Live from London: The Europas Awards

The Europas, the tech startup awards from TechCrunch Europe, will be streamed live from this post from 6pm tonight London time/GMT (10am SF, 1pm NYC). We'll kick off with a startup pitch competition, followed by a panel of some of the leading lights in tech consisting of: our own Sarah Lacy, Jolicloud founder Tariq Krim, MyDeco's Brent Hoberman and Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo. The actual announcement of The Europas winners will be from around 8.30pm GMT onwards. he winners will be announce first on TechCrunch Europe (RSS and Twitter). After that, well, a huge party. Over 300 people are attending from all over the European tech scene. Our streaming partner is TechFluff.tv. If you couldn't get to the awards, if you're somewhere in Europe working on your own startup, then tonight raise a glass, put the projector screen on in the bar and have your very own Europas awards with us. We salute you.

OneRiot Real-Time Search API Now Open To All

For some, it’s useful to go to OneRiot to search for links being tweeted or dugg in real-time. But for a lot of people it’s better if the sites and services they’re already using have the functionality built-in. That’s OneRiot’s intention in opening up its API to the public today.

The site’s API, which has been in use with selected partners for several weeks, will give third-party developers a chance to bake the results right into their sites or apps. One of the big developers that has already been using it is Microsoft, which has a version of its web browser, IE 8, with OneRiot built-in.

Another partner that has been using the API is the desktop social messaging client Nambu. You can imagine that a lot of the clients that offer Twitter functionality may also want to offer real-time link search capabilities, which OneRiot’s API will be perfect for.

Here are four of the main options that OneRiot will offer with the API:

Realtime Search Results – a realtime stream of related web pages and videos that the social web is buzzing about right now for any search query.
PulseRank Search Results – a feed of search results ordered by relevance using OneRiot’s PulseRank algorithm, PageRank for the realtime web.
OneRiot Trending Topics – a feed of emerging topics heating up across the web right now.
Simple Web Search Interface – allowing developers to provide innovative search integration with minimal investment.

OneRiot CEO, Kimbal Musk, will be participating in our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp this Friday.

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Twitter CRM Service, CoTweet, Raises Series A Funding; Launches Public Beta.

CoTweet, the web based Twitter collaboration platform for businesses, has announced a Series A round of funding totaling $1.1 million.  The investors are Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments and Freestyle Capital.

CoTweet helps companies and brands, like Whole Foods, Microsoft, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and the City of San Francisco’s 311 manage their Twitter accounts as a marketing channel.  CoTweet makes it easy to manage multiple accounts and supports group access to the same acounts, so a marketing team can split up Tweeting duties among themselves but still keep a unified public voice on Twitter.

CoTweet also launched into public beta today — meaning anyone can now sign up for the service. Previously, CoTweet was an invite-only service, with invites being hard to snag.

Finally, CoTweet has announced that it has integrated directly with Bit.ly, enabling CoTweet users to access the real-time click tracking and analytics from the URL shortening service. CoTweet launched in 2008, and is based in San Francisco.

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SuperFan Combines Social Gaming With Fan Worship

There has never been a better time to be a “fan” online. Whether it be via Facebook, MySpace, or even through fan-based social networks like TopFans, fandom on the web is taking off now that fans have more ways of expressing themselves. Just look at the recently deceased Michael Jackson, whose Facebook page now has close to 8 million fans, surpassing the fan count of Barack Obama’s Facebook page (6.4 million fans). SuperFan is a new way for people to express their loyalty and admiration for a show, movie, celeb, professional athlete or politician. SuperFan is a social gaming network where users build their network around who and what their fans of and compete with other fans to become the top fan.

Users of the network can become Fans of all their “Faves,” which include everything from ABC’s show Grey’s Anatomy to tennis star Roger Federer. Fans tag their Faves and can then use credits (via a virtual currency) to become the “SuperFan,” which gives them special privileges in controlling the favorite item or person’s profile. The network has enabled a bidding system to motivates fans to prove they are the number one fan.

Fans can earn points as they contributing more to the site. The credits can then be used to send virtual gifts, posting site-wide messages, customizing profiles with skins and colors and becoming the ultimate “SuperFan.” Fans can also create, take and share quizzes about their Faves, create and post to blogs on their homepages, and create battles (posted to the community) between Faves to drive traffic to the their respective pages (think Angelina vs. Jen). Users are also given a compatibility score with other fans on the site, that recommends friends to you base on your mutual Faves.

SuperFan is the brainchild of the co-founder of Tickle (which was bought by Monster Worldwide for $100 million in 2004), Rick Marini. Marini says SuperFan will make money mainly through e-commerce (via virtual currency sales), advertising and afilliate campaigns (SuperFan has partnerships in place with iTunes, Amazon, TicketMaster, StubHub, ThumbPlay to sell products and tickets.) Board members include founder of F*cked Company and AdBrite Philip Kaplan and Napster founder Shawn Fanning.

SuperFan is a innovative and engaging way for users to express their “inner fan” but I worry about how site will amass actual users when many people are already using Facebook and MySpace as fan hubs. Marini says that the site has implemented integration with Twitter and Facebook Connect to allows users to publish news onto their other social network sites, and also possibly catch the attention of potential fans at the same time. Still, MySpace, especially when it comes to music, and Facebook have a relative monopoly when it comes to combining fans with social networks. But Marini counters that on Facebook anyone can create a fan page for a celeb, show, athlete etc, creating sometimes hundreds of pages for one person or item and distorting the ultimate fan experience. Users often don’t know which page is the official one. With SuperFan, all “Fave” pages are pre-set and monitored so fans cannot create new pages but only add to them.

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Office 2010 Promo Video Promises Action, Excitement, Explosions

Office Team Lead: We need something really cool to make people excited about Office 2010. Some Office Programmer Guy: Can we call Google to hint at ChromeOS to take the heat off of us when we launch on Monday? OTL: Already done. We need a video. SOPG: What should it include? A little run-through of the program? Sort of a screencast that folks can watch and understand and then maybe get excited about Office 2010? Maybe we can put some Feist in there? Make it really minimalistic? OTL: No. We need an action movie.

Virtual meetups spark real fitness

Becki Coats was embarrassed, so embarrassed that she didn't want to show pictures of herself with her new grandchild.

Who will switch to mobile TV?

It was a record-breaking performance that slowed taxi traffic across Seoul on Wednesday when figure-skating darling Kim Yu-na took to the ice in Vancouver at the Winter Olympic Games.

Trek to gauge carbon's impact on Arctic

Two teams of explorers and scientists are on their way to the Arctic for the first international project to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in water beneath the ice.

Web fuels global casting call for Benetton models

Famed for its provocative ad campaigns, including the famous image of a newborn baby still attached to the umbilical cord, fashion brand Benetton has always stayed one step ahead of the fashion pack.

Rivals readying their iPad competitors

It turns out Apple isn't the only company readying a touch-screen tablet computer.