The European “Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications” that regulates the ways websites can track users, is coming to sites which serve European users, which covers plenty out there. The Directive requires that sites disclose the use of cookies on their site and allows visitors to opt-in to their use. It could be an immediate turn-off for users, but it’s here to stay. On Saturday, May 26, the UK implements the first phase of the law, so website owners are scrambling to ensure they are in compliance (assuming they even know about it). As we’ve said before, we think it’s dumb and will make it much harder on European startups.

The first requirement of the UK law is that sites do an audit to determine what cookies are used on their site. The Directive asks them to identify two types of cookies: those it deems “strictly necessary” and those that are not. The problem is that most sites have no idea what cookies it might be serving to users. However, US-startup CloudFlare is about to launch a service which will tell site what cookies they are serving and a way to control them: CloudFlare Audit + Control.

CloudFlare launches its Audit service first, possibly later today. This will interrogate a site and deliver a report on what cookies are being served.

Once that is in operation and people are using it, the data collected will form a sort of collective intelligence about what cookies are actually doing. This is useful because cookies can get dropped by multiple sources including the Facebook Like button, widgets, ad networks and analytics services. CloudFlare’s Audit will identify all the cookies floating around and will let a website owner see how other site owners have classified those cookies. Then they can work out which are the “strictly necessary” cookies.

After building a database of all the web’s cookies and the widgets that drop them, CloudFlare then plans to enable the second portion of the Audit + Control app. This will allow site owners to selectively enable/disable cookies and third party scripts on an individual basis via CloudFlare’s interface. Site owners won’t need to change any of their underlying code.

The idea is that sites will then be able to comply with the opt-in requirement of the EU law, which comes into effect later this year, without harming the core functionality of their sites.

The service is available for free to any CloudFlare users (CloudFlare’s basic plan is also free) but non CloudFlare customers will get the Audit portion in three weeks. The Control part of the service will only be fore CloudFlare users.

CloudFlare knows its onions on this score. It already powers nearly half a million websites and sees over 45 billion monthly page views across its network for more than 450 million unique visitors.

Clearly the Directive will put sites run out of Europe at a disadvantage to their US competitors, and slap bang in the middle of a recession. Not only that but the law applies to any website that has European visitors, so it’s not just an issue EU webmasters need to worry about. However, I’d love to see the European Union try to bring an action against multiple Stateside sites.

tape.tv has been around for a while – since July 2008 to be exact. It operates like a mix between an online version of MTV and Pandora. Just like the latter service, on Tape.tv users can skip, like or dislike the videos as they play, so the service starts to tailor itself to their tastes. I came across it in various visits to Berlin over the last couple of years but have been frustrated that this great service has only been aimed at the German market.

However, I’m excited that it’s about to scale into new countries. The company has now raised €5 million ($6.2 million) in a Series B funding round. Participants include Atlantic Capital Partners GmbH , Dario Suter, Christoph Daniel and Marc Schmidheiny (DCM), prolific Berlin Angel investor Christophe Maire, alongside Investitionsbank Berlin and VC Kreativwirtschaft Berlin. The cash will be used to scale the business, appear on other platforms like smart TVs and launches into France and the UK in early autumn. The relaunch will also see the creation of an electronic program guide (EPG) for their own live shows and events.

Its tape.tv’s catalogue of 45,000 videos has attracted around 3.5 million users in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, its main markets since it launched in July 2008. The company managed to navigate the tricky music licensing laws in Germany, which has seen YouTube hobbled in some areas.

Founded by Conrad Fritzsch (CEO) and Stephanie Renner, Tape.tv plans to have an editorial team in each region it launches in, programming its sub channels, like Indie and Hip-Hop.

Fritzsch says the company is now aiming at the convergence of Internet and TV towards SmartTV and hopes to extend to mobile as well. “The future of tape.tv will also be more social, based on user behaviour” he says.

The company has 65 employees, many of them selling ads around the videos, and also has a real TV show on on the ZDFkultur channel in Germany. But it’s a lucrative business. It’s claiming to be running on €20 million in annual revenues.

In Germany it has plenty of strategic partners, including ZDF.kultur, bild.de und spiegel.de and apps with Facebook, Spotify and Last.fm.

TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley is jam-packed with interesting startups and it’s always frustrating that we can’t get to film every single one. However, we do our best and you’ll find that Techcrunch Jordan Crook and I manage to get through plenty in this walk-through. Amongst the companies we caught were Wibbitz, UppSite, Tokkster, Drippler and Clinch.

You can view all of our Startup Alley companies from Tuesday here. And from Monday here.

And if you want more, here’s our previous Startup Alley coverage here, here, here and here.

Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt makes for a pretty grueling experience when so many companies are pitching every passer-by. But Jordan Crook and I went in feet first to check out some of the startups there.

In scenes more reminiscent of tag-team pro-wrestling, or perhaps a sort of Startup relay race, we tag-teamed around and interviewed a bunch of them including Jaxx, Screach, Fanitics, Edaman, SnapCrowd, ColourDNA, Atticous and BuzzCard. Check all of Tuesday’s startups out here.

We also took a trip over to the Israeli Pavilion to check out the likes of Drippler and Vodio among others. Enjoy!

A panel run by TechCrunch’s Josh Constine with with Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL and Melissa Brenner of the NBA was billed as being about how social advertising is working for those content brands. In the end, we heard a lot more about the future path of AOL and TechCrunch perhaps. But let’s review.

Armstrong admitted that AOL was originally built as a portal and on a subscription model but that it needed to head in a content direction.

He said the overall premise is that “content is going to be what differentiates platforms” from search and social. AOL “invested early in the curve and deep into content” in order to tie in business models and eventually move into paid content. A social strategy offers the possibility of huge distribution for this content play.

But, asked Constine, was there a do-or-die moment regarding portals?

Armstrong’s view is that “humans need curated information daily” and that may even mean the old notion of a portal coming back into vogue – something that helps people go about their daily lives. That requires content brands.

He admitted that despite having some dissident shareholders that “don’t believe”, in the content strategy, most of AOL’s shareholders do believe in it.

But should portals be powered by engineers or one where the brands and the people behind them “leave if they’re not treated right,” asked Constine in a barely veiled reference to Michael Arrington’s controversial departure last year.

Armstrong took the diplomatic path. It’s important to “let strong strong brands thrive” he said, and AOL was “becoming a house of strong brands”.

But, pushed Constine, why did people leave TechCrunch and Engadget?

It was at this point that Armstrong was on the spot to address the issue directly.

AOL has focused on letting its “brands have their own voices.” We will check the audio again, but I believe has also added “I don’t think you’ll see AOL play a super heavy role again in those.” So perhaps confirmation that AOL effectively plans to dial down its own brand in favour of pushing its portfolio of individual content brands.

He went on. AOL invested in CrunchFund for instance… (yes I believe we’ve heard of that). Armstrong had a chat with Arrington backstage in fact (we’d love to have been a fly on the wall for that one).

But AOL is now figuring out the branded content business for the next few decades.

But by now Constine was on a roll. What did Tim think about looking “like a dark overlord”? “Did it drive people away?”. Ok…

Armstrong came back. It’s about entrepreneurs, he said. Some sell up (to AOL) and leave and some don’t and stay put. His job as CEO is about making those brands thrive, and trying to keep the entrepreneurs involved and engaged. A lot of entrepreneurs have taken on bigger roles inside AOL he said, we presume referring to Arianna Huffington, rather than Michael Arrington.

Constine kept on. Did TechCrunch make AOL cool again?

Tim: “I think it did, and I hope to keep that atmosphere.”

Ok folks, then we were back to talking about the actual topic for the panel…

“How is AOL’s ad business going?”

“It’s doing well”, said Armstrong. The ad space is getting more data-driven, and he’s placing his bets on Project Devil for instance. He said AOL’s ad network recovered from a double digit decline to double digit growth. AOL is building a CMS into the ad business to let brands be social.

Melissa Brenner of the NBA said the NBA is “in the content business” and it’s up to her group to determine the best platforms for that.

Social “has a place” said Armstrong, and Facebook has done a great job, but the content business is about allowing users to share. As a Boston Celtics fan, he said because of its online and social strategy the NBA now feels like it’s about a great deal more than just the TV broadcasts and programming.

Constine then asked, “Don’t publishers wish they had Facebook’s data?”

Brenner pointed out that without social they would not have realised how big NBA was in places like the Philippines, for instance.

One thing AOL is doing that’s different to social is tracking offline behaviour. Social networks have a lot of data, but the content business has a lot of data on the migration between channels. So for instance, AOL knows the highest consumption of fashion information is on Saturday morning and Sunday night. That affects how AOL programs content around social.

Brenner said that one big thing with social is that when it first appeared it was about real-time updates. As the NBA got deeper into it, they realised fans would be planning what they were watching that evening and used that to suggest NBA programming.

Constine asked what what Facebook could do better, such as launch an off-site ad network.

Armstrong said he’d seen 40-50 major AOL ad customers recently and social is a “big topic” for advertisers. So there seems like an opportunity to have a second-generation version of Facebook, which might involve an external ad network.

Constine asked about blunders in AOL and the NBA’s strategies to date and the answers ranged from the wrong tweet into the wrong channel, and that perhaps some AOL sites were “over-monetized” (read: too many ads). And “sticking social buttons everywhere” is not the way to go, said Armstrong.

Finally, Constine went into curve-ball mode and asked Armstrong which he loved more, TechCrunch or the Huffington Post?

“I love them both. They are both my children. But they serve different markets. TechCrunch as a brand has a global opportunity to reconnect the future of where technology is going. Technology touches every person, every household and business. I would hope TechCrunch becomes a global tech property with much bigger scale,” said Armstong. He pointed out that former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde was consulting with the company after some “scuba diving and yoga”. “I think TC is just starting.”

Over the last few months I’ve detected a disturbance in the Startup Force. While startups from Europe have often looked to the US as a natural market to scale up in, they’ve traditionally looked at the Valley as a natural place to start. But based on what I’ve been hearing, I’m starting to wonder about that. Sure, every company is different, and for cloud startups, Silicon Valley remains the Mecca. But increasingly, New York’s burgeoning tech scene is making it more and more attractive for Europeans to de-camp there. Being in New York for TechCrunch Disrupt has only served to strengthen my impression.

So, here’s what’s happening. For starters, European startups have noticed the growing VC and Angel scene in New York. Sure, it’s not the same size as the Valley but it’s more convenient to get to travel-wise. Similarly, New York funds like Betaworks (Tweetdeck was one of theirs) and Fred Wilson / Union Square Ventures have been visiting growing European tech clusters like London and Berlin hunting for companies that can scale internationally.

Secondly, the tech sene in New York itself has gotten a lot bigger of the last few years. That means hiring people here for a US base for a European startup has become a lot more attractive. It’s also growing at such a pace that if you arrive in the New York tech scene now, you’ll be welcomed into the community with open arms. It’s still small enough that if you join now, you’l be considered to be more prominent than if you tried joining the much older network in SF / Silicon Valley, which – although still welcoming – is relatively harder to break into because it is so established.

Thirdly, the time zone is far more convenient for dealing with distributed teams back home in Europe. I’ve spoken to many a European entrepreneur based in the Valley and they have plenty of horror stories about waking up at ungodly hours just so they can do Skype calls with their team back in European time zones. New York’s location makes it much easier to stay in sync, and from there San Francisco is only a red-eye flight away when you need to be there.

But a strong reason for New York is also about the nature of the startups themselves. Right now we’re seeing a flowering of startups in Europe – and especially London – often attacking traditional industries, especially around fashion, music, media, advertising and financial technology. All of those have big synergies with New York’s biggest business sectors. It makes a huge amount of sense to look towards New York as a natural place to find partners.

And a simple straw poll of European startups I conducted found plenty who either have a New York base already or are looking to create one. Those with established presences include Huddle, Skimlinks, OpenGamma, CognitiveMatch , Spotify, Brandwatch, Zemanta, Mendeley and Covestor to name just a few. Some lesser known startups are putting down roots including Forward3d, Yourkarma, Campalyst, FreeAgent, Checkthis, Admazely, Dashlane, Shopcade, Nuxeo, Zedge, Wrapp, Fluidinfo and Twingz. Meanwhile plenty are looking to get an NYC office and starting the hiring process, such as FantasyShopper and Conversocial.

As one founder put it to me: “I’m spending around 50% of my time there. New York is our beach-head for the US, not Silicon Valley.”

So, New York, you just got a big new friend, and her name is Europe. Let’s cuddle up.

If you are in the business of needing to process shopping for your ecommerce startup then this is going to be of interest. If not, look away now.

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York the startup PayLeap, which is a payment platform for ecommerce, is reaching out with a new program to help fund the development of applications connecting to their payment gateway platform.

Whether it’s marketing spiel or not, PayLeap claims to have “set aside” $1 million in funding to cover developers upfront, as well as a residual stream back from referred businesses that have active payments with the company.

Here’s how it works: A lot of web and app developers refer their customers to some of the larger payment gateway companies, but they don’t get anything back for doing so. PayLeap program (P4) plans to collects these ongoing residuals through a referral relationship. That means the merchant, the partner, and of course PayLeap benefits.

PayLeap is going up against Authorize.net and Auth.net (a legacy gateway that’s been around a long time). The problem is the developers don’t get anything back for those referrals. PayPal, Google Checkout, Stripe and Square are also competitive but often involve additional fees.

P4 is supposed to help offset the development costs associated with certifying through PayLeap’s APIs and help cover co-marketing and promotional costs.

This could be useful for startups which need to handle electronic payments like credit, debit, check/ACH, gift card, and EBT because its connected to global payment processing platforms including First Data, TSYS and Paymentech.

Of course, it’s not just commerce, but could apply to mobile, healthcare, bill presentment, inventory management systems, and pretty much anywhere electronic payments are needed, according to Rod Katzfey, COO.

As they say, you pays your money and you takes your choice…

Babelverse won the opportunity to appear at TechCrunch Disrupt from the Startup Alley and with little notice ended up giving a slick pitch. Essentially this is a solution for universal speech translation, powered by a global community of human interpreters: it means anyone can be an interpreter. We covered its launch back in January but here’s a quick rundown.

Machine translation, as we know, is not reliable. So what we’re looking here is a marketplace for translation.

People practice to interpret and move up through the system, towards being more professional interpreters. Think of it as a sort of Demand Media platform for interpreting languages.

It’s a mobile and web app that lets users benefit from on-the-spot ‘real time’ interpretation, in any of the world’s spoken language.

Skilled amateurs and professional interpreters go on the platform and earn money for their time. Professional interpreters are much more expensive – but this democratizes the process.

Competitors include Google Translate Conversation Mode – a feature available on Android, but only for a limited number of languages.

Eventually they want to be able to get to the point where they can do very live translation.

“All people wear clothes!” declared one of Tagbrand’s founders on stage at Disrupt today. That’s true, but let’s review.

DailyBooth was (is still perhaps?) a phenomenon for a time as people became accustomed to sharing their daily lives in a more quirky manner than mere video can afford. (Ok, OK, it’s a bunch of teenagers sharing their zits, but work with me here, people). Now Tagbrand wants to apply that model to fashion, but with a tagging twist.

The model is simple enough. Take and upload photos of what branded clothes you are wearing and tag them. Effectively, it’s a photo check-in for brands, or ‘Foursquare for fashion’, if you will.

The twist is that users are encouraged to tag up pictures with a visual tag of what brand each item of clothing is. Alas, the site does not yet do visual recognition of the clothes. Maybe one day…

TagBrand doesn’t call this check-ins, but – wait for it – “brand-ins”. People can then comment or vote on the brands their friends are wearing. Clearly the opportunity here is to capture a fashion-obsessed audience and provide a platform for advertisers.

Thus, although Tagbrand is like DailyBooth if everyone on DailyBooth was obsessed with fashion, it’s this tagging element which looks pretty viral.

The product combines contains brands, polls and e-commerce. There’s a lot of virality built into the service – every tags has a Twitter or Facebook button on it.

But clearly the people who do this are obsessed with fashion. TagBrand gives them the tools to be obsessive. The polls certainly feature makes the experience more entertaining when you’re trying clothes out.

Now, clothing brands and retail stores are constantly chasing these people. This is one way of delivering them a highly targeted audience. Tagbrand’s business model is based on creating a special marketplace for them which is visible while browsing the brand’s tag on a photo. The stores provide Tagbrand with a price-list and its system attaches them to a “Recommended” block.

So while browsing their friends’ clothes, users see the real-world item beside the image and can purchase from there (click are on a CPC basis). Users also get delivered latest news on brands they such as new collections.

Admittedly they have older competition in the UK operation, WIWT.com, but Tagbrand’s visual tags are a slightly cuter way of doing it.

TagBrand has secured a $100,000 seed investment from Russian investor Glavstart, while founders Ivan Olenchenko and Alexandr Kobozev have been working on startup projects in Russia for a while now. (And we should add they did a pretty good pitch at a TechCrunch meetup in Moscow last year).

Q&A

Judges asked about extending the app into giving users the ability to upload their own home made brands, and that seemed to be on the cards according to the founders.

Currently in Russian and English, the app launches today in the US.

The Judges also had an issue about copyright and the images uploaded, which seems a fair point.

Right now 80% of usage of the product is on the iPhone app versus 20% on the web.

So far they’ve had 15,000 registered users in 2 months with no promotion/marketing just in the Russian market. With about $4.5 billion spent annually on advertising clothes, they reckon there’s plenty of money to be made out there. Da!

Well folks, while you may think all the action is on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, the flip side of the coin is the enormous amount of buzz, energy and networking that happens in Startup Alley. Today there are 44 companies exhibiting in the Alley itself, not to mention the 20+ companies in the Israeli pavilion which makes its second appearance at Disrupt. We’ll have another brand new 47 companies in Startup Alley tomorrow. You can check out all the companies today here.

But none of this is just for show, because Disrupt attendees get to vote on their favourite companies, and those votes, plus the votes of TC staff, means one of them gets to pitch at the end of each day.

Delegates to Disrupt can vote by 3pm, but have to have a code (which is on their badge). If you’re here in New York at the event then use this URL and your code to vote.

On the third day there’ll be an audience choice for the battlefield competition.

Some themes emerging from the Alley companies today include social photos, social video, location analytics, linking the real-world with offline, and even language translation.

Meanwhile, myself, and my colleagues Jordan Crook and Matt Burns will be roaming the Alley with a camera during the conference and here’s our first installment.

Lord knows there is a lot of online video out there these days, but only a tiny proportion of it has been transcribed (less than 1% according to some estimates). Searching the mountains of video generated by businesses, governments and educational institutions for the valuable information within is almost impossible because the words hidden in the audio are invisible to search. Waiting for it is not just the world, but the many people who can’t access that video because of their disabilities. Transcription unlocks the gold-dust buried in them there video hills.

This would involve transcription on a vast scale, but this is exactly the problem Koemei aims to tackle. It’s a SAAS platform for speech recognition in video. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt it announced it has completed an integration with YouTube’s API in preparation for a potential launch. It also announced the successful completion of its first pilot with the University of Geneva and IMD Business School.

Simple video lectures can be uploaded, translated, linked to and visible on other platforms like YouTube. Users get to see an interface where they can go through the lecture and check the transcription.

Based out of Martigny, Switzerland and with offices in San Francisco, Koemei is a startup leveraging years of academic research. It was spun out of the Swiss Institute of Technology (Idiap institute), which worked with Sheffield University and Edinburgh University on a seven year EU-funded project (which has about $30 million spent on it already). Koemei acquired all the IP under a transfer agreement, has a patent pending and now plans to use its platform to transcribe video content on a super-scale.

The problem they are out to solve is obvious. Manual transcription is expensive (as much as $5 per minute). They claim to reduce the cost down to $0.09 a minute. The startup estimates the market for video transcription is around $16 billion annually, given that there are around 120,000 people doing this work in the U.S. alone. It anticipates there will be a 21% year on year growth in the business. The market for corporate and educational video is clearly the most lucrative here.

Koemei claims its automated transcription program works better than current systems from the likes of Nuance, because it not only transcribes the video’s soundtrack into words, but also produces an interface for humans to check the transcription. This can be open to the public or closed off for designated users. In other words, it ends up being like a crowdsourced effort to check an AI’s transcription, making it far more accurate than AI alone. An hour audio takes an hour to transcribe, claims the startup.

The transcriptions can be pushed to YouTube, Vimeo etc and you get the first 10 hours of transcription free, just in case you need convincing that it works. Of course the technology needn’t just work for the likes of YouTube. There is also videoconferencing, telepresence, web collaboration, group meetings, classroom lectures, webcast; the list goes on.

So far they’ve done a pilot rollout with some university partners which has brought in some revenues and proved the model. Next up will be more partners, plus an enterprise solution they want to offer to the likes of Vimeo, Brightcove, and Kaltura among others.

On the horizon, their potential competition is Nuance, Google (Google Voice) and solutions like Amazon Mechanical Turk. This is not exactly a weak opposition, but they reckon they can beat all comers. They claim Nuance has issues with long conversations; Google Voice is low quality and closed for other platforms; and mechanical turk solutions involving people are pricey – and may even be customers for Koemei in the end.

The startup predicts it could have $44.9 million in sales by 2014, with a potential exit to any number of players including, not unexpectedly, most of their opposition.

Backed with Angel funding, they’re now raising a $1.5 million Series A round, following a commitment from a European early-stage VC.

The team is led by Temitope Ola, formerly of Silicon Graphics, and comprises three others, most of whom worked on the platform during its academic development.

Lately we’ve seen the rise of e-commerce and online retailer stertups disrupting the relationship between distributors and the consumer. Etsy comes to mind of course. Meanwhile, Made.com in the UK is leading the charge, and lately Llustre (also UK) has hit on a model of re-connecting designers with consumers.

That trend continues today as Urbanara, an online retailer for “high quality home textiles and home wares” supplied direct from the people who make them, secures a significant funding round. TA Venture, together with a group of international investors, including Blumberg Capital and Brain-to-Ventures, has participated in a €3.5 million series A investment round in the startup.

Urbanara cuts out the usual costs such as wholesaler margins and warehousing that traditional retailers add on. Originally launched in Germany and Austria last year, Urbanara has broken out to offices in Shanghai and Berlin and now services the UK.

TA Venture has a $50 million venture capital fund focusing on seed-stage and early-stage Web companies in Ukraine, Russia and other CIS countries (former Soviet states).

UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail, has decided to raise the issue of Google’s influence on the UK government, after uncovering the fact that Conservative Party ministers have held meetings with Google an average of once a month since the General Election two years ago. There have been 23 meetings between Tory ministers and Google since June 2010, with Prime Minister David Cameron meeting Google three times and George Osborne – who as Chancellor of the Exchequer is supposed to meet with business leaders – four times in two years.

The story needs to be a seen in a wider context. The Conservatives have recently come under fire for having too close a relationship to another powerful entity, News Corporation (as did the Labour party during its tenure). A huge inquiry into Press standards has in large part focused on the ties between Rupert Murdoch’s media giant and the Conservatives.

But what the report buries way down in the article, is the number of times the newspaper itself has met with the Government. A Google spokesperson told us: “It’s absolutely right that governments speak with companies about issues that affect their citizens. The British Government makes the list of those meetings publicly available – including the Daily Mail’s 34 meetings over the same period.” In other words, the Daily Mail has met with the Government almost one and a half times a month (on average) since they entered office – that’s quite a bit more than Google has. It’s likely those were high-level meetings, not editorial ones.

That said, the issue does raise the question of Google’s closeness to the UK government and its ability to grab the ear of the Government on a number of topics. It’s the kind of access a lot of companies would be envious of.

Culture minister Ed Vaizey has met the firm seven times. Culture Secretary boss Jeremy Hunt has held four meetings. In David Cameron’s first months as party leader in 2006 and 2007 (though not yet Prime Minister), he spoke to the annual Google Zeitgeist conference.

Three senior figures have moved between the Tories and Google in the last few years. Rachel Whetstone is Global head of communications and public policy at Google and is married to David Cameron’s former chief of staff, Steve Hilton. Naomi Gummer was formerly adviser to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, but is now a public policy adviser to Google. Amy Fisher Was a press officer for Google, and is now a special adviser to the Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman.

On Hilton, the right wing Daily Mail newspaper has rarely missed an opportunity to attack his more radical attempts to shake up government thinking about technology and its effect on society. But it’s more likely that the Conservatives – in part driven by Hilton’s thinking – have realised that the world has moved away from the green-screen, big-IT projects which used to fill the coffers of the likes of EDS and others, towards embracing a more open standards approach. On the ground this has fed into attempts to open up government data, and led also the innovative project known as Gov.uk, which is taking a startup approach to government online, employing many of the UK’s best engineers and tech stars.

It’s also quite something to see a sentence describing Hilton as the “shaven-headed son of Hungarian immigrants” – a phrase which betrays the Mail’s antipathy to alternative thinking.

In March it was announced that Mr. Hilton was going to take an academic post at Stanford University in California to be near his wife who works at Google. He plans to return next year, though it’s not yet clear whether he will re-join the government.

Of course, back in the real world, these West Wing-like moves of advisers between big business and governments go on literally all the time. We don’t currently have the equivalent figures for meetings with Microsoft or Cisco, or Facebook, IBM or other companies, but I’d be amazed if there were not similar factoids waiting to scurry forth if someone someone decided to lift a few rocks. Indeed, Microsoft, Cisco and many other large tech companies have appeared several times at the government’s ‘Tech City’ meetings.

So quite why the Daily Mail has decided to home in on this issue is a little bit of a mystery. It may be that the story was placed as an attack by the Labour Party. Their health IT scheme to store patients’ records failed spectacularly just before they left office, so they would have smarted at the suggestion by Cameron that a company like Google could probably do a better job.

The newspaper quotes Helen Goodman, Labour’s media spokesman, who says “Of course it is important for ministers to listen to business, but a meeting with Google every month does look like the sort of privileged access that small businesses can only dream of.” Unfortunately, she neglects to mention the numerous tiny tech startups that have been invited to Number 10 Downing Street over the last couple of years as part of the government’s Tech City initiative, and its purchase of an entire building – Campus London – in East London which is housing small tech startups that have have nothing to do with Google. (As disclosure, I’m co-founder of a co-working space that’s a tenant in that building, but frankly, I’d point this out even if it wasn’t).

Then again, Google doesn’t help its own cause. In Europe it does not have a great record on tax. As Goodman points out: “Ministers must disclose what they discussed. Did they challenge Google over their repellent tax avoidance, which was uncovered by the Daily Mail?”

It’s here that criticism could land a big punch. Google has been oft criticised for paying tax on less than a quarter of its UK income. In 2010 it generated £2.1 billion in the UK but with its international operations based Ireland, where corporation tax is much lower than the UK, it escapes a great deal of tax.

And Google hasn’t always helped its own cause.

Last month Google executive Naomi Gummer, until recently a Conservative minister’s political adviser, caused a furore in the press when she implied (not unreasonably?) that it was the job of parents to stop children seeing adult content online, not Internet companies. Currently a debate rages in the UK about creating an ‘off switch’ at ISP level to block porn, allowing parents baffled by content settings or Net Nanny software to simply order a ‘clean’ version of the Internet direct from their ISP.

A Conservative Party spokesman told the Mail: “All these meetings have been properly declared and it is normal for relevant ministers to meet with a company of this size.”

Ultimately the Mail’s story does raise questions of perceptions over-all but as a major UK tech player, it would be extremely odd for it not to meet with whoever was in power fairly regularly. Neither Facebook not Twitter, for instance, have anything like the huge engineering bases and offices Google has in the UK. Do we want our politicians to remain in a worldview of tech dominated by the desktop and ‘licenses’ or one where developers, startups and apps can thrive? I’d hazard not.

There are lots of different approaches to the amorphous market of ‘e-learning’ but only a handful ever feel much like fun. I think amongst the best of these are sites like MangaHigh which teaches Math, or Moshi Monsters which has subtle learning tasks for kids.

Another which works well is Quipper, which, in a Q&A format, helps people learn things in a sort of game. Today it’s announced that it has raised $3.6m (£2.3m) of Series A funding led by Globis, the Japanese VC. The round has been two other investors: Atomico, the London-based VC firm led by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström and Benesse, a major Japanese education and publishing company.

The fundraising, which seed funding from Atomico last year, will be used expand with an emphasis on increasing the amount of content on the platform

Founded by Masa Watanabe, a co-founder of Japanese mobile social gaming company DeNA, Quipper’s app asks users to answer a series of questions, and they learn during that process. You can also use it to create your own quiz programmes, making the app appeal to teachers and parents but also to professional training companies.

The London-based company says its 1.7 million users have answered questions on the platform 85m times in 2,000 topics since it launched in October last year. The app exists on the site and on Apple iOS and Android.

Heroku was a hit with Ruby developers because it was an easy-to-use development platform. Others have tried to do the same with other languages such as PHP Fog, dotCloud. Then last year AppHarbor, a ‘Heroku for .NET’ out of Y Combinator launched.

And today AppHarbor has extended its service to European developers. EU applications will still run on Amazon’s infrastructure, but they’ll be running out of the EU-West region (Dublin) instead of US-East, where all current applications are located.

The startup raised $1.4m last year though the amount was not announced at the time. Backers include Accel, Ignition, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Quest, Start Fund and Salesforce and there are plans to raise a Series A soon.

“We have spent a lot of time making sure the AppHarbor platform is modular and scalable and this paid dividends when time came to spin up our new EU location. New applications are created in either the US or EU and existing applications cannot be moved, but we’re already thinking about how to turn this up another notch to make AppHarbor a zero-configuration, multi-region, geo-load-balanced application platform,” cofounder and CEO Rune Sørensen told us.

Add-ons in the the AppHarbor add-on catalog will work with EU-based applications. Some (such as SQL Server) will provision resources based on where your application is located. For add-ons that do not currently support the EU, a warning will be displayed when they’re provisioned to an EU application.

AppHarbor is designed to address Microsoft Azure limitations such as being locked into Microsoft’s own database, and its non-support of Git.

They now claim to be 15-20% of Azure’s size in terms of number of users – not bad for a six person startup. Offices are in Copenhagen and San Francisco.

In terms of competition Meerkatalyst claimed to be doing similar bett never appeared while and Moncai has yet to launch.

Lately a trend has emerged: European VCs putting down more roots in Silicon Valley to take advantage of the current scene and act as a bridge for European companies trying to form local partnerships, and of course as a mechanism for M&A or further funding with US-based VCs. One of the more recent firms to do this was Index Ventures, which a year ago put partners on the ground for the first time outside of its bases in the UK and Switzerland.

The latest to join that trend is Earlybird Venture Capital out of Berlin which has brought on Valley-based Konstantin Guericke as a venture partner. Is this part of a developing theme?

Guericke co-founded LinkedIn, where he was vice president of marketing, he took it to six million members and profitability. German born, he also served as CEO of jaxtr, a social communications start-up purchased by SabSe Technologies. He’s currently on the boards of several startups and mentors student entrepreneurs at Stanford University, where he graduated.

Guericke says startups coming out of Europe, and particularly Berlin, that are highly viral and globally scaling from Day One can “compete with the best in Silicon Valley and reach a worldwide audience.” He’s basically correct: far too many European startups are not suited to the continent’s small fragmented markets, don’t realise it soon enough and need to look elsewhere to scale.

Meanwhile, the VC trends in Europe continue.

As we know, Accel, which has a good footprint in London, is a firm with a large US arm already. The other main player in Europe are firms like Balderton, but it prefers, as does Eden Ventures and others, to bridge with US-based VCs.

The opposing view of course is that so long as you have contacts, you don’t need an office on the ground. The reverse is working in Berlin of course: VCs are flying in and out of the place (in some cases even just commenting from Munich or Hamburg) but few have felt the need to open full-blown offices. Perhaps the renowned Berlin winters are putting them off for now? Admittedly Wellington Partners is in Berlin so often it might as well have an office.

Earlybird is the exception, moving its full operations to Berlin and raising $100 million for their new fund.

But right now there is a debate raging about whether European Venture Capital has much of a future. Atlas’s Fred Destin has returned to that theme again recently saying Euro VC is too unwieldy, too in hock to governments and hide-bound by staff incentivised by management fees rather than exits.

Are European VCs, like their political equivalents in Brussels, now viewing Europe as a burning building with not enough exits, as UK PM Cameron once said of the Euro? Is that why we are seeing this attempt to bridge with the U.S.?

Conversely we’ve seen the rise of new entrants like Passion Capital and the soon-to-launch Hoxton Ventures. These guys are actually pretty optimistic about Europe and its ability to build companies outside the salary inflation (and the rest) of the Valley.

You pays your money and you takes your choice I guess.

Then there are quite different new entities like Blackbox VC where early stage startups literally live in a dorm in Atherton trying to catch the ear of the Valley.

More on that later, but for now let us know your thoughts in the comments.

The are almost too many tech events in the calendar these days to mark any particular one out as being worthy of note. I say almost because, on the global stage at least, TechCrunch Disrupt (Ok, Ok, but still…) remains up there because of how much other media attend and, well, just it’s general awesomeness. Into this small basket you could also put, for instance, Le Web, Founders Forum in the UK, DLD, The Lobby Conference, the tech elements at Davos and maybe even TED. What few of them are doing however, is celebrating new blood. You tend to see the people who have made it, not the one’s about to make it (apart from Disrupt of course). To that end one rapidly emerging event which is doing a very good job of bringing together the Valley, New York, Asia, Europe and emerging global startups like South America is the simply named “F.ounders“. And it’s coming to New York on June 14/15, and will be attended by our very own editor, Eric Eldon and co-editor Alexia Tsosis.

They’ll make up around 150 of the world’s fastest growing tech company founders gathering in NASDAQ’s Market Site in Times Square. Paddy Cosgrave says he is moving founders to New York to bring together “high growth companies on track to IPO or otherwise in the next 24 months.” There’s that new blood coming through.

Joining them will be tech stars including Dennis Crowley (Foursquare), David Karp (Tumblr), David Goldberg (Survey Monkey), Alexander Ljung (SoundCloud), Roger McNamee (Elevation Partners) Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) and Steve Case (AOL, Revolution).

You might not have heard of F.ounders as it barely has a web site and you can’t apply for an invite. But it’s been described by Bloomberg as “Davos for geeks”. TechCrunch was more to the point: we called it badass. Perhaps because of that we managed to get a special concession: We got them to agree that TechCrunch readers can ‘apply’ to attend by emailing attendees [@] f.ounders.com. No guarantees, but good luck…

Last year’s event was held in Dublin, Ireland. Bono lead a pub crawl, Riverdance put on a private performance and the Irish President hosted drinks in her residence in her last day in office. Rumours that a TechCrunch European editor led a few late party-goers in a 4am guitar-led rendition of Wonderwall in the lobby of the hotel have never been confirmed.

F.ounders Dublin is held annually in October, alongside The Dublin Web Summit.

In the white heat of the current tech market it’s sometimes easy to forget that some companies, although taking their time, simply become viable businesses – instead of waiting for a call from Facebook or Twitter that may never come. I’ve been covering web site and shop builder Moonfruit for longer than I care to remember (they launched in 2000), but along the way husband and wife team Joe and Wendy White kept on pushing the company until it was one of the most innovative of its kind out there. Today that hard work is rewarded in Moonfruit’s acquisition by directories giant Yell for $29 million (£18m) in cash.

Unusually for a UK acquisition announcement, Yell has also made the golden hand-cuffs explicit for the founders. Retention bonuses of £5.2m (£2.7m grossed up) will be paid to Moonfruit’s executive management team of Joe White, Eirik Pettersen and Wendy Tan-White after two years, provided that they remain exclusively employed by Yell.

Most people know Yell as a yellow pages directory for its 1.3 million SME customers. Clearly what it must become to survive in the era of Google is a online marketplace providing not just listings but business tools for that market.

Over 5 million sites and 230,000 shops have been built using Moonfruit, which is now the no. 1 hosted site builder in the UK, and has seen over 1.5 million sites built in the US. It’s also build a very sticky Facebook integration.

While the competition includes Weebly and Yola (rebranded from Synthasite) in the US Moonfruit has been profitable on a subscription model, these competitors have entered the market more recently and are focused on a free, no ads model. There is also the German-born Jimdo which has since concentrated on Asia. Moonfruit has moved towards a freemium model, with a premium upgrade path for users, but with a new advanced HTML5 engine that build not just sites but shops and mobile versions.

Moonfruit’s engine will be a key component of Yell’s new “eMarketplace” strategy comprising a platform and portal where consumers and SMEs can connect and transact.

Yell already has an enterprise commerce solution in the form of Znode, an Ohio company it acquired last year for $19.2 million (£12 million).

What Yell did not have however was the ability for customer to create “light” commerce and web presence services in the way Moonfruit had.

Both parties seem to win out of this deal. Yell gets a much better offering for SMEs which pulls them out of the pit of just being a classifieds provider, while it accelerates Moonfruit’s own expansion worldwide, building on its growth in the UK and US.

Mike Pocock, Chief Executive Officer of Yell, said: “The addition of Moonfruit’s services and team helps us provide competitive advantage to our global SME customers in connecting with consumers through digital, mobile and social.”

Moonfruit took £1.57 million in funding in 2010 from US investment bank Stephens and Silicon Valley based angels including Dave McClure of 500 Startups, Robbie Van-Adibe and Theorem.

The value of the assets, which are the subject of the transaction, as reflected on Moonfruit’s balance sheet as at 31 December 2011, is £4.88 million. For the year ended 31 December 2011, Sitemaker Software Limited, Moonfruit’s wholly-owned subsidiary, made a loss before tax of £1.26 million.

As Wendy Tan White told us: “All the partnership conversations we had in the US became acquisition conversations, we had several players on the table but Yell’s offer was the best, all cash, clean exit for all our investors and they’ve incentivised us to stay and help them turn a very cash generative, global directory and print business into a global digital services player.

“Basically it seemed like a fun, challenge for at least the next 2 years. They feel like a ‘corporate startup’, lot’s of resources but taking the risks to turnaround their business. They feel in a similar space to Prudential which disrupted UK retail banking with Egg, the first UK internet bank – that was my first taste of a startup project.”

“We were also swayed by the fact they are British headquartered but 50% of their customers are in the US. I felt like we weren’t selling out to the US but we will get the US and global distribution we were looking for. We like a challenge! We may well be hanging out in Seattle for a while so we’ll get more US tech experience. And who knows what we’ll do next!”

Last year Yell had had 1.3m SME customers, £2bn in revenue, £500m EBITDA and £250m free cash flow on top of £200m reserves. But they need to move from their old directory and print business to digital services like Moonfruit’s.

Yell now has a new Chief Digital Officer who was ex-president of MSN and Yahoo Media based in Seattle, where the Whites will report into.

It’s all a long way from giving away MacBooks Airs on Twitter in 2009, but it looks like the plan came together in the end.

Back in March this year Microsoft launched its first ever “direct” startup accelerator, based out of Tel Aviv, Israel. That meant it would, for the first time, be an accelerator owner/operator. Dubbed the Windows Azure Accelerator (WAA) it looked, at least on first inspection, to be designed to push its Azure cloud computing platform. Perhaps this was some paper-thin marketing initiative? “Look everyone, startups are choosing to use Azure!” seemed to be the initial message.

Indeed, the move led to some confusion in the market. Microsoft already works with TechStars and all members of its Global Accelerator Network. It also has an ongoing BizSpark marketing programme to push Microsoft products, and numerous R&D centres around the globe. What on earth was going on? Was this going to be some sort of prison for startups, where they would be force-fed gruel and lashed like galley slaves if they didn’t use Azure? It turns out, no, there’s more to it than that. But there is a back story to this move and a strong hint that this single move may, in the not too distant future, lead Microsoft back to its roots and re-inject that essential startup DNA back into the corporate giant.

I took a trip out to Tel Aviv to get under the skin of this new initiative, to meet the startups they are backing and work out why the hell Microsoft would be doing an accelerator.

But let’s look at the detail first.

Housed in the Microsoft Israel Research and Development Center, the Accelerator is part of the Center’s outreach program ThinkNext, a startup engagement program. Run a little like TechCrunch Disrupt, the ThinkNext Summit is an in-house, invitation-only Microsoft conference which has been running for 4 years featuring key MS people, but which also puts 20 startups on stage. It’s also taken under its wing the Microsoft “BizSpark One” program, which deals with about 50 companies out of a broader 45,000 BizSpark startups.

THE WINDOWS AZURE ACCELERATOR

The Windows Azure Accelerator itself is a four-month, biannual program for 10 startups. Featuring over 30 mentors from the industry (from CEOs to investors to marketing experts), startups also get all the usual free software offered through Microsoft BizSpark Plus.

At the end of the programme they get a demo day for investors in Israel and one in Silicon Valley in September.

Running the WAA day to day is Hannan Lavy a former serial entrepreneur and cofounder of United Parents Online which has been covered on TechCrunch. A CTO for the Accelerator is due to be hired. The key point here is that Microsoft isn’t hiring from within its own borders, but bringing in entrepreneurs who can understand other entrepreneurs.

As with most accelerators, the startups get free office space, coaching, mentorship, legal assistance – the usual.

There will be a big focus on User Experience, something Israeli companies haven’t traditionally been strong in and – in something of a first for a Microsoft initiative – Agile and Lean Startup methodology will be promoted.

The specific Azure cloud use element is good for two years (worth up to $60,000) – so in some respects this is kind of an investment.

Now, you’d think the startups would be leaned on to use it. But in fact I saw zero evidence of this. Quite the contrary – when I visited I saw startups happily talking about their iOS or Android apps and working on Macs just as much as PCs.

The startups also get access to customers and advertising/design partners like the giant Y&R ad agency. In reality I spoke with the mentors from these companies and it’s a lot simpler and less corporate than it sounds – what they are getting in practical terms is the time of two key guys from those companies, and their ability to green light anything the startups need.

Mentor David Sable of Y&R says it’s about “giving the startups practical real-life understanding of what they need to sell and to understand what their clients will need.” Sable is accountable for the Microsoft relationship for WPP. He calls the WAA initiative a “strong partnership” which “is a huge value add for us” and that it adds “huge energy to my company”.

Yoram Tietz of E&Y explains: “Big companies have a problem with innovation. The position of E&Y is pro bono. E&Y was chosen as partners because they have a market reach into the Israeli tech market.”

The other mentors on the programme feature many well known names from the Israeli tech scene including Zohar Levkovitz – Founder of Amobee; Guy Schory – head of new ventures, eBay; Moshe Levin – managing general partner, DFJ Tel Aviv ; Shmulik Weller – founder, SundaySky; Gil Peretz, a Neuro Linguistic Programming expert and Adi Diamant, Former funder of Emblaze Systems, now in the Microsoft R&D centre.

SO WHAT”S THE DEAL?

More unusually the startups inside WAA get no money from Microsoft. But then again, no equity is taken either. So, free offices, free mentoring, access to lots of big potential partners. It’s all just a little too good to be true. What’s going on here?

WHAT DOES MICROSOFT GET OUT OF THIS?

It’s clear Microsoft wants to get something out of this relationship but, but it’s also, at this stage, happy to be vague about the outcomes.

The criteria for startups to join WAA is simple enough: they need to have a cloud component, a big vision for their product, they need to be “coachable / mentorable”, be a small team of less that 4 people and be capable of being nimble.

Amongst the startups I met, it was clear they were small, but hard working. After speaking to a few people I uncovered some typical startup behaviour – office hours amongst these guys usually work 11am to midnight, for instance.

In return for this social contract, Microsoft gets to plug into new ways of working and new trends in technology. Yes, it could get those in other places, like the Valley, but not in such an intimate setting. Indeed, if the startups in WAA choose NOT to use Microsoft technologies, then guess who gets to pump those guys for information directly about why not? Microsoft gets to work out how to fix these issues much simpler way than if they had to engage with startups outside of any Microsoft connection.

It’s true that Microsoft wants to encourage more entrepreneurs to build their cloud-based applications using Windows Azure – but the reality is subtler than that. As I worked my way through the people involved it became clear that they have big plans for the place. And it’s not really just about Azure – it’s about connecting with the startup vibe and informing wider strategy.

Perhaps that’s better done outside of the stuffy confines of Redmond, in a venue spitting distance from Tel Aviv’s gorgeous beaches. But this is no holiday camp.

BUT WHY ISRAEL?

The background to this is instructive. Microsoft has been in Israel since 1991. It created the first R&D centre outside the US in Tel Aviv. Microsoft’s R&D Center houses 550 engineers. And while there are now 45 R&D centres globally, only three are considered “Strategic” ones. They are located in India, China, and Israel. While the former two are – how can I put this? – cheaper to run, Microsoft maintains its R&D centre in comparatively expensive Israel.

The reasons have been expounded up so many time they are barely worth repeating, but for the record: Despite its small 8 million population, Israel has the third latest VC spending in the world according to the OECD and is third only to Silicon Valley and New York in total numbers (not per capita). It’s number four in the world in patents after Taiwan, China, Japan and the US (even though many patents in the US were originally developed in Israel, according to the WEF Global Competitive Report 2011-12). Israel has the largest number of tech startups traded on the NASDAQ. It has 4 of the top 30 computer science universities in the world. Of course, it goes without saying that the reasons for this tech proficiency are obvious: it’s a country with few natural resources, surrounded by enemies and on a constant state of near-war footing. Unfortunately, there’s nothing like a cold war to accelerate innovation and the heady mix of Israeli culture and national army service ends up producing a lot of technically proficient people, as was documented at length in the book Startup Nation.

WHERE DID THE WAA COME FROM?

As Zack Weisfeld, Senior Director of Strategy and Business Development at Microsoft’s Israel Development Center, tells me, it was out of this startup-driven R&D centre, plus the ThinkNext programe, that they came up with the idea of the accelerator. (Weisfeld is a startup veteran who was at Modu and M-systems, acquired by SanDisk in 2006 for $1.6 billion).

They were no longer talking about just innovation, but “innovation excellence” and “fast productisation.” Out of this R&D culture came the die of “rainmaking” – literally seeding the clouds. Clearly there was a missing link to achieve this: they needed the mojo of startups. And thus came the idea of the Azure Accelerator, says Weisfeld.

Gradually people inside Microsoft listened to these siren voices. They needed more than R&D – they needed new blood. They needed the special energy bright by startups, and an accelerator was born.

They also realised startups want more interaction with large corporates in a more collegiate atmosphere.

Admittedly the stock markets might disagree with him but, as Weisfeld told me: “It’s not about Windows versus iOS versus Android or whatever. It’s more complicated than that. It’s not about selling more Microsoft Office licenses.

“It’s really about working across all platforms. Azure is not the main target of the accelerator – it’s about being more connected to startups, trends, ways of working,” he says. Eventually this helps impact MS in other ways. Although the only requirement with the Azure accelerator is to use Azure, he says, startups can use anything else they like including open source tools and other platforms like iOS. “Working with startups gives Microsoft a better chance to compete in the future.”

“People forget Microsoft is still a huge tech company and innovator. It suffers from a bad reputation in some ways, but this initiative shows it can work with startups.”

As Weisfeld says, Microsoft getting access to fast-moving, agile startups “makes us better”.

NEXT UP – THE XBOX ACCELERATOR

The Windows Azure Accelerator is just the first of, perhaps, many more. Weisfeld says that while WAA is the first, others are likely to follow globally.

More interestingly, the next one will be in the same building as the Azure Accelerator and will focus on the Xbox.

Yes, Microsoft already has a ‘Kinect Accelerator‘,which is a venture run with TechStars in Seattle. But TechStars takes its usual 6% equity stake.

This Microsoft-run version will be quite different. This Xbox accelerator will sit next to the Azure Accelerator and right next door to the R&D centre. This makes plenty of sense – the special technology associated with Kinnect comes out of Israeli ‘Machine Vision’ engineering, and guess where Machine Vision is a speciality? Yep, the Israeli Armed forces.

CAN THE WAA IDEA SCALE?

What stuck out eventually about the WAA startups I spoke to was that they were all from Israel. Technically speaking, that needn’t be the case, and I was told the WAA had had applications from 10 countries globally. However, practically speaking, startups don’t get funding to come and live and work in Israel. That meant the gene pool was going to limited to startups from Israel, or even just Tel Aviv.

On the plus side, I was told that in the future the WAA “will be happy” to house startups from other counties, and even “regionally”, so long as they could fund their 4 months in Tel Aviv. Personally, I took this as code for ‘other countries in the Middle East’ – quite some leap of faith for an Israeli initiative. I was also told to “watch this space” on that front.

For here’s the rub. For a global organisation like Microsoft, should we not ask the question: is Microsoft’s first direct accelerator too focused on one country? Surely it ought to be the case that for a huge organisation like Microsoft to start a brand new accelerator then it should be one to all comers not just to Israeli start ups?

It’s a delicate question which is perhaps best understood in the context of Israel’s powerhouse technology centre – one which almost rivals Silicon Valley in hard-core technology and innovation.

The signs are though, that despite it’s all-Israeli makeup – Microsoft’s first ever direct accelerator is likely to be the first of many, as we’ve seen above with the Xbox initiative.

CORPORATE ACCELERATORS – THE NEW NEW THING

The WAA is clearly part of a wider trend. OK, you haven’t seen Apple or Facebook open accelerators, and nor are you likely to. But while Google hasn’t opened a direct accelerator it is certainly dipping its toes into the water. It recently started Campus London, a large building in London’s high tech cluster in the East of the city which houses accelerators and co-working spaces. Meanwhile, Telefonica is rolling out its Wayra incubators globally, while Deutsche Telekom announced its hub:arum incubator for Berlin this month.

But in truth it feels like the more corporate the company culture, the more need there is for this kind of initiative.

NEW MOJO FOR MICROSOFT?

Ultimately, though, I think what we are looking at here in Israel is a kind of prototype accelerator, the model for which will inform Microsoft’s roll out of similar initiatives.

It’s interesting that one of the key missions Microsoft’s R&D center is to look at social networking and monetization – that means social startups need to be part of the equation. And social startups are clearly in this first tranche at WAA.

Perhaps all this activity will inform Microsoft’s future direction as a company. Or perhaps some corporate drone will dismiss it as a flight of fancy, and they should just concentrate on selling more Office and Azure products.

Only time and – many more startups – will tell.

THE STARTUPS AT WINDOWS AZURE ACCELERATOR

Durados
Durados is developing a cloud database application generator without coding. It basically generates templates for any kind of cloud app, like workflow or CRM. It’s aiming to launch on Microsoft’s Azure and Google Apps Marketplaces.
Founders: Itay Herskovits, Relly Rivlin

Evento
Evento is creating a Facebook application initially which makes it easier of events to go viral on social networks and address the problem that about 40% of event tickets go unsold due to lack of exposure. They are targeting sports, entertainment, music, and culture events run by SMEs. You get a lot more management options than the Facebook event application including live maps of stadiums and theatres where you can book a seat. They take a cut of the ticket booking, which is taken from marketing budget not the ticket sale. The system also finds your friends and places you near them in the venue. It’s designed to rewards people with virtual or real goods to incentivize people to spread the event socially. Closest competitor is Ticketmaster’s “Seat New Me” just on the web, but it’s not social. Launching around August with a sports team in the UK.
Founders: Ophir Zardok, Harel Shemer

EverCloud
This Cloud Services Broker (CSB), offers enterprises the ability to dynamically expand on-premise enterprise applications, such as Microsoft Exchange and File Servers, to public Clouds. The multi-tiered SaaS platform maintains communications with the
private Cloud via a proprietary protocol.
Founders: Yuval Rapaport-Rom, Gadi Rapaport

MediSafe
People who consume medication often forget taking their medication or over-medicate, especially if they are elderly. (In the US, over 30,000 people annually die as a result). Scan the Barcode on the medicine packet, and then MediSafe syncs someone’s medication routine with other members of the family. So when your daughter forgets to take her medicine at school, you receive an alert about it. She has to ‘check-in’ that she’s taken the medicine otherwise the Android app alerts the parents. Of course, this works for anyone.
Founders: Omri (Bob) Shor, Rotem Shor

Vidit
Vidit is a cool technology for collect videos taken by many people at a single event. Using a video synchronization algorithm it synchronizes and edits all clips into one. The result can be a rock concert from hundreds of angles in the crowd. The user that uploaded the video appears in the final video incentivising them to create more. A feature also allows you to pick which angle you like best. I’ve seen it and it sort of blows you away.
Founders: Eldad Bercovici, Elad Gariany

AppsFlyer
A Mobile Apps Marketing platform that helps App-Developers, Brands and Adagencies to track and optimize their user’s acquisition funnel. In plain English, this is a analytics for mobile app advertising networks for an app publisher to work out which networks they are getting their best responses from.
Founders: Oren Kaniel, Reshef Mann

Twtrland
Founded by four brothers and with 500k monthly users, Twtrland analyses Twitter profiles for influence on topics. Check out your profile and you may be surprised.
Founders: Eytan Avigdor, Noam Avigdor, Guy Avigdor, Lavi Avigdor

RotaryView
RotaryView lets you take 2D photos of an object and turn them into a 360° / 3D image. This helps online vendors grow more quickly. You just shoot and upload the photos.
Founders: Gev Rotem, Ofir Shefer, Gal Rotem

Stevie – Stealth mode company
WebTalk – Stealth mode

Disclosure: Travel costs to Israel were met by Microsoft

The Le Web conference in Paris is an annual TechCrunch favourite, so be aware that there are just 24 hours left to register for the startup competition for the new Le Web London event coming up. Selected startups get a chance to be onstage and also get free expo space.

Here are some highlights from the programming that are emerging:

• Bradley Horowitz explains how he plans to make Google+ bigger than Facebook.

• Facebook will comment on its IPO and strategy, via European FB insider Christian Hernandez.

• With London being a world center of finance, a bunch of new financing models will be on showcase from Renaud Laplanche of Lending Club, Samir Desai, CEO and Co-Founder of Funding Circle, as well as Errol Damelin, founder of Wonga.

• The subject of Europe vs Silicon Valley will be once again a topic of debate with Uber (US) vs Hailo Cab (UK), both of which raised $20m+. They will be joined by their VC counterparts, including Shervin Pishevar, Managing Director, Menlo Ventures and Adam Valkin, Accel Partners.

• Meanwhile the Pebble Watch has raised $10m without VCs, which raises the question, do we need them any more? Pebble founder, Eric Migicovsky, who has never spoken at a conference, will explain how the day of the VC is over.

And here’s a full list of speakers so far:

With over 500 people going already it’s going to be pretty fun, as Loic and Geraldine Le Meur explain: