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Doochoo, a San Francisco based startup which aims to connect massive amounts of opinion data, has announced the release of Couchin, a richly visual application for iPhone (Android coming soon) that allows users to vote, share and discuss their favorite movies and television shows.

Couchin is only the first of several opinion-based applications to leverage the Doocho platform, which will be released sometime in the future and promises to give opinions on the web tangibility and critical weight. Next up for development is PickOne, a service that eases organization and planning for sets of friends by asking the group for a collective opinion.

“Imagine a place where you can go and search for any possible opinion in a very tangible way, filter it, get recommendations and create actions based on the smart information you just found,” says Paolo Privitera, Doochoo CTO. “This is going to be a real revolution, the semantic Wikipedia for the opinions, a Freebase for what people think. And it all begins with Couchin: Nielsen Ratings 2.0″ adds Armando Biondi, Doochoo CEO.

With Couchin, users connect with the friends they already have to watch their shows together, and discover new friends as they participate. Most importantly, each user adds their vote to Doochoo’s database, which integrates all of the single opinions to create a massive collection of information for television networks about their audience’s viewpoint. Instead of relying on word of mouth recommendations for what to watch, Couchin provides a single portal with reviews and recommendations in a social, addictive setting, which aims to specify the usually imprecise public opinion. The core features are a live streaming chat function and Facebook/Twitter sync, to show your friends what you’re watching now and an ”Audience measurement 2.0″ system, a multiple and real-time rating aggregator, crunched into a social graph.

The team also promises to add soon Netflix/Flixster queue sync ability, trivia contests to win badges, gain backstage access, and unlock special features and forum to review your favorite shows and compare them to other reviews. The company is self-funded.

Couchin is available as a free download from the Apple iTunes store.

After an amazing conference last year, where I was called on stage with Gary Vaynerchuck and Kevin Rose thanks to a post that went on the twitter wall, I’m pleased to offer theStartup.eu an exclusive 15% discount code to Future Of Web Apps London 2010.

The speaker list is really impressive and includes amazing foudners suchs as Jason Calacanis (Mahalo), Nick Halstead (TweetMeme), SandyJen (Meebo), Andrew Mason (Groupon), Mike McDerment (Freshbooks), Andy McLoughlin (Huddle), Joe Stump (SimpleGeo) and Josh Williams (Gowalla). Take a look at the full speakers list.

The conference will be structured as a 2-days 2-tracks event plus one day of workshops (last year I attended Mike’s “The A-Z of building a successful web app” and it was amazing).

So, free up some space on your calendars for October 4-6 2010 and book your flights to London. You can register here, be sure to enter the code 15DISC to get your 15% discount.

These are some of the VC deals that happened until May around Europe, as posted on Techcrunch Europe. Keep an eye out for new posts with all of the latest VC deals.

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  Austrian venture capital house GCP gamma capital partners has sold online trading platformFatFoogoo to NASDAQ-listed e-commerce group Digital River. The exit values FatFoogoo at $10m and GCP has further agreed an earnout provision.
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  GrandCentrix GmbH, a Cologne, Germany-based start up which develops a “Smartphone Analytics” technology, has received an undisclosed investment from High-Tech Gründerfonds.The company develops and provides a Platform as a Service (PaaS) which allows suppliers of interactive mobile value added services to achieve a comprehensive consolidation of mobile user identities.
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  EnjoyVenture has led a second round of financing for amedo Smart Tracking Solutions GmbH.
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  I-Source has led a €3m first round of financing in Compario, an e-commerce company, along side XAnge Private Equity.
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  MMC Ventures has invested an undisclosed amount in mobile telecommunications software designer Creativity Software in return for a significant minority stake.
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  Belgian provider of payment solutions Clear2Pay has acquired Jware Technologies, an internationally operating software technology provider of eCommerce and mobile payment solutions.
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  Qualitas Private Equity has increased its stake in social networking site Tuenti Technologiesto 30%.

• High-Tech Gründerfonds has led an investment in software developer Propertybase GmbHalongside Bayern Kapital and Neuhaus Partners. Properybase is developing a real estate CRM. Financials have not been disclosed.
• Gimv and a number of other venture backers have sold their stakes in CoreOptics to Nasdaq-listed Cisco Systems, which will wholly acquire CoreOptics. TechCrunch IT reported the news, but didn’t say that many of those bakers are european.
• Mobiüs Corporate Venture Capital, INICAP and Enisa have backed Advanced Wireless Dynamics (AWD) with €1m.
• Bessemer Venture Partners has led a $7m series-C financing round for Criteo. You can read more on TechCrunch.com

On Tuesday night TechHub and Techcrunch hosted the Techcrunch Europe Summer Pitch battle.

The venue

TechHub was chosen as the setting for the battle – the recently launched space in central London offering office space and facilities to startups. It represented an optimal scenario for the event.

The contestants

In excess of 35 different startups entered the field to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges coming from Eden Ventures (Ben Tompkins and Katy Turner), Neu Haus Partners (Paul Jozefak) and Moonfruit.com (Wendy Tan White), alongside angel investor Eileen Burbidge. The startups were requested to go through three consecutive rounds: an initial screening based on a written one-line description of their idea, a one minute slide-less pitch and a three minutes aided pitch, before getting to the final podium. Even though the scene was dominated by anglo-american companies, several continental European (and beyond) startups were present to pitch their ideas.

The battle

Around 30 startups pitched their one-minute introduction to the judges and the spectators. The process was a bit hectic, with the twitter feed being overwhelmed by tweets trying to understand the spelling of the startup names.

Only nine startups made it to the slideshow round, where the judges decided for the following podium:

1) Calaboard: presented by Francesco Masia, it promises to enrich video-conferencing by allowing “in-the-air” drawing with your finger – your counterpart will actually see the drawing appear on the conference window.

2) Duedil: complements Linkedin profiles by allowing users to post complete reviews and feedbacks, allowing professionals to build reputation and clients to make better decisions over the professional figure to hire.

3) Geomium: bringing together social and location services, Geomium creates a recommendation engine for things to do in your neighborhood – friends can see what each of them is doing, propose what to do, chat and meet.

The remaining 6 final presenters were:

- ProspectVision: improve the conversion rate of visitors to your website, turning them into sales leads

- Me-Stars: online gaming network, where the user can actually put his face in the game, thanks to a face recognition and digitalization service

- Gourmetorigins: a service to get information about the regional origins of gourmet food, including the possibility to get in touch with the local producers and the local roots of food culture

- CrowdScanner: ever wondered who is attending the same event you are in? CrowdScanner is a mobile app that allows the user to “ask a question” to the crowd, favoring new encounters and easier networking, based on personal interests.

- MindQuilt: Mindquilt is “an enterprise knowledge management platform with intelligent question and answer matchmaking and gaming achievement dynamics”.

- Oneleep: “a shortcut to hard-to-access influentials: the decision-makers, employers, investors, buyers and experts – “Shakers””.

Special mention to the second Italian team pitching, for the first time on the European scene: Fubles.

You can also find the complete list of startups in this other great recap.

The bottom line

Social-geo-location-community are the buzz-words that are closest to the hearts of the entrepreneurs pitching at the event. Many of the startups tried to answer a social question by implementing a location- or community-based layer around (or on top of) their idea. It is notable, on the other hand, how the event winner Calaboard is not a project in the social or location space. Do the VCs see an excessive proliferation of location-based social services? Is the market getting tired of this sudden abundance? It is probably way to early to tell. Or is it?

A pretty light take on the failing and almost scamming of the PGI conference. Read it on Startup Digest.

It’s a known fact that seed capital is very scarce in Italy. Entrepreneurs, which by definition are stubborn entities are therefore finding creative and cheap ways to bootstrap their startups.

Tipsandtrip was born from an idea of social media consultant Juliette Bellavita and Blogo.it CEO Marco Magnocavallo. They had the goal of launching a web app and an iphone app in 6 months with less than $10k.

How did they do it? With some great project management and a few crowdsourcing platforms. Let’s break down their costs:

• Logo design: a simple contest on 99designs with a $300 prize. 114 submissions and a professional logo in less than a week.
• Development: using DjangoPeople and Elance a very international team was born. Developers are in Argentina, Ukraine and Russia. Total cost: $5000.
• Iphone development: an italian freelance developer found on the web. Two months of work and $2500.
• Iphone icon: a dutch designer made a professional icon for $350
• Internationalization: translations in german, french and spanish. MyGengo.com and Tolingo.de. 24h turnaround and a great service. Total cost: $100.
• Hosting: pay-as-you-go cloud servers, mostly free in the beginning.
• Debug/usability: UserTesting and $100.
• Sweat Equity: Juliette and Marco put in a bit of work during weekends as project managers, designers, developers, sysadmins, etc.

Total: $8,350.

They say they’re gonna use the remaining $1,650 to fix the numerous bugs that usually come out after the launch.
We still haven’t drilled down into the app. The founders were tired of having to remember all the precious tips their friend were giving them regarding restaurants, B&Bs, shops, etc. in foreign countries prior to their trips. After looking for an online tool to annotate all this information and having found nothing really useful they decided to build it themselves.

Tipsandtrip is your portable notebook where you can write your vacation related notes and find the best tips your friends and other users make public. The app will be a crowdsourced list of the best restaurants, shops, parks, beaches, B&Bs and city spots for tourists. The app obviously geolocalizes every info and integrates with Facebook and other social networks.

They are competing in a very crowded and fragmented market but I’d say that for $10k, they’re off to a good start.

It’s a free app and you can download it here.