Now, launching its beta, is a new site from Germany, Twidox. The aim is to create an online library of ‘quality’ documents which have been created and uploaded by users, such as academics, researchers and non-governmental agencies. Universities get to save on printing and distribution. Their documents are optimised for search engines - assuming they haven’t already thought of this of course - and Twidox can sell advertising against the content. It just got got a second round of investment from Media Ventures, a German VC, which took a 20% stake in the startup (though terms were not disclosed).

But, I hear you say, what about Scribd? The difference here is that Twidox will concentrate on the high end of the market - data, statistics, academic articles, dissertations, and so forth. And the focus is not so much on any old user as direct co-operation with institutions. Twidox has so far managed to pick up the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN.GIFT) as a client and is now looking to extend into European universities. Interestingly there is also a UK startup trying to do something similar, edocr (reviewed here), but edocr is yet to win substantial backing, and aims more at businesses.

TechCrunch has 500 beta invites for Twidox to give away. When you click on “Register now for private-beta” there is a box called “How do you know about us?” Write TechCrunch in there to get on the beta.

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Imedo.de has kindly offered to throw the networking event at their offices but the meetup, (announced back in May), is now, alas, completely full. So if you haven’t got a ticket now I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until we do another Berlin meetup, which may well be before the end of the year, judging by the enormously enthusiastic reaction to this one.

To keep up with the event live, there’ll be a ‘live community’ on http://blog.twidox.com via Six Groups. If you upload your pictures and/ or videos to Sevenload or Flickr, please tag them with “tcberlin” and use the hashtag “#tcb” when twittering. To join the live stream and for your tweets to also show up, please go to blog.twidox.com and register for the community. When registering, state your twitter account and then your tweets will appear in the live stream.

We hope everyone has a great night. Peter Ha from CrunchGear and I (Mike Butcher) look forward to meeting all the startups and we’ll be doing some live coverage of our own.

Check out more detail on our sponsors after the jump.

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I’m delighted to announce that TechCrunch / CrunchGear are holding a Berlin meetup with our partner and co-organiser twidox. The “TechCrunch / twidox German Web 2.0 Meet-up” will be in Berlin, on the 11th of June. Imedo.de has kindly offered to throw the networking event at their offices here from 7:30 pm onwards (pictured above, nice huh).

Peter Ha will be there from the US to represent CrunchGear together with Mike Butcher who writes for both TechCrunch UK and TechCrunch. We both look forward to being able to say “Ich bin ein Berliner”!

More info after the jump…

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