TechScape

Sorry, didn't write this up on Friday. Emap Consumer Media has bought mobile firm Yospace for £8.7 million, plus up to a further £5.7 million depending on Yospace's operating performance in the next three years.

Yospace is the company behind 3 UK's See Me TV service, which lets users upload video clips from their cameraphones, and then get paid when other users download them. Emap hasn't said much about its plans for the company, other than it'll sit within its Emap Performance division.

Well, it's not strictly a startup. Viadeo started life in France, as a social networking service for businesses, but it's only recently opened a dedicated UK office to drive membership over here.

The obvious comparisons are with LinkedIn and Xing, although as UK country manager Peter Cunningham told me, Viadeo thinks there's more to its service than a pure address book and recruiting tool. It's certainly grown fast.

"It started off as a private online business tool for 200 French companies, and just mushroomed from there," he says. "Since they made it public and open two years ago, it's grown to over one million members, with 50 staff working to run it."

You can’t swing a cat at 3GSM this year without hitting 17 mobile social networking companies, all claiming to be the next MySpace, and all claiming to be unique. Time will tell. Cerkle is one of the more interesting examples however, offering a social networking service that works from your PC and your mobile phone.

“Our belief is that social networking is evolving, and people are resolving themselves down into smaller groups,” says Paul Cox of Roundpoint, the company behind Cerkle.

“If you look at the statistics, most people use social networking more to contact people they already know and arrange to do things. They’re not going out and looking for new friends. So we’re not really trying to do the MySpace thing, as we don’t think that’s what people want in the mobile environment. And besides, you can’t deal with 700 friends on your mobile. You can deal with 10...”