This morning we had a breakfast with Tristan Wilkinson, Intel’s Director of Public Sector and other Intel execs. We had an interesting discussion about the use of  technology in the Western world, in developing countries, in the classroom. For example, we talked about how parents and teachers need to be more open to allowing kids to use technology, the internet, their mobile devices and not focus as much on the negative aspects of technology but rather on all the positive aspects. There is a huge problem with parents’ attitudes toward their kids’ involvement with technology and a huge divide in regards to educating parents:

Video:  Huge divide of educating parents

We also had a little debate about whether Twitter is already a mainstream phenomenon or not:

VIDEO:  Twitter mainstream?

Lastly, we discussed the importance of bringing technology to developing countries and what a difference even one cell phone in a village can make. However, Scoble, part of the TG party, also reiterated the idea which he calls the “Friend Divide” – this is to say that even if you have a computer and are able to get online, you’re still at a major disadvantage to people who have already built a rich network of friends which they can use to get and spread information.

VIDEO – Importance of a network

Right now I am writing you from NESTA’s Reboot Britain conference. More postings to come as we continue on our fascinating British journey…

Here are the shortlisted nominees in each category:

The Europas Shortlist: Best Web Application Or Service (EMEA)

The Europas Shortlist: Best Design

The Europas Shortlist: Best Bootstrapped Startup (less than 3 years old)

The Europas Shortlist: Best Social Innovation (which benefits society, EMEA)

The Europas Shortlist: Best Enterprise / B2B Startup (EMEA)

The Europas Shortlist: Best Cleantech / Environmental Startup (EMEA)

The Europas Shortlist: Best European / Real World Gadget (EMEA)

The Europas Shortlist: Best Entertainment Application or Service (EMEA)

The Europas Shortlist: Best Mobile Startup (EMEA)

The Europas Shortlist: Best Mobile Application (EMEA)

The Europas Shortlist: Best Startup Founder(s)

The Europas Shortlist: Best Investor (VC or Angel fund, EMEA)

The Europas Shortlist: Best Investor Personality (EMEA)

The Europas Shortlist: Best New Startup, Summer 2008-2009

(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:

SoundCloud
Spotify
Stupeflix
TweetDeck
Tweetmeme

(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:

Fred Destin, Atlas Venture
Morten Lund
Robin Klein, TAG
Saul Klein, Seedcamp/Index Ventures
Yossi Vardi, Angel
(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:

Atlas Venture
Eden Ventures
European Founders Fund
Index Ventures
TAG - The Accelerator Group

(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:

Alastair Mitchell, Andy McLoughlin, jointly, Huddle.net
Alexander Ljung, Eric Wahlforss, jointly, Soundcloud
Daniel Ek, Martin Lorentzon, Spotify
Felix Haas, Armin Bauer, Markus Eichinger, Dennis von Ferenczy, Sebastian Baerhold, Marc Bernegger, for Amiando
Richard Jones, Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel, for Last.FM
Richard Moross, Moo

(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:

eBuddy
Fring
MobyPicture
Shozu
Spinvox
Tweetdeck Mobile

(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:

Aka-aki
Bambuser
Goojet
Nimbuzz
GetJar
(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:

eRepublik
Moshi Monsters
Playfish
SoundCloud
WeeWorld

(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:

Fon
INQ Mobile
Modu
My Name Is E
Poken

(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:

Alertme
Amee
Dopplr
RouteRank
SpeedSell

(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:

BlueKiwi
FreeAgent Central
Huddle
VideoPlaza
Zendesk

(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:

Aleveo
Amazee
Decisions For Heroes
Mendeley
School of Everything

(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:

BookingBug
Doodle
Mixcloud
Soup.io
Struq

(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:

Babbel
IRL Connect
Songkick
Spotify
Wonga

(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:

Amiando
Babbel
Dopplr
Jimdo
Spotify

(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).

What is their core functionality exactly? SimilarWeb essentially provides a user-driven site suggestion and rating service, by accepting any website name a user enters, and yielding a list of related sites and data.

The usual protocol is to install SimilarWeb’s tool and to have it docked on the side of the browser. The dock displays suggested sites as thumbnails or as a list, while the user gets to set the display to his liking, submit new sites, and vote a suggested site up or down. Now, with the addition of SimilarWeb’s Twitter integration, a user can get his related (or “similar”) sites to any site in the world, with a simple Tweet. For example, if you wanted to search for all websites that are similar to Youtube, you would simply Tweet “Youtube” with the hashtag: #similarsites. SimilarSites will then send you an @ reply with a link to the search results page on similarsites.com. The service recommends all the sites to you, based on all the users’ votes. Or Offer, CEO of SimilarWeb, says “By offering this service, we hope to allow the user to get more information quickly and efficiently wherever they are; web, desktop client or mobile. This is a prime example of how companies can use Twitter and Social Media sites to expand their reach, increase their user-base and communicate with their users.”

I agree that the idea of the service is pretty cool. In theory. However, is this a feature that you as a twitter user would actually use? Would you want google to allow you to search Google by tweeting to @google?  By tweeting regarding similar sites on your stream, you disclose to everyone what sites you’re looking at (something you may not necessarily want to do) and you get zero value from Twitter’s network effect.  Wouldn’t you just prefer to use the SimilarSites Website for these queries?

SimilarWeb soon hopes to offer other “similar content” to users, such as “similar articles” or “similar products.”  I think all these services can bring users a lot of value but not necessarily as a service integrated with twitter. Even though twitter is all the rage right now, not everything today has to be somehow connected to twitter.

SUNDAY (today)
At 5:00 PM: Traveling Geeks Tweetup: Welcome to London!

NESTA and the SYmbian foundation welcoming the Traveling Geeks to London! This is a Tweetup to welcome Robert Scoble, Craig Newmark, Sarah Lacy, Howard Rheingold, Meghan Asha, JD Lasica, Tom Foremski, Sarah Austin, Susan Bratton, Jeff Saperstein, Renee Blodgett, and Sky Schuyler. The venue is the fabulous JuJu in Chelsea. Fees are just covering costs of the venue, food, and an open bar (until the money runs out!) Register here.

MONDAY

Reboot Britain

A one-day event which will take a totally different look at the challenges the UK faces and the new possibilities that – uniquely - this generation has to overcome them. Punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services. At Savoy Place.

TUESDAY

The Traveling Geeks are on their own private schedule of meetings but I daresay something is going on. Let me know and I’ll put it here.

WEDNESDAY

The Traveling Geeks are on their own private schedule of meetings but I daresay something is going on. Let me know and I’ll put it here.

THURSDAY

CloudCamp London

Evening: 6pm-12pm
The Europas: Teh TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009
The Traveling Geeks will be on hand at this big awards show and social event. Bring your Flips and camera phones!

FRIDAY
The Traveling Geeks are on their own private schedule of meetings but I daresay something is going on. Let me know and I’ll put it here.

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

Using hashtags in this way can also be a double edged sword. Plenty of people are wondering about the bizarre #moonfruit phrase and searching on the term. Plenty of others might well be annoyed by the hastag suddenly filling their stream as their friends rush to try and win a free Macbook. So the campaign could end up having diminishing returns.

A similar tactic was used by Lenovo to run a discount promotion offering a big discount off a new laptop. But these tactics raise the issue of hashtag spam - something Twitter is probably going to have to address soon with some kind of feature for people to vote something as hashtag spam.

However, the Moonfruit promo not putting everyone off. London-based twitterer @gecko84 won the first Macbook and the Moonfruit hashtag doesn’t look like going away.

That’s one way to breath new life into a web site concept - easy to build web pages a Flash interface - which has come back into fashion recently.

Webnode and Jimdo are more recent startup entrants, but they use an Ajax interface for users to build sites. Indeed, I recall writing a piece trashing Moonfruit 10 years ago for it’s - at the time - heavy-weight download interface for web site building. Flash was used to make their websites more design focused but it wasn’t ubiquitous in those days and not enough people had broadband. However it has proved to be a USP today, as the site has a drag and drop interface because of Flash and Flex. Moonfruit users tend to be ‘design aspirers’ and want to customise their own site styles. Clearly they were 10 years ahead of their time - again, another double edged sword.

Moonfruit also had some pretty damn patient investors. At its height the now defunct Europ@web, part of LVMH, had a portfolio of 52 startups during the dotcom boom. With a couple of decent exits, and the rest closed, they continued to back Moonfruit and then gave the founders the choice of buying the site back and managing ongoing customer liabilities. Other investors Macromedia and Bainlab supported this move too.

Moonfruit’s Weny Tan White and co-founder/CTO Eirik Pettersen were tenacious entrepreneurs. They cut the staff from 65 to just them, ran the site from a garret in Soho and hired freelancers.

In the early days of Moonfruit it was ad-supported but with the dotcom crash they had to be open with customers and ask them to pay. A loyal base said yes - and that’s pretty much kept them going since. Moonfruit also has a sister company, domain registrar Gandi.net, run by Stephan Ramoin (CEO), Joe White (Tan’s husband) and lead designer Kevin Foster.

What of the competition? Weebly and Yola (recently rebranded from Synthasite) are their main US competitors. While Moonfruit has been profitable for 6 years on a subscription model, these competitors have entered the market more recently and focused on a free, no ads model. Sound familiar?

But with the latest downturn they’ve tried to monetise with premium features, even as Moonfruit is moving in the opposite direction towards a freemium model of its own, with a premium upgrade path for users. For instance Weebly recently added storefronts - something Moonfruit has had for some time.

So where now from here? Tan says Moonfruit has grown 70% since last year and the build rate has increased by 40% since a new software release recently. That Twitter promotion should help.

LocalPeople beta-launched 20 community sites targeted at small towns and neighbourhoods across south-west England yesterday, with a further 30 planned for rollout in the next month.

The sites focus on communities of between 10,000 and 50,000 users, and blend Northcliffe’s local news and traditional media assets like classifieds and job ads with TrustedPlaces’ local business directories and social media elements, to create an ad-funded community publishing platform.

Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO and co-founder of TrustedPlaces told me the partnership is big news for the three-year old startup, and takes it a big step closer to profitability. Additionally, with Northcliffe’s established sales channels to rely on for market penetration in regions outside TrustedPlaces’ usual big city stomping grounds, the company is free to focus on the technology and product development.

As per the existing TrustedPlaces experience, users can discover, review and recommend businesses in their area, while the value to businesses is a ready-made way to engage with communities around them. There’s a user-generated content aspect to the deal as well, as LocalPeople users will be free to publish stories about their communities - for more on this angle, check out paidContent’s interview with Northcliffe’s director of digital media, Mike Rowley.

Newspaper Club will let users tag online content, collect and curate the content they want and turn it into a really good-looking printed product. The team behind it, Russell Davies, Ben Terret and Tom Taylor, started development earlier this month, and are charting their progress in their hilariously frank Newspaper Club blog.

The idea is that any group of people with a shared interest can use rights-cleared content from the web and print it in a basic full colour newspaper format. 4iP’s Daniel Heaf says the ideal audience could be a group of birdwatchers, the residents of an estate campaigning for improvements, or a printed product rounding up the best of the internet. Ben Terret was instrumental in this last project, which could be considered as a prototype for the Newspaper Club concept.

The business model is based on taking a cut off the printing price as well as selling bespoke solutions to corporate clients such as the internal newsletter it produced for its first customer, the BBC. 4iP is also keen to combine Newspaper Club with its other initiatives such as Talk About Local to give communities a more effective voice both online and offline.

It looks like 4iP’s onto another winner with this model, which combines the collaborative lifting power of digital with the accessibility of a non-threatening tangible product. It also means that online content could find newer audiences among the 30% of people in the UK who don’t yet have access to the web, or the multitudes more who live by their RSS feeds but still take pleasure in handling printed paper.

Content junkies who live to bookmark, tag, annotate and share might see this as a retrogressive step — but until we have networked electronic paper as standard, Newspaper Club seems like the next best thing.

Minbar Al Jazeera is a weekly show on Al Jazeera Arabic that covers various topics of interest to its audience. During the show, viewers call in or send e-mails. Now they tweet as well, using the show’s official Twitter profile. Since the show already enjoys a lot of interaction, Twitter and social media seem to be a natural fit.

While Al Jazeera leads the way in the Middle East, Al Jazeera English, launched in 2006, is one of the three largest English language 24 hour news channels available worldwide. The other two are of course CNN International and BBC World.

The integration of Twitter into Minbar Al Jazeera is not, however, their first effort in social media. The Riz Khan Show, a talk show on the english channel, mentions Twitter and Facebook. The show’s host, Riz Khan, actively receives questions from both sources. And perhaps they got turned on to the idea by their below report about the TwitchHiker:

On Twitter Al Jazeera now provides:

• Al Jazeera breaking news
• Al Jazeera headlines in English and Arabic
• Al Jazeera Gaza, started to provide news on the Gaza War
• The Riz Khan Show

While CNN might not use Twitter very well lately, Al Jazeera’s new media team is trying to lead the way and help its network embrace new platforms. Safdar Mustafa, head of the Mobile Media Unit, told Techcrunch Europe:

For Al Jazeera, it’s not about Twitter, Facebook or YouTube as such, it’s more about engaging with our viewers and actively involving them in our shows. Yes, Twitter is very popular at the moment and a great medium for quick communication with our viewers. It makes for a great tool for shows such as Minbar Al Jazeera. However, nobody is quite sure what the new and popular platform will be tomorrow.

With a global reach, dedicated new media team and very popular branded YouTube channel, Al Jazeera is trying to hold its own. Will the network recognize new platforms in the future remains to be seen, but judging by what Al Jazeera has accomplished in the last couple of years, it’s a good bet they might.

(Thanks to the familiar sounding ArabCrunch for the heads up).