This is our third guest post written by a London-based VC. To allow them to speak plainly without jeopardising their fund or their career in the small village that is the London VC scene, I'm allowing them to post anonymously. FYI, LondonVC is a genuine VC and TechCrunch Europe has met them face to face.One of the biggest challenges for any investor (regardless of the stage/type of investment they target) and founders alike is hiring great talent. In early stage investing the team may be the single criteria upon which an investment decision is based (considering how many times when that's all there is to go by) and even in later/growth stages, while the founding team has been historically crucial, bringing someone new in to help "get the company to the next level" can be the difference between investing or not.Something I've realised and have to admit is that while obviously the absolute pool of talent is smaller here in the UK/Europe than it is in the U.S. (and that cannot be disputed nor is it anything more than a function of population) another factor. It is one which I keep hoping will change, because if it doesn't it threatens to make a small pool even smaller. And that is a cultural and behavioural issue: work ethic.

  Last week, it was reported that AOL - amid restructuring efforts in the lead-up to the imminent Time Warner spin-off and IPO - was putting its instant messaging service unit ICQ on the block and had hired bankers Allen & Co. and Morgan Stanley to assist in the sales process. According to the reports, AOL was looking to offload the asset for $300 million and talking to a pair of non-US companies about an acquisition (likely in a part cash, part stock transaction).Question is: who are those potential buyers?

  Peripherals, they say, are the spice of life. Well, maybe they don't say that, but they do say it about variety, and peripherals add variety to your computing life. If you're reading this on a stock HP desktop, clicking on links with the mouse that came with it, and trusting your data to that 512MB USB stick they gave you at work, then you should consider accessorizing.

  Honestly, it's impossible to work in these conditions. I'm writing this from the TechCrunch Real-Time CrunchUp; a one-day event in San Francisco celebrating the joys of the 'real-time' web. Sounds awesome, right? It is.I've been on stage, heckling participants on the marketing panel, I've been Tweeting from the audience, I've been following the live-blogging of the panels. Generally I've been living the real time dream - which probably explains why I haven't done any actual work all day. And now I'm twenty minutes away from my deadline, and I still have to read a week of TechCrunch and figure out everything that's happened this week.Oh, and to make matters worse, Arrington has filled my work room with dogs.Welcome, then, to a completely - and appropriately - real-time edition of This Week On TechCrunch.

  Keith Teare was hanging around the Real-Time CrunchUp today showing off his newest project - Speedi.ly. What does Speedi.ly do? One thing, very well and at scale. Speedi.ly takes a piece of content, or grabs the content from a URL, and analyzes it. It does this very fast and it outputs some key data. Speedi.ly tells you the language of the content, categorizes it (topics, keywords), and additional metadata. This metadata payload is exactly what Robert Scoble is talking about with his SuperTweet idea.Here's what Speedi.ly returns for this story we wrote on the Skype/eBay sale:

  Extracting meaning from the Web is a difficult undertaking. Keyword search skims the surface of contextual meaning that is locked in Web pages, Tweets and feeds. That's where semantic search comes in. The semantic web deals with looking beyond simple links that make up the web to understand a deeper meaning and context behind that content. The Ellerdale Project, which launched in alpha this past week, is hoping to add context to search by using semantic technology to power a real-time search platform. Ellerdale mines the real-time stream, including Tweets, RSS and the, to identify topics, messages and articles that link together based on content, not keyword. So If you looked up Sarah Palin on Ellerdale's site, you'd see a semantic graph of related content, such as Oprah Winfrey (Palin just appeared on Oprah a few days ago), The Republican Party and John McCain.

  "Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all." - Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, co-founder of FriendFeed, currently doing vague infrastructure things at Facebook.Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld. The topic was: Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus.So can we kill email?

  For our last discussion at the RealTime CrunchUp, we've got a panel on actually generating revenue from these services. Participating in the discussion are some of the Valley's top VCs and veterans of the space.Brian Singerman — Founders FundRon Conway — Angel InvestorDan'l Lewin — Corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging Business Development at MicrosoftGeorge Zachary — Charles River VenturesPaul Buchheit — Facebook/FriendFeedAndrew Braccia — Accel PartnersMichael Arrington — Editor and Founder, TechCrunchModerated by Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld

  Today at the RealTime CrunchUp, representatives from some of the top companies involved in location based services came together to talk about the current state and future of geo-based services.Participating in the panel were:Matt Galligan, co-Founder of SimpleGeoRyan Sarver, Director of Platform at TwitterTristan Walker, VP of Business Development at FoursquareSteve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google LatitudeJustin Shaffer, Founder of Hot PotatoElad Gil, CEO of Mixer LabsModerators were our own Erick Schonfeld and MG Siegler.

  Rippol, the video discovery site that combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting content, has launched to the public at today's RealTime CrunchUp. We recently took an in-depth look at the service, but for those who haven't seen it yet, here's a recap: Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic. It then looks at meta data from video content ingested from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and uses machine learning to identify videos it thinks you'll like. From there you can browse through various genres to look at recommended videos

  At our Real-Time CrunchUp today in San Francisco, we are hosting a panel titles "Media Streams: Are These The Utlimate Marketing Vehicle?"Panelists include Sean Rad, CEO of Ad.ly; Ryan Amos, co-founder of DailyBooth; Jesse Engle, CEO of CoTweet; Robin Bechtel, a celebrity agent and Philip Nelson, SVP of strategic development for NewTek. Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

  Today at the RealTime CrunchUp we saw the launch of VideoLobby, a new service founded by Peter Urban that's looking to make it easier to create professional-looking webcasts, complete with custom branding. The service is an extension of Urban's "sales software for real people" service Smibs.Urban says that while some other services offer embeds, you're generally responsible for building your own branded site to insert those in. That's where VideoLobby comes in: the site helps you build your own custom video portal, and then allows you to include streams from services like Qik, Ustream and Justin.tv. The company calls itself the "Blogger for real-time video".The service doesn't just make your page look nicer, though — it can automatically pull in comments from Twitter and Facebook, and also allows users to submit questions directly from the show's page. Stream administrators can use a management system to heck off their questions as they answer them. And the service is completely free.

  Rotten Tomatoes is a great site because it takes all the movie reviews from around the web and condenses them into an easy-to-understand aggregate score. But let's be honest: Most movie reviewers suck. Why not instead rely on people in your social circle to recommend movies to you? That's the idea behind FlixUp.This new iPhone app unveiled at our Realtime CrunchUp event in San Francisco today essentially scans Twitter for what people are saying about a movie and shows you a rating based on that. It can return a general score from across Twitter, or the tweets about the movie from people you follow on Twitter.

  You know the retweet button you see on content spread throughout the web? You can thank TweetMeme for that. Long before Twitter's new Retweet functionality existed, this button was the way to share on Twitter. And it still is for content not on twitter.com. But now it's time for TweetMeme to think about making money. And they've come up with a way that people are either going to love or hate.At our Realtime CrunchUp in San Francisco today, TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead has unveiled AdTweets. As you might expect, this involves ads that appear on your site — but with the addition of a retweet button. Yes, you can also retweet these ads just as you would any piece of content.