Obviously the media is full of news about Google’s Chrome browser today. But do you think it will have an impact in the UK/European market? Will users take up the Chrome browser to the point where it will impact the mainstream? Or will it remain a browser for early adopters? With Firefox still relegated to the minority (though significant minority), does Chrome have a real chance? What does Chrome mean for UK and European businesses? If Chrome is a Windows Killer, will we be happy with that - or will it make the life of a startup more complex, with another browser to cater for in the marketplace?

Chrome will clearly be more than just a browser - it will bring together Google’s services on and offline. That means Google will know not just the contents of your Gmail and search terms, but also the URLs you visit, via this browser. Is that too much power for one company? Or will we prefer the ‘joined-up’ experience? Will the European Union have something to say about this, as it did about Microsoft’s Windows hegemony? Is Chrome the death-knell of the whole operating system world, apart from free Linux?

Leave your thoughts in the comments.

7digital - the privately held London-based digital media startup backed by Benchmark Capital - has quietly launched the Universal catalogue in the high quality MP3 320K format, the first distributor to do so in Europe. For instance, Abba’s greatest hits is now in MP3 320K. In March of 2008, the company secured the first deal to exclusively sell Warner Music’s full catalogue of DRM-free music across Europe.The site already had a deal to sell EMI’s DRM-free music and is also negotiating with Sony BMG.

From Ollie Parsley, the guy who created FeedMorf, a site we covered last year comes a new service called twitterleague, right now in invite-only beta.

Basically it’s about competing in a league with other Twitter users - say, friends - to get the most followers. The leagues can then be put on a site using a snippet of JavaScript or you can get an XML feed to create your own customised look and feel. For instance, the Diggnation league features Kevin Rose and co-star Alex Albrecht.

We have an invite code for 100 Techcrunch UK & Ireland readers to use: “tcuk”

Just don’t expect this to become the next Google, but it’s fun all the same. And don’t use it as an excuse to “spam follow” people, eh?

Here’s an example league I threw together:

We Heart Places describes itself as a “delicious for places”. Users drag a bookmarklet to their browser, then click the link anytime they’re on a webpage with a place they’d like to visit, and the place gets saved to their account. The site also works on the iphone / mobile. Adding places from a site is ok, but how do you enter the street address of a place in the middle of nowhere? A pin button locator would be handy. Perhaps the site itself is not exactly going to set the world on fire, but what is more interesting is that it features a lot of support for external services including OpenID, Brightkite and Flickr. In other words, there might well be a ’space’ for a location-based delicious, when location based services really take off. It also has data export to kml for integration with mapping apps. The startup is part-based in Munich.

Recently the Facebook watching blog AllFacebook claimed:

There’s a pretty well known secret among top Facebook application developers: one developer is generating over $1 million a month. Who is that developer exactly? Well, most people won’t talk about it and after some prodding around we’ve narrowed down the suspects. We aren’t going to post them though because ultimately it doesn’t matter who the individual is.

TechCrunch speculated that potentially this might apply to Offerpal Media, a lead generation network for Facebook apps that gives users a way to earn virtual currency by looking at an ad and completing an action (such as filling out a registration form) with average CPMs of $75 and some as high as $200. That means that a publisher which ties its virtual currency to Offerpal could potentially earn up to $1 million a month with a single app. So far 80 percent of the top 25 apps on Facebook are using Offerpal.

One of them is Friends For Sale! which lets you “buy and sell your friends as pets” and includes a virtual gift shop as well. Another contender for the million-dollar app is Mob Wars (2.5 million active monthly users) as VentureBeat explains.

But now there are whispers that it might be yet another application developer.

Gaming publisher Playfish has the impressive Facebook games: Who Has The Biggest Brain?, Word Challenge, and Bowling Buddies.

The London-based startup (which has studios in Norway and Beijing) is funded by $3 million in angel financing with a $1 million bridge from Accel. They have given their games a look and feel similar to the Wii games, especially Bowling Buddies. Playfish currently claims about 6 million monthly users across its games, playing an average of 30 minutes a session, which have gone highly viral. Playfish games now regularly feature in the top ten gaming apps on Facebook, totaling around 1 million daily active users. The others are are SGN, Zynga, and Serious Business.

Playfish is monetising gamers at different points. People who play the basic game see video advertising, while others can pay for upgrades and premium games. Recently they released a $10 paid upgrade for “Who has the Biggest Brain?” (which has also been translated into six languages).

I put it to co-founder Kristian Segerstrale that Playfish might be the “million dollar a month” Facebook application developer.

He said: “We don’t really comment on our revenue numbers… I’m happy with how we’re doing. But more importantly I think our experience so far shows a lot of promise in how we can reach a completely new audience for games and let people play together in ways they’ve never played before. Monetization is in its infancy but we’re all learning and I think you’ll see a lot of innovation and experimentation in this area moving forward. Social gaming is a very hyped area currently and there will be challenges ahead for sure, but I think the fundamentally new gaming behaviours we’re creating today will make a profound impact on the $50Bn games industry over time. And it’s that more than today’s numbers is what makes me excited about it all.”

How much does an old Web 1.0 startup go for these days? Well, here’s an indication. Pub listings guide BeerintheEvening.com - running since the late 90s - was for £30,000, confirms Chris Hughes of new owner Neransk, a UK-based communities operator. The sale actually happened about a year ago but Neransk only just got back to me with the confirmation. Would it have been better to use the cash to build a better Web 2.0 site? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

German video entertainment startup Hobnox is going on a big marketing drive, offering $200,000 worth of prizes and giveaways for artists that take part in its Evolution2 contest where participants win support and development budgets worth $30,000 each. Running out of offices in Cologne and Berlin, the site launched in spring 2008, combining community, production and publishing functions with web TV channels into one site.

Hobnox is reminiscent of another European startup, WorldTV (Irish/UK based), but with a slightly slicker interface and some interesting online production tools. However the former does not look likely to break out of Germany any time soon - all of the content on the site appears to be German so far. No bad thing, but that does lock it in somewhat.

Jaiku - the Finnish startup which at one point threatened Twitter to become the pre-eminent micro blogging tool before Google bought it - has now moved to a Google data center in preparation for its “transition” to the Google App Engine. Plus, it is now allowing its existing users to create unlimited invitations to the service. The news emerged after co-founder Jyri Engestrom, now a Google employee, emailed Jaiku users.

Here’s the email:

Dear mbites,

We’ve been working on the Jaiku service over the weekend after
finding an issue with one of our servers on Friday. As part of the
solution, we’re moving Jaiku to a Google data center.

This is something that we’d planned to do anyway, as part of our
future transition to Google App Engine. Now that we’ve moved, we’ll
need to ask you to review and accept a new terms of service and
privacy policy.

As a special thank you for your patience, we’d like to throw a
little nest-warming party and open unlimited invitations for Jaiku.

Please sign in at http://jaiku.com to review and accept the new terms.

Special notice to users of Jaiku Mobile: to reconnect Jaiku Mobile
after agreeing to the new terms, select ‘Go Online’ from the Options
menu on your phone.

See you there!
Jyri and the Jaiku team at Google

Frankly some might - justifiably - say this is a case of closing the gate after the horse has bolted. Plus, existing users will have to sign a new terms of service and privacy policy, which means Jaiku is bound to lose existing users in the process.

As I wrote recently Jaiku looks like it will become another app in Google’s armoury, and possibly one which could seriously affect Twitter. However, it’s darn well taking its time…

Ahead of Seedcamp and TechCrunch 50, Alan Patrick from Broadsight / Broadstuff gives an insight into one of the other UK funding programs in this guest post.

The startup milk round is nearly upon us, what with Seedcamp and the TechCrunch 50 starting soon. However, it would seem that many in the Tech community don’t realise that there are other UK funding programs available as well. We certainly didn’t, in fact it was a tip off by TCUK’s Mike Butcher [Ah, shucks - Ed] that made us enter the Creative Business Accelerator (CBA) program last year.

The CBA program was run by a GLE Capital, and is funded by a combination of bodies such as the London Development Agency, Dept of Trade & Industry, The Institute of Chartered Accountants, as well as supported by the likes of Google, Oracle, NESTA and Kingston Smith.

In the CBA program, 700 entrants were whittled down to a last 70, who all had to make a 5 minute pitch to the CBA panel, of which 15 finalists were chosen. The range of chosen companies was wider than you see in the typical “Tech” bake-offs, we had everything from fashion to film production, but about 1/3rd of the companies were technology or online new media.

To back up a bit - why were we there? We set up Broadsight as a digital media consultancy and technology development house, (becoming “New Media” ourselves via our blog was an accident ). Earlier last year we had submitted a solution to the BBC for a “Zeitgeist Measurement” requirement from their Innovation Labs, which was accepted. We realised later that what we had designed, in the general case, is a real time context search system, so we decided to develop that further. The consultancy side of the business brings in respectable money, but not enough to fund out a product build like this as fast as we would like, so if possible we were keen to obtaining some outside funding. We found that some startup schools like Seedcamp only want the young ‘uns, but we at Broadsight are a bit more seasoned, shall we say

The way the program works is that over a period of about 4 months you attend a number of half day workshop sessions, where experienced people come and talk about various aspects of being a startup. There is also a mentor assigned, a seasoned person to talk to. Sessions range the gamut from legal and fiducial requirements for set up through product marketing and design, effective selling methods, writing business plans, and various other aspects of running a successful business. Calibre of presenters was pretty high overall, but the real value was in the workshop format itself, with questions and comments coming from our wide variety of companies often leading to insights you may not get in a homogenous “all tech” environment. The endgame is a session similar to TechCrunch50, where the companies get to pitch for 5 minutes to a whole range of angels, VC’s etc.

A lot of the course was focussed on learning to pitch, and of course where and how to obtain funding, and when to obtain funding. This was the most fascinating piece – we had a variety of people – angels, VC,s, bankers, lawyers etc come and talk about this, and I think there are some take-aways here that other eager tech startups need to know:

(i) They almost unilaterally told us that money from VC’s etc is the most expensive money available, and if you do take it, take it as late as possible, after exhausting all other sources. The more developed your business is, the better your negotiating position will be.
(ii) There are also a wide range of grants available in the UK – some are 100%, some are 50/50 funded by the government to reduce the VC’s risk (why this is necessary is the source of a totally different post!) – and the T&C and “hassle factor” of getting these grants, while non trivial, are probably no more than the amount of work you will put in to get Angel / VC funding - and you don’t have to hand over equity.
(iii) Never accept the first terms sheet / contract that is put in front of you – this is a negotiation.

The issue the average startup company has is that it has less information of the “art of the possible”, which is why companies like The Funded are useful as they allow startups a better view of what is happening in the market.

Our own conclusion from the session – for the time being anyway - was that we preferred to keep our current business model for a while longer, and first seek grant funding for product buildout. But it was a very useful, and illuminating, exercise to go through.

When the history of the Internet is one day written, as it will be, URLs will probably figure high on the list of the jewels Web companies tried to amass, alongside the services themselves. Some of them have been notorious, like Sex.com (wiki entry). But the best are always those that bring something new to the party, not just a memorable address and a dull, predictable application.

Which is why it’s encouraging to see a UK startup take “Diary.com” and turn it into an interesting new kind of lifestyle service which is absolutely not a simple calendar application slapped onto an obvious URL.

One’s first impression of Diary.com is that it has a clean interface, a little like like Twitter. You have a simple entry window where you can plug in status updates, which go into a life stream, just like Twitter. But Diary has taken the “stripped-down” Twitter conceipt and applied it more more of a journaling, diary writing environment. In other words, you can paste in anything you like, from text (not Twitter’s 140 characters but up to 1000 - a good sized paragraph for the ADD generation), or URLs pointing to pictures and videos. The site then sucks in the actual video/picture, to make it appear in your life stream. It’s this aspect which starts to take Diary away from micro-blogging into the realms of private life-streaming and Digital Lifestyle Aggregation.

As TechCrunch wrote last year, DLAs are a new class of startup which are about winning people for years to come. Digital Lifestyle sites help people to assemble their memories (blogs, images, video) and, bluntly, aim to lock them in through the amount of sheer time they’ve invested. In the US, Our Story raised $6 million in VC, and joined Story Of My Life, dandelife and My Family in the sector. Coming out of the UK there is Rememble and Miomi (backed by Brightstation Ventures). However, there remains a problem at the core of these sites which is how to keep users coming back once they’ve uploaded some memories, and keeping their attention. Diaries might just be the way to do it since keeping a diary is a very old and recognisable concept. A “DLA” is not.

Diary is also pulling away from both micro-blogging and DLAs, because while your initial Diary is private you can also create any number of shared diaries with other users. At this point it seems obvious to point out that Diary doesn’t sound too dissimilar from old-fashioned blogging, or perhaps running a Tumblr site. The difference comes in that there are a lot of privacy controls on the diaries, and it’s not really a blogging environment - you don’t input HTML tags for instance. It’s a very mainstream concept and probably plays well into a crowd of people who will never bother to understand blogging, let alone microblogging. However, the apparent simplicity of Diary.com might also make it look too simple.

The Diary guys say that user testing so far suggests that a few significant niches enjoy using the site. Women - traditionally bigger diary keepers than men - are using the site a lot. As are the younger female base of 16-24year old, who are mainly in the US where journaling and “scrapbooking” has a long history. Some 50% of the test user base so far has been from the USA, while 20% are from UK (the rest are from Asia and Russia).

However some of the site’s core features lend themselves not just to broadcasting your diary entries but to instant diary feedback, so some users are scrapbooking observations, links, pictures and videos and then chatting around this as the shared diary opens out into a sort of group discussion. There are users with travel diaries, shopping diaries (interestingly), and even some diaries between lovers - because a Diary.com diary is more secure than email and allows pics/video and conversations between the diary owners.

To an extent Diary.com is closer to Friendfeed than Twitter, but where Friendfeed allows threaded comments on posts and is essentially and aggregator, Diary is designed to be a destination site, not an aggregator.

Diary.com plans to allow the importing of importing a couple of key feeds like flickr and twitter just to store in your private diary but they don’t plan to become a FriendFeed style aggregator, given the commoditisatoin of that space and the privacy issues around diaries.

So, monetisation strategy? Hard to say until Diary captures a use base following this public launch. There’s obviously an attempt to monetise attention here - perhaps there is scope to offer power users premium accounts, advertising, SMS revenue (mobile would be a natural fit), virtual goods (”pimp out” your diary) and affiliate revenue.

Running in stealth mode for some months, Diary.com is a team of which consist of co-founders Keld van Schreven and Peter Brooke (who’s owned the domain since 1996), Richard Taylor (CTO) and Ken Lee. So far Diary has raised £300,000 in angel money, but say they are going out for a modest series A round later this year.