Zensify is a new lifestreaming iPhone app which lets you update, discover and track pictures, videos and comments across multiple social networks. Other apps have tried to do similar things. But what sets Zensify apart is that it shows the user trends within your social graph in the form of a tag cloud of key words. In other words it brings a lot more intelligence to your social graph. Suddenly, you can see a big trending topic amongst people you follow. I’ve been wanting something similar for a while and I’m not alone. David Winer recently Tweeted: “Wouldn’t it be cool if “trending topics” were localized to the people who are followed by the people you follow.” Well Zensify does this.

And it doesn’t just do it across Twitter. It does it also does it across updates from Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, Photobucket and 12seconds. For that reason it is my new favourite app, bar none, and it’s available for free from the app store here.

Zensify is also reminiscent of some desktop apps in that it allows you to view all your social networks in one timeline, and update Twitter and Facebook at the same time. You can upload and share mobile photos, and share content from all those networks directly back into to Twitter. You can also set up and save regular search terms across your social graph. The app will also play videos from YouTube and 12seconds.

The first version of Zensify is called “Zensify Preview”, so this is not the full app just yet. Even so it’s still pretty awesome.

For instance, this morning I could see that among the people I am following (which is pretty much all the startups CEOs across Europe) that, just amongst my Twitter friends, people were talking a lot about “funding”. Each time I click a topic it takes me deeper into who is talking about that topic.

Plus the search facilities on the app are pretty good as well, allowing you to search across Twitter, videos, Facebook, and many other content types.

However, one drawback comes not from the app itself but from the fact that many people have linked their Twitter account with Facebook, so you get their status updates twice. There’s been a general trend away from doing this and Zenify, and other apps like it, will probably accelerate this as people realise how much it pollutes the stream.

Zensify is seed funded by Ipex Capital, PA Consulting Group’s venture arm and co-founded by Bastian Lehmann. So far they have 11 staff in total.

The development roadmap includes integrating public content from various sources, more social networks and web services like Google Reader, and opening up the platform for other developers. The full launch is planned for June.

How can e-commerce continue to grow? This guest post by Jamie Murray Wells, founder and Executive Chairman of Glasses Direct, looks at the next wave coming round the corner.

Latest figures show UK ecommerce sales continue to buck the financial doom-and-gloom. There was an overall 14% increase in the year to April 2009. E-commerce certainly looks like the Noah’s Ark of retail during the recession: those companies that have a strong online consumer proposition get a ticket to ride out the storm, and those that don’t, may drown.

There is a lot of he growth in the clothing, footwear and accessories category in particular. According to Forrester, in those categories online sales represented 2-4% in 2003, and now represent over 10% and in some cases, over 15% of the total category.

Where the sale of more ‘generic’ products such as books, DVDs and travel can be seen as something of a first wave of ecommerce, understanding how consumers want to buy high-touch, cosmetic products online such as expensive jewellery, fitted garments and for us, eyewear, could represent something of a second wave of e-commerce.

For companies involved in this second wave of ecommerce, it is not as simple as relying on the old cornerstones of price, range, convenience to attract customers. Our peer group face significant consumer purchase barriers to do with try-on, fit, and product education, that one-by-one, need to be identified and addressed, through continued technological innovation and great customer service, in order to pursued customers to make purchase decisions in our favour over the high street.

A number of interesting businesses ride this new wave of e-commerce innovation shotgun with us:

Blue Nile, is an online jeweller that offers a completely new level of service online, changing diamond shoppers’ habits. They offer enormous amounts of information on the diamonds that they sell, specialist experts on-call, and a massive focus on education to teach you about what you should think about when buying a diamond - far more than you could get in a high street store. The technology on their site allows you to see what different carat diamonds would look like on your finger. This matched with the traditional advantages of shopping online – a massive selection, reasonable pricing and convenience, has meant their business has been a runaway success.

Everyone knows ASOS, which has developed some really strong online celebrity and brand engagement. Suggestions for product ranges and tips from other consumers’ purchases, beautifully shot imagery and the ability to zoom in to inspect every detail complete the picture for the ASOS shopper of high-touch products.

At Glasses Direct [interest declared] we help our customers find their ideal glasses with our Virtual Mirror, which allows people to virtually try on glasses while they’re browsing. We want people to use the resulting images to get other people’s opinions on their looks. ‘Do I look good in this’ becomes a question you can ask your community, not just one shopping companion or the store assistant. Retailers like us are looking at ground-breaking ways to visualise products online, especially when the products face higher than average barriers to sale.

And then there’s Zappos, who use customer service to create a ‘personal emotional connection’ with their customers – something that helps it overcome barriers to buying shoes online, drives loyalty and therefore repeat purchase, and helps them sell over a $1b of shoes every year online.

The second wave of ecommerce isn’t about necessarily unique or high technologies, but how we, as retailers of the fitted or fashion product, can fashion practical online solutions to each of our own consumer bases’ needs. I believe that in years to come it is likely that every retailer will be able to offer price, range and convenience like Amazon, and so the real competition will be around the customer experience and the customer service. We’re just ahead of the curve by prioritising these now. This is why, as I said in a blog post after a visit to the company, Zappos, who calls itself ‘a service company that happens to sell shoes’, it will probably in time, replace Amazon as the e-commerce ‘gold standard’.

Now that the first group of second wave companies has proved that the public, investors and the city all buy in to the prospects of companies dealing thin the high-touch, entrepreneurs should be scrutinising the high street for possibilities. Most of the obvious e-commerce first wave opportunities may well have been seized, but there are many second wave opportunities still out there. Look around and anything that says ‘tailor made’ on, is not sacred to the high street anymore.

UPDATE: This event has now been canceled, but please keep in contact with the Mobile 2.0 organisers for alternative arrangements.

The Mobile 2.0 Europe conference is coming up in June and it’s shaping up to be pretty cool. Experts and thought leaders from all aspects of the mobile ecosystem will be descending on Barcelona, and TechCrunch will be descending on it too in the shape of myself and Robin Wauters. Having been last year I can attest that this event is one of the few to really bring together some of the coolest mobile startups in Europe. The Mobile 2.0 Europe conference will be on Friday, June 19, 2009 at the Espacio Esade Forum, with the Mobile 2.0 Europe Developer Day the day before. There is also a Startup Demo Launch pad.

So it’s our pleasure to also be hosting the official TechCrunch Mobile 2.0 party after the event on Friday and after the speaker’s dinner. We are pre-releasing the first 100 tickets here (there is a small ticket fee to prevent no-shows). We are also looking for sponsors of the party, who will obviously be branded at the event and in posts about it. Please email our events organiser petra(at)twistedtree.co.uk.

The U.K. High Court today ruled in favor of eBay, claiming that the company can’t be held legally accountable for the sale of counterfeit L’Oreal fragrances and creams on its online auction site in the U.K. The ruling follows similar decisions by Belgian and French courts, which have ruled in eBay’s favor in three of the five cases L’Oreal brought in 2007 against the company.

This is fantastic news for counterfeiters, who can now keep on duping customers into buying fake L’Oreal cosmetics through the popular web service.

In all seriousness, I think this is a logical ruling, in the sense that eBay is and has always been merely a facilitator of trade and can hardly be expected to verify the authenticity of each and every product that goes up for sale on its auction website. It has in the past taken a lot of steps to do its part in fighting online crime, and recent rulings in European courts fortunately reflect that.

In a statement, Richard Ambrose, Head of Trust & Safety for eBay, reiterated that “cooperation and dialogue is what is needed, not litigation”.

Hear, hear.

Social shopping startup Boxedup has been acquired by super-affiliate Venturian Media in an all share deal, terms were undisclosed. Venturian said it would now integrate its existing portfolio of product comparison and shopping sites into Boxedup.

Four year old Venturian has about £60m in sales with offices in the UK, Australia and India. It plans to blend boxeup’s social media platform with its affiliate revenue model as an independent unit to create services for retailers and brands.

Boxedup was launched in July 2007 by Chris Osborne and Jeremy Baines. Osborne will stays on board to lead the next phase, with the aim to build a database of consumer “purchasing intent”. They will be integrating Google’s FriendConnect and Facebook Connect, among other social systems. He told me that prior to the sale he had been looking for another round of funding, but a conversation with Venturian turned into an acquisiton. The team consists of seven people, all virtually located. The company raised an Angel round in Mid 08.

The site is effecitively a product platform designed to help people organise online shopping. Similarly to ThisNext, it allows you to bookmark products you are thinking about buying, but gets a revenue share when someone buys something its users have bookmarked tracking. Other sites like Kaboodle, StyleHive, and Wists provide similar platforms for people to recommend goods sold elsewhere. Another, Rasba, serves as a storefront for retailers and a social network for shoppers, where, if someone buys something from a user’s tracking list they get a commission - a model Boxedup could possibly adopt.

Kaboodle, which never launched in the UK or Europe, was bought by Hearst Interactive Media for between $30 - $40 million, all cash, although that was the heady era of 2007.

The site recently launched new bookmarklets, a Facebook application and Flash widgets.

[Note: See updates below] Why would someone create a Twitter account for a UK MP which was fake, say the next general is “in weeks”, but then delete the account? Was it a real account or a fake one created out of mischief? Just such questions are buzzing through Twitter right now because an account which looked very much like it was the official one for Nick Brown MP (@nickbrownmp) tweeted, in reply to Austin Mitchell, this morning:

Shortly after that the account was deleted.

Luckily there is Twitter search, plus plenty of people have been watching and the observant @andrewgerrard grabbed the image above.

If this is “real” - and the fact that the account has now been deleted suggest it is - then Nick Brown, known to be close to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, knows that there will be a UK general election this Summer. And he just sent a Tweet which was meant to be a private direct message. Stay tuned, this story is breaking…

(Hat tip to AlbertoNardelli and Tweetminster for the tip)

Update 1: Ironically enough I had to go offline to speak at the Media 140 conference in London this afternoon and have not been able to get back on this story (which I am now doing). So, Sky News’ Political blogger Cheryl Smith appears to have called Nick Brown’s office and they say the @nickbrownmp was fake.

Uber-video reporter Hermione Way (of TechFluff TV fame) stumbled on something interesting today. Yahoo! appears to be running a PR push in London for Flickr called Brilliant Spots. She duly Twitpic’d the pavement based advert from her iPhone. The site mentioned leads to a place which is really about Flickr. What’s wrong with this picture? Yahoo wants everyone to use MMS, a terrible, costly old system pimped mercilessly by mobile phone operators.

But of course, right now the iPhone does not support native MMS and it’s a fair bet that the super users of camera phones right now are iPhone users, posting to Twitpic and other related image services. In addition, sending an MMS picture of something you just find a bit “brilliant” from a normal phone costs *real money* - unlike using up the flat-rate data on an iPhone. Of course, people can use others handsets, like a Nokia, but even then there is no direct call from Yahoo to “post to Flickr” which plenty of people would recognise.

Does anyone else think Yahoo! is “fiddling while Rome burns”? Yes, they’ve been reaching out to the developer community through Hack Days and the like in London. Yes, they are working hard on Yahoo Boss and Search Monkey. But, as TechCrunch US point out, they are seriously losing the plot over search and realtime/streams - which is pretty much what everyone is talking about right now, including Google.

Tell us your thoughts below.

There are not many startups that set out to save peoples lives - unless you count the generic use of things like Twitter to get the word out fast about an earthquake or some other life-threatening event. But then again there aren’t that many aiming for the extreme niche of mountain rescue teams. But Decisions For Heroes, which just launched, is aiming to do just that, and it just goes to show how far the application of social data to a problem can reach.

Cliff rescue climber Robin Blandford - who also happens to be a former executive with Reuters’ new media operation - created DFH after volunteering on rescue operations with the Irish Coast Guard. He’s created the service to address three common challenges for these life-savers: equipment, communication logistics and paperwork/data. So Decisions For Heroes monitors key metrics for these rescue teams like “response readiness”, team availability (since so many of these teams are staffed by volunteers), qualifications and experience.

With a laptop and internet connection, teams can record the details of their rescue operations and training exercises. The software then automatically performs analytical charting, draws heatmaps, and benchmarks reports to outline the teams areas of strength, weakness, and expertise.

DFH then links up all these disparate, global rescue teams, which all share the same kinds of needs, to share data and perform paperless reporting between teams, in a way that they’ve never done before.

The site is based on a 40 Euro a month basic package for rescue teams, going up to an ‘all you can eat’ scenario which so far is unpriced. Think of it as BaseCamp for danger. DFH originally came through the Seedcamp European startups programme.

Eventually the system is designed to generate statistics, observe patterns, educate potential casualties, and ultimately reduce accidents. And who could ask more than that.

Mobile content provider AQA 63336 (whose name makes me think of that new emergency services number) has launched AQA2U, a commercial micro-publishing platform which lets UK users micro-blog for money.

It works like this: you sign up as a publisher via the AQA website. Once approved, you set up topics ending in 2U which your ‘fans and followers’ subscribe to by texting that topic to 63336, at the cost of 98p.

Thereafter, any time you feel like you have something of value to share, you publish it from your phone or online, and your subscribers receive it as a text — at cost to them of 25p per aphorism, observation or other nugget of information. The maximum a user will be charged is £3.50 per month.