Today Scotland-based prediction market startup HubDub, launched a new feature. PunditWatch is tracking ten pundits across four categories, politics, technology, entertainment and sports. Whenever someone makes a prediction on the tracked site, Hubdub either places the prediction in an existing HubDub market or they create a market for it. Every pundit has a shadow HubDub account as if they were playing HubDub themselves. Then HubDub’s users see those markets and start trading them, and the value of the predictions goes up and down. For example, on 12th of May we predicted that the 3G iPhone would launch in May, but the value of that prediction started to go down as May played out. Oh well. Currently, many of the open predictions for the top tech blogs are around the 3G iPhone. So we’ll have to see who wins that one…

Prediction markets are being touted as the new way to really engage users, and create more value for content providers. There are a few out there already: BluBet (more of a game than a market), The Industry Standard re-launched (with mixed results) aiming at tech, Pikum in the UK is majoring on sports, and HubDub is aiming at general US news (though it happens to be based in the UK).

Of course the serious point to all this is that HubDub will use PunditWatch it to drive users to pile in and make predictions and back their favourite news sites. To my mind this is a lot more fun than the model which the re-launched Industry Standard has come up with, and the numbers speak for themselves. Most of the Standard’s hover around the 50% mark, which indicates that not many people are actually trading on them. The Standard has 72 questions open at the moment. HubDub has 1,512.

Writer and soon to be author Paul Carr - in between a recent travelogue of adventures in the US and prior to the launch of his book “Bringing Nothing to the Party: True Confessions Of A New Media Whore” - has come up with a new site. Skewering the Web 2.0 startup scene with a new take on British irony, Haikurious is satire written in the style of Haiku poetry. Think Gaping Void in three line verse (and no cartoon). My favourite so far is below:

TechCrunch UK is taking the TechCrunch brand on a little road-trip (OK, plane trip) around Europe this summer and afterwards, making face-to-face contact with Europe’s best and brightest startups. We just held a great meetup in Barcelona for instance. Where possible I’ll be holding a TechCrunch meetup in the cities I visit (keep track via Dopplr), usually with a local partner. So here’s where I’ll be going next:

Paris
Seedcamp Paris
June 6th
Come and say hi as I’ll be at this influential competition for French startups.

Berlin
June 11th
Berlin TechCrunch Meetup!
It’s gonna be huge… stay tuned for an update shortly on this.

Warsaw
June 12th
TMT.communities’08
A great new event in New Europe. I’ll be speaking at the conference.

Rome
June 20th
TechGarage
Come and say hi, as I’ll be at this cool new event for startups and VCs in Rome.

Dublin
Techcrunch / TechLudd Mashup
June 26th
A TechCrunch meetup held in conjunction with TechLudd (the Irish startup networking event). Watch TechCrunch UK & Ireland for details of the event, to be announced soon. Save the date! (A little more info is here).

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

Athens
July 1st
Athens TechCrunch meetups co-organised with George Tziralis and Open Coffee Greece. Please get in touch about sponsorship.

Barcelona
July 4th
Mobile 2.0 Europe
TechCrunch UK is supporting the after-party for Europe’s hottest mobile 2.0 startups.

Zürich
July 17th
TechCrunch Meetup Co-organised with Zurich’s Wuala and Doodle, and supported by Geneva’s Newscred. Yes, we want to mash-up startups from both those cities! Please get in touch about sponsorship.

Oslo
September 4th
Proposed TechCrunch Meetup Co-organised with Secondbrain. Please get in touch about sponsorship.

Stockholm
September 11th
Proposed TechCrunch Meetup Co-organised with Twingly. Please get in touch about sponsorship.

Hamburg
September 25th
Proposed TechCrunch Meetup Co-organised with Jimdo. Please get in touch about sponsorship.

Other TechCrunch Events in Europe:

And TechCrunch UK has started organising other events, including a recent London Meetup TechCrunch Dinners (our first was with Scott Rafer here). We are looking for other notable speakers for panels and events, so please get in contact if you are going to be in London at some point and we’ll schedule you in.

We are also planning a major TechCrunch event in London, to be announced shortly. And we want to do other meetups around Europe (and I mean all of Europe, including Eastern Europe), so please get in touch about sponsoring and co-organising those with us. We’re currently missing a few countries as you can see. Thanks!

Naked, the UK-based social messaging startup which closed last week mere months after launch and days before it released a beta after a failed attempt to raise more financing, may yet be revived. Sources are telling me the startup is trying to re-animate in Belgium, home to at least two of its co-founders.

One of them, Belgium-based Tom Casaer, has put an advert on LinkedIn for a:

“Software and Infrastructure lead at Naked
preferably Belgium; not a must”

I’m sure plenty of software and Infrastructure leads out there would be gagging to join a liquidated startup, however, Naked still has fans out there willing to give it a go. Perhaps there is life after death afterall. Perhaps they have secured new financing? I have emailed Tom to find out.

Naked ran out of money at the end of April and an administrator was appointed in May to wind it up and liquidate the assets. All 12 employees were made redundant.

However, it’s not yet clear if the code for the Naked application - which mashes up Twitter and email functions - is an asset which has been bought cheap by the former founders, or if they are re-starting the project under a totally new guise. If you have some inside information on this, you know where to find me.

Meanwhile here’s one of their former employees on the whole Naked experience: “It was great fun working there, but the way it imploded, my word, incredible.”

Ok, so that might be a rather strong headline, but it was the best I could think of to describe what is currently going on. (That’s Nero fiddling while Rome burns, btw).

It’s no secret that I am dissappointed that the BBC has spent so much time and money trying to re-invent the wheel For The Glory of the Corporation. I think the BBC should do more, a LOT more, to hook into the innovation happening in technology companies in the private sector, and at the same time allowing private sector companies to innovate around the products the BBC produces. And that does not mean just commissioning more user interface design, or the odd microsite, from a bunch of agencies. If it did so, the BBC might even find some products it quite liked and could use to make the BBC better. Really. No kidding.

Yes, you can talk to me about Rights (”but we don’t have the release forms for that show’s music to be used online!” Yawn.) till the cows come home. That’s what the BBC should do. And I do not mean just organising another barcamp style event for geeks to feel warm and cuddly about the Beeb (with apologies to those great guys over at BBC Backstage).

I’m talking about turning the BBC into a platform that UK startup technology companies can work on and with.

Last week the BBC Trust’s review of Bbc.co.uk found the whole project in a bit of a mess. The most succinct account of this is over at PDA. Here are the main points.:

• The BBC breached its 2007/2008 budget by a whopping 48%.

• Two-thirds of the £35.8m overspend was down to “misallocation of general overheads and costs” such as failing to include costs such as the buildings that house its digital teams. Oh yes.

• Who gets fired? No one. (Thats OK though - former digital head Ashley Highfield has already jumped ship).

• Will the spend go down? No. They are adding £4.4m extra and taking the baseline budget for 2007/2008 of £74.2m to £114.4m, a 54% increase. Trebles all round!

• This does not take into account the BBC’s £400m “future media” budget, so the BBC actually has £500m to spend on digital media. Imagine what you could do with that…

• The Trust recommended three new levels of “protections” aimed at better controlling the BBC’s digital ambition: stricter financial controls, clearer definition for what each part of the website aims to achieve and an “independent” assessment of market impact where competitors risk being “overwhelmed by the scale of the BBC.”

• These rivals could now appeal to this mythical “independent” panel - which is in fact overseen by the BBC Trust. But guess what - the panel would most likely take 18 months to two years to adjudicate. Any startup trying to enter this process would be dead before it got going.

Now, I am not going to weigh into the argument the commercial newspaper sector normally has with the BBC. That’s just dull. They should be innovating just like the rest of the startup sector does on the smell of an oily rag, rather than whining about the BBC’s competition.

But the best way the BBC can now allay any fears about its market dominance is by building a platform for innovation. Not a policy - a real platform. With APIs even.

That way we’ll get our money/value back - and the BBC can start to give something back, not just TV and radio programmes, but a real platform for UK startups to become world beaters.

UPDATE:

I’m starting a list of links to the small number of people inside the BBC who “get it”

Here’s one. And another.

Checked your Twhirl client this morning? Tried hitting the home page? Just ask IsTwitterDown.com, here’s all it needs to say:

Europe’s online ad market is growing by 40% year on year across the continent, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe (release).

In 2007 the European online advertising market was worth €11.2bn (£8.88bn), up from €7.2bn in 2006. The news means the market is closing on the US online ad market, which increased by only 26% during the same period to €14.5bn.

The IAB’s research also found - unsurprisingly enough - that two-thirds (65%), or €7.3bn, of European online ad budgets in 2007 were spent in the UK, Germany and France. Somewhat more interesting is some smaller markets experienced high growth rates - Greece increased 91%, Spain rose 55% and Slovenia hit 49%.

This is great news of course, but as upbeat the ad market looks, there still remains the question of how all these trillions of ad impressions, keyword searches and the like are going to monetised across myriad online channels. When I used to write about the online ad-market for New Media Age (1996-2000), speaking to media buyers usually came down to the issue of buying points. If one buying point could service them with a billion impressions, they go with that, rather than funnel their budget across a long tail of niche blogs and networks which would just take more time for them to manage and prevent them from going to lunch, or the pub, early.

Of course, we are further on from those unsophisticated days (although plenty of media buyers still think in this manners, especially those making the painful transition from TV, as ad budgets switch to online). But it is not so much this clunky media model that is exercising the minds of Venture Capitalists - who invest in new media vehicles like social networks - so much as how do you cut out waste?

Nic Brisbourne of DFJ Espirit thinks Vendor Relationship Management, may be the answer:

“the beauty of VRM is that it eliminates the waste on both sides of the advertising equation - most adverts that suppliers pay for hit people outside their target market, and as consumers most of the ads we watch are not interesting to us. With VRM suppliers get to focus their communications 100% on people who are interested in their message (a key enabler of conversations).”

But where does that leave the media business or social networks with lots of inventory? Hard to say, but it does rather imply that they need to think in terms of facilitating these transactions, or get cut out of the equation - perhaps they’ll need to carry some kind of terribly smart VRM widget instead of adverts…

Meanwhile, other VCs are yawningly bored by the idea that Web 2.0 and social sites won’t make any money - from advertising or otherwise - as they are confident, as Max Niederhofer is, that “Non-social software will be as unimaginable then as the DOS command line GUI of 25 years ago is today.”

Startup MVNO Blyk, which provides a cheap mobile service to young people in return for sending them “targetted” ad messages, has launched a media shop designed for advertisers and agencies to source information from. So far there are campaign results from brands including Penguin, COI, L’Oreal, Boots and Brylcreem. Ad campaign briefs can also be sent directly from the site.

However, there remains some questions about the service which launched in September last year.

Rumours circulated a while back that teenagers were switching off the messaging from advertisers. However, I have made some enquiries from people who ought to know and the opposite would appear to be the case. Apparently the 16-24 year olds which Blyk restricts the service to are lapping up the free airtime they get in exchange for ads.

One source says: “Stories like this are hilarious and made up by people who don’t know what the hell is going on in new media. Blyk is more powerful than anyone realises. Blyk isnt going to shoot down any negative press as it is often no bad thing people take their eye off the ball.”

I also hear that Blyk has been successful enough for it to start preparing to roll out to several more countries from its European base.

If all this is true, then Blyk may be onto more than many critics first thought - that targetted advertising via mobile is not as annoying as it might sounds, especially to a media-savvy youth audience.

Brussels-based social media tracking startup Attentio, has received a 600,00 Euro investment from five new private shareholders well known in Norwegian business circles, along with further investment from existing shareholders. The round takes Attentio’s pot to a total of 1.5 million Euros raised since 2006. Attentio’s goal is to monitor blogs, forums, networks, YouTube and building tools that can analyse the content.

The new board now includes Ole Jorgen Fredriksen (ex. Co-Chairman of NASDAQ-listed InFocus and ex. CEO of ASK/Proxima) and Bjorn Haugland (founder of Confirmit, the stock listed provider of market research software). Other board members are chairman Per Siljubergsasen (founder of Attentio and one of the founders of Kelkoo, acquired by Yahoo), Jarl Fronth a Norwegian Lawyer and professional Board member, Benoit DeBecker marketing director of Cytec and Simon McDermott (ex. Cisco and Intel and founder of Attentio).

Clients include Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Lexus and a number of agencies. Recently, similar US service Umbria was acquired and TNS bought Cymfony.

The Attentio Brand Dashboard (SaaS) is mainly sold through advertising and PR agencies, but I’ve been trying out the impressive blog trend search engine Trendpedia and been pleasantly suprised at its power to map key words and phrases. It has the makings of an interesting web app. Here’s a search for TechCrunch - the results allow you to roll-over the graph and see what highs and lows the search term hit at that time. Very cool.

The Next Web blog - normally great - has had a slight crisis of confidence and attacked TechCrunch UK’s report on the demise of Naked. Blogger David Petherick says they had all the facts about Naked a month ago but chose not to delve into why the firm had cashflow problems or make “a dramatic, and possibly premature, pronouncement of death” because this would not have been a “helpful” approach.

This is kind’ve an odd post.

They say they had close contact with Naked, which quite clearly went into formal administration in early May. Yet they didn’t report it when they were legally able to do so.

On the one hand I understand their motives. Maybe they wanted to give Naked some breathing space to find new backers? They were clearly close to the company. David Petherick of The Next Web commented on the story: “I have had a personal interest in this project since meeting with Naked at StartupCamp in London in March, and Next Web staff have used the beautiful beta version of Naked, and I personally find it very useful.”

But as anyone knows, you can’t sit on a story forever. Sooner or later it will come out. Besides, if the company is any good, then reporting that it has gone into administration is not going to spook a proper new investor. It may even help find them a new one. And there’s an obligation to inform the reader here.

Interestingly, The Next Web also seems to think that the story’s reference to Bonnier’s divource proceedings freezing his assets and stopping further funding to Naked was “salacious”. Actually I think it’s rather relevant. Bonnier was - by all accounts - the sole backer of the enterprise. If his ability to pump more cash into the company was stopped then we need to know why. Furthermore, the allegation wasn’t made by me - it was made by his co-founder Tom Vandendooren and COO, not some junior employee.

Nor did I “selectively unearth” anything about Bonnier. As anyone who Googles this guy will know, there is a very long list of ventures he’s been involved in. It is a fact he was investigated, and cleared of any involvement, in an insider-dealing scam in the 1990s. It is a fact that in 2004 he was fined £290,000 for abuse of the financial markets, but was later able to return in 2006 as a CEO. It’s up to readers to decide if these facts are relevant to the story or not. It is also a fact that I called him and asked him to comment on the story and to date he has not called me back.

Meanwhile, as is often the case, the comments which flood in on any story are often at least as interesting as the story itself. And this has been the case with TechCrunch’s story on Naked. So let’s take a look at what people are saying - all the below have been extracted from the comments and can be read in full here.

• Was Naked’s application any good?

- Naked looked similar to Pownce, but it’s web-only status stopped it from going further.

- “I took part in some focus group testing of Naked during their alpha phase and all of our group were pretty certain within 10 minutes of using the app that it wouldn’t be a success. It was effectively a very poor implementation of Facebook walls (with group support) mashed with some lifestreaming (which I seem to remember was unimplemented at that stage). It was shocking to see quite how wrong they had got the user experience”

- “My understanding of ‘getting naked’ was that tooth extraction was preferable and certainly less painful.”

- (Gordon Candelin): “Not all the money was spent on premium web companies - I designed the beta site of Naked (which has been rather poorly implemented) and haven’t received a penny, nor am I likely to. While working with the Naked team I felt that were some very practical issues with user interface which unfortunately weren’t being addressed. They would have done better perhaps with a smaller dev team and a full time designer/UI expert to help inform the structure.”

• Were they over-staffed?

- “If it is employees then surely they would get down to the core few who will go with the idea and surely the other stuff can be bootstrapped?!”

- “Spending cash on 12 employees and two excellent but premium-rate web agencies at such an early stage doesn’t make sense to me.”

- “They 1) hired too many staff… 2) they used services from expensive agencies and web studios, and 3) rent an office in London known to be the most expensive place in the world.”

• Why did Naked fail?

- “Not getting enough first round funding. Then falling behind schedule technically…Followed by a lower than expected appetite for further investment”

- “Their CEO overestimated his abilities to acquire funding in time.”