TechCrunch UK Relaunches With One Hell Of A Party

I just returned from our party in central London to celebrate Seedcamp Week and the relaunch of TechCrunch UK & Ireland.

Robert Loch, who’s famous for his London parties, generously agreed to have the event at his penthouse London flat in Soho. His parties are so notorious (and I use that word intentionally) that we had to keep the location secret and only email it out to attendees who’d registered. Even so, 50 or so people showed up “off list” and were able to get in.

Total attendance was about 250 people, including most of the venture capitalists in London who invest in the Internet, most of the Seedcamp attendees and a ton of other entrepreneurs. Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis also dropped by for an hour or so.

One thing I need to remember for our next party - Londoners drink a lot more and stay out far later than their Silicon Valley geek counterparts. We actually ran out of alcohol completely at around 10:30 but Heather soon had another shipment brought in. I left at 1:30 am to get back to my day job. As far as I know the party is still going strong.

TechCrunch UK & Ireland Relaunches

The primary reason for the party was to celebrate the relaunch of TechCrunch UK & Ireland, after a nearly year-long hiatus. I am very pleased to announce the return of Mike Butcher as the editor of the site. Mike knows everyone in London - seriously - and he has deep experience writing about startups at The Financial Times, The Industry Standard and The Guardian, among other publications. We are very lucky to have him rejoin the TechCrunch team. Look for his coverage of Seedcamp on Friday morning London time.

See more coverage of the relaunch at The Guardian.

Thank You To Sponsors

Heather put the party together in a week after we nearly canceled due to a lack of an appropriate venue. Still, a number of sponsors stepped up to cover costs of the event and supplied excellent food and drink. Thank you to all. And special thanks to the Seedcamp team for working with us to organize and promote the party.

Event Sponsors:

Olswang is a leading law firm renowned for its work in media, communications, technology, real estate and more recently, biosciences. Founded in 1981, the firm has grown to a staff of more than 500 and has offices in London, the Thames Valley and Brussels. Olswang is organised with both a sector and service line focus, enabling it to deliver specialist legal advice backed by a strong business perspective.

WorldTV is an exciting, second generation video site offering a slick and user-friendly interface for online aggregation, personal archiving, search and viewing of multi-definition video content in Flash, including access to more than 25 million video clips from a range of popular, well known sites. The service lets users create their own full-screen online TV channel, complete with MTV style logo and all at a cool and easy-to-remember URL. Based in London and Limerick, Ireland, WorldTV will launch out of private beta in November, and is an idea from Smashing Concepts! - the UK ideas and incubation company.

Food & Drink Sponsors:

Thanks to Mucho Mas Burrittos (seven days old, founded by former Skype guys, better than Chipotle) and Hummus Brothers for feeding us, and Stormhoek for supplying the excellent wine for the event. The food and wine was awesome and you kept everyone appropriately fed and watered.

gBox: Give The Gift Of DRM-Free Music

gBox is a new take on selling digital content. Instead of emphasizing sales directly to consumers, gBox is encourages you to create wish lists and buy gifts for your friends and family. To kick-start the service, they’ve sealed a pretty big deal with Universal to be the retailer for their new “Open MP3″ experiment into DRM free music. In a move that’s a snub to Apple’s iTunes, Universal will be buying Google AdWords for their music, linking people to the gBox site to buy their artists’ music. gBox will be expanding to other forms of digital content in the future.

gBox is not only a destination retail site for digital content. It also has an embeddable gift box widget to show off what you want to your friends. Your friends can then buy it for you directly from within the widget. It will be available as a general embed or specialized for 7 of the big social networks (no Facebook). Their current offering, music, will go for 99 cents per track and $9.99 per album (to stay competitive with iTunes). You have to have a gBox account to receive a gift, but not to buy one.

Considering people already pay 99 cents to send their friends virtual gifts on Facebook, I’d expect buying a real song to be an attractive proposition. It also seems like a missed opportunity for a network like MySpace, which runs on Snocap.

You can download the content after its bought for you, but need a special gBox plugin to control the downloads since some content partners (Sony, IODA) will be selling music with DRM. This makes the offering somewhat disappointing, because the plugin will only work for IE (FF on the way) and not on the Mac.

gBox was started in June as an angel funded spin-off from Navio systems. They’re a 20 person company based in Cupertino, California.

Here are some of the most recent CrunchBoard job posts:

Peer to peer lending service Lending Club will close a $10.26 million series A round of financing from Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners tomorrow. This comes a few months after the company’s $2 million angel round. Coinciding with the investment, Jeff Crowe and Dan Ciporin (former ceo of shopping.com) are joining Lending Club’s board of directors.

Similar to other P2P lending sites (Prosper, Zopa, Kiva), LendingClub matches borrowers and lenders. However, LendingClub doesn’t work through their own website, but solely through Facebook on the application they launched at the F8 platform launch conference. Borrows and lenders a linked up using their “LendingMatch” system, which recommends loans based on credit and their social relationships to each other. The idea being that trusted relationships make lending more likely and defaults less likely. The application currently has over 13,000 installs.

Unlike Prosper, interest rates aren’t determined through bidding, but calculated based on the borrowers credit score, debt to income ratio, and amount of the loan. There are no hidden fees, and the interest rate is fixed for three years. In July the service surpassed $500K in loans. They recently claimed a little more than 4 out of 5 loans get funded and haven’t reported any defaults or late payments.

It’s still the early days for this industry, and as TC commenters point out, it’s very much a case of Caveat Emptor.

TechStars Demo Day - Class of 2007

Y Combinator wasn’t the only incubator to demo their most recent startups today. Colorado-based TechStars also brought their startups on stage - ten of them - to give the audience a first look at what they’ve been up to all summer. Each startup gave 5% of their equity in exchange for $15,000, operational support, office space and mentoring.

Most of these companies are unlaunched and seeking additional angel funding (exceptions are noted). Here are our notes on each - and see Don Dodge for his take:

EventVue builds social networks around conferences (see confabb, an existing competitor). The idea is to let people connect before, during and after conferences in an online space, to add to the physical interaction at the conference itself. The company plans on generating revenue by charging an affiliate fee for each new registration. They are currently looking for $150k in funding.

Intense Debate - see our previous coverage. Intense Debate is a souped-up blog commenting widget that adds a lot of features for publishers and commenters alike. Currently installed on 30 blogs. Installing the plug-in on your blog (WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad) adds threading, comment analytics, bulk comment moderation across all your blogs, user reputation, and comment aggregation. They are looking for $500k in funding.

socialthing! is an ambitious project that simplifies the management of digital content (blogs, photos, music, friends, social networks and links). Users can also synchronize information from and to various social networks from their profile page. Strong viral component. Revenue from advertising. Raising $500k.

J-Squared Media has launched their “Sticky Notes” Facebook application. It has 1.7 million users after six weeks, who have sent over 4 million sticky notes. They are working on several other related Facebook applications and are cash flow positive with $30,000/month in revenue from cost per action advertising. Not seeking funding. More here.

Search-To-Phone is a mobile search service via voice. Call and leave a voicemail asking about a product or service. The request is then routed to the appropriate business to call you back with information and/or a special offer. Built on TellMe and Gold Systems technologies for voice recognition. They’ve signed a business development deal with Excell Services to provess 10 million calls. They are looking for a small capital investment and more partners before launching.

Villij is a recommendation engine that analyzes your online life (social networks, blogs, bookmarks, etc.) to find people who may have similar interests as you. Raising $500k.

MadKast has the honor of being the first TechStars startup to launch. Our previous coverage is here. They’ve made a dead simple way to increase distribution for your blog with one line of javascript or one click for Blogger and TypePad. Once the widget is installed, readers can send a blog post via email, mobile MMS, or social bookmarking networks to friends. They are raising $300k in capital.

FiltrBox is a content monitoring and filtering service for blogs, news sites and other websites. Content is filtered by topics, keywords and context and then delivered to the user via RSS, email and/or text messages. Filters can be adjusted via sliders and will learn what you like over time. Raising $500k in capital.

KBLabs is developing Facebook applications and widgets. Wah! Cool was their first application, which launched four weeks ago. It now has 100k subscribers and is generating 1.5 million page views per week. Other applications include Post Secrets, Motivate Me and Track Bot. The founders are going back to college this Fall but will continue to consult and build Facebook applications. They are not looking for funding.

BrightKite serves location based notifications (”place streaming”) over email, instant messaging of text messages. The idea is to stream content about a place, from a place. Friends are alerted when you are nearby. You receive offers from local businesses. Etc. Targeted towards conferences, bars, parties and public places. It is also a platform for third party applications. Raising $500k in capital.