It’s not often that Internet companies last 10 years, but Moonfruit in the UK has proved pretty resilient. It survived the dotcom boom the first time round, launching with VC-backing, growing to 65 staff and cutting back to two staff in the space of a couple of years. It’s a wonder why they didn’t exit in the most recent boom, but here they are still, plugging away. And their resilience is proving to be an asset as their 10-years old web site building business comes back into fashion, even as more recent competitors like Weebly, Yola, MyDragnDrop and Webnode, and many others, try to capture the market for people who want to build simple web sites.

So what’s the best way to re-invigorate an internet brand after 10 long years? Get trending on Twitter, that’s how. So Moonfruit has been giving away 10 Macbooks for every year of their operation, beginning this week. The result is that it has become the top trending term on Twitter three days in a row, as all people need to do is add the hashtag #moonfruit to their tweet. An algorithm is randomly choosing a winner. There are five days left. By the second day this week it had reached 2.5% of all twitter traffic. But could the stunt backfire as fast as it worked?

The wave of investments in “realtime” is continuing with today’s announcement from Cognitive Match that it has raised Series A investment from Dawn Capital. Terms were undisclosed but it’s understood the figure was in the £1m+ ballpark, in tranches. The UK company applies artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content to individuals in, you guessed it, realtime. This content can be product, offers, editorial or advertising of course, making it a very interesting prospect for an outfit like Twitter.

Four days ago MySpace announced they were laying off 30% of their staff in the U.S. and promptly sent 400 employees packing. The announcement stated that the layoffs only applied to U.S. employees. That strongly indicated that the next up for termination were over 100 of its international employees, as it has almost 30 offices around the world MySpace in Europe covers 19 territories via 6 offices.

Now we’re hearing from employees inside MySpace’s offices in Europe, who paint a black picture of hushed meetings between management, PR and HR teams. We’ve been told that MySpace PR people in London burnt candles late into last night, going over how to announce the re-structuring of MySpace internationally. Needless to say, requests for “recommendations” on LinkedIn between MySpace staff in Europe have soared, and we’ve even heard that estate agents have visited the expansive London offices, which suggests major downsizing there as well.

It’s pretty obvious that wherever you are in the world, you’re usually looking for the best bar, hotel or venue you can get for your money. And all the information is out there now, especially on live streams like Twitter. The problem is searching it and finding it. So if you could somehow match tweets to actual venues you could also use that data to rate the venue itself. The other thing you could do would be to create trust around the actual users which submitted the information.

Now, mobile startup Rummble is trying to crack this nut with a beta product called Tremors. This is a new Twitter app which does the following: it attempts to match tweets to venues, based on a combination of fuzzy word matching, the general location the tweet came from and then a rough estimation of whether the Tweet was positive or negative about the venue. Right now it works in New York and Austin, Texas (the SXSW venue) and London. These are a natural fit as they are likely to have a critical mass of Twitter users - San Francisco is coming.

Preparations for The Europas - The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 - are coming together. Held on July 9 in London, these will be the first Europe-wide awards ceremony for technology innovation, honoring the best tech companies and startups across the web and mobile scene from the continent of Europe. The first tranche of tickets are now on sale. Put July 9 in your diary, get a flight and grab a hotel through our hotel search partner.

On the evening itself we will be joined by some of the great and good from the European startups scene, and some from the US. Check out who is coming already, and we’ll also be joined by a number of VIPs including Michael Birch (co-founder of Bebo),
Stefan Glaenzer (co-founder of Last.FM), Sarah Lacy (author & TechCrunch editor) and Tariq Krim (founder of Netvibes and now Jolicloud).

The main way is to make sure your company is able to be selected for nomination is to put it in CrunchBase, with all fields filled in, as well as key staff, like CEO etc. Don’t forget your logo and your picture! There are more details here. We will be releasing the list of nominees to vote on shortly. We’re also looking for sponsors for the award categories, details here.

Hunch, the new startup from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, has launched and it’s beguilingly fun. After filling out 42 questions ranging from “Have you sky dived” to “Do you like it when the cabin crew cracks jokes on airplanes?” I was presented with a number of things I might be interested in (I chose which film directors I should watch: Tim Burton). I was hooked enough to fill out the profile page (you can get answers without logging in) and at this point it becomes clear: Hunch is a social network where the social object is sharing questions (and thus answers) which might be relevant to you. The more questions you answer the more your profile page become relevant to you. And you can of course share those questions around with a widget.

It’s widely known that China runs a pretty tight ship - to put it mildly - on what its citizens get to see online, especially that content which is served from outside of China. YouTube has been blocked for some time and although Wikipedia was blocked for a while, it’s gradually become more available. However today Chinese authorities have brought the the Great Wall of China on a number of services including Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail, Blogger and a number of other sites. The picture is patchy across the country between ISPs and geography, but my sources - who all agreed to be named in this post - say the ban is blanket ban is closing.

Since many of the sites don’t actually have Chinese versions, it’s hard to know how many people will be affected by this, but for those brave and resourceful business people, entrepreneurs and social commentators with strong links to the world outside China, it’s a crushing blow.

Having traveled to China last year I have a number of contacts there now who have all now confirmed the shutdown. The move is almost certainly related to the date. The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened on June 4, and the lead-up to any date like this is usually a time when the Firewall is tightened. The API to Twitter, used by clients like TweetDeck, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop, has also been affected.

Edocr, a smaller competitor to other document sharing startups like DocStoc and Scribd, re-launches today with new features and an API, after a long time off-radar.

Eschewing the publisher focus of Issuu, or the broad business focus of DocStoc, the boot-strapped Edocr focuses on corporates and organisations. So for instance, companies can upload all their public-facing documents, whether they be company reports, press releases, guidance documents, you name it. Admittedly the slightly dull-but-necessary focus is not going to set the world alight, but with plenty of enterprises still getting their heads around the basics of blogging, RSS and even social networks like Twitter, edocr is a simple way for companies to share their PDFs without being lumped alongside a pirated copy of a Harry Potter novel.

New features include an improved design, bulk uploading of documents, an API, document categories, better search and the ability to auto-tweet to a Twitter account when new documents get uploaded. The question is, will that be enough to set it apart from the many players in this field?

Spotify, the streaming music service which is gradually gathering a large fan-base in Europe, and is poised to launch in the US, has been plotting a mobile version for a while. It recently hired a head of mobile and the speculation was that it would come out with an iPhone app first after releasing a teaser video. But today it’s released video of an Android app it’s being demoing to people at Google I/O.

The Android app is still very much a work in progress and subject to minor changes, but it gives a pretty good overview of their thinking. The demo highlights a number of features including playback, playlists, offline synch and music search.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet - the service has yet to launch in North America, although I’m about to send some lucky TechCrunch writers some preview codes we’ve gotten hold of - Spotify is a lightweight iTunes-like application for Windows and Mac that lets you search, browse and stream a deep collection of music.

The TechCrunch Europe Roundtable event in Stockholm today (live video streamed below and on @TCEurope on Twitter, official hashtag is #tcen) will feature an afternoon of panel discussions and presentations followed by startup pitches and a great networking reception. TechCrunchTalk Nordic will be exploring the Nordic and Baltic tech scene which produced amazing companies like Skype, Habbo Hotel and, more recently, Spotify (not to mention the likes of Ericsson, Nokia and many other huge tech companies). Check out our full schedule and speakers here. We’ll be covering several topics such as the interchange between Nordic and Baltic startups, VC investment in the region, and the next wave of innovations that will come from this area.

TechCrunchTalk Nordic is sponsored by Bloglovin and Sunstone Capital. Our event partners include: ArcticStartup, Swedish Startups, The Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship and Scandinavian Web Developer Conference 2009 . Our streaming video partner is Bambuser.

See after the jump for our live streaming video, which will appear shortly (from 6am San Francisco time, 9am New York, 3pm Stockholm and 2pm London):

Zensify is a new lifestreaming iPhone app which lets you update, discover and track pictures, videos and comments across multiple social networks. Other apps have tried to do similar things. But what sets Zensify apart is that it shows the user trends within your social graph in the form of a tag cloud of key words. In other words it brings a lot more intelligence to your social graph. Suddenly, you can see a big trending topic amongst people you follow. I’ve been wanting something similar for a while and I’m not alone. David Winer recently Tweeted: “Wouldn’t it be cool if “trending topics” were localized to the people who are followed by the people you follow.” Well Zensify does this.

And it doesn’t just do it across Twitter. It does it also does it across updates from Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, Photobucket and 12seconds. For that reason it is my new favourite app, bar none, and it’s available for free from the app store here.

The Mobile 2.0 Europe conference is coming up in June and it’s shaping up to be pretty cool. Experts and thought leaders from all aspects of the mobile ecosystem will be descending on Barcelona, and TechCrunch will be descending on it too in the shape of myself and Robin Wauters. Having been last year I can attest that this event is one of the few to really bring together some of the coolest mobile startups in Europe. The Mobile 2.0 Europe conference will be on Friday, June 19, 2009 at the Espacio Esade Forum, with the Mobile 2.0 Europe Developer Day the day before. There is also a Startup Demo Launch pad.

So it’s our pleasure to also be hosting the official TechCrunch Mobile 2.0 party after the event on Friday and after the speaker’s dinner. We are pre-releasing the first 100 tickets here (there is a small ticket fee to prevent no-shows). We are also looking for sponsors of the party, who will obviously be branded at the event and in posts about it. Please email our events organiser petra(at)twistedtree.co.uk.

There are not many startups that set out to save peoples lives - unless you count the generic use of things like Twitter to get the word out fast about an earthquake or some other life-threatening event. But then again there aren’t that many aiming for the extreme niche of mountain rescue teams. But Decisions For Heroes, which just launched, is aiming to do just that, and it just goes to show how far the application of social data to a problem can reach.

Larry Page and Eric Schmidt from Google did a double header interview from the Google Zeitgeist conference just outside of London today. But the real question on our lips was what is Google going to do about the astounding buzz around realtime search and Twitter?

During a press conference I asked the question of of of Google’s executives, and the answer came back that “the kind of innovation like what Twitter is doing and what we’re doing is increasing search speed, relevance , freshness and comprehensiveness. Other companies will come up with solutions of course.”

Not a great answer.

Luckily, Loic Le Meur is also here and put Larry on the spot on stage, and captured this:

I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime.

Well we have over 100 people coming to the TechCrunch Europe Roundtable event in Stockholm, TechCrunchTalk Nordic, on May 27, but there are still a few tickets left. I’m really looking forward to an afternoon of panel discussions and presentations followed by startup pitches and a great networking reception. And we’ve just confirmed our latest speaker line-up which includes: Natasha F Saxberg, serial entrepreneur from Denmark; Jüri Kaljundi from Estonia’s nagi.ee; Northzone Ventures‘ Pär-Jörgen Pärsson; Scandinavian investor maven Angel Gambino; and Sweden’s “IT-person of the year”, Stina Ehrensvärd from Yubico. And that’s just for starters.

Dear reader, TechCrunch owes you an apology. We thought the “104-Year-Old joins Twitter” story last week was Digg bait created by the media. It turns out it was all just old fashioned re-hashed PR. But at least we are apologizing - unlike the many news outlets that ran with this manufactured story.To explain…

On May 15 two UK newspapers ran the story about 104 year old woman “Ivy Bean” / @ivybean104 joining Twitter. We correctly called it out as a ruse, but we got the wrong target. What none of those original stories told you, was that poor old Ivy had not joined Twitter just because it was suddenly the talk of the senior citizens home. No. She joined because home PC maintenance company Geek Squad signed her up, propped her up for a photo opportunity - even using her own account to Twitpic the event - and press-released the hell out of it. And the media fell for it.

Yuuguu, the remote desktop / screen-sharing collaboration service which integrates all the main instant messaging platforms is to complete the pack by adding Skype. It officially launches next Tuesday.

That obviously means that as well as chatting via IM during screen sharing you can make free and low cost VOIP calls to your interlocutor. However, there is a drawback as Skype-based screen sharing (as opposed to using IM from another platform) is only Mac-based and will be one to one. But unlike most screen sharing applications, Yuuguu does not require participants to download any software - only the host needs access to Yuuguu. Participants get sent a standard web link that will allow them to view the host’s screen.

As we announced back in February, TechCrunch is coming to Berlin on June 10 and we hope you’ll join us for an afternoon of speakers and startup pitches, and an evening of networking. There is an amazing tech scene in Germany and we want to do our best to showcase this. That’s why we’re partnering with several local entities on the ground to really display the best of the German scene. You can grab a ticket here. (Oh, and if you’re in Stockholm on May 27, come to this).

We also want to involve you in building the content for the event. So I have two requests. First, I’d love to hear from potential speakers who can give a quick-fire, 15 minute talk on any of the topics below. Secondly, we will also be running a pitch competition, so if you want to be considered for this please get in touch (criteria for pitching and contact details are below). This is your chance to get in front of the TechCrunch audience.

We’re putting this event on with a number of great partners. Our Location sponsor is Zanox, a global market leader for performance-based online marketing. Our media partner is Gruenderszene, the magazine for founders and people interested in founding a company. Sevenload, the social media network for Web TV, will be streaming the event live onto TechCrunch.com. And Seedcamp, the Europe-wide travelling startup competition, will be working with us on content and we’ll be showcasing the winners of Seedcamp Berlin the previous day (June 9). We’ll obviously also be doing a wrap-up post after-wards, talking about the startups that pitched and any other news from the event.

TechCrunch Europe is putting together a round-table event in Stockholm on May 27. TechCrunchTalk Nordic, at the Elite Palace Hotel, St Eriksgatan 115, Stockholm (3pm to 8pm), will be an afternoon of panel discussions, presentations and pitches followed by a networking reception. We’ll be bringing together the startup, Angel and VC communities together to debate the next phase of the startup world in Scandinavia, Finland and the Baltic countries - which should make for a lively discussion. Please get your ticket here. Our speakers so far include Pär-Jörgen Pärsson from the VC firm Northzone Ventures, and Angel Gambino, formerly of Bebo. TechCrunchTalk Nordic is sponsored by Bloglovin and Sunstone Capital.

Stupeflix is a French startup which has come up with a radically new way of creating, processing and editing online video. On the face of it, Stupeflix automatically generates professional looking videos out of pictures, music and videos. If that sounds like Animoto, then you are right, but there are key differences under the hood which make Stupeflix totally different and potentially of much greater value. And I don’t say that lightly.

Where Animoto and Stupeflix completely diverge is in their approach and business model. Stupeflix has effectively come up with an API which describes video, text, using and pictures in flash video based on an XML description. So instead of actually editing the video you edit the XML. That means you can edit video just by changing a tag, or by telling their engine to run a different kind of effect for every video you wants to generate. iMovie would create just one video, and requires a meaty package to edit how it’s presented. With Stupeflix you just edit the XML, with tags like “rotate” or “fade left”. Today Stupeflix launches the web interface to its video editing web application and as a demonstration they’ve generated over 1,000 videos direct from Wikipedia content, automatically, in under 60 minutes.

Today Aroxo launches an ambitious play, aiming to create a brand new space in between online retailing and the auction model - specifically targeting eBay. This is, put simply, the thousands of years old process of buyers and sellers haggling over price put into an online model. But there is more to it that that, since it also brings pre-qualified leads to sellers who want to offload inventory quickly. And unlike the group-buying models of old, it can dish out instant sales. Unlike on Priceline, buyers can negotiate the price and aren’t initially committed to a purchase. It can be an anonymous disposal system for the supplier, or they can brand the hell out of it with their logo, the works. It’s the sort of site that could well appeal to recession-hit retailers and backyard eBay businesses.

IRLConnect (as in, ‘in real life connect’) is one of those new social-networks-meets-maps startups, but what sets them apart is some pretty cool integration, a focus on live video and a tantalizing business model based on owning the virtual equivalent of real estate. Today they launch into a public beta after being invite-only since September last year.

The site is bringing together mobile devices and multiple social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, into a very visual platform. As well as integrating YouTube video onto their Google map, they’re pulling in partners including pictures from Mobypicture and live video from Bambuser. It will also pull in geotagged content from YouTube and news alerts from media such as CNN and Reuters.

Here you’ll find the live video stream from Geek’n Rolla, a day-long conference created by TechCrunch Europe for European early stage tech startups old and new to share real, hard-core knowledge about their experiences. Here is our agenda and speaker line-up.

Geek’n Rolla is sponsored by Viadeo one of the largest professional social networks in the world, and supported by UK Trade and Investment, as well as NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. Not only will we be having a great day of content for startups, we are planning the mother of all evening networking parties at one of London’s premier venues, Cafe de Paris, kindly sponsored by Winston & Strawn’s Bootlaw. Doug Richard’s School for Startups is our Strategic Event Partner. Speaker gifts and competition prizes are donated by Park Lane Champagne.

Oracle Corporation is to buy Sun Microsystems for $9.50 a share in a deal valued at approximately $7.4 billion, just a few weeks after a deal by IBM to buy Sun fell apart. It looks like Oracle will pay a premium of $2.81 a share, or 42%, over Sun Micro’s closing price of $6.69 a share on Friday.

Oracle said the deal is valued at $5.6 billion excluding cash and debt. Oracle is calling Sun’s Java “the most important software” it has ever acquired. The deal, which is expected to close in the Summer and was unanimously approved by Sun’s board of directors, has massive implications for the future openness of Java and MySQL.

The official release, after the jump: