[Ireland] Social media consultants Simplyzesty started using Twitter Lists to list blogs. However, a brainwave has lead them to take Twitter Lists to their logical conclusion: creating lists of Twitter users in entire countries. They’ve launched a Twitter list for the UK and the list of users in Ireland is currently going crazy. They call it “crowdsourcing populations”. Who knows – this could end up being a sort of crowd-sourced yellow pages/people directory.

A couple of hours ago they launched a USA version with a script built to make the listings automatic. The plan is to do is to cover the USA in 72 hours.

Amazon is launching “PayPhrase” a simple way to verify your account to speed up purchasing – a great move ahead of the holiday season when even more people than ever will be shopping online.

It’s simple stuff. You set up a unique phrase like “Axe Murderer” or “Car Lover” or “Honey I shrunk the kids” and tie it to a 4-digit PIN. This is linked to your Amazon account which, of course, is pre-loaded with your credit card and shipping address.

I do have to wonder what was so hard about entering an email address and password, but clearly Amazon’s psychological research unit thought “Fluffy Bunnies”, or some such, was going to be easier for the average Jane or Joe to remember.

We’ve been saying for a while that ‘local’ is going to be one of those ‘next big things’, and the win by Red Beacon at TechCrunch 50 has been something of a clarion call for this. Now a new study from TMP Directional Marketing has come out with some interesting data to back this up.

The study shows that the web generally, but in particular mobile and social network search, are increasingly factors fueling growth in the overall search market. This grew to 21.9 billion total US searches in June 2009, a year-on-year increase of 31%.

The French-born version of YouTube, DailyMotion – which has now grown into a global site with 60 million users – has officially confirmed its latest fundraising of €17 million, which was early reported as €15 million earlier this month. The new information is that there was an undisclosed €7.5 million investor in the round which turns out to be a French state-backed investment fund. According to Atlas VC Fred Destin on his blog today, Atlas Venture has participated “above pro-rata in this round and grows ownership”.

The Launch48 event in London this weekend has seen six teams attempt to launch a startup in, you guessed it 48 hours. The event, which was basically created by some UK startup enthusiasts, is different to StartupWeekend in that separate teams come together to each work on their own project rather than one. After frantically coding for the last couple of days, the results were presented tonight at the event, so here they are in order of presentation. I liked Given and Grapeshots. As you can see some were more fully formed than others:

On stage at last year’s Le Web an argument broke out between co-founder Loic Le Meur and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington over whether Europe was capable of producing a ‘big win’ Web company or whether Skype was, perhaps, just a one-hit wonder. Like heavyweight fighters, they traded some heavy blows in subsequent blog posts. But during the live on-stage Gilmour Gang, one company was mentioned by Le Meur which left the rest of the assembled staring blankly: Vente Privee.

Probably the reason it prompted such sideways looks, however, is that this is not a classic ‘web app’ startup, but an e-commerce hub. Vente Privee began in France in 2001, but has only recently become a powerhouse of the new wave in Europe: an online private sales club involving designer fashion brands, otherwise known in the fashion retail industry as the “overstock market”. Its success has lead to a bunch of clone sites, while Vente Privee itself is on target to hit €650m in turnonver globally this year. In other words Europe is not out to lunch – as Arrington put it – it is out to shop.

But Vente Privee’s success has now lead to a number of U.S. companies becoming very interested in either entering this world or expanding their operations. TechCrunch Europe thus understands, from some very well placed sources, that Gilt, Amazon and eBay are all actively looking at acquisitions in the European private shopping club space. The price for Vente Privee alone is being talked about in terms of a $1.5 billion sale. Some sources even put the figure at between $2 billion and $4 billion.

Back in December 2008 Reevoo looked like it was running out of time. The UK-based B2B customer reviews site hunkered down on staffing amid pressure from the downbeat economic climate in an attempt to play out its investment from Banexi Venture Partners and Eden Ventures. Partner revenue was coming in but its crowd-sourced reviews were invisible on Google and it was, in my opinion, treading water.

Well today it looks like CEO Richard Anson’s slow burn strategy has paid off. Reevoo is announcing new partners for its service which supplies genuine, post purchase, customer reviews for European e-commerce sites. But the lack of an open API remains a gaping hole in their strategy.

I’m delighted to announce that this year’s Startup Competition at LeWeb, the annual gathering of global technology luminaries and startups in Paris, will be organized in partnership with TechCrunch Europe. We’ve been running startup events all over Europe for some time now — so I hope to be able to inject our experience into this great event.

Like last year, the LeWeb Startup Competition will have a dedicated room and stage. A total of 20 startups/applications will be selected to demonstrate a new product live on stage at the event. The winners of this competition will then have a chance to present their companies on the LeWeb main stage during a special session the following day. More after the jump.

BREAKING: Well, look out iTunes. We’ve said previously that Spotify didn’t look like it was going to compete with the Apple iTunes Store. It’s streaming, fremium music service after all, not a download store.

It also recently launched an iPhone app that only subscribers can use.

But perhaps the hint of their strategy lay in the fact that on that app you could save playlists and tracks for offline playing (if, say, you were on a plane), though you can not access any kind of MP3 file for sharing of course.

All that changes today because later today Spotify will extend the ‘Offline mode’ that is available on Spotify Mobile and bringing it to the desktop version of Spotify. Users will be limited to how much music they can download to offline mode – but this is surely a very interesting move which has implications for how people consume music.

Livebookings, European-based restaurant reservation service, has secured $16 million in a new funding round from Germany/Pan-European VC firm Wellington Partners. Niklas Eklund, Livebookings’ CEO says Livebookings is “at a point” where it clearly sees itself scaling globally.

It’s also clearly benefiting from credit-crunched restaurants now switching to online reservations to fill their tables, something Livebookings says has risen by 91% this summer compared to last, but there is plenty of growth left in the market. Only 7% of restaurants currently use online reservations, according to the company.

Hot London-based live music startup Songkick launches a new feature today allowing users to share their experiences of gigs. Users can now connect their Songkick account to their Twitter account and auto-tweet any gigs they plan to go to. That’s not that big a deal. What is pretty interesting however is how they’ve integrated Twitter to bring a realtime stream to their service.

When a user goes to a show, Songkick automatically pulls in tweets that they write during the concert as realtime, live reviews. The tweets are from actual gig-goers, making this way more valuable than just pulling in generic artist searches. This looks like the first time anyone has done this. Furthermore the tweets are then preserved for all time on the dedicated Songkick concert page for that gig, foiling Twitter’s annoying ability to lose Tweets after a week or so in search.

Seedcamp, the European startups programme a little (though not entirely) like YCombinator, has announced the winners of its year-long programme to find the best startups in Europe, finally judged over an intense week of mentoring by a long line of fellow European entrepreneurs.

Each startup has won €50,000 to develop their product, in return for Seedcamp taking a stake worth between 5-10% of the company. In each case the exact stake has not been released. As we wrote earlier this week, overall the standard was strong this year and many of the VCs and CEOs I spoke to during this week have remarked on how much the quality of startups in Europe has improved, especially as reflected in this year’s Seedcamp vintage.

So the winning teams are:

So before we get into this, let’s build the case for the defence. Nokia has been acquiring lots of small startups lately (Plum, Cellity and Bit-Side this year) and TechCrunch.com now has a source that says they’ve bought boutique travel social network Dopplr. This appears to have occurred while Dopplr was fundraising – something which often happens when deals are being thrashed out. Dopplr is not commenting on the story.

Anyway, the purchase price is said to be between €10 million and €15 million. We first covered Dopplr in 2007 when it closed on seed funding supposedly raising just €1.25 million or so in total funding. And yet it has a stellar group of backers: Martin Varsavsky (FON), Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Saul Klein (TAG), Esther Dyson (Angel), Tyler Brûlé (Meeja), Thomas Glocer (Thomson Reuters) and Lars Hinrichs (Xing). I mean, good grief, most startups would kill and maim to have that kind of board. As good as this purported exit is, clearly these people thought Dopplr would go way, way bigger than a €15m exit.

Europe has no real equivalent to the big hothouse that is Silicon Valley, but it does have lots of tech clusters and networks. As recent research from the startup Seedcamp startup programme has shown, clusters of innovation are spread far and wide across Europe. One place everyone agrees is a key cluster is London. It now hosts offices belonging to all the top-tier pan-European VCs, several new Seed funds, has an active Angel investor market and hosts many major tech events. However, largely because of its cost – everything is still expensive here – London remains hard for European startups to access and get into, even in a recession. And although European and US entrepreneurs often need to take meetings and work in London, who wants to sign a huge office lease?

TechHub (@TechHub on Twitter) is new project put together by long-time London tech scene person Elizabeth Varley which will address just this issue. It will be a new, physical space for tech people, providing the things they really like: Super-fast Wifi, power for laptops, coffee and flexible, plentiful desk space. What’s really game-changing though is that – as I understand it – it will very, very affordable, which is exactly the problem that needs to be solved in London if the rest of Europe is to benefit.

FuelMyApp is a new site launching now which is a platform for iPhone app developers to reward users for reviews. Here’s their pitch: Developers get reviews about their apps, while users get free apps in return for reviewing them. Now, before you cry Pay-Per-Post read on and let’s figure this thing out.

A lack of reviews on very new apps is a common occurrence when you hear about an app that’s potentially awesome it hasn’t hit the mainstream yet.

So how does it work? Developers submit their app’s iTunes reference to the site and select how many reviews they want. iPhone users sign up with their Paypal email address and iTunes nickname. As soon as the review is published in iTunes, fuelmyapp automatically credits back the app fee to the user via Paypal.

Now, let’s look at those potential problems.

Seedcamp, the European-wide programme for tech startups, has opened its annual week of supercharged mentoring for its final list of 20 startups.

There are other startup programmes and competitions in Europe but Seedcamp seems to have cornered the market in that scare resource: smart European tech CEOs who can mentor new startups.

Put simply, if you’d thrown a grenade into the Costa Coffee at University College London today much of the tech startup scene in Europe would have been wiped out. Which would be a pity. But back to the startups: What are the trends this year?

This week’s TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco brought together a number of threads and stories which have been kicking around the back of my mind for while. A little like Borat, I’ve been asking the Americans a lot of questions (though hopefully without the accompanying chaos).

The first one seems obvious but is worth spelling out one more time: to launch a consumer web service or, increasingly, mobile application, America remains the golden prize worth shooting for.

It is a large, homogeneous market which speaks one language. It is quite simply a no-brainer to really go for it there. That has always had implications for European startups. How do you launch in a market when you are not actually in the USA, or headquartered there? How do you get traction? It is of course perfectly possible.

Seedcamp – the rolling European startups programme which started out as an annual competition and which has morphed into a pan-European network of mentors, investors and startups – will today announce it’s list of startups that have made the cut for Seedcamp Week in a fortnight’s time in London. But at a press conference in London CEO Reshma Sohoni and Chairman Saul Klein also gave out some fascinating data which (and I checked) we can share with you now, prior to the list announcement shortly. [Update: Here's the list].

The data points are interesting because they show the trends in how tech companies are being formed from the primordial soup of Europe’s startup scene and which trends are emerging.

Coming along to give VisualCV and JobSpice a run for their money is new online CV builder CeeVee. It’s now opened up after being in private beta, and aside from the cute sounding name, it’s aim is simple – to be the simplest CV builder out there.

But what is the point of CV sites like this when we have LinkedIn? Well, not everyone is into LinkedIn’s sparse, rather corporate presentation and so CeeVee – as it’s competors do – aims at the wide consumer marketplace with a simpler interface. Apparently Human Resources people aren’t keen on busy CVs (or maybe can’t cope with them?), hence this design approach.

In addition LinkedIn doesn’t allow you to export or share your resume in a widgety, social way (as yet). The aim, as founder Lee Wilkins tells me, is to work with HR departments and companies to make a more standardized format.

According to one estimate the total data storage capacity produced by humans each year is expected to surpass 1 Yottabyte by 2013. Demand for storage is doubling every 18 to 24 months. And the mountains of content being produced by ordinary people as lifestreaming becomes more and more popular is only adding to that growth.

So how are we going to deal with it – search it, store it? That’s the problem Silentale is planning to address, and the startup has just opened it’s private beta to start testing it’s platform. Put simply, Silentale is aiming to store all your digital conversations – Twitter, Email and even SMS – in one place and allow you to access and search them from anywhere. We have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers for the free private beta. Just leave a comment to get on the list.

Streaming music service Spotify has launched on the iPhone and Android devices for its premium subscribers only. You can download it from Apple’s App Store here and the Android Market. Though plans to launch there are in play, the service is not yet live in the US, and it has already taken several European markets by storm. This iPhone app is basically identical to the leaked beta we reviewed in detail.

The mobile apps will allow you to play the entire Spotify catalogue and the ‘offline mode’ caches playlists so they can be played… when you are offline, like on a plane. Spotify has set up a special mobile section with more details.

The launch of this mobile version now fires the starting gun on their US launch plans. A large number of record labels have actually invested in the Swedish-born, London-based startup, which is now valued at €170 million, or about $242 million, with a post money valuation of around €200 million.

Laggard UK music retailer HMV is buying a 50 percent stake in the UK-based online music retailer 7Digital for $12.6 Million (£7.7 million). The move looks set to give HMV a ‘great leap forward’ in digital, since 7Digital has been fleet of foot in pushing non-DRM MP3s, open formats, its white label API and signed deals with tech rock stars like Spotify and many major record labels.

The purchase creates a neat exit for 7Digital’s VC backers Balderton Capital and Sutton Place Managers. CEO Ben Drury told me that the VCs got a “positive return on investment” – though terms have not been disclosed. In January last year it took £4.25 million in a round led by Sutton Place Managers that included original investor Balderton Capital. HMV Group will now use the five year-old 7Digital as its sole supplier for “all of its existing digital operations” in the UK and Canada.

Back in February we were excited to see a sort of “Humorous Twitter” appear in the form of Popjam. Ok, so it was more a microblogging-meets-Digg-meets-CollegeHumour, but as we said at the time, getting Twitter integration fast would really help.

Aiming at College Humour and eBaumsworld or Icanhascheezburger with something Twitter-like seemed like a no-brainer. However, although they used the Twitter mechanic of ‘follow’, they didn’t integrate with Twitter at launch and therefore didn’t get on the back of Twitter’s recent massive growth. That looks to have been a costly mistake.

Why are shares in XING, the German-born business social network that competes most with LinkedIn in Europe, skyrocketing?

Rumors are reaching me that prominent stakeholders in XING – current and former employees – are taking advantage of this moment to offload significant share stakes, and who can blame them. So why the spike? Well, it appears there is chatter of a buyout deal in the offing. But who would want to buy XING? Well the obvious answer is LinkedIn. Such a deal would consolidate it’s position in Europe, making it basically unassailable in business networks.

Remember all that Web 2.0 hype back in the day? Remember how some predicted an end to the monopoly of Microsoft in those basic applications like Word, Excel and others as these functions moved to the Cloud? Well it looks like that trend is well on its way now and especially in the UK.

According to a survey by Accredited Supplier, a B2B services marketplace, Microsoft is losing their grip on the UK small business market under increasing pressure from cloud computing and open source software.

In their poll of 1,400 Microsoft customers, all small businesses in the UK, they found that 13% of them intend to switch to Google Apps within 12 months while 22% are “undecided”. And 62% would “prefer” or “strongly prefer” to have their business applications work through a browser. In addition, an impressive 32% now use Firefox as their default browser within their business.