Where will the next billion-dollar startups come from? The tech world and most VCs tend to be parochial, looking at Silicon Valley, maybe New York, and a few other hot markets like China and Brazil. But what about the Old Country?

Yesterday, I was having coffee with Saul Klein, a partner at Index Ventures and co-founder of Seedcamp. He believes that in every major city across Europe, Russia, and Israel, there are “a legion of companies that are capable of achieving billion dollar valuations and in some cases are likely to be able to do close to a billion dollars in revenues over the next 3 to 5 years.”

I asked him to name five while I pointed my iPhone video camera at him, and he was able to give me a much longer laundry list , which I’ve added below (along with some others he sent me afterwards). I’ve indicated which ones are Index investments and where each one was originally founded. Which of these will get into the billion-dollar club? (Note that some of these already are billion-dollar companies. You can click through to their Crunchbase profiles to learn more about each one).

Skype (London, Index)
Playfish (London, Index)
Wonga (London)
ASOS (London, Index)
Mind Candy (London Index)
Net-a-Porter (London, Index)
Betfair (London, Index)
Klarna (Stockholm)
Spotify (Stockholm)
Wix (Tel Aviv)
Conduit (Tel Aviv)
Fon (Madrid, Index)
Privalia (Barcelona, Index)
Criteo (Paris, Index)
Vente-Privee (Paris)
SoundCloud (Berlin, Index)
LogMeIn (Budapest)
AVG Technologies (Prague)
Kaspersky Lab (Moscow)
Ozon (Russia, Index)
Yandex (Moscow)
Mail.ru (Moscow)

Exclusive - No, Conduit was not acquired for a billion dollars or more by Google or Microsoft … yet (although one executive suggested to me in a phone call this week that the company should, in fact, be worth about half of Facebook’s valuation on the private market – meaning about $35 billion at present day – because they reach about half of the social network’s audience).

We’ll see about that.

Either way, what’s really happening, according to solid sources close to the company, Conduit is in fact acquiring another Israeli startup in the Web app publishing and distribution space, namely Wibiya, and they added that the deal could close as early as next Monday or Tuesday.

According to those people, who are familiar with the negotiations, the transaction hasn’t been signed off yet and the deal could still fall through, although multiple sources I’ve spoken with are confident the acquisition will close soon.

I hear that the purchase price is roughly $45 million, which means the deal would give a solid return to both Wibiya’s founders and investors, who have pumped about $2.6 million into the company. Backers include Primera Capital, Yossi Vardi, Oded Vardi and Jeff Pulver.

If the acquisition closes, all 17 Wibiya employees are expected to join Conduit.

Wibiya essentially enables publishers to add a social layer to their websites, rendering said sites interactive, free of charge, in order to grow their audience organically.

It is similar to what Conduit does, although Conduit is mostly known for its Web toolbars and web application marketplace. Complementarity seems to be the key word, here.

From what I’ve gathered about the company, Wibiya currently partners with publishers of about 120,000 websites, many of which are small ones, although its customer base also includes the likes of TheStreet.com, Playboy.com and Glam.com. In total, Wibiya is said to reach 200 million unique users, although that is to be taken with a grain of salt in my opinion (even Twitter reportedly boasts less active users than that).

Conduit partners with companies like Zynga, Fox, MLB and Time Warner Cable to reach about 230 million unique users, according to its own count. I should note that the company does seem to do extremely well even though those numbers seem to be inflated: it has raised less than $10 million since its founding in 2005 and boasts about 250 employees today.

In January Bing surged in search market share, up over 2 points to 12.8%.

You wouldn’t think Conduit was the main force behind the rise. But the data suggests it is.

Conduit didn’t just bail on Google in favor of Bing. They also changed the way they do search. They previously put Google results onto their own domain. Now when someone searches from the Conduit toolbar the user is results are shown on Bing.com directly. So Conduit is losing all those page views and sending them to Bing.

Look at this comparison of Bing and Conduit from Alexa:

Comscore shows much the same mirror effect. Bing added 138 million more page views worldwide in January than December, and Conduit lost 165 million in the same period.

Coincidence, or cause and effect? That Conduit search deal may have been a lot more important than anyone realized at the time it was announced.

Conduit, the VC-backed company that enables publishers to create and distribute apps on the Web via browser toolbars, is sharing some stats with the world today (as they’ve done before).

The startup says it currently powers apps for a network of over 260,000 web publishers, including Mochi Media and Justin.tv, enabling it to reach a potential audience of some 200 million users via its Conduit Network. The company adds that Conduit-powered apps have increased in user adoption, on average, by 69% each month during the past 12 months.

Social commerce sensation Groupon is taking part in Conduit’s PR blitz with the announcement of a brand new Groupon Browser App, which notifies Groupon users, regardless of where they are on the Web, when new local deals are available (US customers only for now).

Meanwhile, and timed perfectly, an Israeli publication claims Microsoft is looking to acquire Conduit for a reported $300 million, citing sources.

We’re digging to find out more about the alleged acquisition talks between Microsoft and the company, but I daresay the timing of the rumormongering is a tad suspicious.

A spokesperson for Conduit tells me there’s simply “no truth to the rumor”, and Microsoft informed the Israeli reporter who published the rumor that it wouldn’t comment on speculation.

Still, Conduit is reportedly profitable and good for some $100 million in revenues (it has an agreement with Google in place), so combined with the distribution power it is so aptly touting this morning, it might indeed make for an interesting acquisition target.

We’ll update if and when we learn more.

Conduit, the venture-backed company that enables publishers to create and distribute apps on the Web via browser toolbars, is posting some big numbers today.

The startup says its network now boasts more than 250,000 web publishers, and that they’re able to reach some 170 million users. Roughly 23 new users install Conduit Engine every single second, the company adds.

Those stats led Conduit president Adam Boyden to make some bold claims about its size, relative to that of the mobile apps market:

“While most of the buzz in the media is about mobile apps, the reality of the situation is that 118 million more people use Conduit-powered apps than iPhone and Droid apps combined.”

Not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but it does indicate that Conduit Network has quietly become a whopper of a distribution channel for a number of big brands, including Amazon, Coke Zero, eBay, Facebook, Fox News, Hulu, Skype, YouTube, and Zynga.

According to Conduit, its App Marketplace (think of it as an app store for Web applications delivered via cross-browser toolbars) is seeing notable growth, particularly. The company says 60 million end users consume apps from the marketplace on a daily basis, not only benefiting major brands but also lesser known software developers.

Since August 2009, Conduit claims the number of Web publishers that have more than one million users has grown from 1 to more than 40 in May 2010.

At this scale, Conduit is able to deliver some interesting trends on Web app usage, and that’s exactly what they’ve provided us with. Full disclosure: note that there’s a TechCrunch App in Conduit’s marketplace somewhere, which the company refers to.

Quoting ad verbatim from the press release:

Entertainment apps are the largest segment among the hundreds of verticals represented in Conduit App Marketplace; 24.4 percent of the apps were created in this category since the launch of the marketplace.

End users are also hungry for news online and app publishers responded; 19.5 percent of apps in the marketplace deliver news from sources such as Fox News, iVillage, and TechCrunch.

The number of social media apps followed closely, constituting 18.2 percent of all available apps. Also noteworthy, the social media apps category grew fastest among end users during the last year, with adoption increasing on average by 87% each month.

Are you a Conduit user? Why (not)?

Conduit, a service that enables web publishers to easily create their own toolbars for Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox, is opening up its platform to allow for distribution opportunities.

Conduit’s SaaS tool lets companies create and distribute their content and products on a custom community toolbar. Conduit, which we have covered previously here and here, has amassed a network of more than 200,000 web publishers who distribute their toolbars to more than 60 million users.

Conduit is now letting publishers add other publishers’ content to each others toolbars via a marketplace. And consumers can also get additional content for their Conduit toolbars from the marketplace or the website of anyone who is a Conduit user. The toolbar can be a useful marketing tool for companies because it helps market brands by showing logos to users every time they surf the net. And now multiple brands can tap into this potential.The offerings include major brands such as Fox News, Lufthansa, Major League Baseball, Greenpeace and more (disclosure: TechCrunch also uses Conduit).

To date, Conduit has raised close to $10 million in funding and is currently cash-flow positive.

Of course, nowadays everyone has a toolbar and space in the browser is competitive landscape. MySpace, Yahoo, Digg and many others are all either upgrading their toolbars or creating toolbars for their brands. But with its white label offering that can now distribute brands more widely, Conduit may have found the opportunity to help companies cross-promote.

Conduit, a service that enables web publishers to easily create their own toolbars for Internet Explorer and Firefox, has raised $8M in a Series B round with Benchmark Capital.

We covered Conduit a couple of times early last year when the company had 25,000 partners and 5M toolbar installs. The company now has 140,000 partners with 12M+ installs. The company is cash-flow positive and describes its “web community toolbar” offering as a superior alternative to personalized homepages like Netvibes or Pageflakes, which it says require too much time to set up.

I’m not a big fan of browser toolbars myself; all the major browsers have search functionality and pop-up blockers built into them these days, bookmarks work just fine for me, and RSS readers do a better job aggregating the content I want to read anyway. But I can see publishers loving toolbars since they effectively market their brands by showing their logos to users every time they surf the net. And they are probably quite appealing to users who are loyal fans of very few sites, and who don’t care about giving up a little browser real estate space.

Instead of having each toolbar you’ve downloaded appear in the browser window, which takes up a lot of screen realestate, Conduit now lets users switch toolbars via a drop down menu. This only works for Conduit-powered toolbars, but it would be a nice browser feature in general in my opinion.

Given the advertising relationship I won’t go into more detail. But this is something that publishers might want to look into. Our Toolbar, linked in the navigation bar above, has been really useful particularly around getting event updates to attendees. The company now has 130,000 unique toolbars and 12 million toolbars installed (Major League Baseball has one for every team).

Conduit is a white-label, customizable toolbar for other web services. Like the Google and Yahoo, Conduit’s partners can offer users a branded toolbar with customizable functionality, such as a company logo, live chat, broadcasts to all users, etc. The problem, of course, is that most companies don’t have the resources or knowledge to create their own toolbar, and they are completely focused on their core business. Conduit is a good option for those companies.

The company now has 125,000 partners and 5,000,000 toolbar installs. Users can actually create a customized toolbar in a few steps (we’ve done it), for free, and offer it to users for download at a customized domain name ([example].ourtoolbar.com). If you register you can also qualify for revenue sharing from searches conducted on the toolbar.

We created a conduit toolbar for our New York party last November, and used it to update people on the details of the event. We had a few hundred downloads (most people still have it installed), and based on our experience we’re considering creating a permanent one that will include the most recent TechCrunch headlines and other functionality. If you have a community, this is a tool you may want to offer.

The company has raised $2 million in funding from Yozma, an Israeli venture firm.