Europe has no real equivalent to the big hothouse that is Silicon Valley, but it does have lots of tech clusters and networks. As recent research from the startup Seedcamp startup programme has shown, clusters of innovation are spread far and wide across Europe. One place everyone agrees is a key cluster is London. It now hosts offices belonging to all the top-tier pan-European VCs, several new Seed funds, has an active Angel investor market and hosts many major tech events. However, largely because of its cost – everything is still expensive here – London remains hard for European startups to access and get into, even in a recession. And although European and US entrepreneurs often need to take meetings and work in London, who wants to sign a huge office lease?

TechHub (@TechHub on Twitter) is new project put together by long-time London tech scene person Elizabeth Varley which will address just this issue. It will be a new, physical space for tech people, providing the things they really like: Super-fast Wifi, power for laptops, coffee and flexible, plentiful desk space. What’s really game-changing though is that – as I understand it – it will very, very affordable, which is exactly the problem that needs to be solved in London if the rest of Europe is to benefit.

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At this point there shouldn’t be any doubt in anyone’s mind that Apple’s response to the FCC over its ban of Google Voice was rife with half-truths and some complete falsehoods. One claim that’s entered the limelight again is Apple’s statement that it hadn’t actually rejected Google Voice, but that it was still “pondering” it. Yesterday Google released its full, unedited response to the FCC inquiry, and the newly revealed content directly contradicts Apple’s statement multiple times, explicitly stating that the application was rejected.

Apple struck back with a statement that it didn’t agree with Google and that “Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google”. We’ve heard that Google actually has a screenshot displaying its rejection notice, but we may not even need that to show (once again) that Apple isn’t being honest.

In its letter to the FCC Apple says that “contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it”. It then goes on to describe its issues with Google Voice, which include fears of confusing users and replacing the iPhone’s core functionality (for a moment let’s ignore the fact that Apple’s description is totally disingenuous). Apple closes out this description with “The following applications also fall into this category”, and then lists the three third party Google Voice apps that were yanked from the App Store.

Presumably the applications in “this category” are all being pondered over too, and have not been rejected, right? But that’s simply not the case. Riverturn Inc, the developer behind the VoiceCentral application that was listed in Apple’s FCC response, has sent us a screenshot of its ‘rejection’ status that is quite clear.

Of course, this is all semantic hairsplitting — a neverending “pondering” status is exactly the same thing as a rejection — and Apple isn’t fooling anyone with it.

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ToyBots CEO Shervin Pishevar, fresh off his TechCrunch50 debut, apparently wasn’t too pleased with my post yesterday calling him and his company out for not dreaming big enough. My chief complaint – that ToyBots should be building the next multi-billion dollar superhit toy, not messing around with an unproven platform solution that no one may ultimately use, but that many may ultimately copy.

So he stopped by today to tell me that ToyBots will indeed build their own toy or toys, and to show me his super double secret stealth prototype – a very lifelike dog-type thing, only smaller. And it’s certainly cuter than this scary thing. Pishevar says of the device: “We’ll be bigger than Facebook.”

The video is below:

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I’ve had a couple of conversations with Skype exec Jonathan Christensen over the last few days to get a better understanding of just what directions the company plans to go with regard to third party developers. The recent announcement of the closing of the Skype Extras program seems to suggest Skype is heading exactly in the wrong direction.

As an aside, one of those conversations was extraordinary from a technical perspective. Jonathan called me via Skype, which forwarded via Skype Out to my mobile phone when I didn’t pick up. Since Google now controls my mobile number, it rang my cell and my home Vonage line per my rules. I picked up the vonage line and I had a crystal clear connection with no lag.

Christensen says that the Extras announcement is not about Skype backing away from a robust developer platform. Rather, he says, Skype is focusing on a next generation platform that will hopefully address the deficiencies of the old program and open many more opportunities for developers to build on Skype services.

Vague? Somewhat. But it’s a heck of a lot more information than we’ve ever gotten out of Skype before.

Eventually, we suspect, Skype will release a SDK that allows developers to integrate deep into Skype and make calls over the Skype service without opening the Skype client. In other words, people may start to think of Skype (voice, video, chat) as a service rather than a client that must be installed and used to communicate. Today’s tools, which include a public API and the now defunct Extras program, require developers to open the Skype client to make a call.

In the future we’ll see other third party desktop applications be able to make Skype calls directly, and possibly share in the growing Skype-out per minute charges that make up the bulk of Skype revenues. And sometime after that, we will see web applications leveraging Skype as a service, too.

A couple of things have to happen first, though. There are two reasons Skype has to run on a client today. The first is audio/video encoding at the client level that ensure high quality calls with low latency and minimal configuration. There’s a reason calls on Skype tend to sound good. The second is the p2p architecture of Skype, which also affects latency and cost.

It’s relatively straightforward for Skype to allow third parties to build both functions into their apps via a SDK, which is why we’ll see desktop applications integrate Skype as a service first.

But the real win is when you can initiate skype voice and video calls via web applications. It’s not clear that we’re anywhere near that being possible with today’s browses, say experts we’ve spoken with. There will likely always need to be some desktop software to assist with at least audio/video encoding. But it’s possible this could be done via browser plugins, or even in Flash.

Anyway, we’re looking a ways into the future with all of this. But one thing seems clear – Skype, which is happily soon to be under new management, will someday open its doors widely to developers.

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