TechCrunch UK is going to run a “Techcrunch Pitch!” contest for startups at the upcoming Future of Web Apps conference in London, and you’re invited. All you need to do is submit an entry, and we will choose the best three to come up on the stage at FOWA and pitch to an “American Idol” style panel consisting of Mike Butcher (Techcrunch UK), Ryan Carson (Carsonified), Kevin Rose (Digg) and a mystery guest, yet to be announced. The winner will get written about on TechCrunch. If you don’t have a company to pitch but want to come anyway, TechCrunch readers can get 15% off the event ticket using this promo code: “F0WA-tc”

So here’s how Techcrunch Pitch! @ FOWA will work:

You’ll need to shoot a 60 second video pitch and upload it to YouTube so that it appears on Techcrunch Elevator Pitches. In the video, tell us what your company does and how you plan to make money. Imagine you’re in an elevator and have only one chance to convince a potential backer that you deserve a follow-up meeting. Be sure to focus on your company’s big picture while avoiding too much detail about particular products. Please do not include any editing or graphic overlays - just a straight pitch from beginning to end. When you upload the video to YouTube, tag it with “tcpitch”, and then enter its information into our submission form. The deadline for submission is close of play Friday 3rd October.

When you’ve done all that, come back to this particular post on TechCrunch UK and leave a comment with a link to your pitch on Techcrunch Elevator Pitches so that we know who applied. All clear? Ok, go.

[Update: So I just confirmed with with T-Mobile: One thing that seems to be a dealbreaker that it has no in-built video recording capability, which seems to be an astounding omission. Had the "gPhone" added this, it would have looked pretty good against the iPhone. It can play video through a dedicated YouTube app but, it appears, not inside the browser. Update II: I just confirmed that the browser on the handset does not support Flash or Flash Lite].

I met with T-Mobile’s head of Internet and Entertainment Richard Warmsley, who took me through the key features of the new T-Mobile G1 Google Android phone, made by HTC. I have to say it’s a pretty chunky beast compared to your average mobile, and quite a bit bigger than other smartphones like the Nokia E71 or the iPhone. The interface is quite iPhone-like although you can’t “pinch” to zoom in and out of web pages. One of the killer features demo’d in the US was the acclaimed Compass Street View of Google Maps which won’t work in the UK yet. Applications-wise, the Android App store needs a few more apps to fill it out but I daresay these will come on stream soon enough for the October US launch and the November UK launch.

And here’s video of the Compass app:

TechCrunch has been “double-live blogging” (oh yes) the T-Mobile / Google Android handset press launch, and here’s a handy summary of what was said.

If you’re pressed for time, here’s the skinny: It launches in the UK in early November and the rest of Europe 2009. The handset will be free on price plans from £40 a month (no news on pays as you go), which will make it competitve with the iPhone on pricing, which is “free” for a £45 a month tariff from O2. You can pre-register with T-Mobile here www.t-mobile.co.uk/tmobileg1.

Cole Brodman CTO and CIO for T-Mobile talked about the “New mobile Internet of the future.” Others present at the launch in New York were Andy Rubin, Senior Director of Mobile Platforms for Google and Christopher Schlaffer. Peter Chou, CEO HTC was there. HTC makes the G1.

Expect the G1 to have a “Superior user experience.” T-Mobile’s Web and Walk tarrif saw a 250% increase in internet traffic and it was a founding member of the open handset alliance, (and that was without the iPhone), they say.

Rubin: “With Android we are bringing some of those [Internet] strategies to the mobile phone. Developers will be able to develop on it and also to modify it. Because it is open, it is somewhat future proof.” Peter Chou, CEO of HTC said it was a “tremendous effort” to make this Open Handset Alliance/Android possible.

In the US the G1 Phone will be $179 - very cheap for a smart phone - and will be launched on October 22.

The G1 has a touch-screen interface and a Sidekick-like keyboard, which will really set it apart from the iPhone.

With video you can swipe, frame and crop a photo to the homescreen (just like the iPhone!). Street view and google maps look great. Compass (GPS) mode moves as you move. Comes with Google Talk, Google Maps with directions and traffic view, street view with landmarks. Facebook looks good in the Webkit browser. The Music player has advanced features. The Android Market wil be an app store for games and apps (Pac Man!). It has a dedicated search button on keyboard, which competition authorities might take a good look at.

Third party parners include Eco Rio which let’s you track your carbon footprint; Shopsavvy, a barcode scanner, with comparative pricing on goods.

Existing T-Mobile customers can order it today in the US with a $25 data plan with unlimited Web access, limited messaging or $35 unlimited, but no free email.

The Q&A posed a few questions.

Rubin said: “We will go broader with more features and functionality.”

You can’t use it as tethered modem. It can Word docs, Excel, but no Exchange, though there is the opportunity for third party developers to build for this. Email will be push.

The phone will be SIMlocked to T-Mobile.

There is no desktop syncing application. (I guess Google thinks your Gmail is already ‘in the cloud’, right?)

Email: HTML email client, which syncs with Gmail and other POP3 or IMAP mail services. It has a 3-megapixel camera.

It will come with WiFi. YouTube support is also on board.

Google is expecting a “huge effect on GTalk”. I bet.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a surprise visit on rollerblades!

Brin said: “I have been using it in my pocket for a while now. The first app I wrote was one where you throw the phone up in the air and it calculates how much time it takes to hit the ground, using the accelerometer.” Man these guys are geeks…

After just announcing new funding, Qype, the pan-European local reviews site, is not wasting any time. It has just poached LastMinutes’ Sophie MacLaren and Emily van Lierop to be UK Marketing Director and Marketing Manager respectvely. Sophie has also been at Ticketmaster, the New York City Opera, Brazen and Spin Media PR agencies. Emily joins directly from koodos, a UK fashion website. The new appointments come just a week after Qype announced it had secured an additional €8 million funding to help the company expand into new countries.

Meanwhile, I have already had one of Qype’s local reviews competitors (for there are many) ask me “what do you think we should do?”, referring to the newly supercharged Qype. WeLoveLocal chose to throw in the towel back in March (actually, that’s not quite right, they exited at probably just the right time). How long before the less well funded TrustedPlaces, Tipped and MyNeighbourhoods last? At least TouchLocal has £7m from Balderton to keep it going, but its sights seem trained on the business sector, not reviews of the lattes in the local cafe.

Now, when startups start asking journalists for advice, this is usually a bad sign. Flattering… but a bad sign. I put this to a old startup hand I know and his reply was so good I feel obliged to print it. It goes like this:

“Look into your heart. Work out if you are a gritty winner or a tourist. If you are a winner, dig in. Start selling. Focus your business down. Cut staff. Ramp revenues. Batten down the hatches. Find a niche angle. Focus. Make money. Build loyal client base. Then invest, very carefully, in the tech. Product innovate in a controlled fashion. Innovation, where innovation matters - nowhere else. Get some traction. Raise a small round. Win. If you are a tourist: Pack up early before leaving a hole in any creditor’s pockets. Find a job, whilst you still have time and a salary. Look after your staff - encourage them to do the same. Come back for Web 3.0.”

Good advice.

Flirtomatic is one of the oldest social networks in the UK you probably haven’t heard of. Why? Because it’s largely on the mobile, aimed at young people and it’s taken a less subtle approach than some sites: full on flirting. But that strategy appears to be paying off. It’s just announced a million registered users, mostly based in the UK and more than half of them are mobile portal users. If you want to talk about mobile social networking as it really happens, then it doesn’t get more real than this. Somewhere along the line the numbers have just really picked up. In February 2007 it had 225,000, so that equates to a 350% growth within an 18 month period to today. In July it expanded into Germany, and they claim revenue is really skyrocketing, although don’t put numbers on it.

The skinny on the service is that it is targeted at young adults (75% of users are 18 – 30 years old) with a free service. But members pay to do certain things, like send virtual goods - like roses - to the person they’re flirting with.

Flirtomatic, launched June 2006, has venture funding from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures and Seraphim Capital. It’s holding company, Handmade Mobile Entertainment, was formed in June 2004 by Avi Azulai, co-founder of iTouch the mobile entertainment company, and Mark Curtis, a former Managing Partner in digital agencies Fjord and Razorfish.

It’s interesting that Xing, the business social network which competes with LinkedIn has chosen now to launch a marketing campaign in the UK this week - probably something to do with the Adtech trade show on in London right now. There’ll be advertising on some 400 Xing billboards by major London Underground stations, ads in the Metro freesheet and online on at The Guardian, The Times, Sky News, Reuters and MSN Hotmail. Xing has about six million members worldwide and around half a million paying subscribers but till now it’s biggest base has been in Germany, and to a lesser extent, Asia. In the UK LinkedIn passed a million members a year ago, so Xing - which is now a floated company in Germany - has some catching up to do.

Earlier this year 20 UK startups went to Silicon Valley to network with the tech scene. The government-backed trip was called Webmission. Last week 21 UK companies were over in New York on the UK Trade & Investment’s “Digital Mission“, put together by UK online new media community/events outfit Chinwag. Here’s a guest post on the event by Benjamin Ellis.

The Digital Mission was timed to coincide with the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, so there was a long list of sessions and meet-ups both within and around the Expo. For the companies over to drum-up investor support, there were intense discussions with VCs, with more to follow. It might have been a stormy week to be over in NYC, and you know I’m not talking about the weather, but that didn’t slow things at all.

Winston & Strawn (the law firm behind BootLaw) kicked things off with a legal overview of setting up in the US. Tom Watson MP, Cabinet Office Minister and long-time blogger weighed in with a governmental perspective, and an evening reception at the British Consulate introduced the companies to 120 people from the New York tech scene.

The New York community welcomed the Brits with open arms. An invite to Digital Wednesdays was one of the many extended to the companies each evening. Everyone hurled themselves into the scene and networked away, which is harder than it sounds given that it’s a 3-parties-a-night kind of town. Sun Start Up Essentials provided a lunch and talk, and there was even a bit of a cultural exchange with the larger-than-life Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV fame. You think we have lots of meet ups every month in the UK? That much seemed to happen in about a New York week.

Big take aways? The Atlantic’s not the gap that it used to be. Make no mistake, there are definitely barriers to establishing in the US, but they aren’t insurmountable. The New York scene welcomes new talent, and for those that can keep up with the pace there are big opportunities. With folks like Fred Wilson looking to the UK and Europe, it is pretty likely that other smart money will follow. One way or another, the Atlantic is less and less of a barrier to tech companies. In a parallel to the experience of companies on the Webmission trip, one of the big benefits for the digital mission companies was actually getting to know each other. The mission didn’t just build links in New York, it built them back in the UK too.

The 21 Digital Mission Companies:

B View

Harvest Digital

Head London

Headshift

Huddle

idiomag

KMP Interactive Marketing and Technology

Littleloud

Market Sentinel

Mippin

QuickTV

Slicethepie

Smarkets

Sweemo

Tactile CRM

Tempero

UGAME

UnLtdWorld

Unruly Media

Veedow

WorldTV

With a little too much going on last week to keep track, I missed some of the videos coming out of the Seedcamp sessions, so here they are in full.

Day 1

Seedcamp 2008 Day 1 Highlights from Seedcamp on Vimeo.

Day 2

Seedcamp Day 2 Highlights from Seedcamp on Vimeo.

Day 3

Seedcamp Day 3 Highlights from Seedcamp on Vimeo.

Day 4

Seedcamp Day 4 Highlights from Seedcamp on Vimeo.

Day 5

Seedcamp Day 5 Highlights from Seedcamp on Vimeo.

UK based, Kindo.com a family tree service, has been acquired by the Israeli based MyHeritage, which was recently funded by Accel and Index Ventures. The size of the deal was not disclosed, but it’s a fast exit for Kindo which only launched last year. Although Kindo says on their blog that the buy-out took place because “we share the same vision and values”, I think it is also a reasonable assumption that the current financial climate concentrated their minds. Getting a second round of funding for a standalone product in a competitive market was always going to be hard now.

So why would MyHeritage, with 25 million users, but Kindo? TechCrunch US speculates that it’s about extending it’s presence in Europe with an existing team and Kindo’s extensive 14 language service (including Russian, Arabic and Chinese). (ironic, isn’t it that an Israeli-backed services which scaled in the US now returns to Europe to buy a local site which scaled regionally in Europe?) It also needs to have a response to Geni.com in the US and Verwandt in Germany.

But the main difference with Kindo is that where as Ancestry.com is about ancestors and Geni.com is, in the main, genealogy, Kindo tackles the issue of mapping and communicating with your living family. Kindo covers the “next generation” family tree, with communication features, stats and a family ‘news feed’.

Kindo previously won seed funding from Estonia-based Ambient Sound Investments and the ever-present serial seeders The Accelerator Group as well as Stefan Glänzer, first investor in last.fm and executive chairman until the acquisition last year by CBS.

It is not unreasonable to surmise that TAG group, which seed invested in both Kindo and MyHeritage, helped wrap up a deal, but I wouldn’t read too much into it all. Kindo and MyHeritage were clearly in contact well before Index invested in the latter.

Update: Kindo’s own blog sets out more of the detail behind the deal.

MyHeritage and Kindo met for lunch in London’s Soho even before Kindo released the first public version:

“But there we were: A Swede, a South African and an Israeli, all with very different professional background and life stories, talking about the future of families online from very different perspectives. I didn’t expect this, but we found that we had much in common. We shared the same ideas and vision for what we wanted to achieve with our businesses, even though our approach was far from similar.”

They were impressed by MyHeritage’s tech:

“As Gareth and I travelled back on the tube, we talked about how nice it would be to be able to offer our own users the same tools as MyHeritage already had. What really got us excited was their SmartMatching Technology, which matches people in your family tree with 250 Million other names, and suggests who you might be related too. We liked that. We were also jealous of Gilad, since he got to develop features for 25 million registered users - slightly bigger than our own user base…”

Here are some pictures from TechCrunchTalk last week, the Seedcamp Party which followed and, well, the unofficial after-party which followed that! By pretty much all accounts over 300 people from the London/UK/European startup community enjoyed themselves on the banks of the Thames. Quite why some people started to throw a frisbee at the event is beyond me, but it may have had something to do with the contents of the goody bag supplied by our sponsors (who are listed below, thanks again for your support!). The Butcher’s Bunch podcast, featuring highlights from the panel discussions, will be out later this week, and here are the videos from the live webcast. TechCrunch Talk, was curated by TechCrunch UK & Ireland and organised by TwistedTree (please contact them for future sponsorship opportunities) in association with rassami PR.

TechCrunchTalk sponsors:

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