I’m delighted to announce that TechCrunch / CrunchGear are holding a Berlin meetup with our partner and co-organiser twidox. The “TechCrunch / twidox German Web 2.0 Meet-up” will be in Berlin, on the 11th of June. Imedo.de has kindly offered to throw the networking event at their offices here from 7:30 pm onwards (pictured above, nice huh).

Peter Ha will be there from the US to represent CrunchGear together with Mike Butcher who writes for both TechCrunch UK and TechCrunch. We both look forward to being able to say “Ich bin ein Berliner”!

We still have a couple of sponsorship opportunities available, so should you be interested, please let us know via our amazing co-host and co-organiser Nicholas MacGowan von Holstein, Twidox Co-founder.

Please note that because we are restricted on numbers, this is strictly an ‘invitations only’ event, meaning only those that received an invite via the XING guest list will get in. We have 100 tickets to give away though. How do you get to be one of the 100? Just go register on the twidox private beta and the first 100 will get an invite.

We are looking forward to seeing you all on June 11th!

Thanks again to our great list of sponsors, who keep these events free to attendees. Here are the sponsors in alphabetical order (as we have not created a tier system on this ocassion).

aka-aki – takes the social network to the streets: it shows you on your cell phone the profile information of the people close by. aka-aki automatically writes a personal diary that makes it possible to get in touch later on. once you got to know each other aka-aki lets you take your friends with you in your pocket and stay in touch on the go. aka-aki is clicking people – in the real life!”

Allyve – all you have, all live. Allyve is your remote control with preview for the internet: all you have, all live, alive!

Deine Tierwelt – With 4 Mio visits per month Deine-Tierwelt.de is Germanys leading pet community. The platform offers new concepts of “user engaged advertising”. We invented the new ad format “StageAd”: an innovative use of video for online communication.

Gimahhot – Gimahhot is the world’s first B2C Ecommerce platform on which brand products are traded like on the stock exchange. Similar to Amazon’s Marketplace, users can buy immediately at the current offer price or place bids that all merchants can react on

Hiogi – hiogi.com is the easiest mobile search powered by the wisdom of the crowds! It is based upon the world’s first knowledge community that sends adhoc answers directly to your mobile phone. Ask anything – everywhere for free via Twitter SMS, WAP or email.

Hobnox – Hobnox is an online entertainment platform which unites broadcast quality media with social networking and cutting edge technology. Come to Hobnox to watch, connect, collaborate and create

Imedo – imedo is a German health community that enables patients to take control over their health by sharing advice on such matters as diseases or treatment options and finding people with similar health challenges

Jimdo – is the easiest to use online-website creator. You can integrate any kind of content, adjust or implement your own design, write a blog within the site, set different privacy levels – and thus create a completely independent site about yourself. Social features will help you to keep in touch with your friends!

Kyte – The future of digital content distribution, user engagement & monetization. Kyte makes it easy to create authentic digital content, instantly distribute it across the web, social networks and mobile phones, and engage with an audience through real-time multimedia communications

locr – Locate your photos, discover the world and share with friends. locr offers geo-enhanced photo sharing for mobile phone users and hobby photographers.

MediaVentures – an entrepreneur-driven venture capitalist with a successful track record in developing strong brands out of fresh ideas.

Microsoft – Connect, share and make your conversations count with Windows Live Messenger.
· Connect with your friends and family via text, voice and video.
· Send text to mobile phones or handhelds,
· Control how and when your friends and family see you online.

MIKESTAR.com – sing karaoke online. Challenge your friends and other users all over Europe. Listen to thousands of user performed music videos and win prices.

Mister Wong – Mister Wong is Europe´s leading social bookmarking service with more than 4 million unique visitors a month and did just aqcuired lifestream.fm, a media and services aggregator. Lifestream.fm is also a sponsor.

mokono – mokono specializes in blog advertising solutions. The knowledge to do so effectively derives from operating one of Europe’s largest blog community networks including such properties as blog.fr, blog.co.uk and blog.de which carry several hundred thousand blogs

Plazes – Plazes is your social web to-go. Share your location, stay connected with friends, let them know where you’re at and make future plans, see who’s crossing your path and what’s happening nearby.

Projektwerk – A German marketplace for projects and promoting own business – quick and easy. Best for all small Businesses and Freelancers that focus on project work. www.projektwerk.de . www.projektwerk.de/blog

Qype – The largest user-generated local review site in Europe

Refined Labs – Refined Labs is developing an Online Marketing Toolbox that will help advertisers to increase their ROI on Online Advertising. Refined Ads, their recently launched Search Engine Marketing Management Software, enables agencies, big direct customers as well as affiliates to get better results out of their SEM campaigns.

Sevenload – sevenload is your social media platform for photos, videos and interactive shows. Our community offers all sevenloaders a ton of excitement and enormous creative potential – so get on sevenload today!

Sixgroups – With the new six groups livecommunities, webmasters can turn their websites into communities within minutes. They provide a new way of real time communication called the “livestream” which aggregates community activities, topic-related social media and chat messages.

Talicious – a web based community for talented people, no matter whether it is photography, art, music, singing or sports.

Toksta – toksta* provides a text, voice and video instant messenger for social communities and forums. The widget can be implemented by the communities via a copy & paste script and is 100% free (incl. hosting, revenue share, design customization and logo branding).

twidox – twidox is a free, user generated library of ‘quality’ documents that allows individuals and organizations to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover them.

Weblin – The social software Weblin not only makes people visible on websites but also makes communication possible across all websites. It brings people with the same interests together and turns the entire web into a virtual world.

Xing – The business network connecting millions of professionals worldwide

Zanox – Participate in the zanox Web Services Contest 2008: One Million Euros Venture Capital from the zanox Campus Sponsors. Enterprises, startups or developers can prove that they have developed an monetizing business model based on the zanox web services. The best 20 candidates will be asked on September 30, 2008, to turn in their business plans until October 5, 2008.

Sometimes the simplest ideas are best. While a number of startups are working to bring the whole process of creating presentations online, SlideShare recognizes that many people are mostly satisfied with PowerPoint or Keynote. They just want an easy way to share their traditional presentation files with others.

The company, which launched in 2006 and later added audio synchronization, took the YouTube strategy of creating a place where people could upload, share, and embed their media. And now they’ve raised a $3 million from Venrock and a handful of notable angel investors in its first major round of funding, which should help them pursue that strategy further (i.e. build as massive user base as possible). Oh, and fight off future denial of service attacks and increase capacity.

Individual investors include Dave McClure, Ariel Poler, Mark Cuban, Jonathan Abrams, Hal Varian, Yee Lee, and Saul Klein. Many of them actually came to know SlideShare as normal customers and only decided to invest once realizing how handy it was. David Siminoff will also join SlideShare’s board.

SlideShare is using some of the money to relocate from Mountain View to San Francisco, where they’ll have a larger office. It will also grow its team from about 10 people to 18, mostly with local hires even though the bulk of its development occurs in India.

Of course, we’ve been given a press release in the form of an embeddable slideshow, inserted below. Way to go on the blatant self-promotion, Dave.

| View | Upload your own

PlugandPlay’s third annual Expo was held today at their Sunnyvale TechCenter, drawing nearly fifty exhibitors from an array of markets that included mobile advertising, massively multiplayer gaming, and medical technology.

The venue itself was a little strange – a large meeting space/multipurpose room that seemed better suited for a crowd half the size of the expo’s 400 attendees. Seats were in very short supply, though the crowd dwindled as the day progressed.

The expo’s main draw was a 46-company-long elevator pitch marathon that lasted for nearly two hours. Each company was allotted approximately two minutes to impress potential investors, though some didn’t seem to pay much attention to the rule. With very few visual aids (and no breaks) the presentations got a little tedious at times, but there were a few bright stars in the bunch.

Among my favorites:

• Epsodic- Epsodic wants to take events from typical computer games and visualize them with fully rendered cutscenes. The technology will take a supported game’s data and animate pre-fabricated characters.
• Novauris – One of the better-established companies at the expo, Novauris wants to provide speech recognition technology for mobile devices. The on-stage demo featured a cell phone’s voice lookup for Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean. It’s not a new idea, but I want it.

The TechCenter is the unconventional brainchild of entrepreneur Saeed Amidi, who has created a “startup ecosystem” where creativity and competition run rampant. The flagship office, located in Sunnyvale, is currently home to 129 companies, and there are a number of smaller locations across the Valley. With a near-constant stream of VCs and monthly Web 2.0 events, it’s easy to see why the TechCenter appeals to so many startups.

Amidi fosters the community by selectively permitting only “exciting” startups to rent in the building. Of course, his motivations are not exactly charitable – he gets a first look at any company that wants to take space, and has invested in around 20% of them.

Facebook has posted more details about the upcoming redesign of user profiles, which were supposed to launch early April but are apparently now close at hand.

Profiles will be broken down into 5 main tabs: Feed, Wall, Info, Photos, and “Boxes”. The feed tab appears to contain the News Feed as we know it, except with three new size standards: one line, short, and full.

There’s also a bit of confusion between this Feed tab and the new Wall one. Apparently users will be able to post items to friends’ Feed tabs (and their own) using a new Publisher tool. This is described as meant to replace the old wall attachments feature, so it appears as though the Wall will revert to plain text posts and no longer allow for rich media. But it will also incorporate all mini-feed items somehow.

Some suggest that the new Publisher feature will allow for FriendFeed-like conversations through comments, but the official documentation doesn’t make any reference to such capabilities. Screen shots showing comments appear to be only wall-to-wall conversations.

The “Boxes” tab will be where all the current application profile boxes are quarantined, er, showcased. While 5 tabs will show by default, users will be able to add their own tabs that display canvas-like pages for their favorite apps. This appears to be a trade-off Facebook is imposing on developers: isolate their profile boxes in a “boxes” tab but compensate them by allowing for more prominent, full-view pages. That said, Facebook will also be allowing up to 5 app boxes to show up across all tabs in the left-hand column (but they’ll have a severe height restriction).

Unfortunately Facebook has yet to release any screenshots of the new design except for the rather uninformative one above.

More information at Inside Facebook.

Brad Greenspan’s Live Universe continues its acquisitions spree: they’ve bought troubled Silicon Valley startup MeeVee, we’re heard from multiple sources. This comes less than a month after they announced the acquisition of Pageflakes, another northern California startup.

We do not know the acquisition price, but it is undoubtedly less than the $25 million Meevee has raised in venture capital over the years. The company, which was founded in 2000, let 20% of its staff go in mid-2007, and made more layoffs earlier this year.

Meevee integrates online TV listings with video. In 2006 we compared them favorably to other online tv guides, and the product has evolved significantly since then. Still, they never got the traction they needed for a big liquidity event. Perhaps Meevee will find a comfortable home at Live Universe, which has, among many other properties, a popular online video site called LiveVideo.

The MeeVee team will report to Dan Cohen, the former CEO of Pageflakes, according to our sources.

I’m proud to announce that Ning’s Marc Andreessen, Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha and Google’s Marissa Mayer will join us on September 8 – 10 in San Francisco for the TechCrunch50 conference Panel of Experts. The experts will judge the fifty startups launching at the event, and then discuss each of the demos on stage as a group.

More details on the conference are here. TechCrunch50 is a three day conference where fifty new startups will launch over three days. There will also be a number of topical panels and workshops. The event will be held at the San Francisco Design Center, a huge and beautiful venue that can accommodate over 1,000 attendees with ease.

There will be 24 experts in all, more will be announced in the coming weeks. Tickets for the event can be purchased here (early bird pricing is available until July 15). The submission process to launch your startup is here.

More on the TechCrunch50 blog.

	Marc Andreessen Marc Andreessen is the co-founder of Ning, the create-your-own social network platform company that has raised over $100 million in funding. He also serves on the board of Open Media Network. Marc is best known as a co-founder and chief technical mind behind Netscape Communications Corporation and co-author of Mosaic, the first widely- used web browser.
	Roelof Botha Roelof Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital focused on services and software investments. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Roelof served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal (EBAY) and worked as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company. Roelof is a certified actuary (Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries), has a BS in Actuarial Science, Economics, and Statistics from the University of Cape Town and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
	Marissa Mayer Marissa Mayer is VP, Search Products & User Experience at Google. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to 100+ languages and launching numerous features and products. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. Before Google, she worked at UBS research lab (Ubilab) and SRI International. Marissa has been featured in various publications, including Newsweek (“10 Tech Leaders of the Future”), Red Herring (“15 Women to Watch”), Business 2.0, BusinessWeek and Fortune.

Thank you to our early corporate sponsors: Sequoia Capital, Mayfield Fund, Clearstone Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures and Fenwick & West all returned quickly to support us for the second year in a row. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo reached out as well, and we’re very grateful for their new commitment to our merit-based conference format.

New startup KickNote, founded by Brian Erickson, will be launching a “Battle Of The Bands” event this summer that will allow people to watch, and vote, online. The actual concerts will be held in the New York city area, so this event will be called “Battle of the Boroughs.”

Thirteen separate events will be held over three rounds; 50 bands in total are expected to participate. The entire process will take seven weeks. KickNote is partnering with Justin.tv to deliver the live video to viewers.

There are various prizes for the winners, although the potential notoriety and exposure will drive participation. The company says they’ll have a second event in the Fall, based in Los Angeles.

Promotional video for the site is below. Artists interested in participating can sign up on their home page.

You know you’ve made it as a communications medium when you start attracting spammers. On Twitter, the problem is getting bad enough that the service is starting to blacklist people who spam other members. There is already an unofficial site called The Twitter Blacklist that lists 329 known spammers on the service (see screen shot below). That has nothing to do with Twitter officially and is just a public service.

But Twitter also has its own official blacklist. It is not clear how you get on it, but perhaps if you are blocked by enough members you get inducted. Jesse Stay explains:

Before today, Twitter would mark accounts as “spam”, but not tell the owners of the accounts they marked them as spam. Those owners of the accounts could follow others, but no one was able to follow them, and there was no way for the owners of those accounts to know they had been blacklisted.

But now Twitter is simply suspending the accounts of people it considers spammers, but it will notify them. According to a discussion on the Twitter Development mailing list:

We’ve been considering this issue here at Twitter HQ, and we’re planning on simply removing the accounts of users who have violated our Terms of Service, as opposed to freezing their account as we’ve done in the past.

I just hope Scoble isn’t on that list. Taking away his Twitter would devastate him, especially after the whole Facebook banning incident.

Web video for intellectuals is a hard sell. The videos on Fora.TV come from speeches given by intellectuals and business people. It competes with Big Think, which has a slightly different format.

Will Hearst and Adobe Ventures believe in it enough to put another $2 million into Fora.TV, along with some other unnamed investors. Together, with the $2 million in seed capital they invested last October, the company is counting the total as a $4 million A round. Back in October, CEO Brian Gruber told me that he was hoping to close an additional $5 million in an A round by the end of January. It is now three months later, and Gruber appears to be $3 million short.

He is still in talks with another strategic investor (a media company) to invest another $2 million or so. When is that going to happen? “In the next 60 to 90 days,” he says. So why is he having so much trouble closing the round?

Everyone has trouble closing the round until they close the round.

That’s so Zen, I’m going to put that one up on my wall.

This is an interesting story in light of the discussion yesterday about the fate of the intellectual property of failed startups. Email startup Xobni, which recently turned down a $20 million acquisition offer from Microsoft, says they have acquired the key patents around a product called Zaplets which originally launched in 2000.

Zaplets was an email product that put synchronized applications into email messages. The goal was to reduce email back and forth around things like scheduling meetings, coordinating events, etc. Any time an email turned into a thread, Zaplets may be more useful – all those responses would be brought right back into the original email. The Zaplet automatically updated itself in the original email, so long threads were avoided.

If Zaplets launched today, they’d call them email widgets.

Zaplets parent company, FireDrop, raised over $100 million from a slew of investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Their 2000 Series D round alone was reportedly $90 million. USA Today called it “one of the Valley’s most sizzling start-ups.” Dave Winer, by contrast, failed to find it interesting. As an aside, I remember being in their offices and seeing a demo of the product, but I can’t remember why (I had my own company then, and certainly wasn’t running around getting startup demos). I liked it.

But Zaplets were not to be it seems. Eventually Firedrop shut down, the employees dispersed and the assets eventually made their way to MetricStream.

Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte says the Zaplet idea was a good one, just too early. And that’s why they’ve acquired much of the intellectual property of FireDrop from MetricStream. He won’t say what they paid, but hinted that it was in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars for the portfolio of ten key patents.

Bonforte says reducing email threads down to a single active message is a key factor in solving the email problem I wrote about last month. And he thinks Xobni will eventually be able to do that with the IP they’ve just acquired.

Some screen shots of the old Zaplet website are below.

Read More

Google wants to usher in the world of wireless broadband so much that it is willing to spend vast sums to make it happen. It bid more than $4.6 billion in the recent FCC spectrum auctions (which it ended up not having to pay because it lost to Verizon), is backing the WiFi 2.0 initiative, and today it announced that it plunked down $500 million to shore up the new Clearwire-Sprint WiMax business.

Google is very clear about why it invested—to ensure that the resulting broadband network is as open as possible and accepts Android handsets and devices. It also sounds like Google may also be the default search engine on devices connected to the network.

This morning, it explains all of this on the Official Google Blog:

In addition to our $500 million contribution as part of the investment group, we will provide search and applications to the network’s users, and will work with Clearwire to offer additional services and applications. This will include jointly creating an open Internet protocol to work with mobile broadband devices (including Android-powered devices) and implementing other open network practices and policies.

We believe that the new network will provide wireless consumers with real choices for the software applications, content and handsets that they desire. Such freedom will mirror the openness principles underlying the Internet and enable users to get the most out of their wireless broadband experience. As we’ve supported open standards for spectrum and wireless handsets, we’re especially excited that Clearwire intends to build and maintain a network that will embrace important openness features. In particular, the network will: (1) expand advanced high speed wireless Internet access in the U.S., (2) allow consumers to utilize any lawful applications, content and devices without blocking, degrading or impairing Internet traffic and (3) engage in reasonable and competitively-neutral network management.

Google desperately wants access to future wireless broadband networks of all stripes and sizes,but it wants to avoid having to build and operate its own. Deals like this show that it is willing to pay to play. If Clearwire should ever go bust, though, that’s $500 million down the drain.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told the press in Tokyo yesterday that the company “isn’t pursuing other deals following the withdrawal of its $47.5 billion takeover bid for Yahoo.” Their experience dealing with Yahoo, apparently, has put them off acquisitions altogether.

But wait. Just Monday Gates said “I wouldn’t rule out some partnerships but we don’t have anything imminent there” following a meeting and dinner with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak. In corporate-speak, that’s a pretty strong statement that Microsoft wants to buy some companies.

Did Microsoft change corporate development strategies from one day to the next? It appears they did. On Monday he says he wouldn’t rule out partnerships. Tuesday, no partnerships and a go it alone strategy.

What’s the real strategy? I can’t help but wonder if their key goal is to convince the market that they really don’t want Yahoo in order to drive their stock price down as far as possible. It’s clear that the markets still anticipate a deal with Microsoft, or possibly Google. It is currently trading at just under $26; analysts think its share price should be closer to $22.

If Gates is out telling the world, as he did on Monday, that they need to acquire other companies to fix their Internet strategy, it doesn’t take very long to figure out that there isn’t another Yahoo out there on the market. Microsoft has a long term problem on its hands, and Yahoo may be the only remedy. So when Gates says Microsoft isn’t pursuing deals, what I translate that to is “We really, really want to buy Yahoo.”

Update: There may be a translation issue here. The exact quote from the Tokyo conference is below, doesn’t seem to be a statement by Gates that they aren’t pursuing deals:

Q6. (Noriaki Tomisaka, ANB): We heard in your speech that Microsoft will go individually regarding the Yahoo!. Since this merger didn’t work out, your goal is to chase the Google by your own accord. Does that affect your strategy from now?
A6. (BillG): Well, Google in many countries has a very high share of search market. We think that there are innovations that will take place in search. We are company with the commitment to breakthrough software technology that can provide some competition. We really make sure that state of the art does get advanced and advertisers have good choices in terms of what they are doing with their interactive advertising. We will have a conference coming up, I think, in next month in Seattle called the “Advance”. We will start to show you the next version of the search. Some of the things are very excited about with that. In courses, we make these advances when we invest in marketing to get word out there so that people try out our product. Fortunately, the search is very easy to type-in new your keywords and try out different product, we will give people that opportunity as we make the advances that will give people great choice there.

Coolspotters, a new site from Connecticut based startup Fanzter, will launch later today. It’s an eye-candy celebrity-focused site that shows users the products celebrities are wearing in various photos. Users can then talk about and, of course, purchase those items.

Users can track celebrities, products, brands, shows (TV, Movies, etc.), places, events, and more. The idea is to show connections between people and stuff. These connections are called “spots” (as in, “I spotted that”), and show details on the item. If something is incorrect, users can change or remove it, and add new people and things.

There are other services that try to help people find products that celebrities use. Like.com is a visual search engine that lets people find related products based on visual patters. And SeenOn shows clothing and other items used by celebrities in TV shows, which can then be purchased.

But Coolspotters is the first collaborative site that gets users to do most of the work. It’s essentially a structured data wiki (see our coverage of Political Base and our own CrunchBase, which use the same ideas to track politicians/issues and startups/entrepreneurs, respectively). The end result is a ton of highly structured, highly valuable information. Users can sit for hours clicking around and finding related things. And in the case of Coolspotters, buy stuff.

Parent company Fantzer was founded in mid 2007 by Aaron LaBerge, Eric Kirsten and Sujal Shah and has raised $2 million in venture funding.

See their the Coolspotters CrunchBase profile for more screen shots.