It’s still all relatively stealthy – that link above won’t tell you much – but the company has nonetheless announced $650k in seed financing from the Austrian government-funded Federal Promotion Bank.

In a statement, CEO Hubertus Hofkirchner said Prediki’s patent-pending technology would be able to “unveil information about the future where traditional market research and opinion survey instruments have proven unreliable or inapplicable”, for clients ranging from companies to governments.

Hofkirchner has form in this business. He was formerly CEO of a company called Redmonitor, which dealt in financial predictions and sold out to CMC Markets , a UK-based derivatives dealer. However, Prediki’s technology has also evolved out of systems that have been used for political polling.

“In the past, the base technology upon which we’re building was mostly used for political forecasts,” Hofkirchner told me. “In recent times it’s probably twice as good as opinion polls for a fraction of the cost. But it was very hard in the past to apply the technology to anything else.”

“There has been lots of work done to apply the technology to things like sales forecasts, pharmaceutical approval forecasts, technology adoption, evaluating innovations, evaluating media campaigns and so on – lots of work has been done by various players in the last 10 years. But, while there has been success in the predictive performance of these things, nobody ever cracked the problem that it’s really hard to come up with a model for a truly generic all-purpose prediction market.”

So does Prediki’s technology work? What am I, a fortune teller? But the Austrian government seems to have some faith in it (after all, it can apparently be used for NGOs and even governments), so let’s see. The big unveiling should take place sometime in the first quarter of next year.

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The outfit is buying software, rights and people from Vienna-based Novosense, whose technology can support New York Times-style metered free-article allowances without logging readers’ consumption count via conventional cookies.

Twenty-five publishers of 66 sites in Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland have put a small percentage of their web content into respective national payment systems operated by Piano Media. Unlike paywalls for individual news sites, which are fast being rolled out around the world, Piano currently charges a single monthly fee for access to all publishers’ material.

But, through the Novosense acquisition, there is an addition coming in December. “Some of our media partners were asking for individual systems,” CEO Tomáš Bella says (via release). Bella will call the added model “Piano Solo.”

While hard pay-or-leave systems are a spiky reader proposition, meters are finding some favor. The New York Times’ 10-free-articles meter has brought the publisher more revenue and a circulation hike without impacting web traffic.

But such meters can notoriously be cracked, for instance, by deleting the cookie files that count articles read by individual visitors. Novosense boasts an “innovative algorithm” that relies on an alternative  method of user tracking, which it does not describe.

The jury is somewhat out on Piano Media’s existing shared-kiosk system until it can disclose how many monthly subscribers it has in each of its three existing countries. But the task of corralling rival publishers into a single system is considerable — and one that would become harder in larger, more competitive countries to which Piano wants to expand.

With Novosense’s addition, Bella says: “Now individual media can move ahead on their own…without having to wait for smaller or more conservative partners to make a similar decision.”

Novosense’s service also includes some data tools for building user profiles. Piano raised €2 million in April. Acquisition price is not disclosed.

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Why is this important? Because LTE has only seen a patchy deployment so far. The networks know how to do all-IP Voice over LTE (VoLTE), but that’s of limited use if the call dies as soon as the user steps out of LTE coverage. VoLTE only makes sense if the users can continue the call while switching between network types, without noticing.

It’s a virtuous circle. Once VoLTE becomes viable for operators, phone manufacturers can start building their phones around it. Gradually, they will be able to stop putting 2G and even 3G voice capabilities into their handsets, which will make it viable for operators to turn off those old technologies and reuse the spectrum for 4G.

And it’s the smoothness of the handover that’s crucial here. The demonstration back in February used a technology called Single Radio Voice Call Continuity (SRVCC), and involved a pause of more than a second while the call was handed over. This time we’re talking the enhanced version of that tech – eSRVCC – and the pause is less than 300ms.

Huawei actually announced a successful test of eSRVCC a month ago, but this latest work with T-Mobile Austria took place in the field, rather than in a lab.

“Our successful pilot project showed that not only rapid data transfer, but also Voice over LTE technology is ready for widespread commercial use,” T-Mobile Austria CTO Rüdiger Köster said in a statement.

The company added that voice quality should see a boost from the switch to VoLTE, too.

So, when are we going to see that widespread commercial use in Europe? According to a Huawei spokesperson, that depends on how long it takes manufacturers to make their handsets VoLTE ready, but the aim is for the end of 2013.

Incidentally, this development may help put into context some of the changes about to hit MetroPCS’s VoLTE play in the U.S. As Kevin has noted, T-Mobile intends to do away with MetroPCS’s CDMA system and is sounding pretty cool on that carrier’s existing VoLTE implementation.

T-Mobile will be rolling out its own LTE services in the U.S. in late 2013, and it sounds like that timing will gel quite nicely with its adoption of eSRVCC.

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The Irish data protection commissioner (DPC) issued his assessment (PDF) on Friday of Facebook’s compliance with recommendations the regulator made last December. The DPC had been forced into the issue following complaints by a group of Austrian law students calling themselves ‘Europe v Facebook’, and had told Facebook that it had to be more upfront about giving users privacy choices.

The review suggested that Facebook had “fully implemented” most of the DPC’s recommendations, and those that had not been implemented would be taken care of “with a clear timescale” in place.

And one of those moves is apparently to stop recording people’s facial characteristics in order to automatically suggest photo tags.

“I am particularly encouraged in relation to the approach it has decided to adopt on the tag suggest/facial recognition feature by in fact agreeing to go beyond our initial recommendations, in light of developments since then, in order to achieve best practice,” DPC Billy Hawkes said in a statement. “This feature has already been turned off for new users in the EU and templates for existing users will be deleted by 15 October, pending agreement with my Office on the most appropriate means of collecting user consent.”

Facebook, which was targeted in Ireland because that’s where all its non-North American business is based, is also crowing about going beyond the call of duty:

“The latest announcement is confirmation that we are not only compliant with European data protection law but we have gone beyond some of their initial recommendations and are fully committed to best practice in data protection compliance.”

But guess what? That’s not the end of the story.

Facebook’s been under fire over precisely the same feature in Germany, where privacy chiefs have accused the social network of “illegally compiling a vast photo database of users without their consent” – remember, this is the home of data protection law we’re talking about here.

When that last bit of bother struck just one month ago, Facebook insisted that:

“We believe that the Photo Tag Suggest feature on Facebook is fully compliant with EU data protection laws.”

So what gives?

Essentially, Facebook has found itself fighting on too many fronts. What began as an obscure concern of people in German-speaking countries has spread: the Norwegian data protection regulator also started probing the feature, and – crucially – so did the Article 29 Working Party (WP29).

The WP29 is a group of privacy regulators from all over the EU, and its recommendations get taken very seriously indeed. In July it said facial recognition features such as photo-tag suggestions should only be allowed when the user gives their explicit consent (and that means the user being tagged, as well as the one doing the tagging).

So yes, Facebook has just gone beyond the Irish DPC’s original recommendation, but only because a higher authority is waving a bigger stick at it, and because the company’s realized it’s not going to win this one.

In any case, even though Facebook is wiping the facial recognition templates it’s already recorded for its EU users, it intends to bring the system back once it’s figured out a “holistic approach” to properly informing those users.

As for Europe v Facebook, they’re still not happy (no surprise there) but tell me this victory is “totally going in the right direction”.

To give Facebook its due, here are the areas in which the DPC says the company has fully implemented its recommendations:

• The provision of better transparency for the user in how their data is handled,
• The provision of increased user control over settings,
• The implementation of clear retention periods for the deletion of personal data or an enhanced ability for the user to delete items,
• The enhancement of the user’s right to have ready access to their personal data and the capacity of FB-I [Facebook Ireland] to ensure rigorous assessment of compliance with Irish and EU data protection requirements.

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The cash, not all of which will come from the state, is going to be dished out over the next six years. €65 million of government funding will go into a Founders’ Fund that will buy stakes of up to 49 percent in new businesses, with investments ranging from €100,000 to €1 million. This fund is aimed at entrepreneurs who simply can’t find capital.

Meanwhile, a further €22.5 million of state cash will be set aside to match angel investments euro-for-euro, with investments of between €150,000 to €300,000. With this €45 million fund, the idea is to not only finance startups but also give them a helping hand in developing their business.

“When young entrepreneurs are trying to get their businesses started and lack the necessary risk capital, banks are unwilling to provide sufficient credit and business networks are not yet well established, many potentially lucrative businesses will fail to get off the ground, finance minister Maria Fekter said in a statement.

“In terms of the levels of risk capital financing provided, Austria is ranked only 20th of 25 countries polled. Thus, we have a real need to catch up here and I am certain that our two ‘Young Entrepreneur’ initiatives are the right way to make the necessary changes.”

At no point does the finance ministry specify tech startups in its statement, but Fekter’s spokesman told me that the most important criteria were “the degree of innovation, fast-growing ideas and forecast on the labour market for employees”, as well as “the degree of internationalization opportunity”. Given that, it would be frankly bizarre if a substantial portion of the funding didn’t go to tech.

Potential

It’s not as though there isn’t an Austrian tech startup scene worth funding. Just look at the roster of prominent coworking space Sektor5, or the buzz that’s starting to emanate from companies such as language portal Busuu, fashion outfit Lookk, careers advice service Whatchado or web-life recorders Archify.

As for the angels needed to make the second fund happen, well, angels tend to come from exits. And there have been some big ones recently — in June alone, Paysafecard sold to Skrill for €140 million and Blue Tomato to Zumiez for €75 million.

But, by all accounts, venture capital is a scarce resource in Austria. The situation is better in Berlin and much better in London, and neither of those hubs are particularly far away for Austrian startups. Both cities are also supported by governments are keen to put money into startups.

Of course, it can be argued that state funding discourages VC activity by competing with it, but on the other hand it tends to come with fewer demands than those imposed by venture capitalists. Also, in reality, government money is shoring up much of the European VC scene anyway.

Either way, the money being freed up is not insubstantial. Let’s see how much of an effect it has on a scene that’s already worth paying attention to.

Photograph of Hofburg used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Nagesh Kamath

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Not that the students, whose group is less-than-subtly named “Europe v Facebook”, are satisfied. They say Facebook holds way more information about its users than it generally lets on, and they remain convinced that its refusal to cough up is illegal in Europe.

To tackle their nemesis, the group complained last year to the Irish data protection commissioner (DPC), since Ireland is where Facebook has its HQ for all operations outside North America. In December, the DPC decided Facebook was breaching EU data protection law and gave the company a stern telling-off, along with a list of things it should change.

And now we see the fruits.

“Starting today, you will be able to download an expanded archive of your Facebook account history,” a note on Facebook’s somewhat-obscure European public policy blog stated on Thursday.

Since 2010, Facebook has provided a download tool that gives you some of what the company knows about you — timeline information, photos and videos, messages, wall posts and so on — but now it includes more than before.

Now you can access additional categories of information, including previous names, friend requests you’ve made and IP addresses you logged in from,” Facebook said in its note. “This feature will be rolling out gradually to all users and more categories of information will be available for download in the future.”

“Users are again fooled,” Europe v Facebook immediately retorted. The group reckons Facebook’s now including 39 categories of information in the downloads, but that it actually holds about 84 categories on each person. The company’s move is in line with what the DPC asked it to do.

So what are we still not getting to see? “One was ‘Like’ button information,” Europe v Facebook leader Max Schrems told me, explaining that this category kept a record of every webpage a user had visited which had a ‘Like’ button on it (the user doesn’t need to click the button for the tracking to happen).

“We found Like buttons on porn pages. Facebook holds this data in a personal form for 90 days and then — according to Facebook — depersonalizes it,” Schrems said. “According to EU law they have to give out all the personal information that they have about a user. They have to put out the information in raw format within 40 days.”

Clearly not satisfied with the changes forced by Ireland’s privacy regulators, the group is now urging people to complain directly the European Commission about Facebook’s alleged law-breaking.

Nitpickers? Perhaps. A Facebook representative pointed out to me that several categories of data can be viewed in the new ‘activity log’.

But this small group of students has managed to get one of the world’s biggest tech companies to alter its policies for all its users. They’re not satisfied, and I wouldn’t bet against them wrangling out even more concessions in future.

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VAP originally tried to go after Kino.to directly, but wasn’t able to determine who actually runs the site. Attempts to shut down Kino.to were further complicated by the fact that the site is hosted in Russia.

VAP decided to go after the ISP instead because Austrian law forces Internet providers to take action against infringement as soon as they become aware of it, much like the DMCA does in the U.S. UPC said in a statement that ISPs shouldn’t control which kind of content its customers access, and that it is looking forward to clarify this issue in court.

Kino.to is one of the most popular sites for links to free and unlicensed streams of Hollywood blockbusters. The site is particularly popular in German-speaking countries. Alexa currently lists Kino.to as the 42nd most popular site in Germany, which makes it just slightly less popular than MSN.com or Flickr.com. Alexa lists Kino.to as number 819 worldwide.

There has been an ongoing trend toward one-click host sites and rogue streaming sites as the growth of BitTorrent and other forms of P2P piracy have slowed down. PricewaterhouseCoopers recently conducted a study on online piracy that found that 82 percent of users who pirate content online use unlicensed video streams.

Rights holders and politicians are increasingly fighting back against this trend by targeting sites like Kino.to. Some sites been sued and taken down, and the White House recently introduced a bill that would make it a felony to watch movies on unlicensed video sites.

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