TheStartup.eu

Tired of chasing the same conversation on different platforms and infinite social networks?

Romanian Startup UberVU (pronounced UberView)  comes to the rescue. The service lets you “track conversations wherever they go on the Web and reply to them from one place”. Tracked services include Twitter (of course), FriendFeed, Digg, Picasa and Flickr.

But the product is much more than a simple tracker, you can start and respond to any conversation on any network from their platform, and send the message to all of your services, all from one place.

I am seeing immense potential for such a tool, and not as a personal tool. Companies can track their brand awareness, viral campaigns and press releases from a single place. Social media marketing has just got a new great tool!

UberVU is releasing today its public api which can be used by everyone (no invites needed) to add new URLs to track or get all the mentions, reactions and comments for a specific URL.

The team is led by 3 romanian cofounders. UberVU won the Seedcamp contest and subsequently incorporated in London. The development team is located in Bucharest. I wish them the best of luck.

Thestartup.eu offers you 50 invites to their private platform. To get your invite, simply click here.

Spanish company Abengoa announced it has finished its tests on a 20-Megawatt Solar-Power Tower in Sevilla, and started the commercial operations today.

The PS-20, located in the Solúcar platform, can serve more than 10.000 homes with its 20-megawatt power, and save us almost 12.000 tonnes of CO2.

With a height of 160 meters and 1,255 mirrored heliostats the PS20 is an impressive technology plant. Each heliostat, with its 120 square meters reflect the solar radiaction coming from the tower producing them vapor that will then generate electricity. The whole platform is developed by Abengoa Solar.

Spain is now a  3,000 megawatts ”solar country”, aiming very fast to become the largest in the world: Germany has 4,000. Abengoa already has a 10 megawatts solar power tower in service and plans another 20 megawatt plant as part of the Solúcar platform, which is expected to produce 300 megawatts by 2013 covering the needs of more than half a million people.

Abedonga is based in Barcelona Spain, with an office in San Francisco, and has a market capitalization of €1100,11 millon.

In July 2009, 10 teams will have the chance to attend the third edition of  SeedRocket in Barcelona.

Inscriptions are officially open. The 10 selected teams will fly to Barcelona from the 8th of July to the 15th to be mentored and helped with the launch of their company or product. They will attend workshops and get to talk with some of the most important spanish startup gurus including folks from Telefonics, Infojobs.net, Trovit.com, BuyVip.com, eyeOS and Hostalia.
The workshops include topics about Facebook application development, MySQL, Flex and Cloud Computing.

The best projects will obtain €20.000 in funding with the possibility of a €100.000 grant.
The application in open to both european and non-ue entrepreneurs with a working prototype of their product.

We hope to see some great startups at the event!

Second serie of Weekend Reading!

• So you want to Start a Startup? 5 Places to Start

on The Netsetter

• Stoicism 101: A Practical Guide for Entrepreneurs

on FourHourWorkWeek

• Exit Strategy

on VentureLevel

• 15 Roles Every Startup Needs Filled

on Silicon Alley Insider

• Startups: Universities are a Gold Mine
• Top Ten Lies of Startups

on Startup Professionals

• A Week on the Tech Scene

on Startups.co.uk

Feel free to share links in the comments.

Another round of investment for Newcaste-based startup Quick.tv which just raised another £335.000 to further develop its clickable video technology and market its product.
The company provides professional web video publishers the ability to inject interactivity into videos with a quick click, drag, and drop.

‘Online video has gone from being a consumer driven entertainment experience to a fundamental feature of any website. It’s now recognised by businesses across all sectors as an effective marketing tool.’ Nick Bell, founder and commercial director, says.

The fresh cash will mostly be used for a marketing campaign, in occasion of the new product launch.

The round was led by North Star Equity Investors which already backed Quick.tv in 2006 with proof of concept funding of £60,000 and again in 2007 with £500,000 from its Co-Investment Fund.

Update:We got information from Quick.tv that the round was closed on December 08.

High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) has invested EUR 500,000 into software prototyping company RapidRabb GmbH in a first round of financing.

The startup, a finalist at the Red Herring 100 Europe Award, provides an interesting product that gives business and developers the tools for rapid prototyping of software interfaces and easy-to-lear graphic specifications, early-stage testing and efficient communication.

RapidRabb was founded in 2008 by a young group of designers, developers and economists. It is based in Berlin, Germany.

The High-Tech Gruunderfonds invests venture capital in young and promising technology companies who turn scientific results into economic success, they have a volume of about 272 Milion Euros available. Investors of this Public Private Partnership are the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology of Germany, the KfW Bankengruppe, as well as the combinations BASF, Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, Robert Bosch, Daimler, and Carl Zeiss.