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The German Yelp counterpart Qype is continuing its expansion. This time they are heading south and have launched an Italian version of their review website. As with Yelp, Qype members evaluate businesses, places or services such as bars, restaurants, stores, petrol stations, nurseries, doctors, pet shops or sports clubs.

While Qype is multilingual, it treats each localized version as its own site. You’ll never run across a review in French if you’ve specified your preferred language as English. Qype users in Italy will not only find loads of already written reviews in their own language, they can also use the popular Qype radar for mobiles. That’s a nifty freeware application for iPhone and Android devices which shows nearby businesses and uses GPS. In the UK Qype competes with TrustedPlaces, Spoonfed and a handful of other players.

The move makes sense. Italy is Qype’s 10th market. The first countries of launch, Germany, UK and France, remain it’s core markets and are largely responsible for more than 350,000 Qype reviewers and more than a million reviews. Founded in 2005, Qype claims to be Europe’s largest review portal with more than 14 million users. It also operates in Spain, Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, Poland and Brazil.

Founder Stephan Uhrenbacher, who remains Qype’s largest private shareholder, has recently moved to a back seat on the board after deciding to bring in Stephen Taylor, a former Yahoo! Europe head honcho, as CEO. Uhrenbacher is now hunting for aspiring founders to launch new business ideas out of his Upspring vehicle.

A number of significant developments have emerged today in the SpinVox saga. Andrew Orlowski at the Register broke the story this afternoon that former Alcatel-Lucent CEO Patricia Russo joined the firm as a director on 2 June 2009, only to leave on 10 August. Russo is one of the most high-profile business women in the US and would have been a terrific asset to SpinVox given her experience and connections in the telecoms industry. But she left as quickly (and quietly) as she had arrived. Why?

Meanwhile, word reaches us that SpinVox finally has a CFO: John Botts, who has been on the board of directors since August 2006. SpinVox has had no CFO since August 2008, when Andrew Cherry left. SpinVox has a high turnover of financial staff: since June 2008, two high-level executives have come and gone. How long will Botts stick it? More to the point, why has Botts taken the role at all? He’s a high-powered banker and deal-maker, far too experienced to be CFO of a start-up. What’s going on?

One source we just spoke commented that John Botts coming in as CFO “is like Mandelson coming in as Deputy PM. Botts is semi-retired!” In other words, this appears to be a fall-back position after the hasty departure of Russo.

Here’s a pie chart (via paidContent:uk) of SpinVox’s equity split, as of July 8. It shows Christina Domecq holding 16.93% of the company’s shares.

You can add these revelations to the growing number of resignations at SpinVox from staff further down the food chain. Each one seems to be accompanied by cryptic remarks:

Travel search and price comparison site Skyscanner has just been upgraded with a “holiday search” function, adding deals from Thomas Cook, Airtours and others. It offers total itineraries from these providers, rather than just flights. From today, it can tap into 35 million holidays. Trips can be searched by destination, duration and the type of trip and then compared by price, star rating and so on.

There’s a lot of competition in this space: Skyscanner is up against some very big and established players, including Kayak.co.uk. But it’s an attractive site with a pretty UI, and don’t forget that a lot of the competition, such as FlySpy, is US-based and US-centric. But Skyscanner, like Dealchecker’s holiday section, is focussed on Europe.

O2 Germany will not block VoIP services like Skype any more and has no plans to charge extra for their usage. Until now, all four German mobile network operators had banned the use of mobile VoIP in their terms of services. Technically it was possible to use it, bt it was verboten. But O2 clients can now use internet telephony like any other data service with O2’s internet packs and their cellphones. That is a fairly striking blow against bigger competitors T-Mobile and Vodafone, which at first wanted to block Skype in their networks and now try to charge extra. Internet telephony puts their juicy profits from international phone calls in danger.

In April, Deutsche Telekom said it would block the use of Skype on the iPhone (and on Blackberry) for its German mobile network customers and at its Wifi hotspots. Skype would overstrain the 3G network, said T-Mobile spokesperson Alexander von Schmettow. Skype called this a blatant lie. “They pretend that their action has to do with technical concerns: this is baseless“, General Counsel Robert Miller wrote on Skype’s company blog.

T-Mobile and Vodafone were even planning to boycott Nokia’s latest flagship device, German daily DIE WELT reported, because Skype will soon come pre-installed on the new Nokia N97 devices and will be deeply integrated into the device’s address book. Russia may even ban Skype entirely to protect domestic firms.

T-Mobile Germany now tries to charge €9.95 per month for a VoIP option because its “always on” nature causes “extra costs”. But O2 Germany doesn’t seem to have such problems. “We have one of the most modern and fastest mobile data networks in Europe. Our clients should experience it without constraints, no matter whether they are surfing, do e-mails, instant messaging or even making phone calls”, says Lutz Schüler, CEO for sales and marketing at Telefónica O2 Germany. “By opening our mobile highspeed network for VoIP services we set new benchmarks for the mobile Internet.“

O2’s network reaches nearly 100 per cent of the population, today’s press release states. They offer HSDPA with 7,2 Mbps in “big parts of Germany” and also HSUPA for fast uploads up to 1,4 Mbps. This is more than enough for Skype which even works on dial-up connection with 33.6Kbps. O2’s Internet-Pack-M costs €10 and allows 200 MB of usage at HSDPA speed, before it gets throttled to slow GPRS, this should allow 2 hours of Skype calls to every country in the world.

Yesterday, Twicli, the photo and video sharing utility for Twitter, rolled out a set of new features. There’s now audio support, you can tag friends in photos and a friend activity feature helps you keep track of what others are up to.

There’s a new “multimedia tweet box” which gives you more control over how your tweets appear and “mixed content sets” that enable you to tweet a single link to multiple items. Twicli’s profile pages also look more like Twitter’s now, since they’re importing your background and avatar.

And there’s more to come: tagging people in video and audio will be available soon, along with Facebook integration, an API and an iPhone app. I don’t use the service myself, but I’m getting some good feedback about it from others. For more information, you can follow @TwicliStaff on Twitter or drop the guys at Twicli an email.

Gogul (sound familiar?) a new browser project specifically designed for at safe-searching and surfing for children has launched in Russia - but it has shades of China’s infamous Green Dam project. The new online service, consisting of a search engine and Internet Explorer add-on, allows parents to control their kid’s internet access - in other words it’s a kind of Net Nanny software. This allows parents to set the schedule and duration of their child’s internet usage and get the detailed statistics of the pages they visit. It’s pretty standard stuff in this realm. In addition Gogul (love that name!) will only provide access to pre-approved pages and will prevent the launching of any new browser windows that aren’t ‘on the list’.

But parents aren’t fully in control here. The “approved content” consists of over 7,000 Russian web sites which are filtered by a select and slightly shadowy team that consist of parents, professional child psychologists and teachers. The backers of the project are planning to categorize web-pages on an age-based basis and provide additional features till the end of the summer when the new school season will start in Russia.

The browser software is free now, but there are hints that it could become a commercial project. Why? Well an unknown benefactor has invested 15 million rubles (350,000 EUR) in Gogul - so one wonders of they are just doing it for the good of the kiddies?

Gogul has already provoked a lot of - largely negative - feedback on Russian forums, usually related to the controversial design of the website and software, it’s name and ideological connection with an infamous government project called School Portal. My favorite quote from the forums: “… even more, Gogul doesn’t search the word ‘Putin’.”

Scoreloop has just announced it closed its second financing round, with a $2.8 million / €2 million cash injection from new investors Earlybird and existing investor Target Partners, which was the seed funder for the Munich-based company. The funds will be used to fuel the growth of the company and to establish (or solidify) its position, especially in the realm of the iPhone. Since launching its technology in May 2009, Scoreloop has over 500 registered game developers that have published more than 40 Scoreloop enabled games in the iPhone App Store.

So one month after the release of its community application Scoreloop finds a great validation for its product, while Earlybird gets in on one of the most interesting new business areas around.

Scoreloop offers an SDK for mobile game developers that instantly adds social gaming to their applications with features such as challenges and a points system. The company offers its technology for free to developers and monetizes on the points system. To understand better how it works and I suggest you sign up on their community and challenge me (Plus: they have one of the most amazing facebook connect apps I’ve seen).

“We are continuously receiving excellent feedback from game developers and publishers, as Scoreloop offers a unique set of tools for social features and monetization strategies. We are thrilled to be working with two of Europe’s premier VCs with Earlybird as an additional partner beside our existing investor Target Partners.” said Marc Gumpinger, CEO of Scoreloop.

Marc Gumpinger, Scoreloop’s CEO is understandably pleased. Since launching its technology in May 2009, Scoreloop has over 500 registered game developers that have published more than 40 Scoreloop enabled games in the Apple App Store today.

Roland Manger says this is a new market for its fund and Scoreloop fills a gap in their portfolio. Earlybird was looking to get into the new mobile market, without a particular interest in gaming technologies until they found Scoreloop. He points at their significant growth potential: “Scoreloop’s technology and the community platform solve many problems both developers and users are facing in the mobile app-world. Scoreloop will help developers make their games more attractive while improving monetization and users will be able to find games relevant to them much quicker.”

In Amsterdam today, the makers of mobile Augmented Reality (AR) browser Layar announced version 2.0 of the browser as well as a slew of new layars which have been produced since they opened up their API to developers. A ‘layar’ is information overlaid on the camera view of your mobile phone, e.g. the asking price of an apartment for sale in the building your camera is pointed at.  Layar will be pre-installed on the new Samsung Galaxy Android phone about to be released in the Netherlands and the Android version of the browser is available for download in the Android app store. The iPhone version will be available as soon as Apple updates its API to allow access to the iPhone camera.

Bruce Sterling on AR

The Layar event was opened by science fiction writer and Wired editor Bruce Sterling who has been blogging recently about the augmented reality scene.  He pointed out that the biggest language bases for AR are actually Korean and Dutch with English coming in third. Similarly, the greatest interest is not in San Francisco but places like Singapore, Lisbon and Amsterdam. Could this be a new tech industry which does not revolve around Silicon Valley?

He described AR as a “technovisionary’s dream come true” but warned of trouble ahead for the fledging industry as it will face all the problems which accompany any technology with massive commercial potential, e.g. the AR equivalents of spam and online criminalty, the Gartner hype cycle, the environmental impact. He imagined a “Crack dealers layar” or “Neo-nazi’s occupation guide to Amsterdam”.  Sterling also gave the audience a metric for maturity in their industry - when AR people have a characteristic, and expensive, look (”All Web 2.0 people took the same”). He was guessing it would not be dissimilar to the look of chic, off-duty Hollywood executives. If only we had more fashion talk in tech presentations.

Brightkite Augmented Reality from Brightkite on Vimeo.

Building a Layar

Building a new layar is pretty straightforward using the Layar API. A layar can be customised via a simple web form and an Android APK is available for testing. Full info is available on the Layar Wiki. The layars announced in today’s event range from Sapporo hot spots, Poetry in motion (geotagged poems), celebrity sightings and city soundwalks to mobile coupons. There are also plenty of layars for navigation, tourism and real-estate applications. 500 new developer keys were also released today so join the revolution and start building your own layar now.

Both on TechCrunch.com, and by our own efforts on TechCrunch Europe, we try to do two things: 1) cover the tech market journalistically 2) engage with the market as player and commentator, trying to push things forward. We do the latter most often by highlighting new startups, companies and individuals we think the wider market should hear about. But the majority of the time we actually take a pretty upbeat view of things, especially at TechCrunch Europe. Why? Because the market for tech startups remains at a relatively early stage here. Yes we could argue long and hard about what stage it’s at, but generally speaking the majority of the stuff we come across is often still in development. That will probably be the case for a while, but it doesn’t mean we can’t cover it. When I first started writing about Favorit three years ago, Nick Halstead was just another crazy geek with this mad idea to build a new platform for blog comments. Guess what? It didn’t work, but we covered him and eventually that platform became the basis for Tweetmeme, a hugely successful Twitter aggregator and platform. When we started writing about Huddle in 2007, Andy McLoughlin and Alastair Mitchell had a seemingly insane idea to take on the mighty BaseCamp. In 2008 they are the only collaboration partner for LinkedIn and a Europas winner.

But there is another side to our support for the startup community. We get to ask questions. That’s our role. We’re part of the media, but, crucially, we’re also part of the community itself. We hang out with tech companies and tech people all the time. TechCrunch Europe is part of the eco-system. We’re like fertiliser - not only are we able to nurture, but just occasionally we are forced to pour a bucket of shit over something, just so that something new and better can grow up.

Which brings me to the entire story surrounding Spinvox right now and certain commentators who seem suggest that TCE and other parts of the media are ‘out to get them’.

So here’s the deal.

We are not out to get anyone. We are here to report facts. We can prod. We can speculate within reason. We can ask questions. That’s what we do. We’re not playwrights, we’re critics. Hopefully we’re not completely cynical ones (although having to wade through some of the dross we get every day, it’s sometimes a tempting course).

The startups are the ones writing and performing “the plays”. And because we know how hard it is for you guys to start up (no, we’re not entrepreneurs but like many human beings we are capable of empathy) more often than not we give new startups a fair fearing. Let’s see now: here’s some good news from MaxRoam,
here’s something from iDesktop.tv, here’s a nice write-up about a new incubator.

I could go on.

But when startups have been around for a little while we still get to cover them, warts and all.

Plus, guess, what? You guys get to hit back. You get to punch us with your blogs, Tweets, comments, you name it. We’re up for this, because it actually makes us a better media vehicle. And I’m not just talking about page impressions. I’m saying we get better when we interact with our readers - or should I say co-producers - in our market.

Which is why, when Julie Meyer, founder of Ariadne Capital and a backer and investor in Spinvox, started hitting back at the media about the criticisms of Spinvox, I was not surprised. In July she wrote: “Spinvox is a turbo-charged, over-the-top success story of which the UK should be enormously proud… We owe our entrepreneurs in the UK to be rooting for them when they go global, not pissing at them from outside the tent.”

Kerpow! Go Julie! Fair enough. You’re a huge backer of Spinvox, why shouldn’t you hit back?

Now, I have known Julie for a reasonable number of years. We quoted her when I was editing New Media Age magazine back in the late 1990s, when she was a founder of First Tuesday. We put her on the cover of The Industry Standard Europe magazine in 2001 (if I only had that cover image to hand!). I’ve sat on panels with Julie, I’ve talked to her on record and off record many times.

But I’m going to respectfully disagree with her position on Spinvox, and here’s why.

First, I’ll leave aside the fact she’s conflicted. Ariadne Capital is an investment and advisory firm and is a shareholder and advisor to SpinVox. It’s not a venture capital fund (when the BBC often quotes Julie, they call her a VC - for the record, she’s not a VC) but a closed Angel investor network “backed by 50 entrepreneurs - the founders of some of the most successful companies in the world” says their site. Here are Ariadne’s investor members for instance.

Ariadne is really Julie’s amazing network, built up over a number of years. All props to her for that. Props also to Julie for creating EntrepreneurCountry a sort of hybrid media vehicle which promotes entrepreneurship and startups, and Ariadne investments. I’m a fan of Julie’s championing of the entrepreneur.

But I can no longer sit around and read the pronouncements by Julie on her blog and on EntrepreneurCountry to the effect that we should all stop asking Spinvox some very pertinent questions and start being “proud” of them. This is, respectfully, unrealistic. This is not how the world works.

(A brief aside: Spinvox is still not answering lots of unanswered questions (like, why, with £200m in funding does it not have a CFO, or what percentage of voicemails pass through call centres, or why does it now insert “(?)” into text when no-one ever spells that out?). The tragedy of Spinvox seems to be two-fold: First saying it could scale with its voice to text algorithm, not by adding call centres; Second by managing expectations - perhaps it should never have mentioned the D2 technology? But I digress.)

My main point is, we won’t get a world-beating startup eco-system in Europe EVER if all we ever do is be NICE to companies. Feeding the market good news all the time is the equivalent of gorging on pure fat. The muscles don’t develop, the brain turns to mush and no-one ever learns anything.

Julie is a big fan of Ayn Rand who championed a purist form of laissez-faire capitalism. Well, I’m sure even Ayn Rand would agree with this: A well-functioning market economy needs a free press.

And while I know we can’t, in Europe, reproduce the bizarre accident of history that is Silicon Valley (WWII + the military + Computers + geography), we can at least learn from the ballsy culture (an American culture which Julie hails from I might add) which knocks its companies and entrepreneurs into shape every day with a double shot espresso of excoriating critique combined with a little “wow, that’s awesome” now and then.

When criticised, entrepreneurs there don’t just get angry. They get better. And that’s what Spinvox should be doing right now. If it really wants to answer its critics, the best revenge will be to come out swinging - use it’s new £15m cash injection to good effect, get a frigging CFO and get cracking.

Perhaps they will? According to Julie Spinvox is already “profitable” and “conversion revenue is going through the roof - just like a J curve … damn impressive”.

Great, fine. I’ll be first in line to break that news if and when it comes. They have my mobile.

But Spinvox sending in battalions from Ariadne telling the world the bloggers are crazy doesn’t make sense. Bloggers love that stuff! Haven’t you heard?

In a wider sense, and to be frank, the whole “we’re great here in Europe schtick” is good, and a healthy redress to those that say Europe can’t produce the “Googles” of this world. But we can’t let it lull us into a false sense of security. I recently held an event in Stockholm where a guy on a panel lauded the idea of “mini-entrepreneurialism”. Fair enough, each to their own. But thinking small, local, regional, “lifestyle”, is not going to produce the global success stories of tomorrow. Julie knows that, so why is she asking us to suddenly think like “Little Englanders?” I don’t know, which is why this post is in part a sort of ‘letter to a friend’ to think again about what they are saying.

And there is another point to be made here.

It’s all very well people saying they would love to have the “forgiveness for failure” culture in Europe which apparently exists in Silicon Valley. I hear that thought expressed time and time again. And I agree. Europeans are way too hard on their colleagues when a venture goes wrong - especially when the entrepreneur explains what happened. But when someone does really screw up, innocently or maliciously, or if a company is in fact just not very good then its behoves the press to point this out to the market so it can decide and learn.

Julie blogs: “We have to create a “better story” - a common psychology that says - it’s simply a better place to be to be charting our success as a nation by how many global leaders we build as opposed to how many we prevent from happening by tearing them down.

Again, I disagree. That simply creates a world of people who just think what they do is great, independent of reality.

If you want the “acceptance of failure culture” that is legendary in Silicon Valley then you’ll have to have the kind of press that - as well as celebrates the good stuff - also meticulously details failures. This is tough love, but it’s got to happen. If you have ever been “TechCrunched” by Michael Arrrington you will know it. Arrington is best Product Journalist in the business, and a startup that doesn’t take his advice does so at their peril.

And let’s not forget how lauded Spinvox has been for the past few years. The questions have only reached a crescendo in the last few months. Look at this report from the BBC’s Newsnight programme in 2007. It’s practically a love letter.

So, the next time someone whines about their coverage, ask them if they want the freedom to fail, be accepted back and given another chance? Because taking a few knocks, having your say in return, then dusting yourself off and getting on with it is exactly how you get that culture.

Carsonified’s Future of Web Apps London 2009 will be held between 30 September and 2 October at Kensington Town Hall. There’s a day of workshops on day one, followed by the conference proper on 1 and 2 October, featuring speakers like Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) and Digg founder Kevin Rose (@kevinrose). Michael Arrington (@arrington) will be present via video link-up to deliver the results of the 2009 TechCrunch Web App survey (which it’s not too late to complete). Naturally, TechCrunch Europe will be there too, reporting on how it all goes down.

But more about the luminaries later. Let’s look today at the three new start-ups who will be launching live on stage in front of Reshma Sohoni (@rsohoni) from Seedcamp and our own Mike Butcher (@mikebutcher).

Aware Monitoring promises to offer a new way to measure website and web application performance, with on-demand monitoring and SMS alerts for when something goes wrong. They’re promising an intuitive but powerful dashboard and an API. It will also generate independent performance reports that can be shared with your customers. Is Aware looking to take on Google Analytics? I guess we’ll find out. You can sign up for a beta invitation for the service here.

Broadersheet is a news aggregator that learns about your news preferences to present an intelligent digest of the news that matters to you with recommendations of new content you might like. It has social sharing functions and works offline, too. Broadersheet is launching as an app for the iPhone. For beta sign-ups go here.

Go Test It is a compatibility testing utility that lets you test whether your web app works properly across all browsers. According to the founders, Go Test It is the quickest way to build a new test suite to prevent regressions”. It apparently has some fancy scripting features as well that I’m sure they guys will demo on the day. Sign up here for a FOWA promotional offer.

So. Three startups. Two terrifying “dragons”. I can’t wait to see how they get on.

Oh, and here’s a tip: if you’re coming along to FOWA, don’t forget to check out HelloApp. It’s very cool.