The meeting came literally days after Rupoert Murdoch said he was considering withdrawing his vast newspaper empire from Google’s index, despite the possibility of losing a lot of traffic.

What was discussed provides a glimpse of what newspaper publishers may do next, and how Bing will collude in this new war on Google.

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The debate is an important one, in part because Seedcamp, as the only Pan-european YCombinator-style organisation, now has a position that is largely unmatched at this level. That is at once a great thing for Europe – afterall, there was nothing else like it before, and Europe really needed a pan-European Seed fund which could also educate young startups. It’s also a potential challenge both for Seedcamp to explain how it operates – after all, despite its laudable openness to date, let’s not forget it’s a business – and for those that want to sit outside the burgeoning Seedcamp ecosystem.

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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.

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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.

It’s also positioned as a parent/teen solution competing (kind of) with PayPal Student Accounts, because, like the latter, you could give your student son or daughter a PayPhrase which access your account which doesn’t actually access your account controls. PayPhrase lets parents track spending and set account permissions/alerts/etc.

There are other participating websites which will be implementing PayPhrase, including DKNY.com, Jockey.com, and Buy.com that already accept by Amazon’s Checkout service. Of course, earlier this month, eBay came up with its Bill Me Later deferred payment option for both eBay and PayPal which will be carried by Toys R Us, Zappos.com, Petco and Wal-Mart among others.

However, how many people are not going to have a cutesy phrase and default instead to something like “Dad’s Birthday”. All you then need do is type in a plausible month and day like “0820″ for the PIN and… voila! And how many people will just use “1234″ for their PIN? Plenty.

What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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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%.

In particular 4% of ‘young people’ do their searches for local information on social sites like Facebook. That figure can only grow:

It’s interesting that traditional directories remain strong. Internet Yellow Pages type sites sites gained ground, from 19% usage last year to 21% this year. As you’d expect, print directories declined 3%, but I would have thought flat directory type sites would be going down.

Anyhoo, more interestingly, mobile search is booming, with 32% of searchers with internet-capable cellphones now searching for local business information, an 11% increase from 2008. Some 60% of smartphone owners search either via their on-board browsers or via applications, and you can bet most of those will be iPhone users.

I love the stat that shows that only 5% of mobile searchers send text messages from their cellphones to directory assistance. I mean why would you – you’re already on the Web?

However, SMS is convenient and growing – overall, the number of mobile users who got their local information via SMS increased by 27%.

The study also shows that the most popular local content categories searched on mobile are directories (42%), maps (41%), restaurants (37%) and movies (30%).

[Hat tip to Marketing Vox]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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