Over 600 teams applied over the last year of nine Mini Seedcamps, finally coming up with teams from 16 different countries and 19 different cities. Although Seedcamp pinged to South Africa, Israel and even Asia this year, their hard-core remains Europe, and the above data points show just how intense you have to be to suck out startups from such a wide area. If you’re just in Silicon Valley, thank your lucky stars you only have to drive up and down the 101.

Below is Seedcamp’s summary of the contenders.

When the World Economic Forum reaches out to the world and asks people to talk about resource sustainability, energy efficiency and carbon emissions, they expect serious, thoughtful answer. And for the most part they get them.

Americans, of course, have to add a little flair. And so I’m not surprised to see a whole series of super hero interviews where they talk about these important issues, filmed in Venice Beach. The funny thing is that the answers are pretty good if you don’t watch the actual video and just listen to the audio. Boba Fett and Iron Man really nailed it with thoughtful answers in my opinion.

And it’s nice to see the very conservative WEF take a lighthearted approach to this. They even featured the video on their blog and will show it at next week’s summit in China. Our own Sarah Lacy will be there covering the event.

Zynga began rolling out Facebook Credits on some of its games months ago. But now they’ve made Facebook Credits the primary payment solution on all of their games across the Facebook platform other than Poker and a few other smaller games. Users can wire transfer cash, or use Facebook Credits, but that’s it. Other third party payment providers have been removed.

The migration has clearly had bumps – a slew of Zynga users are screaming murder in the forums over various payments failures. Which makes sense since Zynga is almost certainly accounting for the lion’s share of the Facebook Credits business.

One thing to note – Don’t expect to see Facebook Credits being rolled out in Zynga’s games on other platforms like Yahoo. Zynga and Facebook have found détente for now, but I don’t see Zynga processing a single dollar through Facebook that they don’t have to.

Zynga and Facebook’s joint statement: “Facebook and Zynga have transitioned Facebook Credits to be the exclusive method of payment for most Zynga network games on the Facebook platform. The companies are committed to working together to provide the best possible customer experience during this transition.”

Update: To clarify, Poker and the rest of Zynga’s games on the Facebook platform will eventually use FB credits, too.

Coulomb Technologies, a company setting up electric vehicle (EV) charging stations across the United States, today announced a $15 million series C funding. The round was led by Rho Ventures, Voyager Capital, Siemens Venture Capital, and Hartford Ventures, joined by Harbor Pacific Capital and LS Cable Ltd., and LS Industrial Systems Co., Ltd.

With its recharged coffers, Coulomb will be embarking on a program called ChargePoint America, and providing 4,600 new charging stations to nine regions in the United States: Austin, Texas, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Orlando, Fla., Sacramento, Calif., the San Jose and San Francisco Bay Area, Bellevue and Redmond, Wash., and Washington DC.

Coulomb’s strategic partners in this program are three automobile makers: Ford, Chevrolet and Smart USA.

So far, Coulomb has set up stations (that can power any plug-in vehicle) in cities worldwide including: New York City, Orlando, Detroit, Amsterdam, Sydney and Dublin. The charging systems installed are for consumer and fleet use, both, and run on the company’s proprietary networking technology and software, a system called the ChargePoint Network.

In our brief video interview, an enthusiastic Mayer touts Google Instant as a “whole new way to search,”a game changer akin to the introduction of power steering in the automotive industry. It’s certainly a neat feature that optimizes the search experience, but the real question remains: how does Google Instant fundamentally change consumer behavior, and in turn SEO and Google’s ad sales.

Mayer was more tentative on this front. See video above. Apologies for the muffled audio on my end, only one wireless mic was working at the time.

There has been a lot of debate as to how Google Instant will impact Search Engine Optimization. By effectively compressing the time of each individual search and allowing users to edit searches in real time, Google Instant has the potential to radically upend the current mechanics of search and the discoverability of sites. According to Mayer, it’s too early to determine how the new feature will affect the company’s bottom line and she believes there will only be a “small change for the SEO community.”

That said, she does expect consumer usage patterns to dramatically shift, including her own. For Google, the hope is that the net effect is not just faster searches, but more searches: “One of the things I’ve seen in my own personal usage,  is that while each search is faster, I spend more time doing searches. Because I actually see the results coming in and out as I’m doing my searches… I learn things as I go. And after I’ve actually fulfilled my query, a lot of times I’ll see interesting suggestions, so I’ll scroll around and learn different things and so I think ultimately, it may increase engagement of our users.”

Mayer also told us that Google Instant will eventually hit the other sections of search within the next few months, including Google News and image search.

Bonus footage: After Mayer’s interview, we got a chance to talk to Steve Cheng, a product manager on Google’s Mobile team, who gave us a quick demo on Instant on mobile and discussed their upcoming rollout strategy. See video below.

First, take a gander at what El Gruber has to say about Ping. He notes: “One way or another, though, if Ping proves popular, it shouldn’t remain focused solely on music.” He comes at the Ping question from a usability standpoint – shouldn’t there be a separate Ping app? Something completely disconnected from iTunes? In this way, Apple can add books, movies, apps, and the like to Ping and separate it from the lump of code called iTunes.

Read more…

PlacePunch, which received seed funding from Shotput Ventures, allows businesses both big and small to run their own location-based marketing campaigns that integrate with Foursquare, Facebook Places, Twitter, Gowalla and other location-based social networks.

For example, a restaurant can create a loyalty program that counts customer check-in towards rewards and coupons. PlacePunch provides a good amount of the infrastructure, including branded sign-up pages, mobile coupon delivery and analytics, to run these programs. Marketers can also run personalized messaging programs through Twitter for customers that check into their venues. So if customers check-in to your coffee shop, you could set up an recurring Tweet welcoming them.

PlacePunch also provides a dashboard of reports and analytics to help businesses learn more about their customers and venues, including demographics, time of check-ins, and more. And the bootstrapped startup has signed on InterContinental Hotels Group as a client.

Of course, the location-based services themselves could start offering ways for businesses to interact with consumers but the plus of using a platform like PlacePunch is that you can tap into a number of services from the same dashboard.

Researchers propose ‘roaming’ charging stations to keep electric cars powered originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ChompOn targets niche buying sites like the Jewish community JDeal (tagline: “You have to be meshugeh not to join”) and present at launch today is a lineup of partners including Sitepoint, Campusfood, Allmenus, Yoopra, and Stanford University. Says founder Samuel Yam, “And why should GroupOn have the monopoly on local business deals? All types of sites already have an audience to sell deals to, they just need to connect them to the right deals.”

Drawing from Yam’s background in advertising (he most notably sold AdWhirl to Admob), the crux of ChompOn platform is entirely ad networks driven, i.e. the deals aren’t stuck on your site. By adding in three lines of code, you can distribute ChompOn widgets throughout your publisher network, and ChompOn’s central analytics system will track all your data, across sites.  “Imagine as a user you’re browsing your favorite content site, and because of targeting data from other publisher sites, the current site you’re on shows you a personalized deal. That’s the aim.”

Here’s what I think is notable: Taking advantage of the fact that group buying is driven by collective behavior, ChompOn allows publishers to track deals shared over social media like Facebook and Twitter. Sites using ChompOn can now incentivize users if they shared a deal on Twitter or if they “liked” a business on Facebook. This could be a killer app for group buying, especially as the ability to share deals will only accelerate a mob mentality.

Yam explains why the world needs another daily deals site, and specifically ChompOn:

“Deals are here to stay. Lots of them. They bring in the money,and there’s no reason any one site should have a monopoly on deal inventory (as long as other sites have audiences). We’re positioning our play from an ad network background, and are providing the technology to start arbitrating and networking these deals right now across numerous properties.”

Well, someone must be making money off these things, or there wouldn’t be so many of them.