ReadWriteWeb

Index Ventures, one of Europe's largest and most prominent venture capital firms, has announced the creation of Index Seed, a program with which it plans to invest more heavily in seed-stage startups throughout Europe, Israel and the Unites States. The formation of such a fund is just what the doctor ordered for young companies in Europe, as they have been largely underfunded in recent years.

This week was a busy one as Steve Jobs unveiled Apple's iPad on the same day President Obama delivered his annual State of the Union address - two events with significant impacts on startups and entrepreneurs. In this week's ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup, we discuss what the iPad could mean for startups, how mobile developers are excited about HTML 5, and how to find the perfect co-founder for your startup. We also check in with our semi-weekly series, Never Mind the Valley, in which we chronicle communities outside of Silicon Valley with booming startup scenes. This week we go international - hopping across the pond to London, and across the other pond to Beijing.

A settlement for nearly 2,000 years, London is today the most populous greater metropolitan area in Europe with over 13 million residents. Home to popular tourist locations such as Big Ben, The London Eye and Buckingham Palace, London's skyline is unmistakable. While London often serves as the representative bridge from Europe to the United States, it also is the seat of Europe's rapidly expanding entrepreneurial landscape.

The London startup scene saw its first major consumer Internet success in 1998 with LastMinute, a travel site similar to Expdedia that eventually traded publicly on the London Stock Exchange beginning in 2000. UK companies like LastMinute were largely able to avoid the doom and gloom of the dot-com bubble burst at the turn of the century due to the nature of the venture funding scene.

Welcome to the first ReadWriteWeb Event Guide of 2010. There's a new seminar in London later this month that we've added to this week's list. As always, you can download the entire event calendar in iCal format or import it into your Google Calendar. You can also import individual events using the link beside each entry. We publish it every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans. This events guide is a weekly feature here on ReadWriteWeb.

Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.

According to late-breaking news we saw on The Next Web, Foursquare is coming to London by the end of this week.

Other European rollouts, including a Paris debut, are expected soon. We also saw on the Foursquare Twitter account that the service is expanding to college town Chapel Hill, NC. Currently, the popular location-based app is doling out Shameless Drunkard and similar badges in Amsterdam and a collection of large U.S. markets.