The TechCrunch Berlin event is tomorrow and, to be frank, we screwed up. We should have realised that we’d need a lot of space to house all the people who wanted to come, especially since Berlin is one of the largest cradles of the startup scene in Germany. So, our bad. But well done to the just over 100 people who will get to see this awesome lineup of speakers and pitches.

However, we have, at the last minute, come up with a solution for those that couldn’t squeeze in to the daytime event, and at least it will enable lots more people to network and meet startups, investors, and of course TechCrunch Europe. So thanks to the awesome offer from Soundcloud to host the TechCrunch Europe afterparty on their very convenient, and large, roof. Here’s a taster of what it looks like.

The after-party is free to come to but it has some easy conditions:

1. Please - if you have a FB profile - RSVP on the TechCrunch Berlin After-party Facebook page, if possible, thanks.

2. Party starts at 9pm

3. The party is free but people should bring:

- All the booze they want plus some extra for their friend who forgot
- An umbrella since we’ll be under the clouds
- A prepared surprised look for when the Police arrive (you think we’re kidding?)
- GPS is always good.

The Address is:
CloudClub (aka SoundCloud’s offices with the roof terrace)
Across the yard, top floor
Auguststrasse 5A
101 17 Berlin–Mitte

Google Map here.

Or Map: http://tinyurl.com/tcberlinafterparty

Follow TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher on Twitter at @mikebutcher to get live tweets from the event or the Hashtag #tcb09

Pasaj is a website for users to buy and sell handmade items. Just like Etsy in the US, Pasaj also focuses on a niche market and limits its sales on “user generated” products.

Nokta, the leading Turkish online media company, founded Pasaj in January 2009 and inside a couple of months it has a reached nearly 10,000 items listed. That’s not bad for a Turkey-focused startup.

Of course, Pasaj’s success is backed and aided by Nokta’s reach into a large number of online Turkish communities like izlesene.com, the leading Turkish video sharing site, Blogcu.com, the leading Turkish free blog provider, FotoKritik.com, the leading Turkish professional photo community and Sinemalar.com, a Turkish movie reviews community.

Nokta, with all its sites, has nearly 4 million members, and they reach around 2.5 million daily unique visitors.

As comScore’s latest report showed, Google sites ranked as the largest property in Turkey with more than 16 million visitors in April 2009, a reach of 90 percent of the total online population. Microsoft Sites ranked second with 15.5 million, followed by Facebook.com (12.8 million visitors) and DOL (10.1 million visitors), owner of Turkish-based entertainment and sports sites Ekolay and Fanatik.

Recently Pasaj launched its Facebook application which lets its members to list their products on Facebook profiles. Facebook has over 10 million Turkish members. Considering Facebook’s Turkish user potential, it will probably boost Pasaj’s user growth in a short while.

Also, it’s important to remember Sergistan.com which was the first company to try Etsy’s business model in Turkey. It focused on handmade items in Turkish markets but didn’t really get traction.

Turkey currently stands at #7 with its 26.7 million online population and one of the most engaged online audiences in Europe, but its online economy will need more time to catch the European average of online spendings. However, the e-commerce market is growing year on year and, wih 80m in population, my reckoning is that by 2012 the country’s online economy will be in the list of top 10 countries of Europe.

Startups need to sit up and take notice of big change to the domain name system coming around the corner or miss out potential new opportunities. That at least one of the messages coming out of a new report issued, predictably, by a domain name registrar. But hold on a second, do they have a point?

From next year The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the international body that oversees the structure of the Internet, will liberalise the market for domain name extensions – the .com or .uk part of a web address. This means that anyone, in theory, can apply to operate an extension. So instead of “DietCoke dot com”, Coke could set up diet.coke, zero.coke etc etc.

A new report carried out by The Future Laboratory on behalf of domain name registrar Gandi.net quizzed a survey of 1,000 Britons and 50 e-commerce managers from large high street businesses and 50 e-commerce managers from SMEs. It found that while two thirds of businesses were unaware that this change is taking place, over 80% thought, when told about it, that it would be a good idea in terms of branding, domain name control, things like that.

Here’s the interesting bit for startups: less dumb names like woohahoo.com, and something more like greatname.news.

If you’re a well funded startup you could in theory set up a registry to reinforce your brand i.e. every microsite campaign would be punctuated with .yourbrand e.g. .myspace. There’s an argument here about controlling piracy and counterfeiting.

There may also be a startup play for new registries. There will be plenty of opportunities around .news, .film, .london, .restaurant, .football, .fashion etc.

But there’s the flexibility issue. zynga.facebook is a great for a while, but what happens if the business switches to iPhone apps?

Curiously while only 19% of those surveyed said an extension like .microsoft would be memorable only 24% think a .com domain is. What can we concur from that? A lot the time confused punters are probably just Google the domain because they can’t rememember the extension anyway.

The big problem of course is that cybersquatters register all the best domain names or use domain names that resemble trademarks for phishing or similar.

So given the complications and requirement to register even more domain names perhaps woohahoo.com doesn’t look so bad after all?

There’s also another problem. Startups of the kind TechCrunch likes to talk about tend to end up as global plays. So getting .woohahoo might be handy, but it’s only useful if the average person gets used to the idea that .toyota is a normal domain name. Other than that we’re back to relying on search again.

And that change in mindset probably won’t happen for a long, long while, given it’s taken ten years for everyone to get used to .com and .net.

Wonga.com, the startup that has started to change the face of short-term lending in the UK, has closed a $22.25m round of funding led by Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, with the support of its existing investor, Balderton Capital.

Founded by Errol Damelin and Jonty Hurwitz, Wonga provides cash advances to UK consumers, helping solve occasional cash flow problems. It’s provided nearly 100,000 flexible cash advances of up to 30 days since it launched eleven months ago.

The killer USP is that Wonga is the first consumer finance company to fully automate the lending process, providing a completely online credit solution around the clock. Via a Web interface applicants select exactly how much cash they need, up to £750. They can then determine their own price by then selecting how many days they want the money for. The company’s risk and decision technology means applicants receive an instant answer, and if they’re successful, Wonga deposits cash into their bank account within an hour, at any time of day or night. However, it’s not cheap. Interest on a £100 loan for 10 days costs £1 a day. So including fees, a £100 loan for 10 days would have to be repaid at £115.91. APR is generally more than 2,000pc. The maximum loan is £750 and the maximum term is 30 days.

Damelin attributes Wonga’s rapid profitability to its technical innovation and desire to “amaze” its customers. He says Wonga has been built to scale, and plans to expand very rapidly now that the funding is in place.

Accel has a track record of backing some of the fastest growth companies of the last two decades, Facebook included, while Greylock Partners is a long-term investor. Between these approaches, we can expect to see rapid development of the service offering, and expansion into global markets.

Given the global economic situation and the need for a collective rebooting of the lending models that make the world turn, it’s good to see VCs supporting a disruptive lender that makes no bones about focusing on responsible lending and a sustainable business model.

A few days ago TechCrunch carried some fascinating new research into seven million Twitter accounts by Web security firm Purewire (which operates TweetGrade). This showed that some 80 percent of Twitter accounts have fewer than 10 followers, 30 percent have zero followers. However, since 32 million people globally visited Twitter.com in April alone, there are plenty of people getting into it in some way. But this evidence suggests that most people on Twitter are not doing a lot of two-way “conversations” (@replies etc), and that this is generally a more advanced activity. Most people are using it to broadcast one-way, which - to be frank - misses a lot of Twitter’s huge potential as a global platform for conversation.

But it looks like Twitter is used just like many other new media that came along, including blogging. A Harvard Business School study recently suggested that the top 10 percent of Twitter users produce more than 90 percent of all Tweets. Of course just because people are not Tweeting does not mean they are not listening to others’ tweets, of course. So Twitter is similar in a sense to other forms of user generated content, with the top users producing the most content and the majority ‘listening in’.

Further evidence of this arose today in the UK. During a heated exchange between UK politician Lord Mandelson and BBC journalist Andrew Marr this morning, “Andrew Marr” became the top trending term on Twitter, with Mandelson not far behind. For those of you who take an interest, the consensus seemed to be that Mandelson had pwned, or rather beaten Marr into submission during the interview (see 40 mins in here).

This trending topic seemed to throw the Twitterverse into confusion. I saw lots of tweets asking “who the hell” Andrew Marr was, along with Mandelson. But at the same time many of the people I follow - it’s fair to say these are all big Twitter users - were Tweeting away about the Mandelson / Marr exchange.

So in other words we can surmise therefore that Twitter is big amongst those who used to be known as the Chattering Classes and it is not perhaps quite as mainstream in day-to-day use as many would like to think. Or at least, even if it is, most people listen but don’t tweet.

Meanwhile, MPs themselves have gradually been claiming their Twitter accounts over the last year, egged on perhaps by projects like Tweetminster. But one disappointment has been Andy Burnham MP. While his colleague Tom Watson used his Twitter account to great effect to engage with the tech community about business policy, Burnham - a minister who was making policy about the future of the Internet in the UK - didn’t seem to notice when we kidnapped his account to try and encourage him to engage with the industry.

In seven months Burnham never contacted us to claim his account back, and according to some, is too busy to type 140 characters or use it as a platform to engage with constituents. In light of the recent scandal about MPs expenses, this is pretty much par for the course from UK MPs these days. This is one member of the chattering classes that is clearly the exception to the rule when it comes to Twitter.

Well Andy, you can have your account back now. You’re no longer a Minister making Internet policy. And the new Culture Secretary, Ben Bradshaw seems, at least, to be actually using his Twitter account.

Back in April Fring, the Israel-based mobile call and chat application provider, closed a Series C round of financing, estimated to be around £10, on top of the $13 million it had raised since its inception in 2006. So in other words they have plenty of money to play with, lots of traction with their free, ad-supported mobile app that enables VoIP calling, IM and social networking. Android and other platforms await it. But the company faces plenty of other well-funded rivals, including Nimbuzz, Truphone and eBuddy, but also Skype, which recently launched a great app on the iPhone.

So why, at this crucial moment, have they lost a senior member of staff? Neal Fullman, former International communications director at fring, has now jumped ship to join Nimbuzz in the role of chief marketing officer, leading brand development, marketing and communications strategy. Nimbuzz claims to be growing at 25,000 new users a day.

Speaking to Fullman today he told me he wasn’t going to “slag off” Fring, but instead said he felt Nimbuzz had the “right strategy” going forward. He’d also been there two years. Could it be a case of getting itchy feet, waiting for four year-old Fring to - to use a well-worn British phrase - pull their finger out and get on with it? He wouldn’t say.

However, let’s not read too much into this. Marketing people are a dime a dozen and usually, once they’ve changed the logo at a company (”strategic rebranding”), there’s not much for them to do other than twiddle their thumbs until the next job comes along.

Nimbuzz is headquartered in the Netherlands, with offices in Argentina and Brazil and is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners who famously backed Skype, Naspers/MIH and Holtzbrinck Ventures.

You’d think that with the futuristic and gravity defying creations they spawn, architects would be leading the vanguard of efficient working practices. It turns out they’re still stuck in the 90s, where sharing files and collaborating with partners and clients is done via CD and bike messenger, or – shock! horror! – even printouts sent by post.

Tech startup Woobius is trying to solve this problem with its collaboration tool for architects and engineers, built to suit the specialised workflows of the construction industry.

To set the scene: your typical building project involves hundreds if not thousands of drawings, depending on the size of the project. Each drawing has multiple revisions and comments from consultants on the project. Multiply this by 15-20 companies involved in a typical building project, and it makes for a pretty big collaboration headache.

Woobius is taking on existing tools in this space, such as BIW, Asite and 4projects, which have been criticised for being slow, expensive, hard to use and often introduced only in the construction stages of a project, rather than starting from the design process.

The service is centred on two tools: the dropbox, a light-weight inter-company file sharing tool, and the vault, which includes document control functionality. It’s been in beta for a year and has evolved in response to feedback from architects using it on live projects in that time.

The business model is a straightforward freemium one; projects are free up to 200MB, and £10/GB/month thereafter. The privately funded startup was founded in 2007 by architect Bob Leung, who designed the product, and technology lead Daniel Tenner.

They plan to officially launch and market Woobius now that proof of concept is in place. Given the site’s reported growth through word of mouth alone – from 15 initial users to over 2500 registered users across 100 construction projects in 27 countries – I’d say they’re on to a winner.

Well people, it’s time. It’s time we really celebrated the tech scene in Europe with an awards event which we can really call our own. So TechCrunch Europe will, on July 9, hold the first Europe-wide awards ceremony for technology innovation. “The Europas” - The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 - will honour the best tech companies and startups across the web and mobile scene from across the continent of Europe. The first tranche of tickets are now on sale.

These awards will recognise and celebrate the most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations of the past year (Summer 08 - Summer 09), with the tech community invited to have a say in which finalists should be recognised. Leading lights of the the tech community will be invited to give away the awards to the winners, so you’ll have the opportunity to meet your tech heroes and heroines. The initial filtering will be done by referencing our database on European companies on CrunchBase (so make sure you are in it), then by public vote online, with the final Award winners to be determined based both on the popular votes received through website voting and by The Europas Advisory Board.

You’ll be able to vote shortly.

The Awards Ceremony will take place in London from 6pm Thursday, July 9, at Delfina. It’s in one of London’s coolest parts of town with 300 places going for the attending audience.

Award categories

Best European Web Application Or Service
Best Design
Best Bootstrapped Startup (less than 3 years old)
Best Social Innovation (which benefits society)
Best Enterprise Startup
Best Cleantech/Environmental Startup
Best Hardware / Real World Gadget
Best Entertainment Application or Service
Best Mobile Startup
Best Mobile Application
Best Startup Founder
Best New Startup in 2008/9
Best European Investor of the Year (VC or Angel fund)
Best Investor Personality
Best Overall Winner

Join the awards ceremony!

On the evening itself we will have a handful of opening speeches in the “GeeknRolla” format of quick-fire information. These will be followed by a short pitch competition of up and coming startups. To be considered for the pitch competition you need to email TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher, with a one side of A4 text-only pitch, and also include the URL of you company/project/startup etc on CrunchBase (you can add your company onto it if it is not already there). Include: The market “problem” you are solving with your startup, your solution, your competitors, your team, and what you’re looking for (Series A round, etc).

And finally… there will be a special announcement of the launch of a new innovation from Techcrunch Europe.

How it will work

1) You will be able to vote for one of the companies and products nominated which you believe most deserves industry recognition for achievements made in the past year. If you are a site, grab a badge to encourage your community to nominate you for a Europa. Badges will be released when voting starts.

2) The Europas Advisory Board will advise on which entrants should be selected to win from the highest scoring entrants.

3) Join the ceremony!

Following a short pitch event sponsored by UKTI at 6pm, the awards will commence at 8pm. There will be a DJ, an open bar and finger food.

Dress code

This is not a formal “black tie” event. It’s an event to celebrate! But we’ll be encouraging you to “dress to impress” and show off your startup somehow in a cool, fun way.

The Rules

All internet and mobile tech companies from the continent of Europe, the middle East and Africa are eligible for nomination. Nominees will be picked by TechCrunch Europe from our database of companies on CrunchBase, so make sure you have submitted your companies there. Certain awards have specified criteria (i.e. best unfunded start-up or best new start-up launched in 2008) but, otherwise, all companies and products are eligible for consideration based on their accomplishments made between Summer 2008 and Summer 2009. Companies may be nominated for multiple award categories, and companies may win multiple awards. There are no fees to nominate companies for consideration, and no fees to be a nominated company, and no fees to vote. Startups are defined as startup companies with less than three rounds of funding, under 3 and a half years old.

Everyone will be invited to vote on our resulting shortlist of the top companies in each category.

The Europas Advisory Board will advise on the selection of the top companies voted for per award category, winner and, only where appropriate, also advise on the selection of a ‘Highly Commended’ award finalists they wish to recognise.

Finalist companies will be most welcome to join us for the Award Ceremony. Acceptance speeches will be in 140 characters or less.

The Europas Advisory Board reserves the right to discard any and all votes that it reasonably determines to be fraudulent or submitted by bots or other computer-generated voting applications.

The award winners will be announced at the Awards Ceremony to be held July 9, in London.

Tickets

The first tranche of tickets are now on sale. To attend the event, tickets will be £60. Attendee identification will be checked at the door. Due to strong demand for tickets, we regret tickets are not refundable. Tickets are not transferable. In some cases we may be able to transfer names on tickets (if we’re asked nicely), this is at our complete discretion and the more people do this the more complicated an time consuming it can get (we are only a small team!). If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door. If you show up at the event without a valid ticket, TechCrunch Europe reserves the right to charge the full ticket prive £60 plus £15 administration fee to allow access to the event subject to availability.

Sponsorship opportunities

Sponsors will be able to be creative with their sponsorship, with a pre-award video announcing the finalists and winners. Opportunities include sponsorship of individual award categories, sponsorship of the awards ceremony, after-party, drinks and more… Please contact Petra Johansson petra(at)twistedtree.co.uk for further details.

Press

If you are a member of the press wanting to cover the event, please contact Rassami Hok Ljungberg on rassami(at)rassami.com

Editorial/Awards/Programme

Editorial queries related to the awards, the programme and the pitch competition should be directed to Mike Butcher, Editor, TechCrunch Europe.

In September 2007 I launched TechCrunch UK & Ireland. But within three months I realised the tech story that needed to be written was across Europe. So I went on tour to find contacts and companies. This year we’ve re-launched as TechCrunch Europe and I’ve begun running events across the continent to bring the European tech scene together, along with our first ever day-long conference. Today I’m opening up TechCrunch Europe to new contributors from across Europe so that we can really tell the European tech story the way it is.

We’re looking for guest contributing writers for TC Europe. Contributors will get a log-in and password to the back-end Wordpress publishing system of TCE. But in order to apply the same editorial standards as we have across all the TC blogs, we’ll be running a slightly different system to ‘normal’ blogging. To save anyone wasting their time writing something that we can’t publish, the blog posts will need to be pitched first as ideas to TC Europe editorial. This is not going to be a free-for-all where anyone can post anything. The posts will require our approval to go live on the site and will almost certainly be copy-edited by TC Editorial staff prior to release. Some may not like that approach, but that’s the way it will run. At least for now.

But posts that do go live on TC Europe will have the byline of the writer and will also get Tweeted by our @TCEurope account with the Twitter name of the writer, e.g. “Headline http://tcrn.ch/xyz by @person”. That Twitter account has over 3,000 followers right now, and obviously this will grow. If there is a post we really like then the post would get “cross-posted” to TechCrunch.com (but that’s up to us).

Content-wise we are looking mainly for breaking news, exclusive stories and other types of content, like interviews. Unfortunately we don’t have a budget for European contributors as yet, but we hope that this would be a good way of promoting yourself in the scene. Plus, it will almost certainly bring you more Twitter followers. Of course, it goes without saying that our preference is for contributors to be independent of the things they are writing about, and where they have an interest, that is declared.

In order to apply to be a TechCrunch Europe guest contributor you must send an email to me, Mike Butcher, marked “TC Europe contributor”. Please include links to previous blog posts you’re proud of and stories you’ve broken. In particular we’ll be looking for people who have contributed to country-based blogs that cover the tech scene in the local language.

We’ll be running this contributor model for the next few months. Assuming it works OK we’ll make it a permanent arrangement, but it will be reviewed periodically.

We are looking for contributors from the countries that, coincidentally and conveniently, also make up the Eurovision Song Contest catchment area, as well as wider Europe. Anyway, These are, in alphabetical order:

Albania
Andorra
Armenia
Austria
Azerbaijan
Belarus
Belgium
Bosnia & Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
FYR Macedonia
Georgia
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Iceland
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Latvia
Liechtenstein
Lithuania
Luxemburg
Malta
Moldova
Monaco
Montenegro
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia
San Marino
Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Turkey
Ukraine
United Kingdom (we have that covered)