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Tech startups across Europe are currently preparing their entries for Seedcamp 2008, the annual contest that offers five or so winners the chance to secure early stage funding and advice from a panel of expert VCs (in return for a chunk of equity).

But any not making it may not have to wait for another twelve months to get their hands on the organisation’s cash.

Polar Rose, a startup based in Malmö, Sweden, has announced the receipt of $5.1 million from Nordic Venture Partners for its facial recognition and visual search technology.

Polar Rose’s Bloom technology uses a combination of automatic facial recognition with 3D modelling to look for photos on the Internet. In addition,  Polar Rose’s image search will allow users to tag photos to improve recognition.

There’s a pretty great post on Particletree  about the kind of questions VCs ask when you’re doing a startup, so I thought I’d highlight them here as there seems to be a profound lack of 'noisy' UK-based Web 2.0 startups, and maybe finding finance is one barrier for entrepreneurs?

Where are all the UK web startups? Maybe everybody is just being very quiet (to fail in complete obscurity), or perhaps things are as dead as they seem to be (more than likely). The UK seems almost entirely barren compared with what's happening in the US.

It’s probably worth noting that local VCs seem to be a little behind their US conterparts (two local startups that I can think of off the top of my head have been approached by US investors – names of the innocent withheld). This too could be part of the problem.