VentureBeat

If you’ve never heard of Dragon’s Den, it’s a popular British TV reality series, where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to get funding from business experts — the “Dragons”. One of those Dragons, Doug Richard, a UK-based Californian and founder of investment research firm Library House got a name for himself as a particularly fastidious investor on the show. And now he’s selected 20 of the UK’s most promising web application start-ups to go and try their luck in Silicon Valley.

The initiative is called Web Mission 2008, and it offers subsidized participation in a one-week tour of the Valley, which begins next week. The program includes visits to Oracle, Bebo and the Web 2.0 Expo. For these British web start-ups, many with CEOs in their twenties, it’s a pretty alluring opportunity. The jury, led by Doug Richard, describe the selected companies as highly promising businesses that are well prepared to attract American investors and customers. “Some of these companies are as good as anything coming out of the Valley”, Richard said in a statement.

More than 100 British web companies applied for the 20 available slots, and the winners were announced the first week of March. The program is sponsored by the UK Trade & Investment Organisation, along with some companies from the private sector. The idea is that British web companies in their early stage have a lot to learn — and earn — from entering the US.

The companies span a broad range of web applications (see full list here). Most were founded a year or two ago. Here’s a quick taste of who’s coming:

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The company that runs The Filter, a music recommendation service, has raised $5 million from investors including musician Peter Gabriel.

The Filter provides you a software download, which searches your library of music and then generates playlists of other music it believes you will like based on what other people with similar tastes have liked. It also takes into account music you’re listening to at the moment, to suggest music that fits your mood.

It’s similar to other recommendation companies like Last.fm, Slacker, and especially MyStrands (which has a similar download, and like The Filter, has a player that complements iTunes). The Filter’s parent company, Exabre, plans to use the money to expand the recommendation service to include film and TV, and then any other area that is digitized.

Co-founder Rhett Ryder said he wants to use recommendation engine to cross between content, for example recommending films you might like based on the music you like. The same could be done for interior decorating, wine, and dating, said a company spokesman. This would extend the sort of recommendations already offered by Amazon.com.

Another investor includes Eden Ventures, a firm that had previously joined with Gabriel to invest in On Demand Distribution, an early music download service. That company was later acquired by Loudeye, which was in turn acquired by Nokia.

The Filter works on a PC, Mac, iPod or Nokia mobile phone (Nokia licenses the technology).

The company says it has 150,000 active users, and seeing 25,000 new downloads a month.

It plans to make money from advertising.

The company earlier raised $3.6 million (1.8 million pounds).