School of Everything, designed to connect anyone who can teach with anyone who wants to learn, has quietly launched an early public alpha version of its site.

The site is set up to serve the thousands of people in the UK who now work as independent, self-employed teachers.

Co-founder Mary Harrington told me via email: “We’ve tested it out with some teachers and learners; we’re getting positive responses (and some successful matches!) and though technically we’re still changing very fast it’s time to open it out a bit more so we can grow and work more with the community.”

SoE has taken its inspiration from learning exchanges like the Free University in Palo Alto in the 1960s and Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1973), which pictured “webs of learning networks” to connect learners and teachers.

The site was developed originally with the support of the Young Foundation, a non profit which runs the Launchpad programme. In September 2007 SoE was chosen as one of 20 early stage start-ups to appear at Seedcamp, which was covered by TechCrunch UK.

The co-founders are Pete Brownell, Mary Harrington, Dougald Hine, Paul Miller and Andy Gibson. It also has an impressive group of advisers who include people such as Charles Leadbeater, Euan Semple and Tom Steinberg among others.

It’s early days for the site and users are still thin on the ground, but it’s Google map with teachers marked on it is useful. However, I just hope the maps aren’t totally accurate, as this would worry me if I was a teacher. No doubt they’ll sort all this out when the Beta version arrives…

FaceContact, a new UK startup which has a tool to track and reward referrals for job candidates, clients, investors and just about any other defined “prospect”, has gone live with its public beta site.

It’s incredibly complicated to track where an original referral came from. FaceContact is set up to try and crack this problem, and incentivise people to make referrals. It turns out it’s pretty simple to do this: just offer money! So long as everyone trusts the tracking system, in theory everyone wins.

FaceContact allows you to offer a cash reward to your contacts or anyone else who makes a successful referral that results in your making a new engagement. This could mean finding a new employee, service provider, client, investor, or anyone else. Even funding for a startup.
You can automatically upload your contacts from almost any address book (Outlook, LinkedIn, webmail, Gmail, Yahoo, CSV files etc) then invite contacts. You use the dashboard to select the most interesting proposals. FaceContact updates prospects and referrals on the status of their applications, proposals, and inquiries . You can also publish your engagement announcements on the FaceContact board for free. It’s also possible to control the number of degrees of separation you want to use.

FaceContact was one of the finalist of the Seedcamp competition for EU startups organised by Index Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Atomico, DFJ Esprit, 3i, The Accelerator Group, Atlas Ventures, Partech International, Accel Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Wellington Partners and Advent Ventures.

MirriAd, a UK startup which has developed a technology to embed advertising into videos ranging from user generated video up to studio quality productions, has received a a £2 million investment from Seraphim Capital among others.The firm, which has operations in New York and Mumbai, has a patented its technology called ZoneSense to insert video advertising into video streams which purportedly makes it look as if the image was in the original video. The technology could be used for seamless product placement, a market which is worth $7 billion globally.

MirriAd debuted its technology in August, in a campaign to promote the release of The Bourne Ultimatum movie. It embedded content into live-action clips taken from the movie, to create a promotional competition. Special keyword clues were digitally added to movie clips running on EMAP’s FHM.com and Empireonline.com web sites.

I can see this type of technology being looked at with interest by the likes of YouTube and others.

London Seed Capital, South East Growth Fund and Oxford Technology Partners, also participated in the investment.

The French iPhone deal is being delayed by arguments between Apple and the France Telecom-owned network Orange over the amount of revenue that will go back to Apple from iPhone sales. The news comes as Apple takes a massive PR hit over its latest software update to the iPhone, which is all about locking the phone down to one carrier.

With the iPhone deal all but done the official announcement is still being awaited as Apple reportedly argues for over a third of the revenues, according to French weekly Challenges.

According to the article the argument stems from the fact that Apple realised only late in negotiations that it might not make much margin out of iPhone sales alone. This is because under French law handset and service contracts cannot be sold as one package. Hence Apple wants more revenues from the tariff. The article adds that if an agreement is not reached by the middle of next week, Orange will miss its Christmas sales window.

The legal separation of handset and service contracts is a situation which exists in several other European countries, meaning Apple may find rolling out the iPhone in a similar manner across Europe increasingly difficult. It’s ironic, since Apple is getting increasing amounts of revenue from European sales of its products.

More detail on this on TechCrunch France

The Internet is now inexorably weaved into daily life in the UK with almost 90 per cent of home internet users now spending six hours or more online each week, 40 per cent of whom are downloading music and 16 per cent watching online video.

Unsurprisingly, 90 per cent of broadband users go online to send email while more than 60 per cent use auction sites such as eBay, according to new research from Point Topic.

At the end of last year almost 65 per cent of users had purchased from an online store but by June 2007 this had reached 70 per cent. However, weekly spend online as declined slightly, even as there has been a slight increase in user spending at the lower end of the scale (£1-£20 per week). In other words people are buying smaller and smaller items online in quick one-off purchases, and some high street stores are matching internet prices. At the same time Dr Katja Mueller, research director at Point Topic says “one is that the fastest growing groups of online users are now at the lower end of the income scale and this is reflected directly in the amounts being spent online.”

Point Topic’s broadband consumer survey indicates that 86.6 per cent of residential internet users spend at least six hours online every week, up from 83 per cent at the end of 2006 and 50 per cent at the end of 2005. In addition, five per cent of respondents claimed to spend more than 80 hours a week online. That’ll be the World of Warcraft crowd, then – or the bloggers and Facebook addicts (I jest).

No figures were released for Ireland, but it’s probably fair to say they would be on a parr, given similar rates of broadband uptake.

MAXroam, the new mobile roaming service from Cork-based startup Cubic Telecom, has sold over 500 SIM-cards in the first day of trading today.

CEO Pat Phelan told me by phone: “It’s going mental. I thought we’d do 50-100 in the first day, but I didn’t expect this. The servers are being hammered. What is more amazing is that people are obviously buying for a reason as this is a niche product.” The first day’s trading was also linked to an competition for a free unlocked iPhone, which may also have helped.

Phelan also said Cubic Telecom has had over 15 offers of venture funding today – including one offer from a potential investor who wanted to fly to Cork tonight – although he stressed the 13-strong Cubic is well funded presently. Cubic was one of the hotly tipped startups to appear at TechCrunch40 last week.

With the slogan “Travel Global, Pay Local” Cubic telecom is attacking incumbent mobile operators and mobile roaming charges with a dedicated SIM card and a free incoming number from the USA, UK, France or Ireland for €29.99. Customers need an unlocked phone.

The Cubic SIM allows a customer to make calls to or from any of 214 countries for 50 to 90 percent off what the big mobile carriers would charge. The pay-as-you go service also enables you to request local phone numbers in up to 50 cities at no charge, allowing your friends overseas to call you at local charges. The calls are then re-routed over the Internet – for very low cost to Cubic – just like any VOIP call.

Furthermore, for a flat €30 a month, you can have an unlimited Wi-Fi calling option which comes with a MaxRoam handset. This lets you receive unlimited unmetered calls to any numbers in the world from WiFi hot spots.

Islandoo, a UK-based MySpace-style site originally built as a social network to support casting for the reality TV show Shipwrecked, has opened its doors to any TV show, film or music video to cast for their show.

TV producers can use the casting system for free . Since the launch this week Channel 4, BBC and MTV has signed up to the system, and Models 1 is acting as an online agency partner.

Islandoo is something of a sleeper site. It now has 38,000 users since its launch late last year by Mint Digital, UK a company specifically set up to create social media for TV companies.

The idea is that the promise of fame will keep the site packed with out-going and “glamorous” 18 to 25 year olds. The production companies are incentivised to promote Islandoo, since it helps with the filtering process.

However, a quick scan of the site shows there are plenty of unglamorous people too, which suggests that the site’s back-end casting system is going to have to work overtime.

Revenues will come from advertising.
Andy Bell at Islandoo said: “We’ve developed a system that makes casting a much smoother process. If your normally cast by getting people to fill in a word document and email it back, then this could revolutionise your job.”

Social travel site HereOrThere, backed by Hugo Burge (the internet entrepreneur involved in Cheapflights), has started to publicly promote its beta site after three months in development.

Backed by Howzat Media LLP, the early stage dotcom investment fund which Burge runs with partner David Soskin, HereOrThere is something of a me-too play in the travel space. You know the drill, add your profile, upload reviews, pictures and video about where you are or where you’ve been, read reviews of places you plan to visit, etc.

That’s not to say they aren’t tapping into a fertile market. A recent YouGov survey found that 67% of British holidaymakers intend to use the internet to conduct most or all of their travel planning next year. Some 40% of those surveyed said they have not visited a high street travel agent in the last 2 years, and 76% of holiday planning Brits research their destinations online.

HereOrThere is a good looking site and allows the ability to ‘rate’ a post about a place. The site also features Yahoo maps and commenting on posts – in fact it feels like one big community blog decked out to look like a ‘web 2.0′ travel site. But although it’s not strictly travel, TrustedPlaces, also from the UK, is a lot more advanced since its recent relaunch, intelligently tracking the user’s clickstream as they go to suggest results. It’s that kind of functionality HereOrThere needs to look to, if it hasn’t already.
HereOrThere joins a crowded space, which in the Uk is dominated by WAYN.

Trivia: Rather hilariously HereOrThere was originally going to be called Twitter.

Google has appointed its first ever Vice President of Engineering in Europe, in a move which could herald new local products from the search giant.

Nelson Mattos (Ph.D.) will oversee Europe, the Middle East and Africa, in a sign that Google is increasingly interested in concentrating its management talent in high growth areas, like Europe, for its products.
In a statement Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President Technology and Research at Google, hinted that the move to hire a dedicated VP of engineering for Europe presages a hiring and launch spree for the search giant across the continent: “Given the enormous computer science talent available in these countries there’s great potential to develop new products locally which can help improve people’s lives everywhere.”

Nelson Mattos practically said ‘we’ll launch more local Google products’ when he said: “I am excited about the opportunity of using the great brains we have here to develop product in the region not just for EMEA but the rest of the world too.” Mattos will be based at Google’s office in Zurich, Switzerland. Prior to joining Google, he worked in various capacities at IBM for 15 years.

Mattos is almost certain to be involved in any moves Google makes on its rumoured mobile phone project. Mobile is a big focus for Google in Europe for obvious reasons. In March this year Google’s Spanish CEO Isabel Aguilera let slip that Google engineers have been working on designs for a mobile phone. Then in May Google hired UK mobile veteran Robert Hamilton to be product manager on one or more undefined mobile services, working out of London. And let’s not forget that Nikesh Arora, Vice President, European Operations, joined from T-Mobile, where he was responsible for all product development, terminals, brand and marketing activities.

Google currently has 12 research and development centers in the region. These are located in London (UK), Aarhus (Denmark), Trondheim (Norway), Lulea (Sweden), Krakaw (Poland), Moscow and St. Petersburg (Russia), Haifa and Tel Aviv (Israel), Zurich (Switzerland), Dublin (Ireland) and Munich (Germany). It employs around 2,500 people across all its operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Last.fm, the social music site sold to CBS in May for $240m, is launching a PR campaign in the guise of an initiative to get unsigned and independent bands using online tools to build their careers.

The campaign title and dedicated blog – nowformaband.last.fm – is inspired by punk fanzine Sideburns’ call to action in 1976 – “here’s three chords, now form a band.” Last.fm’s spin on this is “here’s three websites, now form a band.”

Last.fm’s aim is to show bands how to produce, promote and distribute music “without spending a load of money, and without lots of other people getting involved.” It sounds characteristically anti ‘big music industry’.

The campaign is part of Last.fm’s current activity focused around its ‘Hype’ chart, which has recently begun to be published in UK record industry magazine Music Week. Last.fm are starting to promote bands from the Hype chart live, most recently at their sell-out fundraising event at the Spitz venue in London.

Martin Stiksel, Last.fm co-founder, said: “There’s so much great music out there that doesn’t get a chance to find an audience and we want that to change. It’s possible now because we’re in the middle of a revolution in terms of how music is made and distributed and promoted. There’s a lot of talk about all these things in the media but not much action in the real world – so we’re going to show new bands how.”

Stiksel and co-founder Felix Miller last night appeared at a packed Second Chance Tuesday event (pictured below) in London talking about their journey towards a $240m sale and their continuing vision for Last.fm. The discussion was chaired by the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones, and although not revealing a great deal of new information, was fascinating and fun, and live-blogged by the Guardian. [Interest declared: TechCrunch UK is a media partner for Second Chance Tuesday].

In deal news, wunderloop, a specialist European tech firm in targeting ads based on user behaviour and content, has won 10 new customers. The roll-call is: AOL (UK), Bild.T-Online in Germany, Orange (NL and E), Webads (NL), Ilse Media (NL), SBS TV (NL), VNU/BP (NL), Imnetworks (NL), Tutto Gratis (I), and Tradera in Sweden, an eBay group company.

Wunderloop has an behavioural ad and content technology designed to to improve the efficiency of online ad placement and campaign management. Founded in 1999 by online advertising and technology pioneers, Ulrich Hegge and Frank Conrad, wunderloop has investment from Atomico Investments (co-founded by Skype founder Niklas Zennström), well-known European Angel Klaus Hommels, and Howard Hartenbaum of Draper Richards.

In the UK, teen social network Piczo’s market share is dropping like a stone. Can new features allowing it to target advertising based on how users decorate their profiles stop the rot?

According to Nielsen//NetRatings yesterday, Piczo has lost 40% of its unique users since December 2006 and has only 3% active reach as against Facebook and MySpace’s equal 20% and Bebo’s 14%. Nielson says Piczo is currently sitting on 851,000 unique users in the UK, although they themselves claim 4 million users in the UK (their largest market, followed by Germany with 2 million) out of its 28 million total registered users globally. Facebook is now judged to be the biggest social network in the UK, while Perfspot is coming from left-field as the fastest growing. All in all things don’t look so great for Piczo compared to last year, but perhaps their new features will help?

The new feature – dubbed Piczo Zone – is now in private beta and will be released generally in a few weeks.

TechCrunch US has reviewed Piczo Zone, which is a way for users to decorate their profile pages in much the same way as teenagers decorate their rooms – with posters, music, movies etc. Users put images, videos, style sheets or just about anything else onto their profile. Each content item also includes descriptive data and tags. Anything a user creates can be added by another user to their profile page, creating a viral effect.

Being able to track what users add to their pages (artists/bands, movies and brands) means the site can build a more detailed demographic and psychographic profile of the user for greater targeting in advertising. So, for instance a music label could target advertising for a new band around kids who have added a similar band to their profile. Since the users are effectively pre-sifted, sales and clicks for a campaign should go up.

So far, so obvious.

More interestingly, Piczo can track the trend of a band of brand’s popularity, getting an early warning on a surge of interest in a band that could be just about to break into the mainstream, for instance. Piczo’s users, mostly teenagers, are the trend-setters, making this a particularly powerful tool.

Equally you could track if a band was going out if fashion and drop them from their record contract!

Piczo is following other sites into this trend-prediction area, such as HotLists released by HotOrNot. HotLists are made up only of images, but like Piczo, users create them themselves and they are spread virally.

UPDATE: Piczo’s Chris Seth responds: “The fact is that Nielsen has never picked up our numbers to any degree, due to their panel methodology and to the fact that they don’t include under 15 in their sample (the audiences for the networks you mention below are all predominantly over 16 now). ComScore, which has us at 3.9 million in the UK, is a much better reflection of our own internal numbers. Our reach into the young teen audience in the UK is second to none.”

Facebook has now overtaken MySpace in the UK.

The latest figures published from Nielsen//NetRatings show that Facebook has more unique UK visitors than MySpace. In something of a revelation however, Facebook is no longer the fastest growing social network. Instead Perfspot, the US-based site where people “share their interests”, is fast gaining traction in the UK.

And despite it being gradually deserted by corporates as a failed marketing opportunity, Second Life turns out to be the most engaging social network in terms of average time per visitor.

Nielsen//NetRatings figures say that Facebook received 6.5 million unique visitors in August 2007 compared to MySpace’s 6.4 million – both are now visited by one in every five Britons online. Since December 2006, Facebook’s audience has grown by 541% compared to 20% for MySpace. Almost half (48%) of Britons online (15.3 million people) visited at least one of the ten most popular social networks in August 2007.

Some context to this. As Alex Burmaster, European Internet Analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings points out, at the end of 2006 Facebook was one fifth the size of MySpace, so its growth has been pretty rapid. However, MySpace has managed to maintain more than six million visitors in each of the last six months – which Facebook will have to match if it is to be considered the true MySpace killer.

Perfspot’s success has come out of nowhere. Until April this year it was not even on the radar, but it has now grown by 756% in just four months – making it the fastest growing social network in 2007 ahead of Facebook, which has grown by 541% across the eight months from December 2006 – August 2007.

Amongst social networks, Facebook accrued the most total time spent by Britons (991 million minutes) followed by Bebo (600 million minutes) and MySpace (540 million minutes), while Second life is the leading social network in terms of monthly time per visitor (5 hours 29 minutes) followed by teen community Habbo (3 hrs 6 mins) and Tagged.com (2 hrs 40 mins).

Surely this is because it always takes so LONG to do anything in Second Life?

One thing’s for sure. Perfspot’s sudden appearance on the scene just goes to show that the social networking business is far from being played-out.

Media stories tend not to be our staple fare here at TechCrunch, but it’s worth mentioning the launch of a new professional blog publisher in the UK, MessyMedia, and welcoming them to the blogosphere.

I wrote an article over two years ago for the Financial Times about what I thought at the time would be the rise of blog publishers in the UK. Others noticed the trend too. But today there is only one big player left, ShinyMedia. Granted there is also the three-month-old startup BlogNation, but it appears to be concentrating on being a global, rather than UK-specific blog network, as well as becoming a “TechMeme for the rest of the world“. Successful blog publishers, who have flourished in places like the US, Canada, France and elsewhere, have been few and far between in the UK.

However, MessyMedia has a particularly good publishing pedigree, which is unusual in the wild world of blogs. It’s headed-up by Lloyd Shepherd, formerly of Guardian Unlimited and Yahoo Europe, and Andrew Levy, formerly of Yahoo Europe. Both are former journalists and both know a lot about online publishing.

Westmonster – their first site – is a new blog about British politics, which will be “irreverent, clued-up and scurrilous“. It’s written by Westminster insider Sadie Smith. Others are planned.

Scribblesheet, a citizen journalism portal, goes live today. The London-based self-funded startup from co-founders John Ndege and Brian Oula, is a brave attempt to reproduce the success of OhMyNews or Newsvine. I fear they will get nowhere near those sites, but let’s hear them out.

Ndege says: “Our strategy is to create a site where people can write their opinion on something they care about and get valued feedback through voting and commenting.” He admits it is similar to a blogging platform, but insists it will not take the same commitment from a user as a blog, and will aim at users who “see no point in starting a blog if they will write something 6 times a year. So they write on ScribbleSheet.”

The site will derive revenues from advertising matched against its user generated content. Heard that somewhere before?

What’s the team like? Ndege (22) previously worked as an IT consultant for Accenture, while Oula (22) has an IT consulting background.

Now for the problems.

Surely those anyone writing on ScribbleSheet can just as easily go get an account on the much bigger Newsvine or NowPublic?

Plus ABCTales is the UK site to beat in this ‘occasional writing’ space. However, despite the similarity, Ndege insists ScibbleSheet will focus on reporting opinions and news, rather than fiction. In which case I hope they have been reading up on their UK libel law.

Ndege tells me: “You only have to count the number of dead blogs on the web. This is the need that ScribbleSheet addresses. I dont believe any other UGC site addresses this need sufficiently.”

Personally, I’d be worried if my main competition was ‘dead blogs.’

I wish them well. They are a young team and have a way to go in this space. Perhaps ScribbleSheet can confound my tired, goutish scepticism. I do hope so.

The dangers of hooking yourself up to a DRM-enabled music rental store which could go bang at any moment are highlighted today with the news that Virgin Digital customers will lose all their music when the store closes its doors next month.

Virgin Digital was a two-year old Windows Media-based alternative to Apple’s iTunes, but it stopped selling one-off downloads last week and next month their songs will no longer be playable, thanks to DRM imitations built into each track.

Virgin announced the move via an email to customers this weekend. Their only option is to back-up their tracks or attempt to burn them to a CD and re-import them as MP3s. Not an easy task where hundreds of albums are concerned. Virgin gave no reason for the shut-down, but it is offering UK subscribers a free month’s usage of “Virgin Media’s music streaming service” – a new service the combined broadband, cable TV and mobile phone network will be announcing this week. US subscribers will have their Virgin Digital pre-pay cards and vouchers honoured by Napster.

This is the latest music store to be squeezed between the leading iTunes, Napster UK and “illegal” sites like Russia’s AllofMP3.com, which sold non-DRM MP3s for as little at $0.10 each and which – until its closure through legal action in July this year – accounted for more sales than all the UK music stores combined, outside of iTunes.

[via]

Trutap, a recent entrant in the TechCrunch40 competition which markets a social media client software for mobile phones, has raised another £3.23m ($6.5 million) from The Tudor Group and angel investors. The offers software blog posting, IM, group SMS, web photo-sharing and access to existing social networks. Last year it raised £600,000 ($1.2) angel funding, with £3.23m ($6.5m) from Tudor. Total funding is now at £6.45m ($13m).

Trutap – effectively the re-incarnation of Hotxt, the London-based company, whose CEO and co-founder is former Dragons’ Den judge and Cambridge-based angel Doug Richard – will use the funds for further development, marketing and team building.

Blyk, the mobile virtual network operator offering free phone call minutes and messaging in return for sending customers advertising, launches in the UK today. Renting airtime from France Télécom’s Orange network and targeting only 16-to 24-year-olds, the network will target the ads based on a detailed profile customers will fill out on their website. It’s ironic timing. MySpace is today announcing an ad-supported mobile version of its site to get on the new mobile advertising bandwagon.

As I wrote earlier this month, the Blyk launch is timed for the start of the new school term in the UK. It’s a smart move but it’s not surprising. Blyk has a very experienced team, headed by backer former Nokia president Pekka Ala-Pietila and Antti Öhrling, a branding veteran.

Blyk is giving itself 3-4 months to make an impact on the highly competitive but mobile-obsessed UK market and will use real-time feedback on what “the kids” are doing to help brands with the targetting process. To make sure the audience is the right one, only 16-to 24-year-olds will be allowed on it, with cross-checks for age in place. Advertisers, including Buena Vista, Coca-Cola, I-play Mobile Gaming, L’Oreal Paris, StepStone and Yell have already confirmed that they will be among the first advertisers.

Blyk isn’t selling handsets, it’s sending out SIM cards, so customers will need an unlocked phone capable of MMS. Every month, Blyk users will get 217 free texts and 43 voice-call minutes as standard, on condition they opt in to receive up to six ads to their phone a day. It’ll cost 99p per megabyte to browse mobile sites.

Meanwhile the MySpace news coming out of Fox Interactive Media is just part of their overall plans to roll out mobile versions and start picking up ad revenues. FoxSports.com, the gaming site IGN, AskMen, Photobucket and its local TV affiliates will all have mobile versions in the coming months. Right now MySpace has subscription-based version of of the service with AT&T and Helio, but the new mobile sites will work on all US carriers.

The concept of using mobile advertising to subsidise calls and thus win market share is not new. Virgin Mobile in the US recently reported that 330,000 of its 4.8 million subscribers have agreed to view ads in exchange for free calling minutes. But basing an entire mobile service on this business model is to date untried, and it’s fairly obvious why. Mobile operators generate billions upon billions in voice and text revenues, yet mobile advertising is estimated to only generate $1 billion to $2 billion in revenues worldwide this year.

However, voice revenues are flat or falling (messaging never goes out of fashion, it must be noted) and the mobile ad market is expected to surge from from $5 billion to $11 billion within five years, generating much needed growth, says the IHT.

The UK market, in particular, is poised to get very, very busy in mobile advertising terms. Last week reports began to circulate based on a Guardian story that Google – a dead cert for a mobile ad play – was considering a move into the UK wireless market after the regulator Ofcom said it would auction off older 2G spectrum currently allocated to Vodafone and O2.

It’s highly arrogant. Utterly selective. And slightly random. We present for your enjoyment our selection of the best web and mobile events coming up in the UK and Ireland (with the odd wild-card thrown in here and there). To flag up your event for consideration, just get in contact.
Tuesday, September 25
Mobile Transactions Forum 2007
A 1 day event for payment companies, retailers, content providers, tecnologists and entrepreneurs

Refresh Newcastle
Meetup for designers and developers in Newcastle

Wednesday, September 26
Internet Icons
The Web is back! And the British Library has assembled a group of internet “icons”…

Brighton Coding Dojo
The Dojo is set up to let everyone experiment with coding in a non-competitive, collaborative, fun environment.

Thursday, September 27
OpenCoffeeSussex

Wireless Communications
- Challenges and Choices, London

Friendship in the Digital Age
But who needs 100, or 1,000, friends?
Chinwag Live on Tour – Media Widgetised @ ad:tech
Discuss the impact of widgets, web feeds & aggregation on mobile and web media… At ad:tech London 2007, Olympia 2

Thursday, September 28
Brighton Open Beer

Saturday September 29
mobileCampLondon
mobileCampLondon is a barcamp for designers and developers working with mobile technologies.

Tuesday October 2
mashup* Demo
13 startups pitch before an audience of professionals who would include:- investors, media journalists and bloggers. (TechCrunch UK is a media partner)

Geektails
A new monthly evening networking event in London for everyone interested in internet startups

Wednesday October 3
Future of Web Apps
The UK’s premier web 2.0 event returns to London

Assoc of Online Publishers conference 2007
London – The leading lights of UK online publishing come together to work out what next…

Thursday 4th October
Google Open Source Jam
Google London Engineering & Sales Office

BarCamp Bristol
Bristol’s first BarCamp

PHP London
Meet PHP users, professional developers and recruiters

Saturday, October 13, 2007
Multipack
Midlands UK web geek gathering
Monday, October 15
Mobile 2.0
A one-day event focusing on the mobile web and disruptive mobile innovation

Wednesday, October 17
The Facebook Debate
A debate hosted by the British Interactive Media Association. TechCrunch has some tickets to give away for this so stay tuned….

Wednesday, October 24
Virtual Worlds Forum Europe
Bringing together leading European brands and corporates to share their thinking about the virtual worlds emerging space. To get 15% off the conference fee use the special TechCrunch UK VIP code: VIPS011

Thursday, October 25
Mobile Geeks of London II

Thursday 01 November
it@cork: Leaders Awards Ceremony
(Ireland)

Wednesday, 14th November
The Future of Mobile, London

Tuesday 20th November
Essential Mediatech 2007
Investors, corporates and entrepreneurs. Pitches from 30 of Europe’s most innovative media technology companies. Expert panels.

Monday 26th November
mashup*
The Business of Social Networking (London)
Wednesday 28 November
it@cork Technology in Business Conference 2007, Ireland
Mark your diaries for the 9th Annual Conference

Tuesday, December 11
LeWeb3 conference 2007
A mission: grow the european internet sector and have fun!

UK Facebook application specialists Techlightenment have won the account to create an application for one of the legends of modern music: Bob Dylan.

The application was created for Bob Dylan’s forthcoming single and his recent album for SonyBMG.

Users fill out ten boxes with words they want Bob to read out on his boards during one of his most famous tracks, Subterranean Homesick Blues. The app also appears on profile pages.

The app has yet to be announced, so you heard it here first…