Asian entertainment destination site Crunchyroll has announced a variety of new partnerships with three major Japanese anime studios today. The three studios are: TV TOKYO Corporation, SHUEISHA Inc. and Pierrot Co., Ltd. Back in March, Crunchyroll signed a variety of content distribution deals including with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

Crunchyroll self-reports 4.6 million unique users a month. Crunchyroll also announced an upcoming relaunch of the site to verify that professionally-produced content is approved by licensors.

Earlier this year there was a good deal of talk around Crunchyroll and their copyright issues. It seems that Crunchyroll is following in the same footsteps as YouTube. Tony Hung took a look at CrunchyRoll and went deep into the copyright and believes that CrunchyRoll is a "legal landmine."

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Berlin-based social recommendations service Plista has announced a round of funding today from the Draper Investment Company. Swiss-based investor Peter Schüpbach also joined the round. The company is not disclosing the total amount raised.

Plista moves into private beta today and the company is planning for a full public release in January 2009. The system uses Collaborative Filtering and is available for Web, mobile and video-on-demand applications.

Rafe has a good review of the service where he notes, "Think of it as Aggregate Knowledge meets MyBlogLog meets Sphere, with a dash of Matchmine." Tom Foremski has a lengthy review of the product and says that he would have picked Plista to win over Yammer at the TC50 event. Tom notes, "Plista’s technology creates models of user behavior — it even has a mood filter. "We can tell if you are in a grumpy mood in the mornings and we can factor that into your ratings," says Mr Dominik Matyka, Plista CEO. Plista also has a social network component so that you can share your recommendations and find and follow people with similar tastes."

This story comes out of Berlin, Germany. A 21-year old Web developer created an iPhone application that uses the GPS in the iPhone to help you find the nearest public transportation U-Bahn and S-Bahn (subway) stations. If you are onboard a train you could watch the transit map move live. The application has been downloaded over 20,000 times to-date.

The German BVG agency which is responsible for public transportation, had the application removed from the iPhone App Store. BVG spokeswoman Petra Reetz said that they want "but only the best for passengers". In speaking with one of my German contacts, he believes the fear for the BVG is that if the app data is wrong, German citizens may sue BVG. So rather than deal with that potential issue, they had the app shut down.

This type of mobile application would be awesome for many cities around the world. While it would only work where there’s mobile coverage, it could be a huge help in getting more people to take mass transit. 

You can read the full story (in German) on Heise Online.

Update from madam3181 via Twitter: "The iPhone app "Fahr-Info Berlin" is still available from the iTunes store however the current version has the maps removed"

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This story comes out of Berlin, Germany. A 21-year old Web developer created an iPhone application that uses the GPS in the iPhone to help you find the nearest public transportation U-Bahn and S-Bahn (subway) stations. If you are onboard a train you could watch the transit map move live. The application has been downloaded over 20,000 times to-date.

The German BVG agency which is responsible for public transportation, had the application removed from the iPhone App Store. BVG spokeswoman Petra Reetz said that they want "but only the best for passengers". In speaking with one of my German contacts, he believes the fear for the BVG is that if the app data is wrong, German citizens may sue BVG. So rather than deal with that potential issue, they had the app shut down.

This type of mobile application would be awesome for many cities around the world. While it would only work where there’s mobile coverage, it could be a huge help in getting more people to take mass transit. 

You can read the full story (in German) on Heise Online.

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Ikea launched a new online interactive advertising campaign in Germany this week. The campaign is called "Warte bis September" ("Wait until September”). The man in the video is Nils and his home has no furniture or accessories because the new Ikea catalog has not arrived yet. Let’s hope the catalog arrives soon!

It’s similar to the Big Brother series; you can watch two different camera angles on his apartment. The phone rings ALL DAY and he rarely answers. From what I can tell, he has friends come over to eat and chat (in German). His doorbell is the one jingle I absolutely hate!

If you want to interact with Nils, you have three options:

• Twitter him (this seems to be the most likely way he will see your message)
• Email Nils
• Call him - +49 40 22 61 11 61 (use a voip provider so the call is cheap)

Here’s the video or go to the site to watch it fullscreen:

Earlier this year, Ikea was named one of the top 10 corporate brands using YouTube.

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Yakov is reporting that Russian financial group Finam along with a group of Russian investors have acquired a minority stake in Deluxe Television. There are plans to increase the share to 50% by year-end. Deluxe Television is a Munich-based broadcaster of music television channels. Yakov notes a daily audience for Deluxe Television of 5 million people and he explains the current state of Deluxe Television:

Founded in 2004, Deluxe owns a free-to-air music television channel, Deluxe Music, seven pay-TV music channels (rock, soul, lounge, jazz, etc), two radio stations, the music label Sashimi Records. It also has an online shop where users can download songs and buy DVDs, CDs and merchandise. Deluxe tests a high-definition music channel to be launched later in 2008.

You might remember the name Finam as they were the venture capital firm for Russian contextual ad firm Begun which was recently acquired by Google.

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comScore is out with their German search engine rankings for May 2008. Google picked up another 1.5% share from the previous month, moving them to just over 80% of the German search engine market. That’s a staggering number. eBay is the second most popular search engine in Germany, however they lost .5% share for the month, coming in at 6% overall.

German networks Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck and ProSiebenSat1 Sites own 4.6% share combined.

It’s interesting to compare the numbers to the Russian search engine comScore report. In Russia, local search provider Yandex owns nearly 50% of the search market.

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By now we all know that Germany lost the EuroCup to Spain. To make up for some of the pain that Germans all over the world are feeling, Flock has launched a full German-language edition of their social browser.

It’s more than just a language translation - the browser is rich with German language content. They call this conversion, "deep localized". Dan Burkhart notes, "The Flock DE edition ships with local content, media streams and service offerings from the most popular sites in Germany. (For example: sports content from sites like Sports1.de, and bundesliga.de rather than ESPN.com. News from Spiegel.de and FinancialTimes.de instead of CNN.com). Search services deliver German search results (for example, Yahoo.de, Amazon.de, eBay.de, Wikipedia.de, etc). Social sites like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube are defaulted to return the German experience." 

And Flock says more localized versions will be coming soon as soon as the "dedicated volunteer localizers worldwide" offer up their free labor.

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Just a week after announcing that they will support OpenSocial, European social network Netlog has announced that Yahoo will market the service in Europe. The deal is an exclusive one in Germany and Netlog is Yahoo’s first network partner in Germany. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Comscore reports that Netlog’s services reach 1.3 million unique users, who spend an average of 177 minutes on its sites and reach a total of 676 million page views per month.

Could this be a replacement for Bebo which may leave Yahoo now that AOL has acquired the social network. And more importantly, could this be the first step towards a Yahoo acquisition?

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The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is out today with a new report they created with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) regarding online advertising spen for 2007 in Europe. The full report is available now. The net takeaway from the report is that in 2007, the European online advertising market was worth EUR11.2 billion, up four billion euros from EUR7.2 billion in 2006.

From the report, "Two thirds (65% or EUR7.3 billion) of European online ad budgets were spent in the big three markets of the UK, Germany and France. However some of the smaller markets in our report enjoyed very high growth rates - Greece at 91%, Spain at 55% and Slovenia at 49%."

It’s important to note that this report is for calendar year 2007 and the report for 2008 might show a very different result.

As you can see from the chart below, Europe as a whole is starting to catch the U.S. in total online spend.

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