As I have said previously, I’m on a tour around Europe, looking for Europe’s best and brightest startups, and I’m happy to say, it’s going very well. I already have a stack of content to write up in between plane journeys and queuing for passport control, and to that end, today I’m in Turkey. TechCrunch and Turkish Web 2.0 blog Webrazzi teamed up to do a meetup in Istanbul. Thanks to our generous sponsors, below.

Nokta Internet Technologies, established in Turkey and North America, has operations in the online sector with the vision of “developing and operating leader social media platforms in Turkey and in other emerging markets where large auidences and advertisers are connected”. Nokta properties serve as platforms for sharing all forms of user generated content. Some of Nokta’s projects in the Turkish market are: Turkey’s largest blogging community blogcu.com, Turkey’s biggest video sharing platform izlesene.com, amateur and professional photographers’ photo sharing platform fotokritik.com, Turkey’s leader movie portal sinemalar.com, and all purpose photo sharing platform negatif.com. Nokta’s youngest project, Turkey’s new online advertising platform Virgül was launched on February 2008.

ADTECH is an innovative ‘new media agency’ offering unique and combined affiliate and mobile marketing solutions to advertisers on a cost per acquisition basis. We have built a fantastic reputation by delivering the highest ROI available online and we look forward to helping you grow your business with a successful affiliate marketing program. We maintain the largest affiliate network in our region and our affiliates are amongst the most skilled and best paid in the industry. We are also highly skilled with mobile marketing, thanks to multi-years of mobile business experience of CETECH Inc., our major share-holder. Visit us for designing and deploying the best digital advertising package for your brands, too.

Key to social interaction for the i-Generation is to be constantly ‘switched on’ and available to others. Significantly, the mediated aspects of mobile technology means that social connections are valued for their ‘liveness’, whereby interactions are expected to take place in ‘real time’. CETECH is an M-VAS company that has developed remarkable social connectivity tools via mobile internet convergence and have created new opportunities for i-Generation to incorporate these technologies within their everyday lives. Visit us for making the right choices and developing an adequate strategy on mobile internet convergence that will determine your future success, too.

BERIL Tech is a company focused on developing and growing internet startups. After selling two successful startups (Blogcu, Tr.tc) to international companies in 2007, BERIL Tech is continuing to develop commercial search, content and accessibility products, including vertical business search engines Sirketce.com (in Turkey) and Busiverse.com (global, US and European versions). BERIL Tech is also backing and operating startups like Botego, UygunTeklif, Yonlendir and Dns.com.tr. Another branch of the company is making angel investments to help entrepreneurs succeed. BERIL Tech is founded in 2002, privately held and based in Ankara, Turkey. Founders of BERIL Tech have established a sister company and set up offices in Los Angeles, California, US in 2008.

Cimri.com is an online “shopping guide” where you can compare products according to their comprehensive features and prices. Cimri.com is enhanced by an advanced search-engine technology in order to be able to guide customers on their buying decision criterias like ”price” and “technical features”. Customers are directed to the e-commerce sites of the suppliers they choose, once they’re done with their comparisons and want to proceed to the transaction phase. With its user-friendly design and up-to-date detailed product features and photos, one can easily and rapidly compare as many products as he/she likes in one simple attempt.

GittiGidiyor.com is the largest Turkish e-trade platform with more than 2 million registered users, over 450 thousand daily visitors and over 900 thousand listings at any given time. GittiGidiyor which has created a powerful marketplace for enhancing C2C trade, has undersigned more than 4 million transactions since its inception. This trustworthy, easy and rapid service is driven by No Risk System invented by GittiGidiyor. The world’s largest online marketplace eBay with its global presence in 39 countries has become a minority shareholder of GittiGidiyor in May 2007.

Golden Horn Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm that invests in high technology companies. Golden Horn Ventures is the only venture capital firm who is committed to technology ventures in Turkey. Golden Horn Ventures takes an entrepreneurial approach to investing and partnering with companies whose technologies have certain characteristics such as innovative, disruptive, scalable, high growth and emerging.

hakia is a pioneer in the semantic search space and is currently in the late stages of developing technology with the potential to revolutionize the search industry. Founded in 2004, hakia is privately held and based in New York City. For more information about hakia, please visit www.hakia.com.

ReklamStore is an online advertising network which provides its advertisers a fast, effective and productive platform for their respective campaigns. ReklamStore offers an advertising environment with minimum transaction costs with maximum benefits to advertisers but also to all publishers. With expert analysts and developers, software of ReklamStore maximizes the return from every advertising dollar. Also, ReklamStore aims to provide its publishers their deserved share of the online advertising market. With over 25 million adviews and 2 million unique visitors daily, ReklamStore has become one of the most comprehensive advertising media in Turkey.

You’re curious about something ? Settle it by watching an expert on it ! UZMANTV.COM offers 10 thousand high resolution “Ask the Expert“ videos to more than 1.2 million unique visitors per month though it’s been only a year since its launch in summer 2007. Total duration of videos on site has now accumulated to 375 hours and many new shootings are on their way!

XING makes your professional network an active part of your life. Far more than a directory of business contacts, XING enables its members to discover professional people, opportunities and privileges through its unique discovery capability and advanced contact management tools. With the successful IPO of XING as the first Web 2.0 company to go public, XING AG has had a long-term impact on the social networking trend amongst professionals. By focusing on the target group ‘business people worldwide’, the company is able to offer tailored features, thereby making networking and contact management simpler. Besides Headquarters in Hamburg, XING AG is also represented with offices in Barcelona, Istanbul and Beijing. XING. Powering Relationships.

I flew into Dublin today for our first TechCrunch meetup in Ireland (yay!), and as previously blogged, TechCrunch is hooking up with networking event TechLudd to create a real-world mashup we like to call CrunchLudd (see what we did there?)

This morning I rocked up to Dublin’s The Digital Media Hub to meet with a bunch of interesting startups here. I took a few pictures and shot some short video pitches (please excuse the camera shake, it was shot on a mobile phone…)

Here are the pix so far of the trip:

Here’s the short video interviews with RelevantMedia, IGO People, PutPlace (which just launched an open beta), SentryWireless and Digital Media Forum:

Meetup details for tonight:

If you’re in Dublin tonight, then the meetup is from 7:30pm at “4 Dame Lane”, Dublin

The event is absolutely free so please but you must register on the Amiando page. There’ll be an “OpenDemo” for those who want feedback on the stuff they’re working on right now. Here’s a list of our demo companies.

Thanks a million to our sponsors:

dev.mobi
dev.mobi is the world’s leading independent mobile development community, brought to you by Dublin’s very own dotMobi

Digital Media Forum
The Digital Media Forum is an enterprise network that develops and administers enterprise resources for companies in the digital media industry. Our goal, over the next two years, is to develop the network of companies in the Digital Media area.”

Sun Startup Essentials
The Sun Startup Essentials program is specifically designed to help startups get their business off the ground FAST—at the LOWEST COST possible.

Tidal Wave Media
Coming soon at http://tidalwaveweb.com, Tidal Wave media is a crowdsourced magazine publishing company. It uses Social Networking technology to allow users in specific interest areas to build and realize a magazine for them and there community.

I’ll be live blogging the debate, and posting picture here. Stay tuned

Currently handing out name tags on the door. A long-held ambition….

[Update: Post event, Steve Bowbrick wrote it up here as well]

The start….

I did a quick intro to why this debate happened I won’t bore you here, you’ve heard it, suffice it to say that Steve Bowbrick, chair, came up with the tag-line “A Common Platform” to describe what we think the BBC should build.

The Panel:

Tom Loosemore, Ofcom and former ‘head of Web 2.0_ at the BBC

Jon Gisby, Channel 4’s first dedicated new media director

Azeem Azhar, startups angel investor, ex-BBC, original proposer of the BBC Public License

Tony Ageh, BBC New Media controller of internet

James Cridland, Head of Future Media & Technology for BBC Audio & Music Interactive

Jem Stone, Portfolio Executive, BBC new media

Chair: Steve Bowbrick, entrepreneur, Blogger on BBC policy

Opening remarks (apologies for typos etc, as much of this as possible are direct quotes):

Steve Bowbrick opened the proceedings, introducing all the speakers (Steve suggested the idea for the panel / debate and is a very able chair!)

Azeem Azhar:

The BBC is funded with public funds and at the same time there aren’t great incentives for businesses to develop within a public sector context. But there is an opportunity to fill the gap marked “market failure” without crowding out commercial entities. Look at open source initiatives, with a non-profit motive.

The BBC has this brand value which is second to none, And yet there’s this question of who are you competing against. 10 years ago TV controllers would get in to the office in the morning, run into their HP Gateway desktops to look at the overnight ratings. Built into the DNA was the view we were measured apple for apple against a commercial entity like ITV. If you spend time trying to compete on that basis you have to compete in the same way.

So the first question is whether the culture of the BBC has changed, whether the Yahoo’s / Google, etc would be considered “successful” at the BBC. So long as the metrics are the same the outcomes are similar,. But is the BBC now no competing on the same terms as the entrepreneur / startup and the newspaper web sites?

We now live in a world where people carry maybe even two phones. It’s a digital world. So is there not now an opportunity to re-create the mission of the BBC for the 21st Century?

Jem Stone:

Considering its huge staff and long history I’d like to defend what the BBC has achieved so far.

The thing about this debate is you really should be careful what you wish for. We could talk about events like Mashed, an initiatives around innovation etc but if you push this then the argument often turns into “the BBC is crowding out commercial entities” and that’s then when the argument turns against the BBC’s funding.

Now across the BBC, from the top downwards, it’s not just the engineers, it’s the guys in suits, many who are former eningeers – they do subscribe to re-engineering the BBC. Also, there is a selfish reason – in terms of the BBC’s funding – under review in three years time, and seeing Carolyn’s Thompson’s recent speech promoting innovation.

It’s in the interests of the BBC to have a platform. The ultimate goal should be to make the web better. Bill Thompson says by creating machine readable data, you create not so much a BBC, but “a BBC everywhere,” which shines a light on how the BBC should be funded.

Bowbrick: Is there a worry about an upswell of dissatisfaction with the BBC coinciding with David Cameron coming to power?

Stone: There are different views about how it should be funded yes.

Tom Loosemore

I feel schizophrenic about this debate. On the one hand I have sympathy and admiration for BBC people getting the data out of the BBC. But the truth is the BBC is not lead by people who understand the Web. Look at the senior echelons. There is not a senior person on the BBC Trust who has any web experience at all. I’ll take that back when there is a candidate for Director General who is a former Web person.

(Intergejction from audience: “Well Jeremy Peters is on Facebook vomitting slugs”)

The question is what should public institutions do to foster more world beating products? Here’s my suggested list:

The BBC’s Research and data is unbelievable. Audience research is amazing. But they don’t really use it yourselves. They probably have better data about non-BBC programmes than non-BBC broadcasters.

Code: A big part of Azeem Azhar’s BPL idea was open source. But the BBC’s infrastructure is a train crash right now – but it will get fixed.

Data: I hired Ben Metcalfe. It enjoyed it. It was a challenge thereafter. But I give a lot of credit to what Backstage has done. The BBC is a broadcaster. It’s very constrained and so all the Backstage licenses are non-commercial. Don’t expect tonnes more. But the Government has tonnes of data. It has a relatively enlightened policy. You can re-use commercially core government data but it’s a mess trying to get hold of it. If you come to OpenTech we’ll show you what’s possible.

Channel 4: When you look at Backstage data, the best data is not owned by the BBC but it’s where they have acted as a broker. There is an interesting role there for the BBC as as an honest broker over data.

Shared tools: Make the Internet better. I want a Geolocation API for postcodes. I want to be able to find communities of interest. I’d like to be able to see and search what UK bloggers are saying. I want better serendipity.

Let’s help small businesses become better small businesses. This is where Channel 4 could excel, where it helped with production companies. It could do it on the Web. It’s invested in School of Everything for instance.

The BBC has had a role to be a trusted guide to the web but it’s development in this area has been absolutely lamentable. That’s cultural.

Finally, the Internet needs to stay open. We are only here if the Internet stays open. There are “next generation broadband” products coming along which do not necessarily mean next gen Internet.

James Cridland:

In radio we agree on technology and compete on content. We agree and co-fund with commercial radio RAJAR. Using paper diaries alas. We agree and have co-marketed digital radio. We agree on NICAM, teletext, you name it. We are looking at Radio DNS to look for IP-enabled web services. And other things that the BBC has done in it’s time are … the reason people agree that the Web is a trustworthy source of news is down to BBC News Online. When we say forward slash, that was some BBC steering group which came up with that phrase.

I’d like to stress, in terms of how the BBC operates we have a massive positive effect.

John Gisby

I was at the BBC ten years ago, at the time was some of the initial Internet investment was being planned. The flavour of the debate then, as now, was looking at the Net as a distribution platform, not unlike Chanel 4 – distributing content. At the BBC, lots of people, about 40, were called “Controller” but there in lies a challenge. In broadcast it’s about control. My guess is there is no-one in the business right now called “enabler.” And the reason is first, there is a lot of DNA that takes a long time to change. Think about that at the BBC and Channel 4. We’re about distribution, it’s not necessarily about being a tech company or having an impact on industrial policy [Read, helping startups – Ed]. Anything in that area is a by-product not a core policy.
Finally there’s the commercial angle. There are constraints. There are a whole series of things which are not anybody’s fault.

In terms of where Channel 4 comes in, we are not a tech company. We outsource a lot of what we do. The platforms we have are relatively light, purely in investment terms.

We have some of the advantages of the BBC in that we’re publicly owned, but we are able to play commercially, and do hybrid funding models, such as mix public money with commercial. We have a brand which has an attachment with a younger online audience. We have the ability to cross promote and aggregate, in less constrained ways, such as via partnerships. We don’t have in-house production. We think there is an interesting role we can play, Next on 4, a pilot over the next two/three years. 4IP will have about £50m which is enough to do damage. We’re not necessarily starting with TV, but look at pushing content and services out to audiences. We expect entrepreneurs will be involved in that, and with significant businesses who want to play in this space.

We share the aspiration, we think we can do something new in this space and will be having lots of conversations. We will have some spectacular failures, but also successes. Critically we want to learn to operate in a new space which we think is critical.

Tony Ageh

I agree hugely with what Mike Butcher wrote. We’re here to answer a challenge. I also think Azeem is right. Some of the ways the BBC measures itself… it’s never quite addressed the opportunities to re-invent itself for the 21st century, but I think it will happen. But it should have happened over the last decade.

I think the BBC is the License fee. If that stops, it becoomes a media company like any other.

The BBC needs to focus more on the outcomes and how to further its objectives using the technology now rather than looking backwards. If the Net had happened first, the funding wouldn’t have gone into TV. We need to focus on what Mike said. The challenge is to step up and use this medium to its full. In some cases that will be allowing small businesses to make money, but that shouldn’t be at the core.

A common platform has three things: Standards, Technologies, Content and data.

When it comes to standards the BBC should look to its past. When it started it was an engineering company which made other radio stations comply with its standards. With the Web, it could have been more active and shaped and driven standards, rather than maybe overwhelming it. Azeem’s 138% effort is a red herring. In the early days all the engineering took the funding, then the content happened. But we could have created a platform for entrepreneurs and we didn’t.

Tom Loosemore tried three times, with trhee different policies. Foundation, Web 2.0, Backstage. Eventually he did persuade them that they needed to start from scratch. I think we should start from scratch and start using open source technologies and put the code in the public domain. We shouldn’t be warehousing code.

In terms of content there MUST be data the BBC can share. I know the issues around rights, but there MUST be data we can share,

The Creative Archive was a disaster for a number of reasons. But the whole BBC site should be the “creative archive”. It won’t be everything but it’s a good starting point.

We shouldd be aggregating data form other sources, driving standards and making them interoperable. We have the ability.

Are we broadcasters or not? We think like that, but it may be beyond this generation to change. Increasingly we are seeing a new wave of people thinking in new ways. They don’t think in terms of control, or time, or scheduling, or moderation. People who think like that will move the BBC into the new era.

(Q&A then ensued. I will load those notes as soon as I have taken out the typos!)

Meanwhile, here’s some rough video I streamed from the event “live” using a new service called ubcam.com

Owners of the somewhat idiosyncratic FaceParty, one of the UK’s oldest social networks, appear to have had an altercation – with almost their entire user-base. On Tuesday night the normal home page was replaced with a diatribe against users who had complained about a fancy dress competition the site was holding. The site was cut off for several hours, blocking all users from logging in.

In a message entitled “Fuck the haterz”, the owners said “Sowwy [sic.] dudes but some of you have pissed us off so much today that we’ve shut the whole site down and fucked off to the Zoo.” (London Zoo to be specific).

In the history of social networks and Web 2.0 startups, I have to say this is the first such incident I have come across. It’s either an elaborate marketing ploy (in fact, it is almost certainly this) or a genuine, heartfelt hatred of large sections of the user-base. It’s an interesting strategy, but according to the site’s description on Wikipedia, not the first time it’s had a run in with its users. However, the owners did apologise to “tha people who appreciate that we give our lives to make this good for you” – and invited them to come to the zoo as well.

As of now (just after midnight, Wednesday morning) the site had been restored. Perhaps we’ll find out what happened tomorrow…. Meantime, here is the statement the site was carrying until an hour or so ago.

Alas, I couldn’t make Mashed, the BBC hacker event over the weekend (largely due to wanting to see my wife and children in the breaks between my TechCrunch Euro Tour of European startups). However, the Guardian has done a great round-up of the projects presented during the competition. Alas, not many URLs are yet available to point to as yet. But the projects that won prizes and which also caught my eye are below.

By all accounts (and the photos) Mashed was a great event from the BBC, and comes just in time for us to thrash out the ideas around the BBC’s data in two days time.

Winners:

TEAM BOB
Parses BBC subtitles onto the cards in Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues.

TWITTER ON TV
An interactive TV app which displays RSS feeds as subtitles on your TV screen.

MICHAEL STILLWELL
Uses Fire Eagle to work out where you are and pushes Loney Planet tips on interesting things in the neighbourhood.

CURRENTCOST LIVE
Takes electricity monitors and publishes their information to the web – allowing you to compare energy consumption with friends.

SCRIPTING ENABLED
Makes the BBC Redux API accessible for blind people, so they can find the audio they want – a similar process is also shown for Slideshare and Powerpoint.

NORTHENDERS
Dubs a TV show into another language in real time: running the subtitle data through translation software and then uses speech synthesis to dub the video (which is delayed by 10 seconds for synching)

Looks interesting:

Jamie Munroe: Uses a music fingerprinting algorithm to match music you liked against stuff from BBC Redux. It can tell when DJs play the same song, or what tracks a TV show uses.

Video mashup: Watch TV and talk about it online at the same time: watch any TV channel and enter an on-screen chat too.

Bradley Freeman: Your ISP probably doesn’t support multicast – which helps networks save bandwidth by caching popular streams locally. This lets you do it even if they won’t let you.

Phil Lewis: Download the h.264 streams from the iPlayer site, for people who use Macs or Linux. [Illegal surey? ]

BYK: Looks at the audio on your computer and finds BBC radio shows and tracks for recommendation.

If you are coming to the “The TechCrunch BBC Debate: A Common Platform” this Wednesday night (June 25) then please take note of these important details.

Attendees should report to Broadcasting House reception for a prompt start by 7.00pm sharp.
BBC Broadcasting House is in Portland Place, London W1A 1AA.

Because this is a highly sensitive security area then only people who registered for the (free) tickets will be allowed in (we are sold out). Sorry, but that’s just the way it is. The BBC kindly agreed to give us the venue, so we have to respect that. As it is about 80 people are coming, with members from the press, government and key players.

The Panel:

Tom Loosemore, Ofcom and former ‘head of Web 2.0′ at the BBC

Jon Gisby, Channel 4’s first dedicated new media director

Azeem Azahar, startups angel investor, ex-BBC, original proposer of the BBC Public License
Tony Ageh, BBC New Media controller of internet

James Cridland, Head of Future Media & Technology for BBC Audio & Music Interactive

Jem Stone, Portfolio Executive, BBC new media

Mike Butcher, Editor, TechCrunch UK

Chair: Steve Bowbrick, entrepreneur, Blogger on BBC policy

Background to the reasons why this debate has been organised:

With Highfield gone the BBC must now open up

While the BBC Fiddles Britain’s innovation burns

Ireland gets a startup shot in the arm this Thursday, June 26, when three (count’em 3) startup events happen in Dublin on the same day: OpenCoffee Dublin, Silicon Ireland and the TechCrunch / TechLudd meetup, which we have humourously named “CrunchLudd”.

So head over to OpenCoffee Dublin first for a morning coffee, then go to the day-long event at the City North Hotel to hear guest speakers and network with VC’s, entrepreneurs and service providers. Finally head over to the TechCrunch/TechLudd event in the evening for drinks and chat with (me) Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK. See you there! (And this is the last call for sponsors of the drinks at the CrunchLudd event btw, contact us today)

Nokia’s acquisition of Plazes today, the Germany location startup, will do one or both of two things. It will mean other mobile startups with location as a feature will be looked at in a more favourable light. The main startup in the UK in this arena – currently – is Rummble, but there are an increasing number of others, such as WeGlu, Moblog and Buddyping. It may also mean that the battle for location-based services has reached a peak, with startups now having to think about location being a “given” and then looking to create less commoditised services, like filtering, as Rummble does.

My industry sources are telling me that this was a smart acquisition for Nokia, which needed to have a consumer based offering outside the rigid maps infrastructure they have, since the purchase last year of Navteq.

There is also a local story here. The Plazes office is in Berlin, physically close to the Gate 5 people, and we know from good authority that Gate 5 people are highly respected on the Berlin scene. It’s therefore likely that they had a lot to do with the acquisition thinking inside Nokia as they know the guys from Plazes.

From what we know about Nokia, the purchase of Plazes fits in with their strategy in terms of context and location and what to do with it. Put together the Ad system they have, and they control a strong section of the mobile ecosystem from ad generation, delivery through branded channels, with good profile information about the user, especially since most new handsets from Nokia now have GPS built in.

I have been attempting, usually in vain, to post the many relevant events for readers to keep track of. This is obviously a tricky task, given that there are an increasing number of these. However, I have managed to re-gain control of the old TechCrunch UK group on Upcoming. Now, event organisers who post their events to Upcoming will be able to add the group “TechCrunch UK & European Startup Events” to the event and it will appear under that group as well. Obviously I dare say one or two people will try to game this system, but as this is the kind of listing this industry needs if it is ever going to develop I’m happy to let the “crowd” decide what’s relevant or not (until such point I have to start weeding out the crap of course – I retain the ability to delete events, so trolls and spammers be warned). The feed won’t be published on TechCrunch Europe because we reserve the right to push events where TechCrunch is a specific media partner, or the event is really, really relevant to readers.

It’s worth pointing out that the fact that an event appears in this Upcoming group is not a sign of TechCrunch’s official backing – it’s just a sign someone wanted to promote it to the kind of audience TechCrunch has – developers, startups, entrepreneurs and venture financiers. The Upcoming feed is just a simple service for you. You can decide for yourself whether the events posted there (by just about anyone) are relevant or not. I have added the tagline “& European Startup Events” because although there are other European groups for things like “new media” or “social media”, none focus on startup businesses, which is our goal here at TechCrunch. And I think it will be helpful for all to see the kind of things going on across Western, Central and Eastern Europe as a whole.

I hope that people will use the group in the spirit in which it was created – to advance the development of startups across Europe.

So the relevant info again is:

TechCrunch UK & European Startup Events (on Upcoming)

RSS Feed

iCal feed

Google Calendar

Now, there other plenty of other sites where you can get good event information (although to be frank you will generally find they err towards events around training courses or online marketing, rather than business events for startups). That said, currently the most comprehensive is that offered by Chinwag, but there is also the listings from NMK and Bima. There are back-channel discussions about trying to produce a more comprehensive listing for the UK where competing events can be listed, but I gather those are ongoing.

Meanwhile, there are six upcoming events over the next week or so which are of particular interest to TechCrunch readers:

25 June
The TechCrunch BBC Debate, London
This event is, alas, already full but you can read all about it here.

June 26th
Techcrunch / TechLudd Mashup, Dublin
A TechCrunch meetup held in conjunction with TechLudd (the Irish startup networking event). Register here.

27 June
SocialMedia Business School: How To Build Your Business
(Tickets) You can get a 20% discount if you use the code “londev”.
Location: The LEWIS Media Centere, Millbank, London
This is an interesting event where application developers will be taught how to turn their social app into a real business, not just a project. Nick Gonzales – former TechCrunch writer – is a keynote speaker. Here’s the blurb: “The purpose of the SocialMedia Business School session is to bring together industry experts to help guide you in building out your applications’ revenue model and preparing your business plan for financing and general planning. SocialMedia Networks, the social advertising network will bring together advertisers, leading developers and analytics gurus to help you build your business. You will learn about the resources available to you to make the most money from your applications, and using supporting materials provided by SocialMedia you’ll apply what you learn into an actual business plan that turns your apps into a sustainable business.”

June 28th
TechCrunch Istanbul Meetup
TechCrunch and Webrazzi, Turkey’s leading Web 2.0 blog, are co-organising a Meetup, featuring demos from Turkey’s best and brightest startups.

July 1st
TechCrunch Athens Meetup
Athens TechCrunch meetups co-organised Open Coffee Greece.

July 4th
Mobile 2.0 Europe / TechCrunch Evening Party
TechCrunch Europe is supporting the after-party for Europe’s hottest Mobile 2.0 startups. Check out the startups selected.

UK video hosting startup Mydeo, has launched an enterprise version of its service under the name m3 (Mydeo Media Manager). The idea is to aim the service at the SME business market, providing simple, turnkey uploading and reporting interface for companies wanting to deliver high quality video on their sites and run rich campaigns. M3 supports all the major video formats including Flash, Windows Media and QuickTime and more. The problem with delivering high quality video on a site is that it can affect performance. Mydeo’s pitch is that they’ll take care of that issue. Mydeo says it will will be launching co-branded versions for both agencies and traditional hosting providers looking for a delivery partner. The move marks further momentum for the UK startup which last year signed a deal with giant US retailer Best Buy to offer its service to customers. Mydeo launched in Spring 2005 following an R&D grant for Technical Innovation from the DTI. By the end of 2005 Mydeo were Microsoft’s European Windows Movie Maker partner, providing high quality Windows Media Hosting services for XP users worldwide.

Update: Looking into the pricing, it’s 100GB transfer and 10GB storage for $475, which looks kinda pricey, or perhaps this is what it takes for ‘quality’ video?

Update2: Cary Marsh from Mydeo responds to the pricing issue in the comments.

Last night Sky News asked me to comment on the Associated Press move to stop sites quoting AP articles (BTW TechCrunch has now banned linking to AP stories. Payback sucks):

More from Mike A. on this.

Smarkets, a London-based pre-launch betting exchange focusing on making betting simpler, has raised $200k with a convertible note from five private investors. This will be used for product development, buying a gambling license from Malta (but of course) and conducting a private beta launch for summer of 2008 and a public launch Autumn of 2008. There’s an interesting twist – they plan to offer an open API for people to develop their own betting applications and use the Smarkets infrastructure. Their idea is this: users don’t need knowledge of odds or experience. It’s more about speed and entertainment than sports.

The main competition is big: Betfair is worth $3billion and there are other betting exchanges
including intrade, tradesports, and betdaq. Then there are more entertainment and fantasy games competitors like hubdub and pikum.

Smarkets’ founders are computer science graduates Americans Jason Trost (27) and Hunter Morris (26), who joinin other American emigres who have launched gambling sites in Europe, most recently Sean Glass of Pikum. Alas, America – known the world over for possibly the bigest gambling centre in the world, Las Vegas – has yet to get over its rather one-eyed view of gambling nationally.

It’s fairly rare to find VCs clamouring over a startup, virtually throwing term sheets folded into paper aeroplanes through any open window they can find, but this appears to be the situation surrounding UK search company True Knowledge, which only launched late last year.

The chatter I’m hearing is that True Knowledge is being talked about in hushed tones, as if it might be the Powerset of the UK. To put that in context, Google has tried to buy the Silicon Valley search startup several times, and they have only launched a showcase product, not even a real one. However, although True Knowledge and Powerset are similar, they are different in significant ways, more of which later.

I understand that True Knowledge has been given a pre-money valuation of £20m, according to one VC’s term sheet, and the startup – from what I can gather from my sources – is in communication with at least two other VC firms (I’m still in the process of trying to dig out which firms are involved). Of course, I have put this to True Knowledge but they have declined to comment on anything to do with fund-raising. What we do know about True Knowledge though is that early stage private investor group Octopus Ventures put around £600,000 in back in September last year.

But what I have heard makes for an interesting scenario. The idea is to use a large series A round to accelerate the startup to almost Google-like recognition levels in about two years – no small feat.
Currently in private beta, True Knowledge says their product is capable of intelligently answering – in plain English – questions posed on any topic. Ask it if Ben Affleck is married and it will come back with “Yes” rather than lots of web pages which may or may not have the answer (don’t ask me!).

One sign that the startup is on the right track is that they have brought on William Reeve as a non-executive director, a veteran of a number of prominent UK startups who has seen many a profitable exit for all concerned. Reeve co-founded Fletcher Research in 1997, which became the UK’s leading Internet research firm before being acquired by Forrester Research in 1999. In 2003, he co-founded ScreenSelect.co.uk, backed by Index Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and DFJ Esprit. It subsequently merged with LOVEFiLM in mid 2006 and now has operations in five countries. Reeve remains its COO.

The key difference with True Knowledge versus any old search engine is this. It only interrogates structured data, whereas PowerSet is going to look at unstructured documents. That makes True Knowledge more complimentary than competitive to PowerSet.

Here’s why the difference matters. True Knowledge can infer answers that the system hasn’t seen. Inferences are created by combining different bits of data together. So for instance, without knowing the answer it can work out how tall the Eiffel Tower is by inferring that it is shorter that the Empire State Building but higher than St Pauls Cathedral.

Currently True Knowledge is working on an API beta with over 2.1 million geographical places, plus time zones. So in theory web and tele-conferencing services could use this to help you place calls at the right time for both parties across the planet.

AI software developer and entrepreneur William Tunstall-Pedoe is the founder of True Knowledge. He previously developed a technology that can solve a commercially published crossword clues but also explain how the clues work in plain English. See the connection?

TechCrunch is hitting Dublin to create a real-world mashup with Irish tech networking event TechLudd. So I present to you “CrunchLudd, the TechCrunch / TechLudd Meetup”. Come along and meet new people, and make new contacts and have some fun too. It’s a great opportunity to pitch your startup.

When & Where:

26th June, from 7:30PM at 4 Dame Lane, Dublin

RSVP:

This event is absolutely free so please but you must register on the Amiando page. There’ll be an “OpenDemo” for those who want feedback on the stuff they’re working on right now, and only 8 spaces but if a lot of people are interested we might expand it. Please register to demo, slots are allocated on a first come first served basis.

Sponsors

Sponsors get to support a great event but also will get promotion with links and logos via a posts on TechCrunch and TechLudd. We’re looking for sponsors right now so please drop our co-organiser a line, anton [at] techludd [dot] com. for details.

Tickets for the Amsterdam TechCrunch Meetup on July 22nd, co-organised by eBuddy, are now up for grabs here (they’re free). I gather a boat may be involved (it is Amsterdam, after all).

We have 3 sponsors now on board for the meet-up:

Gold sponsors:

eBuddy – Host and co-organizing, leaders in Web instant messaging and aggregation
Q-go – Natural Language Search company
Bronze sponsor:

E-Factor – a global platform for entrepreneurial people

Civil servants now have a new code of conduct for social networks, thanks to MP Tom Watson, a long-time blogger and savvy MP who just announced (on the floor of Parliament) that he’s got it down to five points and a few paragraphs of government health warning stuff at the end. A little bird emailed it over to me, so if you’re a civil servant, listen up:

Principles for participation online
1. Be credible

Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.

2. Be consistent

Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be cordial, honest and professional at all times.

3. Be responsive

When you gain insight, share it where appropriate.

4. Be integrated

Wherever possible, align online participation with other offline communications.

5. Be a civil servant

Remember that you are an ambassador for your organisation. Wherever possible, disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency.

In the small print it says “You should participate in the same way as you would with other media or public forums such as speaking at conferences.”

Just to update you on The TechCrunch BBC Debate: A Common Platform, I can confirm that a few members of the press are now confirmed to attend, and we have added another great person to the panel: Tom Loosemore is leading Ofcom’s work exploring the proposal for a “public service publisher”, a new online operation that will have a budget of between £50m and £100m per year. He is also a former ‘head of Web 2.0′ at the BBC. His contribution will be invaluable in all this.

The theme for the debate is not the usual media owners’ whinge about BBC.co.uk’s money and freedom of operation but something more subtle about the future of the Corporation’s public service obligations. Steve Bowbrick, who is chairing the debate, and I have subtitled the debate ‘a common platform’ which is a phrase that seems to suggest the potential for the Corporation (and other players like 4ip) to build a shared space for citizens, organisations, institutions and businesses to use.

Unfortunately we have sold out of tickets to the event, but I’ll be blogging live from the event and encouraging others to blog, twitter and video, of course. I suggest we use the tag “TCBBC” for posts, images, etc.

Update: Jon Gisby, Channel 4’s first dedicated new media director and the former managing director of Yahoo in the UK and Ireland, will also be joining the panel.

Update: Steve Bowbrick blogs about the idea of a “common platform” here.

Feeds and commenting aggregator fav.or.it has finally come out of the door into public beta, with a large number of new features aimed at simplifying interaction with news sites and blogs. Having realised that the site was being misinterpreted as a feed-reader in the style of, say, Google Reader, founder Nick Halstead has now focused on the core goal of making feed reading and commenting as user-friendly and mass market as is humanly possible. So RSS reader afficionados will be dissapointed by Fav.or.it, but then it is not aimed at them, and that’s worth keeping in mind. The original idea, of Fav.or.it – the ability to comment on stories and have the comment appear both on the site and the originating blog – remains, thus making commenting pretty simple. (Halstead explains more in a video I shot last week, below)

The question is, whether people well served by un-tailored news sites like Google News actually know that they want or need something more sophisticated. But certainly, Fav.or.it’s desire to make commenting on blogs a mainstream activity is a laudible one. And if you want to send a comment via your Twitter account, that’s possible too.

Fav.or.it has also made it possible to aggregate your IDs from a large range of services. You can add your IDs from Twitter, FriendFeed, or OpenID, amongst others. Perhaps the closest this comes to the mainstream is Blogger, though they say more are to come.

As promised when I first wrote about Fav.or.it in October last year (some months before the launch of the private beta) the site uses Javascript to gauge how long you read a post, which is very useful data (assuming you don’t just leave the browser open while making a coffee, of course) and they can tell if a window is open longer than would be reasonable to read a post. You can also vote stories up and down. Fav.or.it uses this data to start suggesting items it thinks you’ll like.

There are 2,000 feeds inside Fav.or.it, with 3,000 more to come, but Fav.or.it will add the feeds, not you. Interestingly there is also human powered search in that if you disagree with the category or tags that a particular post has, you can change it. If the community agrees then it gets changed.

What about the copyright of feeds? If content is marked as non-commercial Fav.or.it only shows excerpts. Feed owners can embed advertising into their feeds and Fav.or.it will display these without any alteration.

Developed using the Zend Framework on PHP, they have managing to build a pretty big product with just three developers – rather more than competitor Wikio with 34 people. Wikio’s main pitch is that it is indexing news sites and blogs and majors on new product reviews. It’s a sort of Google News meets Kelkoo meets Digg. Fav.or.it suffers from no such confusion and has developed a pretty amazing system, which is closer to putting the heat on other commenting systems like CoComment, SezWho, Tangler, Disqus and Intense Debate.

Next2Friends, the mobile social media platform, today launches its ‘Live’ application designed to provide real-time streaming from mobile devices to the mobile and static web, and mashes it up with a proximity app.

The pivately-backed startup will take on a number of startups including Seesmic, Qik, Kyte, Loopt and even Twitter. But Next2Friends says it has more tools for controlling who you broadcast to, (public / private etc). Once videos are on the Next2Friends network, videos can be embedded into third party sites. Next2Friends Live has a 15-30 Frames per Second (FPS) speed and supports GPRS, 3G, 3.5G and Wi-Fi connectivity. They claim a 0.2 second delay under optimal conditions – however, some might say Qik has better quality video over mobile.

TechCrunch UK previously wrote about the Next2Friends Bluetooth application (a Java app) which allows you to match your profile against another Next2Friends user within range of your Bluetooth enabled phone. It’s part of a bunch of other apps they are working on.

Here’s an example of video:

Following news last moth that George Coelho, co-founder of venture capital technology investor Balderton Capital, had joined renewables investment firm Good Energies as managing director and head of venture capital, Balderton is refreshing its team. Now Bernard Liautaud, the founder of Business Objects, will join the firm as a General Partner. In January 2008, Business Objects was acquired by SAP AG for $6.7 billion, making it the third largest ever software acquisition at the time.

Based in London, Balderton manages approximately $1.5 billion in committed venture capital. Notable investments include Bebo, (the social networking site, which was recently sold to AOL for $850m), Betfair (the online betting exchange), Codemasters (the video games publisher), MySQL (the open-source database business, recently sold to Sun for $1 billion) and Setanta Sports (the leading European sports broadcaster).