Readmill, a soon-to-launch iPad app and accompanying Web site, helps users highlight passages in the e-books they are reading, and turns those passages into shareable, embeddable permalinks. So just as you might post a YouTube video on your blog or Twitter, Readmill will allow you to share quotes.

There is, of course, an underlying social network where users can follow each other’s reading histories. Users can also post comments and minireviews about the books they’re reading, which could eventually help inform book recommendations.

And the Readmill app has some nifty features that quantify personal reading stats by visually depicting for users how far along in a book they are, and how much they’ve read per session. Readmill founder Henrik Berggren showed me, for instance, that he spent 21 hours over the span of six months reading the epic novel “Shantaram.”

For now, since Readmill works only with EPUB books rather than proprietary formats, it mainly has access to older classics.

What Berggren would like to do is get the Readmill API included in e-book applications, to bring a social reading experience to larger libraries and user bases. He said he’s making some progress on that front, but it’s slow. Market leader Amazon Kindle is “proprietary to the core,” he said.

Both Kindle and Nook already have some social features. Amazon, in fact, has come under fire for automatic-sharing settings. Berggren argued that Readmill offers a superior social experience because it’s built to be social from the ground up.

Currently the Berlin-based Readmill team is working on a marginalia mode for its next release, which will make it easier for users to share their comments directly within books. Berggren said the service should open to the general public in the next couple months.

Readmill has raised about €300,000 ($431,460), led by Index Ventures and Passion Capital.

Today, eBay said it has acquired brands4friends, a German online retailer for $200 million in cash. Earlier this month, eBay announced the acquisitions of Milo, which keeps a database of local retailers’ inventory, and Critical Path, a mobile application development shop.

EBay expects brands4friends to strengthen its position as a leading online fashion destination in Europe. Brands4friends claims to be “Germany’s largest online shopping club,” which offers top brands at reduced prices to members through limited daily offers.

Online shopping clubs account for 20 percent of online fashion sales in Europe, according to eBay’s own research.

The 3-year-old company has about 3.5 million members and 200 employees.

As part of the deal, eBay will also assume brands4friends’ equity interests in U.K. shopping club secretsales.com and in Japan’s brands4friends.jp. The acqusition is expected to close in the first quarter, pending regulatory approval.

Another freaky but compelling movie trailer–this one for “Unknown,” a bad-guys-stole-my-identity thriller set in Berlin and starring Liam Neeson and January Jones.

It’s got a lot of action and special effects, but it looks like the complex story is at the center of the action.

Enjoy:

Sources tell me that Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures are leading a “significant” new round for the Berlin-based company. I don’t have a dollar amount, but I’m told that VCs were competing fiercely to get into the three-year-old company, which raised a $3.3 million round from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures in 2009. The round hasn’t closed yet.

Online music has been a black hole for investors for a very long time. So what’s the attraction here?

In large part, it’s because SoundCloud isn’t dependent on deals with the major music labels. It’s designed to let professional and amateur musicians share their own music with each other and the public, via cloud-based files that the company hosts.

Once the tunes are on SoundCloud’s servers, the service makes it easy to move the stuff around the Web, via its own widget and an API that’s showing up on lots of interesting sites, apps, services and devices, including Facebook and Apple’s iPad. You can load SoundCloud files into Spotify, the streaming music company that Index has also invested in.

The service uses the freemium model, offering most of its capabilities for free, and charging up to $700 a year for more storage and extra features.

You can also use SoundCloud to share music you didn’t create and don’t own–and a “private sharing” option makes it easy to do so discretely. That could leave the service open, theoretically, to copyright claims, a la YouTube.

But so far the company has signed up a million users without attracting the ire of the big labels. And recent court decisions in the Veoh/Universal Music and Google/Viacom cases seem to give user-uploaded services like SoundCloud a lot of legal leeway, at least in the U.S.

I’m told that the company also plans on using Audible Magic’s “fingerprinting” technology, which will make it easier for copyright owners to pull content off the service.

SoundCloud, Index and Union Square all declined to comment.

Here’s an example of SoundCloud at work–a 43-minute (!) mix that Beck has posted to his Web site, which we can also embed here:

Melted Lemons by planned_obsolescence

SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

Beliefnet, the spirituality site bought by News Corp. in late 2007, is being shopped around for sale, according to several sources.

Sources said that the media giant is also considering selling off Berlin-based Jamba/Jamster, a mobile content provider now called Fox Mobile Group. News Corp. (NWS) paid $187.5 million to VeriSign (VRSN) for a 51 percent stake in Jamba in 2006 and bought the rest in 2008.

Founded by Steve Waldman and Robert Nylen in 1999, Beliefnet is a social networking site focused on religious, spiritual and faith-based issues, with $7 million in venture funding from Softbank Capital, as well as an initial angel investor round.

While its users skew Christian, the site offers blogs, news and other services related to Islam, Judaism and many other faiths, in addition to Christianity.

Its motto: “Our mission is to help people like you find, and walk, a spiritual path that will bring comfort, hope, clarity, strength, and happiness.”

The site was bought for an undisclosed sum by News Corp.’s Fox Entertainment Group as part of the Fox Digital Media unit. The digital strategy was to distribute some of its religious-based content on Beliefnet.

News Corp. has recently sold off some of the digital purchases it had made several years ago, such as its Rotten Tomatoes site to Flixster in a stock-trading deal.

Interestingly, Beliefnet’s Waldman is now senior adviser on the future of media and information technology to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski.

Jamba was founded by Germany’s Samwer Brothers. On its Web site, News Corp. said it eventually bought it out entirely and “aligned the company’s business strengths with the global market opportunities in mobile entertainment, enabling it to underline its leadership in mobile content distribution, licensing and production as well as offering its customer a broad and up-to-date portfolio of mobile entertainment content further on.”

A News Corp. spokeswoman declined to comment on either Beliefnet or Jamba.

Hence, Sony’s announcement that it’s making a big bet on…3-D TVs. CEO Howard Stringer is using the IFA Technology Show in Berlin to announce that Sony will make 3-D Bravia sets.

And 3-D Vaio laptops. And 3-D PlayStation3s. And 3-D Blu-ray DVD players.

No plans for a 3-D Walkman, though. (But wait!)

This is a recurring theme for Sony, by the way: Stringer also talked up 3-D in January at the Consumer Electronics Show. I still wonder about the actual demand for this; I sampled some new-fangled 3-D at CES and left underwhelmed. But the stuff I saw–a live broadcast of the college football championship game–was, admittedly, an experiment.

In any case, even if you believe Stringer’s assertion that consumers really love the new 3-D experience, there are some big hurdles before Sony (SNE) or anyone else in home electronics can capitalize on it. For instance:

• A looming format war, the same thing that kept Blu-ray from taking a running start at the DVD market.
• Ginormous prices: Sony hasn’t said how much its 3-D-enabled TV sets will cost, but the ones that rival LG go for something like $5,500.

A few months ago BoomTown was in Berlin and visited a number of Internet companies there, including studiVZ, which I called “the Facebook of Germany” in the video posted below of my visit there.

Ooops!

As it turns out, that is apparently the illegal way to describe it, at least according to Facebook itself, which sued the German company in a California court last Friday, accusing it of making a “knock-off” of the popular social networking site.

That includes having a German version of Facebook’s popular Wall and other similar features. At least studiVZ is red, while Facebook is blue!

The name studiVZ is an abbreviation of the German word for students’ directory. Its tagline is “Bist Du schon drin?,” which translates to “Are you already there?”

Facebook has been trying to break into the German market for months now, as part of an aggressive international expansion.

But its efforts have been dwarfed by studiVZ, which was founded in 2005 and has been expanding throughout Europe. studiVZ now has 10 million users, mostly in German-speaking countries.

It also has a site for high-school students called schülerVZ and another for nonstudents called meinVZ.

Thus, a lawsuit from Facebook, which just settled a lawsuit with another startup called ConnectU (Winklevoss!) that accused Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg of stealing its original idea for a social networking site!

This just drips with irony, doesn’t it?

In any case, in its lawsuit, Facebook said it is “seeking to end studiVZ’s illegal activity to ensure that users are not confused and that Facebook’s reputation remains unharmed.”

Oh, German users aren’t confused–they just seem to like studiVZ better.

So much so that the company was bought last year by an investor, the large German publisher Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, for $112 million.

In response to the Facebook lawsuit, studiVZ said it had not yet been served with the California lawsuit and could not comment in detail.

Except it did manage to issue a statement that the “claims are without merit.”

Apparently, studiVZ is also trying to block the suit in German court too, creating what amounts to an international SuperPoking incident (called a gruscheln on studiVZ).

“Now that Facebook, despite trying hard, has not been successful in the German market, the company seeks to obstruct studiVZ through court action,” said Marcus Riecke, CEO of studiVZ. “Their strategy appears to be: If you can’t beat them, sue them.”

Added Riecke: “There are numerous social networks. Facebook was not the first and certainly isn’t the only one. By attempting to harm studiVZ through a meritless California lawsuit, Facebook is arrogantly laying claim to an international monopoly over social networking sites that the facts show it does not deserve.”

In the video below, I talk to Dennis Bemmann, one of two founders of studiVZ, as well Michael Brehm. They run the company together in a troika with Riecke.

Notice how they try not to cringe when I call their site the Facebook of Germany, and also when Bemmann takes pains at the end to say that there are a lot of things alike all over the Web.

Like studiVZ and Facebook, say?

Here’s the video (sorry about calling it studio so much and not just studi–but my German stinks!):