UK mobile startup Rummble has teamed up with TotalHotSpots the global WiFi hotspots directory to produce a branded version of Rummble iPhone app. Marketing of the app will start on Monday next week.

The end result is an application which will tell you where you can get WiFi nearby, as in places like Cafes, and the ability to “Rummble” (or rather rate) those wifi hotspots and see user comments. The application also allows you to add hotspots you have found and rate them. This is is the most useful aspect because you can now benefit from insider knowledge about open nodes.

The app is already in the app store, retailing at £2.99. The regular Rummble app is free, but does not contain the global data on wifi hotspots from all the ISPs and UGC on wifi hotspots).

The app is being featured on the Gadget Show tonight (Friday 30 Jan 2009) at 8pm on Channel Five.

Atlas Venture has closed its eighth fund (Fund VIII), which comes in at $283 million. The bad news is it’s smaller than Fund VII ($385 million) and comes in well below their original target off $400 million. The good news is that it’s amazing that there are still VC houses out there raising any funds at all in this car crash of an economy. And more importantly for startups they will be really zeroing-in on early stage startups – in part becuase the fund is smaller – which is great news for good entrepreneurs with great ideas and teams who have drawn a blank so far.

The company is spinning the reduced fund as a positive thing, of course. “The new fund is the right size for our early-stage focus and organisational structure,” said Jean-Francois Formela, partner.

Amongst VCs themselves some will snipe about the “size” of each-other’s fund, but frankly if a startup secures backing, who cares. One of the go-to guy for tech startups in particular will therefore be the same guy as before: Fred Destin, a VC who also doesn’t mind firing off a few opinions on his blog now and again.

Destin told me that the new fund will be used to follow Atlas’ strategy of “Prove, Build, Scale”. In other words put a relatively small round into a team they think are good, then build it from there – something they did with Seatwave with a $3m A-round which went on with B and C rounds.

But he also told me – something I have been hearing all over – that it’s going to be tough out there and the days of VCs funding “one man bands” are well over. “Good entrepreneurs should instead team-up together and create kick ass teams,” he said. They’ll look for the usual criteria: great teams (”we don’t mind how early stage they are”), good product which “show promise”, and companies which are already accelerating (”booking 5-10 m euros in revenues”).

The stealth-mode cloud computing startup CloudSwitch is its first investment out of Fund VIII, Matrix Partners participated as well. CloudSwitch was founded by entrepreneurs Ellen Rubin, formerly of Netezza, and John Considine, formerly of Pirus Networks (acquired by Sun Microsystems).

Atlas’ news means it can at least now look Accel and Balderton in the eye, both of which recently raised new funds. (And BTW, my Balderton sources say they are going to do early stage funding, contrary to my post at the time). With a cool $430m to play with in Europe, Balderton is viewed by some as the strongest over here right now, but it’s touch out there for VCs (I know, you’re crying inside, right?). I understand Doughty Hanson and DFJ Esprit have yet to close new funds and neither has Sofinova in Paris. At least, that’s what my sources say.

The smaller Atlas fund also means some personnel changes. Boston-based IT partner Ahmet Ozalp and London-based IT partner Martin Gibson are leaving. Boston-based IT partners Eric Hjerpe and Barry Fidelman move into venture partner roles. Life sciences specialists Bruce Booth becomes partner, and COO Jeanne Henry has retired. In Europe they have the continuation of the lineage with, Graeme O’keefe (who’s into wireless broadband), Destin ( Digital media and ecommerce) Max Neiderhoffer (a senior assiciate who loves gaming platforms) and long-time partner Christopher Spray.

VC houses remind me of monasteries (especially when they go on about “succession”) – one Abbot retires, another takes their place to continue the investment in scrolls…

Flirtomatic, the UK’s mobile and online flirting service, is launching a mobile beta in the United States following good take-up in the UK and Germany. Mark Curtis, CEO, says its because they had “consistently high usage from the US via the web” so it makes sense to launch the mobile service over there as well. Flirtomatic now has 1.3m users and is now ‘on deck’ with operators in the UK and Germany. The service enables users to to flirt online via the Web and mobile WAP site. Flirtomatic has received venture funding from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures and Seraphim Capital.

We previously reviewed Flirtomatic here.

Music streaming service Spotify is getting lots of plaudits from users lately for its ease of use and vast catalogue but that’s about to change. In a blog post yesterday the startup outlined how it will be removing a number of songs from its catalogue and adding country restrictions to some tracks, which may make them unplayable for many users. The changes are being made because record labels have slapped restrictions on Spotify’s service. The issue is to do with the publishing rights associated with compilatoins. A user in one country might be able to listen to a track on one compilation in their country jurisdiction, but to share that track on a playlist with a user in another country could affect the publishing rights. It’s a bizarre situation to think of in 2009 but it means that a user could share a track with a friend in another country, but that friend wouldn’t be able to play that track. As the Sweden-based startups says: “…our hope is that one day restrictions like this will disappear for good”. Here’s the post:

Some important changes to the Spotify music catalogue
January 28, 2009

Next week we are going to be making some changes to our music catalogue that we feel are important to communicate clearly. Unfortunately we are going to be removing a number of songs from our catalogue and adding country restrictions to some tracks, which may make them unplayable for you.

Why are we doing this?

The changes are being made so that we implement all the proper restrictions that are required by our label deals. Some tracks will be restricted from play in certain countries, this means that if you share tracks with friends who are in other countries it’s possible that they won’t be able to listen to them. The reason for this is that our agreements contain strict rules as to what tracks can and can’t be played in various countries that we are now capable of implementing. These restrictions are a legacy from when most music was sold on tapes and CDs and they have continued over into streaming music, our hope is that one day restrictions like this will disappear for good.

Additionally, some of the music that has been delivered to us had been delivered by mistake even though the artist did not want their music to be included in a streaming service. In order to respect the decisions of the artist we now have to remove those tracks. We have not lost any licenses and no labels have stopped working with us, this is just a matter of updating our catalogue to be in line with the agreements we actually have. In hindsight it would have been better to remove this in October when we launched publicly, we realize this now and apologize to you for not doing it sooner.

How will this affect you?

A number of the tracks that you’ve listened to previously will no longer be available for streaming, these tracks have already been removed from the search function. If you have some of these songs in playlists we will try to automatically replace those songs with versions from albums that we are not removing so you don’t lose the song. If there is no replacement available then the song will appear in red on your playlists.

What’s next?

From this point on there are no plans to remove any more music and our catalogue will only grow from here. We already have music from all the major labels and a vast majority of the independent labels licensed, between them we have millions of tracks that we still can add into Spotify. Now it’s a matter of importing that music into our system, which we are doing on an ongoing basis in an effort to add thousands of albums a week. We continue to work hard to sign deals with more labels and will work with the labels we have signed to fill the holes in our catalogue.

Our dream is to create a music experience where users can play whatever music they want, whenever they want, it may take awhile but we will keep working at it. Please feel free to leave any questions you may have on the blog or join the conversation on our forum if you require more information.

A fairly big play to help small businesses grow fast launches today in the form of Smarta, an attempt to create a one-stop shop for setting up and growing a business. You’ll be hearing a lot about it in the press because it has a bunch of people behind it with high media profiles, namely two Dragons from the BBC’s Dragons Den TV show. But will it cut the mustard?

It will if the tenacity of CEO Sháá Wasmund is anything to go by. She made her name during the last boom as a director of travel company, Deckchair.com and Mykindaplace.com, sold to BSkyB. Most recently she has been at BrightStation Ventures, an investment vehicle, but has since extracted herself to work full time on Smarta, which has nothing to do with BrightStation.

Smarta’s private backers are Simon Woodroffe (Founder of YO! Sushi), Bebo founder Michael Birch, David Saul (Business Environment Group) and Dragons’ Den panelists Theo Paphitis (also owner of Ryman Stationery) and Deborah Meaden. There is up-front sponsor money from NatWest, RBS bank and Vodafone, as well as from law firm Mishcon de Reya and serviced office provider Business Environment, which will both be providing services to users. Smarta is due to be launched today by Minister for Digital Engagement and Parliament’s first blogger, Tom Watson MP.

Get the picture?

So, Smarta is not unlike a sexier, private sector version of Business Link, the government-backed initiative to support small businesses which has been disappointing to say the least. Word on the street tells me they spent £20m on their useless web site, much of it on management consultancies to tell them they were fulfilling their brief. Sounds like your average government department, no?

But with Smarta you will be able to do a number of practical things: Legally register a business online with almost as much ease as you would buy a domain name; actually buy domain names; use the in-built social network to promote your businesses and yourself to other entrepreneurs; watch video tutorials and interviews with entrepreneurs; read how-to editorial features for businesses; ask questions; get financial and legal advice. You can also apply for a business banking account from RBS or NatWest.

They aim to have 200,000 users by the end of 2009. Revenue will be from sponsorship/advertising and transactions (domain name sales, business planning software etc).

Apparently there is a market out there. Here’s their maths:

The 2007 UK Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report found that roughly 2.8 million people in the UK are thinking or have thought about starting up a business. Figures from the Department for Business, Enterprise Regulatory Reform also show that only c.400k business actually start up each year. So therefore roughly 2.4m million people who are thinking about starting a new business never do.

The reasons are simple: professional services and infrastructure are expensive; paperwork; hard to find other entrepreneurs to network with; lack of mentoring. Smarta aims to address all these.

Thus, if Smarta gets 1% more of the 2.4 million to start up a business, that’s 24,000 additional start-ups. If each one has an turnover of £225,028 (according to the UK Dept for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform estimate for UK private enterprises with 0-49 employees in 2007) then the figure that pops out is £5.4bn.

Of course Smarta itself isn’t going to get all that. But it might be able to hook into the market if it’s quick, and, er, smart enough.

However, although the site shows plenty of promise, a couple of things ring alarm bells for me. The site was not built in-house but by digital agency Public Zone and designed by How Splendid. That’s fine, but real tech startups control their own tech. Perhaps they’ll address this later.

The videos of entrepreneurs are good, but you can’t share/embed them. It’s on their to-do list but I do wonder why they needed to build their own video player for this. Also, events don’t have calendar feeds (also on the to-do list).

Smarta will also be hard to scale across national boundaries beyond the UK (but perhaps not impossible?).

Lastly, their biggest challenge is in not becoming Ecademy. And there are other sites out there that purport to do the same thing. Two things help them on this: Smarta is not out to be a personal cult for it’s founder, although the media profile of the backers is going to go some way to differentiating the site from similar-sounding ones. All they need to do is execute on the tech a bit better.

Assuming all the above can come together, Smarta should be a very welcome boost to the UK’s entrepreneurial scene.

I didn’t quite believe it when one of my most trusted sources told me that AOL was seriously considering selling Bebo. But I have now confirmed the rumour with three other sources intimately acquainted with the company. AOL is indeed quietly pondering a sale after watching Bebo perform much worse than it had hoped. That, combined with an advertising market buffeted by the waves of the economic downturn, means Bebo’s days at AOL could be numbered. Selling Bebo only a year after AOL acquired it for $850 million would be an astounding about-face. How did this happen?

[UPDATES: As a result of this story, more sources are coming forward. One I trust says Bebo is being pitched at $200 million. Update 2: Sources inside AOL are denying that it is exploring a sale. Bebo also denies a sale. Update 3: We have been in contact with corp communications at AOL, they say on the record: "There is no truth to this rumor." Four of our sources, including former and current Bebo insiders and a well-placed VC, say otherwise. Last December Gigam published "Is Time Warner Having Second Thoughts About Bebo?". I'm not saying Bebo is formally on the block, but I am saying that a sale is something under consideration].

My sources paint a picture of a startup which cleverly went about wooing advertising agencies, their clients, and – in the end – a media company that was prepared to jump on the social networking bandwagon during late 2007. There is absolutely no suggestion that anyone was dishonest or misrepresented the situation. But a year on it’s clear that AOL itself projected more growth onto Bebo that the network could deliver.

Head over to TechCrunch.com for the rest of this piece…

Those TechFluff.tv people have another episode. This time it features Spotify, Tweetdeck and Chinese web space expert, Shakil Khan, among others.

Mobile World Congress spins up in a couple of weeks time but like any good event, the real action takes place ‘Off Broadway” at the fringe events. And that’s not just because TechCrunch is running an event: TechCrunchTalk Mobile 2.0. One of the main one this year is The Mobile Peer Awards from the Mobile Monday global non-profit network. They have picked their finalists for the awards from a list which started at 162, went to 42 and is now down to the final 20. It’s necessarily from a wide cross-section of countries because each MM chapter picks ‘their’ winner. Hence why there is only one finalist from Silicon Valley – Soonr – but that means you also get to hear about Aradiom from Istanbul, among others. Some of the trends are clear: location-based services, events, social networking, producivity apps, app stores, enterprise and VOIP. The full list of finalists appears after the jump.

The finalists are divided in two categories: early-stage and emerging.

Registration to attend the event is now open here.

Early Stage Startups:

Addict Digital Media – Mobile Monday Buenos Aires

aka-aki networks GmbH – MobileMonday Berlin

Babajob.com – MobileMonday Bangalore

Big in Japan Inc. – MobileMonday Dallas

bioLocate – MobileMonday Jakarta

Dial2Do – MobileMonday Dublin

Fortumo – MobileMonday Estonia

Mob4Hire – MobileMonday Vancouver

Orbster GmbH – MobileMonday Munich

Oxynade – MobileMonday Brussels

Tellmewhere – MobileMonday Paris

Xumii – MobileMonday Sydney

Emerging Startups

Aradiom – MobileMonday Istanbul

fring – MobileMonday Tel Aviv

Getjar Networks – MobileMonday Lithuania

Keynetik – MobileMonday Washington DC

Mobintech A/S – MobileMonday Copenhagen

PopCatcher AB – MobileMonday Sweden

Soonr – MobileMonday Silicon Valley

Unkasoft Advergaming – MobileMonday Madrid

This week’s TechCrunch Europe Job of the Week is for a developer for Theiplatform.com advertising startup. They are in London (though I think the description “Farming, Fishing, and Forestry” was entered incorrectly).

Remember, it costs only £20 to post *any* kind of advert on the CrunchBoard related to your startup/business, whether it be jobs, searches for office space or requests for new projects.

Every week we publish the Job of the Week here (8,000+ on RSS) and Twitter it to about 7,000+ more people. To apply to have Job of the Week featured, put up a job on CrunchBoard and contact editorial.

We’ve already seen that Twitter is turning into a source of breaking news. But it’s also clearly turning into a way of organising social movements extremely quickly. “Tweetup” (as in a meetup facilitated by Twitter) has passed into common parlance amongst regular users but now the concept has spawned a global event for charity which will involve nearly 50 U.S. cities among over 100 worldwide, including Beijing, Tel Aviv and Beirut. Twestival, on Thursday 12 February, will happen over a 24 hour period in a kind of tweetathon – except it is Twitter-organised meetups that people will be hitting, not phone lines. And the whole thing came together over Twitter inside 24 hours.

Lead organiser Amanda Rose told me that because of Twitter’s viral nature it took only 24 hrs to get the the main 40 cities organised, and the rest followed shortly after. There are now over 100 Twestival cities, including London, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, Edinburgh, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Sydney, Melbourne, and Lima. The London event sold out tickets in 24 hours. The events will be raising money to support Charity:Water, a not-for-profit organisation bringing safe drinking water to people in developing countries.

Twestival started out as a one-off event in London last September. It’s come a long way.

It may not be Live Eight but Twestival is just the latest “tweetup with a cause”. One December has already lead to an initiative to clothe homeless people through Winter in Vancouver, and there are certain to be many more, less publicised, events in the future.

UPDATE: Well they did indeed discuss Twitter at reasonable length (well, 40 seconds is a long time on TV). Ross says he’s been following Fry on somethiing called Twitter which is “a bit like a message board”. Fry says Twitter is “much mocked” by those who “don’t get it”. Ross likens it to mobile text messaging. Fry describes it as Microblogging in 140 characters. Fry says he has lots of “nice people” following him, though those who mock say Twitter is just about telling the world what you had for breakfast. Ross says he notices from his Twitters that that Fry has been doing a lot of walking. Ross then turns to Tom Cruise and asked if he ever Twittered… {also posted to YouTube)

[Original story, before and after show]: Twitter could be about to break significantly into the mainstream of Internet users. TV talk show host Jonathan Ross, who has built an underground following on his Twitter account during his suspension from the BBC, is poised to discussed Twitter with comedian/author/presenter Stephen Fry. His show used to get 4 million viewers a week but numbers are likely to be well up during tonight’s show – that means a lot of people in the UK suddenly curious about Twitter.

Fry confirmed they discussed Twitter during the pre-recorded interview on Thursday (below), but whether it makes the cut remains to be seen and the mention of Twitter did make the cut, according to Ross (above). The question is, what did they actually say? Check back on this post after the show tonight on BBC 1 at 10.35pm for more details.

TechCrunch Europe is hosting a couple of afternoon panel discussions at the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and we’d love you to come along and join us for some great discussion and evening networking with mobile startups and the investment community.

*** GET A TICKET HERE ***.

In addition, I’m happy to announce that TechCrunchTalk Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona kicks off a series of TechCrunch events in Europe this Spring and Summer, all focused on bringing together and networking the European tech community. Outside of the below dates I will be attending ad-hoc European tech events and, following my speech at Le Web on Europe’s startup scene, I’m also available as a speaker on this subject.

This is really important: If you wish to be on the mailing list for information about all the up-coming events, sign up on our Amiando account here.

Regarding content and opportunities to be on the panels please contact the TechCrunch Europe Editor, Mike Butcher.

We have a few sponsorship opportunities and demo tables available for companies to show off their products. If you are interested in supporting the Barcelona event or any of the other forthcoming events, please email our event organiser Petra Johansson of TwistedTree.

If you are a member of the press wanting to cover the Barcelona event or any of the forth-coming events, please email Rassami Hok Ljungberg of rassami PR.

The up-coming TechCrunchTalk events are scheduled for:

19th February – Barcelona
25th February – Paris
19th March – Warsaw – Central European event for tech startups & VCs
21st April – London
27th May – Nordic and the Baltic states event in Stockholm
10th June – Berlin

TechCrunchTalk Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona

2009 promises to be the year many of the predictions made about the rise of mobile may start to come true. Startups in the space are poised to take advantage of affordable mobile Internet access and sophisticated handsets like the iPhone. The question is, can they do it? That’s what TechCrunchTalk in Barcelona will seek to tease out from the assembled entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists that back them.

Here’s the press release we just put out:

TechCrunch Europe will be hosting a TechCrunchTalk event in Barcelona on Thursday 19th of February, 3pm-6.30pm followed by drinks and networking in conjunction with the GSM Mobile World Congress.

Where: Hotel1898.com, La Rambla, 109 (Entrance on Pintor Fortuny) – 08002 – Barcelona. Tel +34 93 552 95 52. Fax: +34 93 552 95 50.

“TechCrunchTalk Barcelona” is aimed at bringing together the Mobile 2.0 startup and VC community to debate the next phase of the mobile startup world. It will feature two quick-fire panel discussions with the hottest entrepreneurs and investors selected for their leading views on the market, and with topics focused around a number of themes, including:

- What will be the mobile trends over the coming year?
- What are VC’s looking for?
- Can the power of the operators really be disrupted?
- What value can be created in the mobile world in difficult economic times?

The panel discussions will be followed by casual networking over drinks.

Tickets to the event are a nominal Euros 25 per person to minimise no-shows – and can be purchased online here.

The event is sponsored by LiveCLIQ Inc.. Other sponsors slots are still available.

LiveCLIQ Inc.
LiveCLIQ is a leading provider of 2-way, 3-screen Digital Media Streaming, able to stream network and user media on Mobile, Internet and TV platforms. The Company offers its hosted services to media properties, consumer brands and mobile carriers. LiveCLIQ’s user media site, www.livecliq.net, that enables people to stream live and recorded video from their mobile phones to public and community destinations on the web. LiveCLIQ’s Magellan interface provides a media overlay upon Google Earth in which geo-located media are displayed with user, title and tags enabling contextual media searches. The Company’s founders include product and business leaders from Apple, Microsoft Xbox, Netscape, Motorola and MobiTV. LiveCLIQ is based in San Francisco, California.

The events are organised by TwistedTree in association with rassami.

If you’re a European startup then you need to check out Plugg organised by long-time Web 2.0 consultant, blogger, entrepreneur and now TechCrunch contributor Robin Wauters. The event will take place on the 12th of March in Brussels, Belgium, and will feature a host of top speakers from the continent, and a startup competition. Registration for the Plugg Start-ups Rally, which is free to enter, is now open, and the deadline for registration has been set to Wednesday 4 February at midnight (CET). Any European early-stage company with a maximum of only one round of institutional funding can sign up for the competition by entering details about their team, concept and business model until Wednesday the 4th of February at midnight on this dedicated mini-site. All submissions that fit the criteria will be carefully evaluated by a professional jury of pundits and VCs, and twenty will ultimately be invited to pitch at the audience from the main stage at the conference.

Red hot Stockholm-based music startup Spotify has appointed Gustav Söderström as director of “portable solutions”. This clearly means Spotify intends to exand its music streaming service into the mobile arena. Söderström is a serial entrepreneur, joining Yahoo! in 2006 after his early-player mobile social software company Kenet Works AB was acquired. For the last two years he’s been Director of Product Management and later Director of Business Development in Yahoo! but clearly the startup life has tempted him again. Daniel Ek is CEO of Spotify.

He says on his blog today:

Like many others , my first time using Spotify gave me that very rare ”Wooha!, wait a minute!”-feeling. I got that same feeling using Skype for the first time a few years back. It wasn’t the VoIP technology, I’d used loads of other VoIP apps before, it was the implementation of the service. The fact that it just worked! I didn’t have to care about firewalls, NATs, VoIP servers or user SIP domains (because they didn’t use SIP). And the core proposition of the service, voice, had awesome quality! Even more importantly, because of this, my friends, and even my parents, got it to work!

More tellingly he says:

“Starting in February, I will head up something that a lot of users have already requested and discussed extensively, Spotify on the Mobile.”

This is a key win for Spotify. I interviewed Söderström four years ago for some research into mobile social networking and it was clear then that this was a guy who is technically and strategically very adept. Spotify is getting a lot of great press at the moment and is understood to have raised a massive €15.3m from Northzone Venture Partners.

We’re in an official recession. The property market has slumped. But who cares? Property search startup Nestoria remains busy. It’s just set up a white-label version of its service for AOL, following on from similar such deals with The Daily Telegraph and the Independent newspapers. The site is for users on AOL.co.uk and the Homes and Property Channel. Meanwhile it’s launched a brand new mashup using it’s data.

Where Can I Live uses the Nestoria database to help home hunters find their properties based on commuting times to their place of work in London. The user determines which Underground or DLR station is near his/her workplace and the budget to buy or rent. Tthe Where-Can-I-Live engine then finds properties on the market ranked by price and commuting time. Travel time is calculated only between stations, so the users need to add walking time to and from stations (apparently walking distance is inversely proportional to the renting value of many properties in London). The open-source OpenStreetMap is used as the base map, and it’s a lot more impressive than I thought it would be.

Where Can I Live is based on a tool originally developed by Christopher Osborne as part of his Masters project at UCL which he did with Nestoria. The site was created and launched as part of Nestoria’s Lokku Labs and realised by Doodledo.

Nestoria is, as I say, keeping busy, despite the doom and gloom in the property market. It’s also partnering with UK property portal Country Life and has whipped up Nestoholic.com, a house prices comparison site by location and area in the UK.

However, Where Can I Live is useless for people who live in London but want to live near an over-ground rail-line, not an Underground line. It also doesn’t cover bus routes, which are increasingly important in congestion-charge London (bus times have increased).

Nestoria remains “privately backed” but faces plenty of competition not least from Zoopla which now has £3.75m in funding to play with. That, and another player I am hearing about which is poised to bring yet another new model to market, so watch this space. Interesting times…

UK-based Tweetdeck, probably the best desktop application to date for tracking your Twitter feeds, has completed the funding round hinted at recently. The funding will come it at just under $500,000. As expected, Betaworks is leading the investment into Tweetdeck.

The announcement caps a great story, whereby lone developer, Iain Dodsworth, came up with the Tweetdeck idea just a few months ago. He told me “It’s enough to turn this into something that generates revenue. Betaworks came to me, we spoke about where I wanted to take TweetDeck, discussed what level of funding it would take to get there. I was aware of Betaworks already via Summize and bit.ly and it is such a good fit working with them.”

The other participants are a mix of London and New-York based investors:

• The Accelerator Group, the most active early stage tech Angel in London.

• Taavet Hinrikus, one of the first Skype employees, now based in London.

• Gerry Campbell, an experienced Internet/media executive and former President of Reuters’ Search and Content Technologies group.

• Howard Lindzon. An entrepreneur, and creator of Wallstrip and Stocktwits.

• Roger Ehrenberg, early stage investor.

TechCrunch Europe Announcement: I’ll be heading up to a Northern Startup 2.0 event on January 28 in Manchester. There’ll be some chat from myself and others and then a pitch competition ominously entitled “StartUp4Slaughter”. I’d heard they were pretty hard in The North, but…

Here are the details:

Thriving as a Tech StartUp in an UpStart economy – Beating the economic blues

“With the last three years of the emergence of web 2.0 startups with no clear focus on revenue generation, the current economic climate is forcing these startups to think otherwise. The startups with the right strategy will emerge, grow and have the opportunity to acquire struggling startups.”

PROGRAMME:
18:00 Registration and networking
18:30 Introductions to 2009 and partners
19:00 Speeches
19:45 Break
20:00 Panel discussion
20:40 StartUp4Slaughter: 5 mins presentation by a tech startup highlighting a specific problem it has. Through rapid Q&A, audience attempts to find answers within 10 mins.

SPEAKERS:

Mike Butcher, Editor, TechCrunch Europe

Ed French, Venture Capitalist, Enterprise Ventures

James Brocket, Managing Partner, CalibreOne

Dr. Zoe Lock, Technology Strategy Board

UK mobile RSS reader Mippin is upgrading its service to cater for the iPhone and the Android G1 after witnessing a marked increase in use of the service by these handsets. The question is, will we notice?

Mippin says the average user duration is just over 5 minutes but on the iPhone and G1 it is 7+ mins. The user churn on G1 and iPhone is minimal (of 100 users who visit on those devices virtually all are still using the service 2 months later). Plus Mippin has launched an Android application which has had 20,000 downloads thus far. None of this is that surprising. Everyone knows the mobile web rocks on these devices compared to any other handset. This is not really big news.

And the trouble is, Mippin’s business model – monetising RSS feeds tailored specifically for mobile by sharing revenue with publishers – could have a real up-hill battle getting anywhere.

It also seems odd, that after getting their actual VC on board as CEO to steer the company, that they are reduced to making a big song and dance about tweaking the interface for the iPhone. I mean, shouldn’t that have happened a while back?

Granted, Mippin is gunning to be the application whcih takes the process of reading RSS feeds on your mobile into the mainstream. If there is one startup out there that could do it, Mippin is probably it. However, one really does wonder if this will happen. iPhone applications appear to be the way forward for many publishers. Plus personally I find the Google Reader on the iPhone to be amazing. I just don’t use Mippin. Does anyone else? Feel free to comment below.

Of course, I may be completely and utterly wrong. Quantcast and Compete both shore Mippins traffic heading in the right direction. This is US traffic, so the uptake there may well be greater than we think, back here in the UK. In which case Mippin should be talking about traffic, not interface tweaks.

Take your standard issue iPhone, throw in tagged audio recordings uploaded to a web-based audio rendering platform, add a dash of geolocation data slipped into Google Maps – et voila! You have AudioBoo, an application that lets you record, slice, dice and track audio uploads by location or tag from your mobile. In plain English, that would translate into a map of the world tagged with evocative sounds of each place.

Sound cool? UK broadcaster Channel 4 thinks so – its innovation fund 4iP has bankrolled AudioBoo’s next stage of development for an undisclosed amount. Channel 4’s new media guru John Gisby will be demoing the app at the Oxford Media Convention today, where he’ll announce the beta release. Developer Best Before Media has 97 tokens left available for would-be beta testers, though a few are already taken – Stephen Fry is one of the early adopters.

An ad-sponsored model of AudioBoo will be free to consumers, with a premium service offered to corporate users, such as tourist authorities, businesses, museums or news organisations. Here’s a taste of what’s to come (updated video):

Hello AudioBoo from Mark Rock on Vimeo.

Best Before has submitted AudioBoo to the App Store, and hopes to launch it officially at SXSW Interactive in March, which it is attending as part of the Digital Mission organised by Chinwag for UK Trade & Investment.

AudioBoo is the brainchild of Best Before Media, a London-based company that makes software-based audio and video toolsets for the next generation of broadcasting. You may have heard of them in the context of Millicent, their web-enabled framework that is an attempt to be to broadcasting what Aldus Pagemaker and Quark Xpress was to newspaper publishing.

In fact, the company has developed a host of disruptive technology over the last two years, built on the fundamental principle of a simplistic approach that makes doing fairly technical things easier, cheaper and a whole lot less fiddly.

Case in point: Millicent does all the rendering in the cloud and outputs to any resolution, including HD, and in a choice of formats, including any Quicktime format, AVI, Flash, Silverlight, and digital TV compression formats such as MPEG2 transport streams or more specialized ones like Microsoft’s IPTV platform. It can also pull in dynamic data via XML and render it to video in realtime in a visual form entirely different from what it looks like on the web.

Founder and CEO Mark Rock has a team of eight backing him up, including CTO Jonathan del Strother, aka the guy who implemented the Cover Flow GUI, and sales director Matt Waring, who was previously with Bob Geldof’s company, Ten Alps.

Prior to Best Before, Rock co-founded design & technology company, Static 2358 Limited, which owned and operated the interactive TV games channel PlayJam on Sky and cable in the UK, TPS & Canal+ in France and Cablevision in the US. Static had successful financing rounds with Sky, HSBC and Casenoves before being sold to iTV middleware provider Open TV in 2001 for $60m.

UPDATE: 4iP now has more details here.

UK Internet traffic to Twitter has increased 10-fold over past last 12 months, according to Hitwise. For the week ending 17/01/09 Twitter ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, up from a ranking of 2,953 for the week ending 19/01/08. UK Internet traffic to the website has increased by a staggering 974% over this period. Hitwise also admits that Twitter is probably even more popular than its numbers imply, as Hitwise is only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website, not access via mobile (it’s big on the iPhone, I can tell you) or third party applications like Twitterrific and Tweetdeck.

Plus, the average amount of time that people spend on Twitter has more than trebled from less than 10 minutes a year ago to half an hour now. Make that about 2 hours for me.

Twitter’s penetration per head is even deeper in the UK than in the US. It ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, while in the USA it ranked 350th. It’s big amongst the young, but the fastest growing age group of users is 35-44 year olds, who now account for 17.3% of UK visitors.

Famous Twitterers are boosting the site. Stephen Fry, has over 50,000 followers, John Cleese can claim more than 30,000, and 2,000 people are following Andy Murray’s progress at the Australian Open. Jonathan Ross (13,000+ followers) is spreading the Twitter religion by verifying if his celeb pals are on it. He calls himself the “Number One Twitter Detective”.

The amount of traffic it sends to other websites has increased 30-fold over the last 12 months. Almost 10% goes to News and Media websites, 17.6% to entertainment websites, 14.6% to social networks, 6.6% to blogs and 4.5% to online retailers.

Facebook remains Britain’s most popular social network and is now the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK.