Picli.com, a photo sharing community site launched in private beta in March 2007, has relaunched with a slew of new features and a more clearly defined business model.

Two years seems like a long time for a site to be in beta, and Picli’s developer/designer founder duo of Sam Street and Sean Miller acknowledge this in the FAQ, referring to 2008 as ‘the dark age’ in which, well, nothing much happened. Still, Picli managed to gather a passionate core user community of about 2,000 in this time, whose feedback has contributed to the recent refinements.

Picli’s a bit like Flickr meets Digg – users submit their photography under Creative Commons licensing, which then gets rated up or down by the community. The central focus of the site is the Showcase, a gallery of the most popular photos.

With the relaunch comes tiered membership packages, which the founders are currently soliciting user feedback on before any final decisions are made. There are plans to build upon the online advertising options, currently revolving aorund Google AdSense, and to implement a photo buying service where Picli users could sell usage rights on their images to picture buyers, using a commission-based system which Miller and Street call ‘targeted tagging’. The guys also plan to release an API that will encourage developers to extend the site’s functionality to mobile devices and web apps.

While on the face of it Picli may seem like yet another Flickr, the founders are adamant this isn’t the case – it’s less about acting as a giant harddrive for users to upload all their photos to, and more about community-driven quality control, where photographers share only their best work and take inspiration from others — not dissimilar to what FFFFound does for visual artists.

Miller and Street are bootstrapping Picli for the moment, and say they would love the site to drive traffic to members’ personal portfolio sites as a result of the interest generated on Picli. The site’s gone a ways in proving the concept around a free-to-use model. Whether or not it can compete with the likes of fotoLibra and Demotix will depend on how readily the user community coughs up for annual subscriptions, and whether or not picture buyers find on Picli what they can’t find elsewhere. Watch this space.

Here’s something from the department of Quelle Surprise: Bango (AIM: BGO) reckons the iPhone lags behind the top 20 mobile handsets most used in browsing and buying on the mobile web.

The Bango Top 20 handset list, based on Bango’s February statistics, puts the Nokia 3110c on top, followed by the Samsung M800 in 2nd and the Nokia 6300 in 3rd place. On the whole, smartphones account for 30% of handsets in the top 20. Bango detected a total of 1,811 different types of handsets accessing the mobile web in just one month.

The iPhone appears as 24th on the list, leading Bango to conclude that brands trying to reach the mass market on the mobile web need to look beyond that rarefied group of iPhone users whose buying is restricted to the Apple App Store.

The company’s stats are based on its own metrics from Bango Analytics, monitoring the activities of major brands and businesses as their consumers browse to mobile websites, and the number of sales of mobile content and services handled by Bango Payment.

While it’s not a comprehensive or comparative study, the stats and Bango CEO Raymond Anderson’s blog analysis will still make interesting reading for businesses that monetize their mobile content and services across a wide demographic.

Anderson’s point that companies that haven’t optimised their sites for mobile browsing or transactions are missing out is on the money, but this situation is not likely to remain constant. Come June, when new iPhones are launched, it’s likely to be at different pricepoints more suitable for the mass market.

UPDATE: Please join us tonight for the TechCrunch Europe meetup: an open invite, pre-dinner networking event for 20 UK and Irish startups (WebMission), plus any other European startups in Silicon Valley and any US tech companies or bloggers/media who want to meet us and connect with TechCrunch Europe.

It’s on tonight (Monday) from 7pm onwards at the 21st Amendment Brewery. The venue also serves food. It’s right near to South Park, the city’s hub of Internet companies (and near Cal train and the ramp onto 280 for South Bay).

Your first drink is kindly sponsored by:

BookingBug.com [CrunchBase], an embeddable, hosted, booking and reservation system for small businesses. And ProofHQ [CrunchBase], a web application that streamlines how designers manage review, proofing and approval of designs, artwork, documents and images.

Date: Monday March 30
Time: 7pm onwards

21st Amendment Brewery
*Mezzanine Level*
563 2nd St
(between Brannan St & De Boom St)
SOMA
San Francisco, CA 94107
www.21st-amendment.com
Yelp review
Virtual Tour
Google Map

Orginal post: Everyone knows there are plenty of Europeans already in Silicon Valley, but Web 2.0 Expo San Francicisco provides a reasonable opportunity for those of us on the other side of the pond to invade en masse. Which is why TechCrunch Europe is organising a couple of meetups as part of our particular invasion. How about that – a TechCrunch invasion from a different continent.

The first involves a bunch of British and Irish firms on a co-ordinated attack on the Valley. WebMission09 involves 20 companies rattling around the Valley meeting investors and making contacts. TechCrunch Europe is co-hosting them tonight (Saturday) for the WebMission09 Cocktails @ Ozumo bar, adjacent to the Harbor Court Hotel in downtown SF. Come on over if you are free.

And on Monday night it’s an ad-hoc meetup in downtown SF just prior to Web2Expo. Logistics-wise we don’t have a venue for the meetup right now, but it’s likely to be within striking distance of the Galleria Park Hotel on Sutter Street. Sponsors of the bar are very welcome! To get an update on the venue for Monday, leave a comment on this post or follow Mike Butcher, TechCrunch Europe editor on Twitter, or follow the official WebMission09 hashtag of wm09 – you’ll find us.

But the Brits and Irish aren’t the only ones invading. The French are organising their own Revolution on Thursday night. Loic Le Meur will be pleased. And if you hear of any other European-organised events this week let me know and I’ll add your event to this post.

UPDATE: The German meetup for #w2e is on 2nd Street on Tuesday for their “Webmonday” event. There will be roughly 40 people. It is possible to sign up on the Webmonday Wiki: and on Facebook.

The Put People First march in London this weekend will use some interesting tech to get their point across to the world leaders of the G20, assuming they are listening, and on Twitter.

A caped ’superhero’ called “The Megamouth” will shout out messages from the public to the likes of Obama and Brown about the world’s poor.

But exactly what he’ll shout will be pulled from Twitter’s API (any tweet tagged #themegamouth) into a moderation and edit console, as well as any from the ActionAid site and via SMS. They will then be manually approved – nothing too off topic I presume, like “Hello Mum” – and the shouts will then be fed into an iPhone app which The MegaMouth uses on his wrist-mounted iPhone. Each time he hits a “shouted” button, a tweet will be generated to inform the crowd of what he’s been shouting (probably because they won’t hear either).

The main video footage will be encoded and uploaded in chunks using Tumblr and Vimeo, embedding it into the ActionAid site in one move. This will be supplemented by live streamed footage from a Nokia N95 using Qik – again, embedded directly into the ActionAid site, and generating automated tweets as it does so, as anyone who’s used Qik would know.

How’s about that then? Protest 2.0 huh.

Last year yet another ‘build your own social network’ appeared. SocialGO was a white-label social networking site creator spun out of UK company Bright Things. SocialGO lets you create an online community website which is either stand-alone or inside an existing website. All the usual features like IM, content-sharing for photos and videos, blogging tools etc are there.

Clearly things may not have gone to plan though. There are any number of these companies. Let me see now (deep breath) Ning, PeopleAggregator, SocialSpring, OneSite, GoingOn, CrowdVine, Mzinga, Haystack, CollectiveX, Moli, KickApps, DZOIC, Pringo, SmallWorldLabs and in the UK, WebJam and Kwiqq. And all of them arrived well before SocialGO. Ning of course has Marc Andreessen as Chairman and well over 100 million dollars in funding.

So what’s the answer? What can be user-generated virtually for free, is in high demand and creates a lot of traffic? Yes! Porn!

Thus, Zocku.com, a white label social networking platform dedicated to adult networks which has SocialGO as its underlying platform, has been money-shot into existence.

Apparently there are already plenty of customers with one “generating in excess of $5,000 a month in ad revenue and membership fees.” One client says Zocku.com “has created a more complete and satisfying experience for Ruffkin’s members.” I’m sure it has.

In other words, it may well be the case that SocialGO launched and then found itself inundated with porn merchants, as happened to Ning – something which nearly destroyed the company until it banned them.

The question only remains. How Bright did Bright Things have to be to dream this move up? The words “not” and “very” spring to mind.

Given the US economy is tanking right now, I wonder if there is not a wider trend for European startups to start thinking about Asia as a more viable place to make deals and potential exits. Certainly TechCrunch has been speculating on whether China is now the place to look to, for instance. So with that in mind news reaches me that Jimdo, a German startup with an easy to use online-website creator with social features, has announced an exclusive agreement with KDDI Web Communications, a subsidiary of Japan’s 2nd largest telecommunication corporation KDDI, to launch a Japanese Jimdo version. The site will offer Jimdo’s website creator for business clients on a hosting platform.

Jimdo wisely paid particular attention to internationalising its product and Japanese is the eighth language it’s incorporated and the second East Asian localisation. Jimdo’s partner in China, the consulting firm Web2Asia, has managed the Chinese portal and provided local support for Chinese users since July 2007.

The aim is to get 300,000 new Japanese users within the first twelve months. And it’s a ripe market. Although Internet adoption rates in Japan exceed 70% only about 12% of all businesses have their own web domains according to KDDI itself.

Jimdo co-founders Matthias Henze, Christian Springub and Fridtjof Detzner must be pretty pleased right now to have landed such a big fish having built the company in on an old farmhouse. They had a consulting firm NorthClick which built the Jimdo platform, but, in the familiar classic story of many web startups, frequent requests from friends gave the founders the idea to offer free “Jimdo-Pages”. The Samwer Brothers invested in the web startup and the rest as they say is history.

Is O2 about to enable MMS for iPhones well before the next release of the handset, rumoured to be in June? Word reaches us from a reader that, having made “several phone calls to different sections of the company” O2 will “officially” switch on MMS services for the iPhone within the next few weeks. To be clear this applies to O2 customers, within the UK only – and it’s only rumour, so be warned.

Of course he could have been talking to anyone, but it’s interesting that customer service reps are saying “a few weeks” when we already know that that the iPhone 3.0 platform, which supports MMS, won’t be available until the summer, or around June. So either Apple is planning a small update between now and then (unlikely) or O2 will enable MMS somehow at their end. They also found out that:

MMS messages will be taken out of your original allowance (i.e. if you signed up to the £35 contract you had 500 messages), the MMS messages will be deduced from the allowance as 4 messages per message (so if you have a £35 contract you will get 125 MMS messages). If you have the unlimited text bolt on this WILL NOT give you additional MMS messages, you can only use your bolt on for standard SMS messages. O2 did not comment on whether they would be providing a MMS bolt on of any kind, they also did not comment on how much additional MMS messages would be if you over run your allowed amount. Pay and Go iPhone users will be charged out of their current balance, and that I could be around 35p per MMS message sent.

He drew a blank on tethering – allowing customers to connect a laptop to the Internet via the iPhone.
I’ll put a call into O2 and see what they have to say about this…

Whispers started to come out today about this, but Twitter has now confirmed that it has re-launched out-going SMS in the UK on a shortcode, but with only one provider, Vodafone. So while Vodafone UK customers will be able to receive SMS updates from Twitter as part of their package, and send for free to begin with, users on other networks will have to wait while Twitter negotiates separate deals. The free offer is for a trial period, after which sending a message to Twitter will count as a normal SMS, although receiving updates will remain free.

Twitter cut the ability to get your Twitter feed last August after starting to throttle the service down in November 2007. At the time co-founder Biz Stone said that: “Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US.” Although they’d been able to negotiate service fees with mobile operators in the US and Canada, negotiations failed in the UK. TechCrunch Europe caught up with co-founder Ev Williams at TechCrunch 50 to quiz him about this very subject.

Word among operators then was the Twitter had behaved like amateurs, attempting to dictate terms. However, with Twitter growing like a weed in the UK now and being adopted by celebrities left right and centre, they clearly got back into a reasonable negotiating position.

It’s fascinating to think back to it now but mobile Twitter took off in the UK amongst early adopters – largely people in tech – precisely because it had an SMS service. Jaiku, the competing service which was bought and killed off by Google only had SMS in Finland, a tiny market. It languished on the desktop rather than the mobile and only had a client for one mobile device, Nokia/Symbian. Twitter’s API saved it, allowing others to develop applications to the point where we are today, with many ways to access to service.

Whether the Vodafone announcement will draw Twitter users to the network remains to be seen, but it’s certainly a more mainstream way for people to get into Twitter so should serve them well enough.

Here’s their full announcement:

Thursday, March 26, 2009
Full SMS Service for Vodafone UK Customers!
Extending the power of the real-time network globally through the simple technology of SMS is a driving goal for Twitter. Anyone in the world can update Twitter via SMS but receiving tweets on your mobile has been restricted to North America. Today, we’re happy to announce an agreement between Vodafone UK and Twitter. The shortcode for UK Vodafone customers is 86444 and you can activate your mobile in your Twitter settings.

What’s The Deal?

Vodafone UK has signed an agreement with Twitter allowing customers to send and receive SMS updates at no additional cost. Sending tweets from your mobile will be part of your normal text messaging bundle with Vodafone—there will be no extra fees. In fact, for the first few weeks, sending tweets won’t even effect your bundle. Receiving tweets via SMS on your mobile is totally free. Vodafone loves Twitter!

Making Progress

In the United States, folks can send and receive tweets via SMS at no extra charge. In Canada, Bell Mobility customers can do the same. Now Vodafone customers in the UK can send and receive tweets. Twitter will continue to make arrangements with operators around the world so hopefully your country and your mobile provider will be next!

Buyers clubs along the lines of Vente Privee (which started in France) and Brand For Friends in Germany are spreading like wildfire across Europe and no wonder. They are business models tailor-made for the recession, offering big discounts on designer goods among almost guaranteed buyers. They hit revenue almost from the word go and the jungle drums tell me that Vente-Privee is on course to deliver hundreds of millions in revenue this year alone.

Now online shopping club KupiVIP.ru in Russia, operated by Privat Trade Ltd has raised $8 million in a second round of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, Arlan, and ABRT Fund, we hear from Russian blog/search startup Quintura. The company previously raised $3 million from the same investors. The site organises designer brand online sales in fashion and fashion accessories with discounts of up to 70% off boutique prices. KupiVIP has hit 200,000 registered users since launching last October.

Now, Brands4friends is also Mangrove backed. Notice a trend anyone? Expand into big territories and then exit by rolling up these startups into a sale to a retailer hit by the downturn that needs a new model. QED, perhaps…

As I wrote in February last year, News International saw the trend early in the UK and invested in online fashion company Brand Alley UK, which offers private sales and bargains designer fashion brands. The joint venture with French online boutique BrandAlley is, of course, a luxury “private members’ club”. BrandAlley was launched in 2005, is backed with VC cash (I’m just checking who) and claims a membership base of well over 1.3 million and 200 brands.

MySpace has launched Web IM in the UK. Thus, users no longer need to download anything to use instant messaging to reach their MySpace friends. Previously the site pushed the installed Windows version of MySpaceIM but that looks highly likely to be completely supplanted by the Web version. Web IM now appears in the right corner of any MySpace page for the IM bar.

It’s part if an overall push for web services for the site. Yesterday MySpace launched its official toolbar, giving users immediate access to their MySpace activity notifications regardless of what site they’re currently browsing on the web. The toolbar is available on Windows for Firefox and IE users, as well as on Mac for Firefox (there’s no Safari support yet). You can get it here.

No, it is not April 1st yet. The British government is proposing that Twitter is to be taught in primary (elementary) schools as part of a wider push to make online communication and social media a permanent part of the UK’s education system. And that’s not all. Kids will be taught blogging, podcasting and how to use Wikipedia alongside Maths, English and Science.

The draft plans were due to be published next month, but have leaked early to The Guardian. Children will also learn “fluency” in handwriting and keyboard skills, and how to use a spellchecker. Luckily they will still be taught how to spell themselves, rather than rely on Mr Clippy.

It’s a big overhaul of current thinking. Children will no longer be absolutely required to study the Victorians or the Second World War, as Teachers get a much freer hand in what goes on in the classroom in the biggest changes to primary schooling in a decade.

Traditional education in areas like phonics, the chronology of history and mental arithmetic remain but modern media and web-based skills and environmental education now feature.

The plans were drawn up by Sir Jim Rose, the former Ofsted chief, appointed by ministers to overhaul the primary school curriculum, and are due to be published next month.

Today (March 24) is Ada Lovelace Day, a great idea organised by Suw Charman-Anderson. Over 1,000 people have signed up to write a blog post about a woman in technology whom they admire. Although I didn’t sign the pledge I’m doing a post anyway. I knew about Ada since the day I read about her semi-fictionalised character in that amazing steampunk novel, The Difference Engine, and well, I was impressed. Plus I like the aim of the whole project.

Ada Lovelace Day was founded to raise the visibility of women in tech, and rightly so. This sector is woefully bad at getting more gender balance into the industry, and that is partly why I’ve put a debate about the issue into Geek ‘n Rolla next month.

Ada Lovelace herself was fascinating. Born in 1815 she became the world’s first computer programmer. In 1842 she translated some notes on Charles Babbage’s invention, the Analytical Engine, and then created a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with it. Thus the first computer program was born.

The first computer programming language was thus named Ada. In 1942 the ENIAC was programmed not by men but by six women. A woman, Grace Hopper inspired the development of the COBOL programming language. So computers are steeped in female history.

The Guardian has a great list of women in tech. But I’ll be honest. I don’t know many of them, so allow me to list some of the great women in this business today I that have had the privilege to meet, aside from Suw herself, and some I’d like to meet. This list is not comprehensive and yes – before you ask – it includes people who don’t code because there are plenty of men in tech who don’t code but still consider themselves in tech. Including me! Capeesh? And besides, these women have to put up with all us guys, so I think they deserve a roll of honour don’t you?

In addition to which, the next time you see an advisory board with no women members, or a tech event with no women speakers, then at least now you might have a list to refer to for some ideas, right? Right. (see also Geekspeakr.com)

Adriana Lukas, mediainfluencer.net
Aleks Krotoski, The Guardian
Alicia Navarro, Skimbit
Amanda Lorenzani, Excite
Amanda Rose, Twestival
Anna Bance, Girlmeetsdress.com
Anna Colclough, Tourdust.com
Avid Larizadeh, Accel Ventures
Basheera Khan, journalist
Bena Roberts, Gomonews.com
Bindi Karia, Microsoft
Caroline Roberts, WE Connect
Carrie Marsh, Mydeo
Cate Sevilla, BitchBuzz
Catherine Williams, Osborne Clarke
Christina Domecq, Spinvox
Clare Logie, HBOS Women
Daniela Arens, Linqia.com
Deirdre Molloy, Cimaglobal.com
Elizabeth Varley, Onlinecontentuk.org
Elizabetta Camilleri, Tereca
Helen Keegan, Beepmarketing.com
Helen Lawrence, Dare / MeasurementCamp
Hermione Way, Newspepper
Inmaculada Martinez, Stradbrokeadvisors
Isabel Fox, IF Communications
Jamilla Knowles, BBC
Jane Houghton, British Venture Capital Association
Janet Parkinson, Quirk
Jemima Kiss, Guardian
Jenny Fielding
Joanne Jacobs, Amplified 09
Joanna Geary, The Times
Judith Clegg, 2nd Chance Tuesday
Julie Meyer, Entrepreneur Country
Karen Hunton, Toptable.co.uk
Katie Lee, Shiny Media
Katie Lips, Treasuremytext
Katie Moffat, PR
Leisa Reichelt, Freelance user experience consultant
Linda Bernardi, Straterra Partners
Lisa Bilton, Life-Essentials.com
Liz Bolshaw, Lymehound
Margaret Gold, Betavine
Maria Dramalioti-Taylor, Protos Capital
Martha Lane Fox, Luckyvoice.com
Melissa Geffert, Opal Telecom
Meriem Aissaoui, Smarta
Michelle Dewberry, Chiconomise.com
Michelle Martin, Digital Planet
Miranda Munn, NovaLoca.com
Natalie Diep, Morrison & Foerster LLP
Nicola Maguire, Reed Smith
Peggy Anne Saltzman, MsearchGroove
Petra Johansson, Twistedtree.co.uk
Priya Prakash, Priyascape.com
Rachel Armitage, Zoombu
Rachel Bremer, Spark PR
Rassami Hok Ljungberg, Rassami PR
Renate Nyborg, Poken
Reshma Sohoni, Seedcamp.com
Sally Goodsell, Finance South East
Sarah Blow, Girl Geek Dinners
Sarah Cebik, DLA Piper UK LLP
Sarah Eaton, GLE Growth Capital
Sarah McVittie, Texperts
Sasha, “sashinka”
Sayula Kirby, Index Capital
Shaa Wasmund, Smarta.com
Sharon Vosmek, Astia
Sherry Coutu, Cambridge Angels
Simone Brummelhuis, The Next Women
sMary harrington, School of Everything
Sonia Calvo, BlueandPink
Sophie Cox, Worldeka
Sophie Hobson, Smarta
Steph Bouchet, Rougefrog
Sue Guerrieri, SugarPlum Shop
Sue Lawton, WE Connect
Swannny, Gadget Girl
Thayer Prime, just unique
Vero Pepperrell, Thatcanadiangirl.co.uk
Wendy White, Moonfruit / Gandi Group
Yuri Bacas Hosaka, CityAmigo
Zoe Margolis , Girlonetrack
Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson, Huddle.net

(Apologies if I’ve accidentally left you off the list!)

This week’s TechCrunch Europe Job of the Week is for a Senior Developer ( – ASP.Net/C#) at Gig Junkie.

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 the CrunchBoard and contact editorial.

When Google Streetview was given the green-light by the UK’s Information Commissioner last July, it appeared as if sanity had prevailed. Despite the protests of Privacy International, which pops up like a Meerkat every time Google or another tech company tries do do something innovative, the Commissioner ruled that it was “satisfied” that Google’s Street View photo-mapping would have safeguards to avoid risking anyone’s privacy or safety. But then Google made two major errors when it launched Street View last week. It has not covered up the faces of many people on the maps, or the number plates on their cars. And it has not photographed the house of Google’s UK MD – because he lives in a private road. As we say in tech: FAIL.

Given how the largely right-wing UK press would act once it smelt blood, Google is now facing a perfect storm of protest that could hobble Street View – but with it the chances for Europe to join the tide of positive innovation that the release of publicly editable data is going to have on society.

Now a formal complaint about Google’s Street View has been sent to the Information Commissioner (ICO) by Privacy International citing more than 200 reports from members of the public identifiable via the service, and it now wants the ICO to look again at how Street View works. As if it hadn’t already.

But as Google boss Eric Schmidt has said “We agree with the concerns over privacy. The way we address it is by allowing people to opt out, literally to take anything we capture that is inappropriate out and we do it as quickly as we possibly can.”

In other words, as fast as people complain to Google that they have been seen on SV standing on a street corner, or they found their house, Google is allowing them to be removed from the system. So how long will PI’s list of 200 last? Probably less than a week. But no matter. PI wants the whole thing switched off.

This is not to lightly dismiss some real concerns. The BBC reports that a woman who had moved house to escape a violent partner was recognisable outside her new home on Street View.

But do I wonder if Google is being disingenuous. Surely it’s system could have been more thoroughly checked before going live? Could it possibly have contemplated the idea that all this publicity would help break the whole story into the mainstream media? Going live and just telling a few tech blogs does not a national issue make.

If Google had wanted to avoid the controversy it could have double-checked its system before going live and conducted a public information campaign. It could have told every private householder in the UK that their property might appear on the Google database and that they’d have the right to take it off. But they did not. Is it not far easier and cheaper to release Street View “half-cocked”, create a storm of media interest, get public awareness and at the same time allow people to remove themselves?

This is, however, a dangerous strategy. In Europe we are obsessed with privacy (at least among the older generation – the younger generation is far more savvy about these things). Just look at Germany’s reaction to Street View.

Plus, Street View will have three powerful forces aligned against it:

- Our innate, culturally European desire for privacy.

- Our innate, culturally European fear of crime / burglars / nosey neighbours.

- Our perfectly legitimate concerns about terrorism, and anything which makes it easier for terrorists to check out locations (a matter which has historically rarely affected mainland North America and which people internally at Google will probably just not get)

- The desire of European governments – especially the current British one – to use any news at all to draw the masses away from blaming them for the Great Recession. They will happily join the mob and the press against Google and Street View.

Meanwhile the ICO is doing the smart thing and just telling Google to “ensure all vehicle registration marks and faces are satisfactorily blurred” and advising “individuals who feel that an image does identify them (and are unhappy with this) should contact Google direct to get the image removed.” Common sense.

And I’m seeing it happen. Traveling down a local street near my house on SV I am starting to come across blank patches where people must have asked to be removed (I live in an area of London where there are plenty of tech-savvy people). Just before the images reach a local school they stop. Someone at Google thought that through. I hope.

However, the system is by no means perfect. It took me 30 seconds to find a car number plate unblurred and another 20 mins to find a man with a face untouched. In other words, not a lot of effort. There is clearly work to be done.

But should we dismiss Street View so lightly?

The UK is one of the most heavily photographed nations on earth. There are more CCTV per square mile here than almost anywhere in the world. They are also always on. Google Street View however is only a snapshot, it does not show trends and we can edit it. That’s a significant difference.

Yes, Google is using these images for commercial purposes. But we can use them too. There are already startups piling in to Streetview to add value to their service

Property or venue recommendation companies will use it. Trusted Places and Qype will be able to integrate Street View.

IRLConnect will implement Google Street View to their presence-based network, to get conversation going around locations.

Novaloca didn’t even wait for Street View. They integrated images from Seety/ which has done it’s own drive around London with cameras. Has Privacy International heard of them? Perhaps it’s not high profile enough of a target.

There will be others: Local councils will be able to identify derelict houses, or map road problems faster and more cheaply than before. Society could actually, conceivably benefit from this technology – and isn’t that why we live in a democracy? To use it better than the bad guys?

So far I think the best one is both environmentally cool and a great idea:

ParkatmyHouse.com, the UK’s largest on-line parking space marketplace allows drivers to find cheaper alternatives to commercial parking lots and in turn, puts the money in home owner’s pockets rather than those of large corporations. Surely a business for our times? It has implemented Street View to allow drivers to view a parking space before they rent it. The implementation is here and you see it by clicking on the Street View tab above the map. This is one of the first commercial implementations of Street View in the UK which adds value to an existing service.

Meanwhile I sympathise with those, like Broadsight’s Alan Patrick, who found their car’s number plate on Streetview unblurred. But he has submitted his (anonymous) email address and asked it to be rubbed from the system. Yes, Alan, Google took a picture of your house without your permission or paying you. Does this contravene some rules on privacy? I’m not sure either, but to be frank, anyone can take a picture of my house and put it on the Internet and I’d be none the wiser. At least Google lets me ask for it to be removed. At least I have some control over this data, some recourse to action.

With one nation, under CCTV, I do not.

It looks like the VCs are buoyant about the future of online advertising, especially video, even if a few people aren’t right now. Kennet Partners, the pan-European venture private equity firm, is investing €6.5 million in GoViral, a global online distributor of branded video content. As part of the investment, Michael Elias from Kennet will join the board of GoViral, which is based in Copenhagen, with offices in London, Frankfurt and Paris.

GoViral serves branded video content across its proprietary online publisher network. The campaigns are distributed in local languages, on local sites and with local publishers. It works with creative and media planning agencies and publishers to create campaign strategies.

Michael Elias, managing director of Kennet (which has around $500 million in funds under management) reckons GoViral has “developed a first-mover advantage in a significant new market” which is VC-speak for “it’s going to scale fast and we’re going to do well out of it”. It also ticks a few other boxes: Transforming media? Check. Fast-growing? Check. Profitable? Check. Global market opportunity? Check. Capital-efficient? Check. Good management team? Check.

Jimmy Maymann, CEO of GoViral thinks “video advertising is a key consideration that will help the online channel become the most important advertising medium in the future.” That’s fair comment, given what we know about the rate at which online video is growing.

Privately-backed Touchnote, the startup which enables you to create a kind of postcard which stands up from any photo, is going all Web 2.0 on us. It’s launched an API that enables any third party website with visual content (photos, drawings, cartoons…) to enable their users to turn the images into Touchnote cards. This generates a ‘create a card’ widget/button on a partner site with the image dropped directly into Touchnote’s Flash card personaliser. I have to say, as well as providing another revenue share model for social sites with images, it beats the crap out of traditional card companies like Moonpig in the UK, plus they don’t have any annoying TV adverts.

And the site now seamlessly integrates with albums on Facebook and Picasa. The startup address a pretty simple market need – can you see photos when the computer is switched off, and what about older generations who don’t habitually have Facebook open? The product design allows the card to stand up so people keep them up longer than a traditional greeting card. Cards are green with 50% recycled card and their printers are about to become FSC certified. Speech bubbles and captions, write a message and then have it posted nationally or internationally. Customers can also get the card to for hand-signing if they want or use a gallery of images if they don’t have their own photo.

Some other bells and whistles they are adding include the ability to create a Touchnote from a special effect-manipulated image on Photofunia. Partner sites are also getting royalty for every card printed with one of their images, along with branding on the inside of the card – something which could be of interest to any web app out there that wants to monetise its visual content outside of T-shirts and mugs. Other partners to date include Someoneoncetoldme.com and FACEinHOLE.

Touchnote is seeing a lift in traffic from these partnerships and international orders now make up 20% of orders. With a small team which includes people from Skype, BSkyB, Expedia, WishingWell.com among others, Touchnote, which launched in November last year, counts Simon Murdoch (Friends Abroad, Bookpages/Amazon Europe) among it’s advisors.

FreeAgent Central, the money management and accounting tool aimed at small businesses, has secured an undisclosed amount of Angel funding for the service – though I understand it’s in the low six figures Sterling. The UK firm came out of beta in February last year and has users across the UK and US. The investors are Christoph Janz, Martin Armstrong and Sebastian Serfas.

Janz co-founded German Internet startup DealPilot back in 1997, one of the first comparison shopping services, funded by Bertelsmann and later acquired by Shopping.com. In 2005 he co-founded Pageflakes the personalizable homepage backed by Balderton Capital and recently acquired by LiveUniverse.

FreeAgent says it is is onboarding customers at a good clip and signing strategic partnerships with professional accountants, both for co-marketing and deeper relationships.

Run out of Edinburgh, FreeAgent Central costs up to £25 per month but in theory you could buy an off the shelf accounting product for £100. Why spend three times as much for software that doesn’t update? It’s built to address ’spreadsheet hell’ and double entry book-keeping and do all the grunt work in the background while giving your professional accountant the figures needed to prepare regulatory accounts.

It’s also attempting to get into the business of predicting cashflow, and giving a heads up on your tax position before your professional advisor. The UK account for the UK tax regime costs sole traders £15 per month, UK Partnerships/LLPs £20 and Ltd companies £25. The Universal Account can be used by anyone costs US $20 per month and uses all the sites features but without the tax functionality, although this is going to be rolled out.

Competitors in the ‘light-weight invoicing’ and small biz management arena – mainly in the US – include Freshbooks, BillMyClients and Blinksale, but FAC claims it has more features geared to smaller operations and allows freelancers to know their financial position in a more ongoing basis. In the UK there is also Bionicbooks, and ClearBooks – but these seem to be less ambitious in scope.

Founder and CEO Ed Molyneux says Freeagent is seeing more people come from Word and Excel than other competitors, though there is competition from Kashflow.co.uk, also UK-based, and xero.com in New Zealand. He says people are now leaving paid employment and expect more than being handed a spreadsheet by their accountant.

This makes an awful lot of sense to me and should have the likes of Sage and Microsoft on the back foot. Cloud apps like FreeAgent Central are the kind of thing that will lead to a death by a thousand cuts for the incumbents in this business.

Jive.ly is a new app in full beta, billing itself as a Twitter-like site for mobile. Created by UK-based developer Martin Buhr, the app is designed as a place to update your social network accounts with images and videos from a mobile without having to hook up third party services like Twitpic.

It enables quick, simple posting of video, images and text to your user feed from any mobile device via email or MMS with twitter-like replies, hashtags and trending. In other words it’s quite like Twitter, but this does MMS and video as the site will auto-embed content from Youtube, Vimeo, Flickr and other web sites from posted links and synchronise with your Twitter and Tumblr accounts. Or just post plain text if you like. You can also set up notifications for search terms you are interested in and then have it notify you via mobile. The service also has an API. Here’s my profile.

Buhr wanted to be able to just post videos straight to the web and although it’s possible to do this with Youtube, that won’t update a Twitter or Facebook status with the new media – jive.ly can. He calls it “Twitter, without the $55 million price tag .”

Business model-wise Buhr says Jive.ly will offer white-label accounts to businesses that want to have live-media on their own sites for a fee, using the site API (for example News organisations that want instant UGC with little to no development or server costs on their end); “single tweet” advertising and content-licensing. Buhr is looking for funding.

If there are comparisons to be made you might compare it to Utterli or the now defunct Jaiku or perhaps Moblog.net (though the latter does not have the ‘follow’ model of Twitter). However, all of those are a lot longer in the tooth and are wrapped in, shall we say, a much better design.

It’s my pleasure to announce a grand day out for tech startups old and new to share real, hard-core knowledge about their experiences on April 21st – an event we’ve dubbed “Geek ‘n Rolla” in a light-hearted homage to a certain movie which also pulls no punches. You can buy early-bird tickets already here.

Geek’n Rolla is sponsored by Viadeo one of the largest professional social networks in the world, and supported by UK Trade and Investment, as well as NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts.

This is as much an event for would-be entrepreneurs as it is for startups already ‘doing the business’. If you are passionate about being disruptive and thinking big, this is your event. With the economy on a major downer, one of the few uppers left is the zest and creative energy tech startups bring to the world – that’s what Geek ‘n Rolla is setting out to showcase and celebrate.

Our speaker line-up is probably the best ever for an event of this nature.

Our speakers include:

Leisa Reichelt, Freelance user experience consultant

The day will include a series of panel discussions, interactive sessions, keynote presentations and, at the end a TechCrunch Pitch! competition, followed by an evening party. The event is designed to bring together startups, investors and key industry players for great networking, TechCrunch style.

Peter Crosby, COO of Viadeo, says: “We are delighted to be sponsoring such an important event in the UK tech calendar. Viadeo’s growth began with a small bunch of networking entrepreneurs and we are now the biggest professional network in China and one of the largest in the world. So we recognise just how vital it is to network, collaborate and get inspired.“

We are also working with UKTI to get startups up to speed with their pitches with some free training. See below for details.

Venue:
RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects)
66, Portland Place
London
W1B 1AD
Nearest Tube: Regents Park, Great Portland Street and Oxford Circus
Map

The venue/location for the networking party will be sent to registered attendees prior to the event.

Sponsorship
We still have a few sponsorship opportunities and there will be a dedicated exhibition area available for companies to show off their products. If you are interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at the event, please contact Petra Johansson on petra[at]twistedtree.co.uk

About Viadeo
Founded in June 2004, Viadeo quickly established itself as the place to be for professional networking in Europe and beyond. Since then, with more than 7 million members (as of January 2009). Viadeo is essential for those who want to:

• Increase their business opportunities (to discover new clients, staff and business partners)
• Enhance their visibility and their online reputation
• Manage and develop their network of professional contacts

Viadeo’s members consist of business owners, entrepreneurs and managers from a diverse range of businesses both start-up and well established. Each day Viadeo attracts more than 10,000 new members; 40,000 new connections are made and over one million profiles are viewed. Based in Paris (head office), Viadeo also has offices and teams in the UK (London), Spain (Madrid and Barcelona), Italy (Milan), China (Beijing), India (New Delhi) and Mexico (Mexico City). The company employs 200 staff worldwide. www.viadeo.com

UK Trade & Investment is the government organisation that helps UK-based companies succeed in the global economy. We also help overseas companies bring their high quality investment to the UK’s dynamic economy – acknowledged as Europe’s best place from which to succeed in global business.

UK Trade & Investment offers expertise and contacts through its extensive network of specialists in the UK, and in British embassies and other diplomatic offices around the world. We provide companies with the tools they require to be competitive on the world stage. For further information please visit www.uktradeinvest.gov.uk or telephone +44 (0)20 7215 8000.

NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. Its mission is to transform the UK’s capacity for innovation. NESTA Investments has the largest portfolios of early-stage businesses in the country and is a leading authority on how to grow new ideas. We have strict investment criteria, and work with companies that have high potential for growth, are at seed or start-up stage, and have the potential to attract syndicated support. When we do invest, we aim to maximise our investment by assigning mentors, part-time managers or specialist support. We also stimulate imaginative solutions to pressing social issues and shape policy to help the UK meet its national innovation challenges.www.nesta.org.uk

Programme: See here for the schedule

Pre-Geek ‘n Rolla Pitch! Workshop
Geek ‘n Rolla will provide a small number of start up companies with the opportunity to pitch to investors and key industry people. These people are frequently being pitched to and often complain about the quality of the presentations they see.

So if you need to brush up on those pitching skillz, sign up for the pre-event Pitch! workshop sponsored by UK Trade & Investment and supported by the British Libary and IP Centre.

Pitch! takes place on 7 April 2009 at the British Library where Julie Collins will cover all aspects of successful pitching, including preparation, delivery skills, overcoming nerves and networking the hell out of the opportunity.

To sign up, contact Petra Johansson via petra (at) twistedtree.co.uk.

Please note:
Only qualified startups may apply to participate in this workshop. Startups will be able to chose to join the morning session (10.00-13.00)or the afternoon session (14.00-17.00). A maximum of 2 participants per startup may attend. Please note that participation in the Pitch! workshop does not guarantee that your startup will be pitching at TechCrunch Pitch! on 21st April 2009. The TechCrunch editorial team reserves the right to select the pitching startups.

Geek ‘n Rolla is an event programmed by TechCrunch Europe and organised by TwistedTree in association with rassami.

Wuala, the Zurich-based peer-to-peer-storage startup owned by Caleido AG, has been taken over by LaCie, the French manufacturer of external storage devices in a deal which frankly makes a lot of sense. One has an application, the other has storage hardware.

They are calling it a merger, but Wuala is clearly a lot smaller than LaCie. The deal marks a high point for Wuala co-founder and CEO Dominik Grolimund, but rather confirms the usual course of European startups in exiting as early as they can rather than scaling their startups to a point that they become world-beaters. It also looks like they either didn’t go for the VC deals they were rumoured to be in discussion about, or that those talks never came to fruition.

However, all props to Grolimund who has been on a four year journey from developing what became Wuala ago at the ETH Zurich to something that could end up being a reliable and secure cloud storage backed by millions of devices. Philippe Spruch, founder and CEO of LaCie thinks the Wuala deal will lead LaCie to transform from a hardware manufacturer to a “digital storage provider”. He may have something there.

We’ve previously written about Wuala at length here.