will encourage user engagement, so for example, allowing users to send ads to a friend or click to call the advertiser directly.

So far the app’s received a lukewarm response on the App Store, garnering a mere 1.5 star rating (though of course, only six people have rated so far) and complaints about the speed of the app over GPRS and loads of ‘page not available’ error messages.

Picli.com, a photo sharing community site launched in private beta in March 2007, has relaunched with a slew of new features and a more clearly defined business model.

Two years seems like a long time for a site to be in beta, and Picli’s developer/designer founder duo of Sam Street and Sean Miller acknowledge this in the FAQ, referring to 2008 as ‘the dark age’ in which, well, nothing much happened. Still, Picli managed to gather a passionate core user community of about 2,000 in this time, whose feedback has contributed to the recent refinements.

Picli’s a bit like Flickr meets Digg – users submit their photography under Creative Commons licensing, which then gets rated up or down by the community. The central focus of the site is the Showcase, a gallery of the most popular photos.

With the relaunch comes tiered membership packages, which the founders are currently soliciting user feedback on before any final decisions are made. There are plans to build upon the online advertising options, currently revolving aorund Google AdSense, and to implement a photo buying service where Picli users could sell usage rights on their images to picture buyers, using a commission-based system which Miller and Street call ‘targeted tagging’. The guys also plan to release an API that will encourage developers to extend the site’s functionality to mobile devices and web apps.

While on the face of it Picli may seem like yet another Flickr, the founders are adamant this isn’t the case – it’s less about acting as a giant harddrive for users to upload all their photos to, and more about community-driven quality control, where photographers share only their best work and take inspiration from others — not dissimilar to what FFFFound does for visual artists.

Miller and Street are bootstrapping Picli for the moment, and say they would love the site to drive traffic to members’ personal portfolio sites as a result of the interest generated on Picli. The site’s gone a ways in proving the concept around a free-to-use model. Whether or not it can compete with the likes of fotoLibra and Demotix will depend on how readily the user community coughs up for annual subscriptions, and whether or not picture buyers find on Picli what they can’t find elsewhere. Watch this space.

Here’s something from the department of Quelle Surprise: Bango (AIM: BGO) reckons the iPhone lags behind the top 20 mobile handsets most used in browsing and buying on the mobile web.

The Bango Top 20 handset list, based on Bango’s February statistics, puts the Nokia 3110c on top, followed by the Samsung M800 in 2nd and the Nokia 6300 in 3rd place. On the whole, smartphones account for 30% of handsets in the top 20. Bango detected a total of 1,811 different types of handsets accessing the mobile web in just one month.

The iPhone appears as 24th on the list, leading Bango to conclude that brands trying to reach the mass market on the mobile web need to look beyond that rarefied group of iPhone users whose buying is restricted to the Apple App Store.

The company’s stats are based on its own metrics from Bango Analytics, monitoring the activities of major brands and businesses as their consumers browse to mobile websites, and the number of sales of mobile content and services handled by Bango Payment.

While it’s not a comprehensive or comparative study, the stats and Bango CEO Raymond Anderson’s blog analysis will still make interesting reading for businesses that monetize their mobile content and services across a wide demographic.

Anderson’s point that companies that haven’t optimised their sites for mobile browsing or transactions are missing out is on the money, but this situation is not likely to remain constant. Come June, when new iPhones are launched, it’s likely to be at different pricepoints more suitable for the mass market.

Astia wants to hear from you. The Silicon Valley organisation focused on funding women-led start-ups has launched a programme in the UK to help high-potential, high-growth startups across Europe find investors and mentors.

Astia’s US programme has run since 2003 with fundraising success upwards of 60%, raising more than $495m for presenting companies and had 11 exits, including two IPOs. The not-for-profit organisation has high expectations to match this success in Europe, and is putting the call out for women-led startups to tap in to its community of over 450 experts, serial entrepreneurs and CEOs in the Valley and Europe.

The London programme will kick off with the three-day Doing It Right event from 11-14 May; the deadline to apply for a place at the event is 22 April.

Astia’s advisory board includes a number of very strong and well-connected entrepreneurs, investors and advisors, including Microsoft’s Bindi Karia and Jane Houghton of the British Venture Capital Association.

AudioBoo, the audio blogging platform and iPhone app that was launched in private beta in January, is now freely available at the App Store. It’s one of 4iP’s first investments – backing Best Before Media’s development of AudioBoo, which lets users create and tag recordings which in effect produce a map of the world tagged with evocative sounds of each place.

Knocking about the AudioBoo.fm site, you can learn about White Day in Japan, listen to a German practising his guitar chords or any number of ‘boos’ that are the AudioBoo equivalent of “Testing, 1, 2, 3…” – and even those are surprisingly addictive.

Mark Rock, founder and CEO of Best Before, says the company will soon roll out plugins to allow Wordpress users and other bloggers to embed their boos on their own sites, and will be publishing the API to encourage development of AudioBoo for other phones and mobile operating systems. Ultimately, the vision is for AudioBoo to be available for any internet-connected device that can record audio.

Dan Heaf at 4iP has blogged his hopes that AudioBoo will empower users to better create audio journalism or first person narratives, as well as making it easier to find this type of content on the web. Rock says Best Before is already in talks with a number of regional news organisations who see the potential for the tool in ultra-local news reporting.

The company’s still number crunching to determine the ideal mix of revenue streams; one proposal is a freemium approach where people using the free version would be capped at three minutes’ recording time, while those paying a monthly subscription would be able to record for up to an hour and attach multiple images to each file.

The next release of AudioBoo will allow users to store boos on their phones and cue recordings for later upload.

UPDATE: This event is now sold out.

I recently heard that Scott Rafer would be in town next week. Scott is a Silicon Valley Internet entrepreneur, CEO of Lookery (CrunchBase info), and former CEO of MyBlogLog, which was acquired by Yahoo! last year for $10 million.

So I thought I’d throw a quick dinner to get some startups together and chat. Scott will be talking informally about the scene in the US for startups, and his impressions about the European scene which he knows well. The event will be of particular interest to social networking startups.

You can get a ticket to the dinner here on EventBrite.

Unfortunately, due to the nightmare of booking a venue last minute there are only 12 places, so hurry and get yours. We’ll be throwing bigger, more open TechCrunch events in due course – this dinner is a sort of experiment. If it’s successful and people like the idea, we’ll do more.

(PLEASE NOTE: This is an all-inclusive “Ticket Only” Event, which means you’ll need to have purchased a ticket prior to the event. You can’t turn up and buy one, sorry about that! )

BIO:
Scott Rafer has been helping Internet publishers and users jump on What’s Right Now! since 1995. Today, that means delivering services for social publishing and discovery. Scott is CEO of Lookery, as well as co-founder of Mashery and chairman of Winksite. Lookery is an ad network and user-targeting service that is supporting the growth of social applications starting with Facebook. Mashery manages API and developer programs on behalf of web services providers including Facebook app providers. Winksite helps publishers large and small assemble active mobile communities around their brands based on the content they already syndicate. Just before all that, he was CEO of MyBlogLog until Yahoo! acquired the company in January 2007. Before MyBlogLog, Scott tried to build blog/RSS search companies in both 1998 & 2003. Before the first dotcom boom, Rafer led Internet products group Kodak Hollywood, worked in investment banking at Needham & Company, and graduated from the M&T Program at UPenn.

More info:
Lookery.com
BIO
LinkedIn

Tuesday/Wednesday next week sees the launch of the grand-sounding World Biz Online, and my Spidey Sense is already tingling.

Big London launch in a Mayfair hotel? Check. “Global internet portal”? Check. “The first functioning Web 3.0 site on the internet”? Check. Poised to “change the way that business is currently done on the internet”? Check.

So I just got off the phone to the PR guy who wouldn’t tell me anything about who is behind the site, like the CEO’s name for instance. However, I gather it’s about 20 web apps wrapped into one big site (video, blogging, directories, email, VOIP, chat, text, photos etc) and mashes up consumer and business target markets. Its been “some years in the making”, built across the UK, South Africa and Germany, and is a “home page where you can do everything in one site.” Double check!

I’m in two minds about whether to go to the launch because it already sounds like they have ignored the now distributed nature of the Net and the emergence of APIs and platform applications. Should I go?

UPDATE: I did in fact go along to the presentation.

The site is positioning itself against large business-focused directories like Alibaba, Wand and Yell.com. However, they rather laboured the single point that they had come up with the “alpha and omega” of taxonomies to cover all possible categories. They have also wrapped up a tonne of tools (VOIP, IM, SMS, video, you name it) and are giving it all away free (not that original) as an incentive to register, create a profile and start hocking your business. CEO Stuart Sterzel, who is ex South African Special Forces but also former head of a number of mining and oil/gas businesses, very politely told me that they were extremely confident their plan would succeeed. Indeed, he said they have been researching it for 8 years and had put in well over 6-figures of funding into it via private investors.

My Opinion? I think the site does indeed look like it is 8 years old. The interface is very old fashioned. Plus they will need a lot (and I mean a lot) of marketing to give it any traction. I admire their enthusiasm, but I’m afraid I don’t hold out much hope for it’s success, to be blunt.

Pikum has gone into an invite only beta. The site lets anyone create and play games called Pikums where they can see who’s better at predicting the outcomes of future events/sports fixtures. Pikums can be played for bragging rights, or users can compete for real cash, capitalising on the attention and engagement of fans. Think gambling social network. Technically an e-gambling site, its registered as business on Gibraltar but is run out of London. Early last year Pikum won a seed round from of $650,000 from First Round Capital and a Series A from Virgin USA of $5.27 million. When I can get my invite code to work I’ll let you know what it’s like…

Pixsta is a London-based startup with an image search technology which allows you to browse and search visually. Since launching trials with a handful of partners including Elle’s browse&buy as well as others like the News of The World, it’s now going on the warpath with an image-based advertising network for the online fashion retail market, similar to Google’s adwords model, but based on images not text.

This is how it works: You click on an image, say a dress, and new associated images (matching handbags, shoes etc) appeal in a cloud around it. Clicking on any of the displayed items re-submits that item as the search term. Pixsta argues that a click on its AdImage network is worth more than an AdWord click because for the advertiser, customer acquisition costs are lowered, with lead-to-customer success rates higher. Media brand owners get a new, visual way of monetising their site which is perceived as content rather than advertising. Consumers get to see all the products from various retailers presented in a homogeneous way, like in a shopping mall, with no need to visit numerous individual sites. Clicks go direct to the product landing page.

Pixsta’s patent-pending image search technology is based on research by Pixsta co-founder Dr Daniel Heesch, who came up with algorithms that enable any image to be compared with any other, to determine their similarity in terms of shape, colour, texture and more. Pixsta CEO is Alexander Straub, CEO and co-founder of Pixsta and of early dot-com Mondus back in 1999.

I don’t know where they plan to head with this technology but it occurs to me that if they allowed users to improve the image search by adding their own tags, the search may be improved. However, I dare say they thought of that already and are confident their algorithms can do the heavy lifting.

On March 31st this year Google and Virgin announced a joint venture: to create a human settlement on Mars. Sir Richard Branson penned a passionate statement on the Google Blog, saying:

“Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical…”

Virgle, the name of the joint project, took applications for the first Mars mission on its site, under Google.com/virgle. And there was even a YouTube competition and official video channel. However, the entire stunt was the day before April Fool’s day, and sure enough that’s what it turned out to be.

But it now looks like the joke was on Google and Virgin.

One enterprising individual went and registered Virgle.com, but way back in January. Who registered it, and why?

Back then a story surfaced related to news that Google and Virgin were working on “a secret project”, code-named Virgle, which was not to do with Mars at all. It supposedly had an environmental bent and may have been related to news that Virgin was looking to develop new kinds of environmentally friendly fuels (Virgin Fuels), possibly in conjunction with Google.org. Google’s non-profit arm is rumored to be working on a flexible-fuel, plug-in hybrid that could be powered by electricity, gasoline or biofuels.

So well before before April 1st, one Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Amsterdam-baseed entrepreneur and co-organiser of European startups conference The Next Web, already had the Virgle domain. Van Zanten is best known as “Boris” the guy in the white suit who invaded Mike Arrington’s house with his partner in crime Patrick Laive.

Whatever his reasons, it would be fair to say that registering Virgle will be useful publicity for The Next Web as Virgle.com now-redirects to a January 4 post on The Next Web’s blog where van Zanten commented:

“Guess what, the domainname Virgle.com was for sale and cheap too. I bought it and will make it redirect here. If this project becomes cool enough we could start another blog on that domain.”

That might have been the end of the story, until Virgin recently contacted him about the domain:

> Congratulations on registering virgle.com – swift work on your part!
> I have now been asked to retrieve the domain by both Virgin and
> Google. On that basis, we should be grateful if you would transfer
> the domain over into our control. We shall, of course, reimburse you the
> official registration and hosting costs you have incurred to date.

Van Zanten tells me “I haven’t decided what I am going to do with the [virgle.com]domain. Giving it back is an option. Starting a blog too. Selling it is always possible. For now, I’m just going to wait and see what Virgin/Google comes up with.”

So could there be more to this than meets the eye? Could Google and Virgin be working on something together after all? Id that why they want the domain back?

Stay tuned for more as this story as it develops…

Hobnox is a video and audio tools platform in closed beta coming out of Cologne, Germany. It’s aimed – mainly – at users who’d like to use rich tools to create and collaborate over video and audio. And I must say, what they have done with Flash tools is amazing.

The idea is to unite broadcast quality media with community tools. So the Hobnox Audio Teaser audio engine is a pretty complex Flash tool for sound, mimicking some real-life products, like effects pedals. Users get access to a digital media library and can collaborate with like minded creators and consumers. The lucky few get filtered into some editorial-led Web TV channels, which are quite high quality. Hobnox plans for the Audiotool to be scaled into a full browser-based audio production studio and the Livetool will become a fully functional broadcasting studio for live shows.

The site is still in a closed-beta phase, though some parts of the site are still accessable through invitation only.Althoug Hobnox is based in Germany (Cologne, Berlin, Munich) it also has an office in the USA (Boston, MA).

For a taster of what you can do Paul Proulx from Hobnox put together the below mashup of Tarantino films (via):

MySpace thought it was all over when it secured the MySpace.co.uk domain in February this year. A decision by Nominet’s dispute resolution service handed over the address, which previously had been owned by a small UK ISP since 1997, two years before MySpace.com launched. But an appeals panel has today handed the domain back to Total Web Solutions (TWS), a company in Stockport, near Manchester.

The fact that Myspace.co.uk was originally used to offer email services and websites to subscribers meant TWS had insulated itself from an action for some time. But MySpace’s main argument to Nominet centred on the most recent use of the domain as a Pay Per Click website which sent MySpace.co.uk visitors to a parked page with advertisements for social networking websites including MySpace. MySpace Inc says the practice started in July 2005 when News Corp took it over, boosting its fame, but TWS claims it was “at least” before June 2005.

Secondly, at issue was whether parking the .co.uk domain had become “abusive” when the PPC ads changed because MySpace.com became well known. In the case of MySpace.co.uk, the ads on the parked domain did change to “reflect the fame of MySpace.com”, admitted TWS, “but that had happened automatically as a result of the algorithms used by parking company Sedo.” In other words, TWS fingered the firm servicing the ads. While MySpace Inc. argued that TWS should have exercised control over the content of the adverts, TWS said this did not constitute a “change of use”.

The three-person appeal panel said they were “reluctant to place any duty on a registrant, who has merely had the good fortune (or maybe ill fortune) to register a name in good faith…” so long as they don’t exploit the situation.

There appears to be no more steps that MySpace can take within the Nominet DRS arbitration process to challenge TWS’s right to hold onto the name. So it’s the end of the line – unless there is further action MySpace can take through the civil courts.

Total Web Solutions also claims that Nominet tried to “unfairly help” MySpace by at first denying the existence of emails sent between solicitors and MySpace which may have aided TWS’s case. The solicitor who represented Total Web Solution in the case, Jim Davies, is now standing for election to the Nominet board, as he believes it’s unwise to “operate the DRS (Domain Resolution Service) from within the company.” Davies has been involved in a number of the more high profile domain name disputes in the UK recently.

Total Web Solutions’ Managing director Paul Fallon issued a statement [PDF] saying “We refused to be bullied by one of the largest media organisations in the world. This has been a very stressful case for a legitimate medium sized ISP to have to take on – but we had to defend our reputation and to stand up for what was right.”

Of course, the MySpace.co.uk domain is now effectively worthless since TWS would be ill-advised to do anything with it at all now. It is currently displaying a blank page. MySpace continues to use uk.myspace.com/. A MySpace spokesperson declined to comment.

Last.FM has got in touch to say that since the new Coldplay single ‘Violet Hill’ was released for free on Coldplay’s website this morning, Last.FM has been tracking the number of times it’s been listened to. And it’s a lot: 10,000 times in the 5 hours since the track was released. That’s 1 play every 2 seconds. Apparently the last time a track was listened to this intensively on Last.fFM was ‘15 Step’ from Radiohead’s free In Rainbows album, which clocked up close to 22,000 listens in 12 hours. Coldplay has had about 51 million listens on the site and their entire back catalogue of music is available for free-on-demand streaming. I’m not sure how that would compare, say, to a radio station playing a track on high rotation during a typical day of release. But then Last.FM’s service can go on forever, right down into the Long Tail, the radio station can’t.

Lycos Europe, the forgotten portal site which left the tent and said “I am just going outside and may be some time” a few hundred years back, is up for sale (via PaidContent). Owned 32.1 percent by Telefonica and 20 percent by Bertelsmann, it’s now appointed Dresdner Kleinwort as its advisor following the inevitable “strategic review to evaluate its options”. First quarter revenues are EUR 16.2 million, respective to Q107 last year of EUR 20.0 million. Net losses were about EUR 5.9 million, down from a profit of EUR 7.5 million over the same period.

So the ideal play would be to roll-it up with Excite Europe, itself living on the smell of an oily wrag following an acquisition last year by GOADV, an Italian media company which specialises in generating qualified traffic and which at least has a few interesting ideas like its Mix start page. Either that or a long painful death, owned by some terrible advertising company.

The venerable FriendsReunited, one of the the oldest social networks in the UK, has relaunched as a free social network containing features which will have a direct impact on several niche social startups, specifically Miomi and Rememble, which are both pushing the “digital lifestyle aggregation” as a feature.

Rememble is a bootstrapped startup but Miomi is a larger venture backed by Brightstation Ventures and created by three German developers and headed up by CEO Jonny Crowe. Both were launched last year.

Both sites feature timelines where you drop in life events, as well as share content like photos – exactly the same feature at Friends Reunited has added (see video, after the jump, which I have manually encoded so it will auto-play, apologies – FR don’t have a properly embedable version the video is annoying!).

Friends Reunited was sold to TV broadcaster ITV in 2005 for £120m.

TechCrunch UK & Ireland has learned that Wubud will be the next venture of UK-based entrepreneur, Paul Walsh, who already runs Segala, a usability and certification agency (though he is possibly better known as a blogger and UK Internet scene networker). Wubud – yet to launch – will be a mobile social network pre-installed as an application on a SIM card belonging to an as yet unnamed MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) as well as distributed for download online.

The Wubud mobile social network will most likely hook into location-based services, and details are sketchy at this point – but anyone watching Walsh’s stream of Twitters can’t have failed to notice the idea has been brewing for a while.

The model is an interesting one, according to what I understand Walsh has been saying to colleagues. The MVNO will have some kind of deal to distribute the SIMs (I’m guessing a large retailer or online player?) and will also take care of billing customers. But as an application on the SIM, Wubud will also have access to the billing system and will be able to charge for services without the customer having to input credit card details. That removes a lot of friction and allows Wubud to introduce paid-for services on top of its social network. The only other players able to do this would be another MVNO or mobile carrier, as a normal mobile social network would need to integrate with a separate payments system like Paypal or SMS billing, which incurs extra charges.

The team for Wubud will include (Update: apparently these are just ‘advisors’): Paul Birch (Co-founder, Bebo), Carl Taylor (Director of Applications & Services, Hutchison Whampoa Europe and a member of the Executive Committee at the GSMA); and Ewan Spence, long-time mobile commentator, writer and blogger.

Along with Walsh’s backing I understand that Birch, who recently hit paydirt when his stake in Bebo was realised with its sale to AOL for $850m, is providing seed investment.

Meanwhile, Walsh’s other business, Segala, which specialises in the arcane world of Internet standards compliance certification for web and mobile services, is developing a browser extension. This will classify the content of web sites in a Semantic Web fashion to enable “trust” based on standards and codes of conduct. Angus Banks (Co-founder of Moreover, bought by Verisign) recently became an advisor to Segala, which is looking to raise a $4 million round.