India Calling Cards

[UK] Self-employed ad man Sam Butterfield , who describes himself as “an ideas person”, has created possibly the world’s most pointless iPhone application iPhone Pilot . That said, with its ability to turn grown men into excited children, it may also be a work of pure genius. The app turns the iPhone itself into a WW2 fighter plane that you hold in your hand and fly around the room, accompanied by flying and shooting noises, and attachable paper wings

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Turn your iPhone into a WWII fighter? Yes, there’s an app for that too

I’ve never understood the attraction of CES . Why in January – a month set aside for recovering from the excesses of the holiday season – thousands of people would fly to Las Vegas for a gigantic tradeshow.

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NSFW: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crunchies

[France] Nomao defines itself as a personnalized search engine. It helps you to find places, based on what you like or what you Facebook friends like and where you are. Their search is using not only the data they have about the places, but also what they found on the web about them (a kind of aggregator)

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Nomao iPhone app brings Augmented Reality to its local search engine

Welcome to 2010 and the first weekly roundup of the mobile phone news stories you may have missed this week.  With the CES show in Las Vegas just getting under way, we should be seeing more than a few new handsets and mobile accessories – speaking of which… 1.  LG Calm Windows Mobile 7 Fears.

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Top Ten Mobile Phone News Stories of the Week

For weeks now, the Google Phone has hogged the spotlight, and it doesn’t look like things are about to change. The first ever Google Phone is already being shipped, sim-free to the USA, UK, Hong-Kong and Singapore, but as yet no carriers are taking it outside of the US.

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Vodafone’s Getting the Google Phone…

Total Telecom is reporting the the Nexus One handset will actually be available on several networks here in the UK. Vodafone was initially reported as carrying the device here but now there’s news that T-Mobile UK and 3 UK are in negotiations to support the handset from “Spring 2010″. A T-Mobile spokesman stated that.

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Nexus One could be headed to T-Mo UK and 3 UK

[UK] The UK government today announced that its Next Generation Fund will invest £1 billion to help bring “super-fast broadband” to 90% of the country by 2017, particularly rural households and businesses who might otherwise be left out of so-called Digital Britain. The “additional” investment will be funded directly by the British tax payer as a continuation of the “duty of 50p on all fixed lines”, which was previously announced in the Digital Britain White Paper as part of the government’s unambitious ‘Universal Service Commitment’ to deliver broadband speeds of 2Mbps broadband to the whole country by 2012.

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UK’s Next Generation Fund to invest £1 billion in “super-fast broadband”

[Luxembourg] Jamendo , a community of free, legal music published with Creative Commons licenses, is actively looking to sell to or merge with another company, TechCrunch Europe has learned. Jamendo CEO Laurent Kratz has confirmed rumors that had made their way to Twitter earlier this week. The reason is fairly simple: Jamendo is running out of money after failing to raise a follow-up round of venture capital

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Digital music startup Jamendo runs out of steam, mulls sale

OpenFund , an Athens-based seed level Venture Firm, has announced the first bunch of startups selected for funding. Besides the actual funding, which is between €20-30k for a 20% equity stake in the company, OpenFund provides a four-month incubation period. In this round, OpenFund selected four companies in total, one from the UK (its founders are from Slovakia), one from Ukraine, and two startups from Greece

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Greek seed level OpenFund announces first winners, applications open again

The Chicago-based Groupon has been valued at $280 million after closing their recent $30 million venture round with Accel Partners and previous investors. Clearly Groupon’s new take on group buying is a hot space right now

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European startups scramble to emulate the Groupon explosion

[UK] TweetSwitch is a new project from the team behind London-based Comufy , the communications platform for businesses. Built on top of Comufy’s technology, TweetSwitch provides a simple but deceptively powerful service, enabling you to send and receive Twitter updates via various Instant Messaging (IM) clients.

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TweetSwitch – send, receive and filter tweets by IM

As the world awaits the announcement and introduction of numerous new gadgets at CES 2010, being held Jan. 7-10 in Las Vegas, Nevada, Google has gotten ahead of the curve and has launched the Nexus One Smartphone. The Nexus One Smartphone is the first mobile phone designed and marketed by the search engine giant.

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Nexus One – Google Phone – Prepares For Lift-Off

Business social network LinkedIn has set up its first office in Continental Europe, and announced today that it will be led by Eugenie van Wiechen , who previously led eBay.nl / Marktplaats.nl in the Netherlands as Managing Director. The new offices were set up at the World Trade Center in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport

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LinkedIn opens first office in mainland Europe, based in Amsterdam

Badoo , a social network popular in emerging markets like Russia and Brazil, has been banned in Iran. As of December 2009 Badoo says it had broken the 50 million user mark globally, with 250,000 of those coming from Iran. Pictured is the text that comes up when trying to access Badoo from inside Iran

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Social network Badoo is banned in Iran

[Germany] While others hunted for presents, Germany’s most prolific startup founders used the holiday season to collect even more investor money and to start another company.

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Samwer brothers pump millions from France and Sweden into their German startups

3G Auction Delayed,Yet Again The Indian Government seems to have lost it way with the much awaited 3G auctions.If the Department of Telecom(DoT) is to beleived , the official 3g auctions might get delayed by a more than a month and start around the first week of March.DoT is yet to finalise the Notice Inviting Applications. The 3G hype has been doing the rounds for quite sometime but it got delayed on a regular basis.India despite being one of the largest growing telecom network, is still waiting in wings to have access to the 3G network.More than that, the spectrum being offered is one of the lowest too. The government has estimated to generate over Rs 25,000 crore (Rs 250 billion) from the sale of 3G spectrum.

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Telecom Tuesday: 3G Auctions, Advertisments,Mobile Banking

To go along with the shiny new iTunes 9.0.2 and Apple TV 3.0 software released today, Apple has also bumped their Remote app [Free - iTunes link] to version 1.3.2, which: “provides bug fixes and compatibility with iTunes 9 and Apple TV 3″ If you have an Apple TV and haven’t tried the latest version This is a story by the iPhone Blog . This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store . Apple iPhone/iPod touch Remote App Updated to Support iTunes 9.0.2 and Apple TV 3.0

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Apple iPhone/iPod touch Remote App Updated to Support iTunes 9.0.2 and Apple TV 3.0

I’m currently blogging from a boat, rented by Belgian social network operator Netlog to host about a hundred of their closest business partners for a presentation about their freshly redesigned website and a roadmap of what’s in store for the future. In their presentation, co-founders Toon Coppens and Lorenz Bogaert introduced something other than the newly revamped site. The company has also been developing a separately branded social gaming platform called Gatcha! which was talked about publicly for the first time today

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Netlog launches Gatcha!, a cross-network social game distribution platform

MacRumors has been tipped that users attempting to make purchases in iTunes today are being greeted with new Terms of Service (TOS) which include the following, tantalizing line: The Terms of Sale have been revised to clarify that you can now use iTunes LPs and iTunes Extras on Apple TV with software version 3.0 This is a story by the iPhone Blog . This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store . iTunes TOS Leak Apple TV 3.0 with iTunes LP and iTunes Extra Support

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iTunes TOS Leak Apple TV 3.0 with iTunes LP and iTunes Extra Support

Today, Netlog – the ‘European MySpace’ as they’re often referred to – is hosting a Partner Day at and around their global headquarters in Ghent, Belgium. The most important thing the company will be sharing is a look at their redesigned website, which has been in the works for about a year and is today being rolled out to a number of key countries. I got an exclusive preview of the revamped website from co-founder Toon Coppens , so here’s an impression of what it will look like and where they’re going with the social network.

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Netlog gets a major makeover, now growing at 500,000 users a week

The Droid has been somewhat sprung on us.  Problem ridden Motorola have done nothing of note seemingly since the V3, then surprised us all with the DEXT – a very capable but hardly groundbreaking new Android phone – so now they have unleashed a red-eyed robot to destroy the world!  No, that’s not right, what they’ve released is a mobile phone with a red-eye motif that just could see them make a return to the dizzy heights they achieved in the early 2000s. At first we knew it as the Sholes, then as a standalone phone made with Verizon, but now as the first in what seems like a line of phones, all under the Droid umbrella.  This phone however, has the Droid nametag all to itself and is a touchscreen handset with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, running Android 2.0 as its operating system, giving it the honour of being the first smartphone to do so.  Seeing as it was mere weeks ago we were introduced to the Droid, and not that long before to the Sholes; it’s surprising that the new phone will be released on the 6th November !  Now that’s the type of turnaround we like – are you listening Sony Ericsson?

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The Motorola Droid Hits Verizon USA.

Y combinator’s annual startup school event was held in Berkeley last Saturday and featured a stellar lineup of speakers including the founders of Twitter, Facebook and Zappos. The founders speaking were almost universally charming and funny, even Mark Zuckerberg who I was determined to dislike (he does look around 12 though). This reinforces my belief that charm goes a long way in business

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Startup School 2009: 37 Signals has some lessons for European startups

[UK] We’d been hearing whispers that Atlas-backed discount fashion buying club Koodos was looking at its ‘options’, but we’ve confirmed today that it was yesterday acquired by the e-trader group which specialises in the onwards sale of surplus stock. The price is undisclosed but it’s a cash and shares deal which we understand to be in the vicinity of less than £250,000. In other words, that is pretty cheap, especially for a VC-backed business

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Atlas-backed Koodos sold to E-trader group, at a discount

Google Powermeter , the search giant’s home energy monitoring tool, has launched in the UK today. While the environment stands to benefit – research shows that when users have access to detailed information about their energy use, household energy bills are reduced by up to 10% – Cambridge, UK-based AlertMe should also do quite well out of this. The VC-backed company has become Google’s first device partner for the service

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UK launch for Google Powermeter via AlertMe – but please don’t tweet your light switch

Vodafone and Apple today confirmed that they have reached agreement to offer iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS in the UK in early 2010.  This announcement follows on the heels of Orange’s own announcement yesterday that they would be joining O2 in offering the iPhone in the UK, bringing the total number of operators offering the iPhone in the UK to three.  Our office speculates that T-Mobile may soon offer the iPhone to its customers as well due to their merger with Orange. The Telegraph reports rumours that Virgin Mobile are also attempting to secure the right to sell the iPhone

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Vodafone to Offer iPhone in Early 2010

The GMSA Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona could have been a great place for Google to demonstrate progress establishing Android in the industry, but instead the open-source operating system showed only a slightly larger toehold. Google has high hopes for Android, which the company launched in an effort to spur smartphone development, mobile use of the Web, and new search advertising. Although Android certainly isn’t vaporware, and Google’s clout makes the effort a serious challenge to other operating systems, so far Android’s potential exceeds its real-world presence

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Android skips Barcelona’s mobile-phone party

The 2008 Owner Manager of the Year is: Darren Steinhardt Managing Director, Infocus Wealth Management – representing the Sunshine Coast Darren has worked to revolutionize the Australian financial services industry, and his company is recognised as one of the industry’s fastest growing enterprises. The Infocus Group employs 400 individuals, has 53 franchises, and manages over $3 billion on behalf of 31 million clients.

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And the winner is…

The Australian Institute of Management would like to congratulate all the finalists in the 2008 Management Excellence Awards, and the Queensland Managers of the Year: Professional Manager of the Year: Ian Gillespie Chief Executive Officer, RACQ Owner Manager of the Year: Darren Steinhardt Managing Director, Infocus Wealth Management Young Manager of the Year: Rick Coker Engineering Manager, Russell Mining Equipment Pty Ltd Rural/Remote Manager of the Year: Geoffrey Pike Managing Director, General Trade Industries Pty Ltd

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Congratulations to all our finalists