UK-based YouTubers can now earn ad revenue from posting videos to the UK site, as US users have been able to do since early last year. The UK version of the site is the first outside the US to benefit from the YouTube Partner Programme, with more European territories in the pipeline. Adverts run next to videos. Contributors retain their own copyright. Those in the UK set to benefit include GiR2007, a computer scientist whose most popular video ‘Pancakes’ has generated 2.5m clicks to date.

MySpace wasn’t dumb when it launched in the UK without securing Myspace.co.uk. It was registered in 1997 by a company in Stockport, near Manchester. But the fact that it has now won the right to use the domain after a decision by Nominet’s dispute resolution service is a lesson to anyone sitting on a URL which might become successful. The fact that Myspace.co.uk was originally used to offer email services and mini-websites to subscribers meant it had insulated itself from an action. But when owner TWS flipped its business to try and exploit MySpace’s popularity, sending visitors to parked web page with advertisements for social networking websites including MySpace, known as “kiting”, that’s when it lost the moral high-ground. The lesson to sites? Make your business model different to the giant who’s name you own and benefit from all those mis-typed URLs. It’s still kinda sleazy, but it works.

Dopplr, lets you share your future trips with your social network, has been been working on a new feature that lets you import trips from calendaring applications like Google Calendar and Apple iCal. They are still finalising the design and layout, but alerting early testers on the site. The startup won early stage funding in December from a gaggle Web names including Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman and The Accelerator Group led by Saul Klein.

Mobile internet start-up Rummble, a location-based content discovery startup still in closed beta, has launched an application for Bebo users. Beboers will get an application which shows a map on their profile and shows their friends which countries they have visited and what places they recommend in those countries. Rummble has a Facebook application already. Rummble’s mobile “pitch” is based around learning users preferences and who is trusted in your friends network. Rummble has a team of five based in Cambridge, UK, headed by Andrew J Scott and, though privately backed, is looking for venture capital funding as well as media partners. They are certainly playing their cards close to their chest because, pushing what seems like a year, this is one of the longest closed betas I can remember. Or is that unkind? Here’s more on Rummble.

Startup MVNO Blyk – which supports its free mobile network for 16 to 24 year olds by sending them targeted adverts – has secured undisclosed investment from Goldman Sachs and the Industrial and Financial Investments Company (IFIC), and plans a launch in the Netherlands. It launched first late last year in the UK. Also in the round were Sofinnova Partners and some private investors. Founded by ex-Nokia president Pekka Ala-Pietilä and Antti Ohrling, Blyk will piggyback on Vodafone’s network, and plans other Euorpean launches. Last week they denied slow subscriber rates after a disgruntled Blyk user said they and their friends had turned off the Blyk handset’s messaging capabilities in order to avoid receiving the adverts. Kids huh?

Bazaarvoice, a US-based online ratings and reviews provider, has secured funding (amount undisclosed) from venture capital firm European Founders to expand in the UK and Europe in 2008. The 160-strong client base includes Dell, figleaves.com, Early Learning Centre, Timberland and Goldsmiths. The European Founders Fund is run by the three Samwer brothers who also invested in LinkedIn, currency trading and conversion site Oanda.com and ReachLocal.

In September last year the firm closed $8.8 million in Series B funding in a round led by Battery Ventures with Austin Ventures and First Round Capital also participating. Texas-based Bazaarvoice provides white label Amazon-like editorial recommendations for products to other companies. The pitch is that it is cheaper for companies to use Bazaarvoice’s setup than build their own client in-house.

A lot of people this side of the Atlantic are sitting around scratching their heads as we learn that Ireland-based MOLI has – as if it were a Klingon starship in an episode of Star Trek – ‘de-cloaked’ in the middle of Dublin with a brand new kind of social network and almost 60 staff on its books. Who knew?

It turns out US-based Mainstream Technologies, which runs MOLI from its international headquarters in Dublin’s ‘Digital Hub’ area, raised almost €20.3m ($29.6m) from backers including the founder of the giant US Home Depot chain Bernard Marcus, and the chain’s co-founder, Kenneth Langone. They were joined by US hedge fund Vantis Capital Management, founded by Langone. Indeed GigaOm reports that founder Dr. Christos M. Cotsakos, former Chairman and CEO of E*TRADE and AC Nielsen, has already previously seeded the company with $20 million of his personal funds, plus $6 million from private investors. He has been busy.

So what is this innovative new business model? Annoyed with how Facebook only gives you one identity to manage friends, family and work? Well MOLI is designed to address the core issue of privacy. Users can create and manage diverse personal profiles via one user identity and a single, customised home page. In other words, mashup LinkedIn (work), Facebook (personal) and Musical tastes (MySpace) and then put some privacy controls in. That’s the theory at least.

There is no limit to the number of profiles, which are free with your first URL but further URLs cost $1.99. Cotsakos himself has 13 profiles, some personal, some work-related and some hidden. Users can decide which of their profiles are shared and to whom.

But this is not just a Facebook / LinkedIn mashup. MOLI is a social network aimed at “enterprising individuals above the age of 18 and small business owners”. These are people you probably know – people who have talent or a skill, often creatives or artists. So, for a mere $3.99 a month, you can have a retail site linked to a profile, which is in turn linked to a network you can, if you want, sell into. Think Facebook meets eBay or some other web store. So now you can sell your home-made wood carvings to your friends, while also pimping your hi-tech consultancy to your work network. Billing is by Google Checkout, or PayPal. MOLI also comes with an analytics engine, CoVibe Live, which MOLI has filed a patent for.

And there is more to MOLI – which stands for “money and living” – than meets the eye. Mainstream has three main operating subsidiaries in addition to MOLI: CoVibe TECH, Tertiary Productions and MOLI Kids. CoVibe TECH is the underlying MOLI platform which they plan to license to other businesses. Tertiary Productions provides original, high-definition video content. And MOLI Kids is an online destination under development for children ages five and older.

However, there could be an ice-burg heading MOLI’s way, and it is the heady but potentially dangerous blend of private, casual content with professional marketing and selling. Yes, you can pay $2.49 a month to make your experience ad-free, but what happens when your ‘friend’ flips into work mode and starts trying to sell stuff to you?

Furthermore, one Ireland-based blogger, initially thrilled at the news that an Irish startup had secured such backing for a what seems to be a pretty sophisticated and well designed social network, has instead highlighted a concern about the level of controls in place inside this new network. Internet marketer Sabrina Dent, blogs:

“For all the positioning and talk of “protecting your privacy” MOLI fails at the most basic hurdle. Because it doesn’t cloak new joins; in fact, it has to be displaying them somewhere, because within 15 minutes of joining, the spam started.”

She goes on to detail how the granular controls on profiles she expected did not appear to be in place (and has also had some over-enthusiastic MOLI employees trolling her blog, alas).

But for now, let us hope that MOLI can address these concerns in the weeks to come. In the meantime, it’s nice to see such a big project appear in Dublin.

ShoZu, best known as the UK-based developer of an application which allows you to upload to social sites like Flickr, has raised just over £6m ($12m) in Series C funding. SEB Venture Capital led the round, and was joined by previous backers Atlas Venture, Crescendo Ventures and TTP Ventures. In November it launched services allowing users to upload Flickr albums, Facebook pages and personal blogs via picture messaging/MMS simultaneously. Destination options also include Google Picasa, Faces, Buzznet, Kodak EasyShare Gallery, Webshots, Windows Live Spaces, Moblog.uk, Dada.net, Pikeo, Faces.com and blip.tv.

Amid rumours that the iPhone has not been selling as well as hoped in the UK, O2 has decided to make the packages for low and mid-tier iPhone owners somewhat cheaper. The £35 tariff customers will get up to three times as many free calls and text messages for the same price, while it is phasing out its existing £55 per month deal, moving customers to the equivalent £45 per month contract instead. The high-end tariff, costing £75, will give users 3,000 minutes and 500 texts. The £269 cost of the iPhone itself remains unchanged as does the 18 month contract. Meanwhile it appears that a million iPhones mysteriously missing from Apple’s sales figures are most likely to be handsets which are being shipped by the truck-load to Asia where they are unlocked. My own experince of meeting iPhone owners in the UK is that the handset is almost always unlocked, except where the bill is being paid for by their company. As most UK iPhone owners know, you can get better deals than the ones on offer from O2, hence the incentive to unlock the thing. In addition, the iPod Touch, now with its new productivity apps like email, is probably eating into iPhone sales as well, given that it comes without a contract.

Last.fm is releasing figures today based on its relaunch as an ad-supported streaming service. It looks like the three free full plays of music tracks are driving users to build more playlists and tags, which of course will again pull in more full tracks, and so on. The CBS-owned music discovery network said that in the UK the site saw a 32% increase in listeners, 30% increase in page-views with a 19% increase in unique visitors. In the US its unique listeners increased 85% on the day of launch (Jan. 23) versus the previous Wednesday (Jan. 16). That means the key metric of ‘engagement’ is up. The site also had a 45% increase in page views and 27% increase in unique visitors in the U.S. during the same time period.

Look out world here comes mig33. Or that what we’re supposed to believe. The mobile social network has won $13.5 million in a second round of funding led by Menlo Park-based VC firm DCM. First round investors Accel, Redpoint and TVP also pumped in more money. Originally from Australia and now based in California, the two-year old company, will use the cash to expand internationally, and that must surely means us over here in Europe. Its Java client lets users chat and send IM, email, make VoIP calls, and share photos across networks. It has 9 million users in over 200 countries, creating 2 million sessions and 45 million messages per day and sharing one million photos a month.

But hold on just one minute. There are other players in this game with equally interesting products. The question is, will the better-funded startups in mobile social networking win out or will the application itself be the game changer?

For ideas on this start with UK startup Trutap. In September last year it raised another £3.23m ($6.5 million) from The Tudor Group and angel investors. That brought its total funding to date to – guess what? – £6.45m or $13m, almost the same as mig33’s latest round. Trutap also offers software blog posting, IM, group SMS, web photo-sharing and access to existing social networks. Then there is Next2Friends, another UK firm working on social apps for the mobile, not to mention Rummble, Buddyping etc. This game is not over yet.

UK firm Fav.or.it, a yet-to-launch blog commenting system, has launched a seperate project called Tweetmeme, which will track what’s hot on micro-blogging platform Twitter. As I write on TechCrunch.com today, the business of tracking the online conversation just a got shot in the arm with the tech equivalent of crack cocaine.

Tweetmeme looks for new content and tracks who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. As anyone knows, the number of URLs which spread virally through Twitter each day must run into the millions, so tracking where that viral trail starts and gains momentum is going to be fascinating. It also categorises the content into blogs / videos / images and audio. Sure there are other Twitter aggregators like Politweets (politics), TweeterBoard (conversation analytics) and many others. But Tweetmeme has a few other features including a ‘river’ of new content and RSS feeds for the river (or categorized feeds for blogs / videos / images / audio). In addition Fav.or.it will integrate Tweetmeme into its API so you’ll be able to comment on blog posts through Tweetmeme. [For an explanation of how Fav.or.it will work see here and here. Favorit won seed funding last month].

The knockout punch is that Tweetmeme will Twitter the original person who first mentioned the item if it makes it onto Tweetmeme. What this means is that Twitter users will get to see if they are the first person to Tweet a cool/hot news URL or not. It’s going to be interesting to see where all this leads.

UK digital media and music retailer 7digital has taken £4.25 million in a round led by Sutton Place Managers that included original investor Balderton Capital (formerly Benchmark Europe).

7digitial currently has 1.1 million customers with access to a library of over 3.5 million music and video downloads available from 99p each. The company starting offering DRM free downloads in December and has since seen a 188% increase in sales, following the popularity of DRM-free tracks. It would be fair to say that for a relatively smaller player 7digital has played one of the savviest games in the digital downloads market in the UK to date, especially in moving away from DRM.

Covering the UK, Ireland and Germany, 7digital also provides branded digital solutions for clients such as ITV & Channel Five, Pringles, Miller, Last.FM & Bebo. Under the deal Patrick Maxwell from Sutton Place Managers (investors in media properties such as Getty Images and Cricinfo) will join the 7digital board.

Hubdub, which launches formally at the DEMO conference today, is a news forecaster that allows users to track news stories, predict their outcomes and compete with other news junkies. The Edinburgh (Scotland) startup has as it’s CEO Nigel Eccles, the guy who was previously behind the Flutter betting exchange acquired by Betfair. Once you know that, you realise where this startup might be heading.

In theory, this predicting process turns you from being a passive news consumer into an active news participant. Think fantasy leagues for news, or a Google News wrapped around a Betfair. Try Wiki Media versus Mahalo for instance (if you have an invite code). And if want to know whether Hubdub will deadpool by the end of the year, they have that covered too.
The site will be targeted at US news initially to because of the size of the potential market and its a market which produces a lot of news so a tracking engine like HubDub might come in handy. Apparently there is also an election going on.

Founded in November 2007, HubDub is currently in private beta, but aims to go into a public in late January. As well as Eccles there is Tom Griffiths (Product Director), Rob Jones (Creative Director) and Chris Stafford (Technical Director). Hubdub closed a round of seed financing from a group of Scottish technology investors including Kevin Dorren (previously CEO of Orbital software) and Ian Ritchie. Hubdub is – apparently – only the third Scottish company to be invited to DEMO. Go team.

Ad funded now, HubDub could move into a fantasy league model, assuming people really are as passionate about news as about sport, which is debatable.

UK-based Huddle, an Enterprise 2.0 startup which is now clearly positioning itself square-on against Basecamp, launches a well-featured Facebook application at the DEMO 08 conference today [Update: The Facebook app was built by Techlightenment and is here]. The Facebook integration will make your boss think you are working even when on Facebook – it allows full access to all Huddle’s tools. And the new Huddle Desktop application will drag and drop new documents between the desktop and Huddle’s service. Also included is OpenSAM Integration where you create, view and edit documents in Word, PowerPoint and Excel within Huddle through embedded Web Office tools from iNetWord, EditGrid and Preezo.

But unlike BaseCamp the free version of Huddle includes three team workspaces, one Gigabyte of document space and unlimited team members (Basecamp doesn’t go this far on either count). After that there are paid-for options. In November last year Huddle announced $4m in series A funding from Eden Ventures in London. Companies using Huddle include Reuters and PR group Edelman and UNICEF.

DotHomes, the UK/South African real estate search engine, is launching into the US market today, 18 months after launch. DotHomes.com is funded by three of Europe’s leading early-stage venture capital firms: The Accelerator Group, backers of GlassesDirect and lastminute; Arts Alliance, backers of LOVEFiLM, lastminute and propertyfinder; and Samos Investments, which funded the online betting exchange Betfair. The question, is will the US – packed to the gunnels with property search engines and in a sub-prime slump – actually notice?

From being branded an event which could “do more harm than good” and was poised to “damage the Ireland Inc brand“, TechLudd, a first-time event in Dublin last week for the tech startup community, is now being described as “a huge success”. As Eirepreneur points out, blogger Jessica Roy says “It was the most successful most attended event, barring a conference, that the Irish tech community has ever seen”. Check out the great photo albums on Pix.ie, and the next event will be in Limerick. Congratulations to the organisers for ‘damaging’ the Ireland Inc brand in such a creative manner. [Update: Just for the record, former vehement critic Paul Walsh has now retracted his criticism].

What is Webjam? Last time I looked is was a highly customisable home page creator. Founded in 2006 in London by a talented team led by former Yahoo! exec Yann Motte, it bundles community features with a drag-and-drop interface in a modular format. But it has been hard to really put a finger on where it’s big USP is, despite it being called (somewhat inaccurately) an “alternative to Facebook” by the BBC and winning .NET magazine’s people’s choice award. Was it really a MySpace plus Netvibes on steroids?

However, now Webjam says it has a new renewed vigor and focus. It has upgraded its platform and is positioning itself along the lines of Ning, where you create and collaborate on your own community, rather than just produce personal home pages. You can suck in feeds from Flickr, YouTube, Amazon search, Google Maps etc etc, you name it. Identity management and APIs and allowing community owners to monetise their sites is also in the plan. There are lots more privacy settings and customised profiles letting you show just what you want. A more granular Facebook, maybe.

My question is, will all this be enough of a differentiator? And will Yahoo and Netvibes – also now concentrating on start pages and community fetaures – end up squashing Webjams efforts?

There is also the problem of following down Ning’s path. It’s already been accused of becoming a Porn Web ring, unable or unwilling to control the spread of its communities. And if Google buys Ning to acquire a social network white label platform were does that leave Webjam? Google isn’t going to buy two companies in this space, surely? Then there is Flux, a new social network joint venture between Viacom and SocialProject, which is a full on Ning competitor.

I really hope Webjam can re-position itself in the market with a strong, clear offering, and it looks like they are heading in the right direction. They raised a first round of £1 million in March 2007 from French early-stage VC I-source Gestion. They are now preparing for the 2nd round.

But it looks like there is going to be a lot of competition on the horizon, some of it useful (confirming the market), some of it not so.

(If you want to know more check out their London event on Wednesday January 30).

The UK seems to have a skills problem, especially in the online sector. Chinwag Jobs, a recruitment website for digital media in the UK, has found 97% of the 200 employers it surveyed are finding it difficult or impossible to attract suitably qualified digital staff for their businesses. And over three quarters are reporting problems persuading staff to stick around longer than it takes to dial-up a cup of cold tea from the office vending machine.

While a lot of businesses staffed up on ‘digital’ skills last year, it would appear we have mined most of our natural resources and it’s getting harder to get the staff – to the point where 85% of companies are worried about business’ growth. Of course, the question is, are these people leaving older ‘digital agencies’ for tech startups, or is this skills shortage hurting startups too? Alas, likely the latter.

How fortuitous then that Anglo Estonian (see video below recently organised a reception for UK businesses out to reap the same rewards Skype did by building their team in Estonia. Here they found staff equally as skilled as their UK counterparts and, coincidentally, cheaper. Trebles all round!

Let me start out by saying that I absolutely loathe and despise voicemail. It is the bane of my life. Which is why I was rather bemused to learn I was to be pitched by Pinger, a US-based service which launches in the UK today with a method for sending people voice messages. However, here’s the general thrust…
Already live for a year in the US, Pinger now lets you send voice messages to mobile phones in over 20 countries for the cost of a local call in each place. The theory goes that instead of sending a short SMS which has the gist of the info you need, you send or receive a voicemail up to five minutes long which employs the “personality” (assuming you have one) of your voice, as opposed to smilies and exclamations marks. “You can’t sing Happy Birthday in a text message” says Joe Sipher, co-founder of Pinger. Ok, he has a point. The question is will the person getting it be bothered to sit there listening to someone sing? Maybe if it was from their kid I guess…

At any rate, the issue here is that this is asynchronous messaging, not voicemail, which is what made text messaging so powerful in the first place. Pinger won’t release numbers on how they’ve done in the US, but they did win funding of $3m (series A) and later $8m (series B) from backers Kleiner Perkins. The business model is going – as some point – to be inserting ads in text messages alerting you your have ‘Pinger’, and possibly, down the track, audio ads after voicemails. They claim that Pinger is quite viral, in that once you try it, you start sending your friends these types of messages. It is also quite similar to US competitor startup 3Jam.

Now, I don’t know about other networks but on T-Mobile and can do this already. The advantage with Pinger is that – unlike the ill-fated Push to Talk system – it is network independent.

I remain to be convinced, plus I think Twitter and UK group text startups like Zygo Communications, by concentrating on Text, will appeal more to SMS-obsessed Brits.