Registration for the Plugg Start-Ups Rally 2010 are now open. You can register here.

Since 2008 Plugg in Brussels has become a must-attend fixture on the European startups scene. It was one of the first startups events I attended after just joining TechCrunch and it was a brilliant event, made more fun by the great welcome put on by founder Robin Wauters, who later happily became a TechCrunch writer as well.

Every year Plugg gives European startups an opportunity to pitch a large audience composed of entrepreneurs and investors, and an esteemed jury.

The Mobile Premier Awards have announced their full programme, happily occuring at the same time as the Mobile World Congress talkfest in Barcelona. About 30,000 mobile experts will be in the city so it’s great timing. TechCrunch Europe is a media partner with the Awards and I’ll be on the jury this year judging the startups.

Besides the classic MPA in Innovation live 3-minute pitches, this year also features the winners of previous awards.

There’ll also be a special keynote from arguably the most successful startup in mobile history, Russell Buckley of Admob, which was recently aqcuired by Google for $750m.

Asmallworld, the social network for a rather self-selecting elite, was launched several years ago by Swedish Investment banker and INSEAD Alumnus Erik Wachtmeister. Back then he’d deicded to tap into the evolving microcosm of social networking. In that era it was Myspace that was making its way as the leading social net aside from Friendster et al. Specialized social networks were still scarce. Wachtmeister hit up this niche of a an international network of affluent and influential people. Asmallworld grew to a userbase of initially 30,000 users, and later 500,000. So what happened?

[Ukraine] We know Skype is a great tool. It has over 500 million users worldwide. But even Skype has some feature gaps. In fact Skype has no internal call recording capabilities so that produced a variety of call recorders in the Skype ecosystem – from complex to buggy, from expensive to free. But what is the most common characteristic of the tools? They lock users into the computers they are installed in, hardly appropriate in a Cloud computing era. Users who want to access their call recordings or chats from another PC (e.g. home/work) are stuck. If you change a computer or reinstall Windows your Skype history will be irreversibly lost.

Fortunately there is a tool that effectively resolves both drawbacks – G-Recorder is a lightweight and simple Windows (only) application that records Skype calls and chats to Gmail. Its innovation is in integrating a user-friendly Gmail interface to handle Skype conversations like e-mail.

[Ukraine] Divine is a site which converts any Photoshop design to a fully functional theme for Wordpress CMS in several seconds. And it doesn’t require deep knowledge of technical HTML details or Photoshop skills. That makes it pretty unusual.

Since August 2009 30,000 users have installed the Divine plugin. Near 800 beta testers suggested approx. 245 ideas and near half of the ideas have been implemented in the first commercial edition – Divine Personal, which is to be released after extensive beta testing in the second quarter of 2010.

[France] The founding of Paris-based Creads sounds no different from the success stories of Silicon Valley: in 2008, 23-year-old co-founders Julien Michen and Ronan Pelloux founded their company with no more than €7,000 and the money in their pockets. Their main source of seed funding was won through a start-up idea competition at France’s Salon des Entrepreneurs – the same event that is taking place this week in Paris.

Two years later, Creads’ online platform has seen top-name companies leverage their creative community of over 10,000 people.

Everyone knows “realtime” has been a hot tech category for the last year or so but as we all know the ‘realtime problem’ is getting some kind of intelligence out of that firehose, and, crucially, eventually working out if or how it can be monetised. Search found its way with keyword targeting, but what will happen around realtime?

The Cognitive Match startup is applying artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content (product, offers, or editorial) to realtime content. It’s doing this in part by relying on an academic panel of professors in artificial intelligence from Universities across the UK and Europe who specialise in machine learning and psychology. The idea is to ensure maximum response from individuals, thereby increasing conversion, revenue and ultimately profit.

Last year it raised a Series A investment from Dawn Capital, rumoured to be in the $1m+ ballpark. Today Dawn has stepped in again with a follow-on Series B investment of $2.5m which the company will use to accelerate its growth. That takes it’s war-chest to around $3.5m

[UK] Forget farming or being a gangster, a new Facebook game from London-based music store theBizmo, lets users play the role of record label A&R person. And in the process of doing so, help promote and sell tracks by real artists.

Players of Hit Or Not compete with each other to predict the popularity of tracks from a catologue of independent artists. After picking from a range of musical genres, users are asked to listen to and rate tracks. They then earn points based on how closely their judgment resembles the average across all other players of the game from which they receive a “Hit Spotting” rank.

[Germany] Serial entrepreneurs and investors Christoph Janz and Mark Gazecki have invested in Momox, Germany’s leading online trade-in service for media products. Momox has run on revenues since 2003, but is now pulling in around €10m a year. The German-only site, which lets users trade-in their used books, CDs, DVDs and games for cash, will use the investment to expand (and hopefully get a UI makeover, geez). Terms were not disclosed.

Private individual traders enter the barcode of the CDs, DVDs or video game into the site and then get a trade-in offer from Momox immediately. If the person is happy with the price they send in the item and Momox pays the shipping cost and then pays the trader. Many eBay sellers switch to Momox, finding it much easier. Around ten thousand new items are added every day.

[Germany] Bab.la, the wiki-style language portal, has created a Twitter app that effectively turns the microblogging service into a real-time translation dictionary.

The Hamburg-based startup says it’s the first of its kind and that the idea was suggested by users, which seems appropriate given the crowdsourced nature of bab.la itself.