The iTunes-for-apps, Allmyapps, has just announced its first round of funding with French VC fund, Elaia Partners – the same firm that has backed French all-stars like Goom Radio, Goojet and Criteo. With 1 million in the bank, the Paris-based company founded in June 2009 plans to focus on product development and emerge as the leading Microsoft-dedicated app store.

Just so happens that Allmyapps, founded by Thibauld Favre and Arnaud Coulondre, is also the company that won the startup pitch competition at TechCrunch Paris in March.

The European music streaming service Spotify has partnered with Sonos, the Californian maker of Wireless Multi-Room Music Systems. This will mean that by the end of this month, Spotify Premium subscribers – the same tariff that enables mobile access – will be able to stream Spotify’s music catalog around the home to a networked Sonos box (or multiple boxes), which is a nice additional option for users of the cloud-based music service.

Spotify is currently available on Linux, Mac and Windows, along with mobile OSes, Android, iOS and Symbian. There’s also televisions via a partnership with telco TeliaSonera.

Televisa Interactive Media, the digital wing of Televisa, the largest Spanish-language media company, has partnered with Busca Corp-owned Level Up to launch an “exclusive” video game channel across Latin America. Level Up is the leading online social media and news site for the Spanish-speaking video-gamer market.

The new channel will be co-branded and will have a content tie-in with Televisa’s vertical video site Tvolucion.

AOL has announced that it is creating 20 new software engineering jobs at its Dublin Development Centre, the majority of which will be with AOL’s Media Technology division and will focus on “developing AOL’s global media channels” which include AOL News, DailyFinance and the AOL.com homepage, amongst 80 brands in total. The new jobs are in addition to 50 software engineering jobs announced in June, says the company.

Candidates are also being sought for AOL’s Advertising Technology division in Dublin, which develops the company’s advertising services – ADTECH and AOL Advertising, and Patch – a new local news service which provides personalised news in towns across the U.S.

The U.S. location-based social gaming platform SCVNGR is launching in the UK today through a partnership with Quno, a web based rail search and booking service due to launch later this year. It will give rail passengers the opportunity to “participate in fun challenges” in stations across the country.

In line with other games built on top of SCVNGR, which runs on iPhone and Android, the Quno Challenge gives commuters the chance to compete against each other for badges and rewards. To take part, rail passengers first need to download the Quno Challenge app and then ‘check in’ at their station upon which the Quno challenges can be accessed. The game will be available at the following stations: London Waterloo, Paddington, Liverpool Street and Euston; Bristol Temple Meads, Birmingham New Street, Manchester Piccadilly and Edinburgh.

Withings, the Paris-based company behind the famous tweeting wifi body scale, has just scored 3 million euros from French VC firm, Ventech. It’s the company’s first round of funding and will be used primarily for the development of 2 new products, which should come out within the next 6 months.

For anyone who isn’t already familiar with the company’s first product, the tweeting wifi body scale, it’s a terrific wifi-connected device that tracks your weight. May sound simple but it can recognize up to 8 users and allows you to transfer your weight information to a computer, iPhone or iPad – which is where the Tweeting comes from, obviously. The product launched officially last year on June 25 goes for €129 in France and is a great little way to track a fitness program or diet.

Goodypass, a new ‘flash offers’ startup which will offer members goods at cut down prices, looks to be more than just another Groupon clone. If you think about it, most offers sites are startups with no pre-existing brand or audience. The only thing they have to go on is the attractiveness of their offers.

But Goodypass heralds a new wave. It’s fronted by UK breakfast TV star Kate Garraway and backed by investor Kite Ventures. Edward Shenderovich, a Russian-born internet entrepreneur raised in California, is providing seed capital thorough Kite, which has also backed AlterGeo.ru, a Russian social networking site and SponsorPay.com in the past.

Goodypass wil have two main advantages as I see it: access to celebrities to promote the offers and the ‘brand values’ of each celebrity. And crucially, a pre-existing audience for those celebs who will be almost certain to push the offers out through social media.

It’s Alcatel-Lucent‘s second acquisition in 3 months and without a doubt, the company is trying to flex a little muscle in the mobile applications space. The company bought ProgrammableWeb, a well-known respository for web API’s back in June and has just announced the acquisition of OpenPlug for cross-platform mobile app development.

With the acquisition of France-based OpenPlug, Alcatel-Lucent will provide tools enabling developers to develop and easily deploy mobile apps across multiple platforms. OpenPlug’s solutions allow developers to write apps once and then convert them into native software, compatible with various mobile operating systems – including iOs, Android, Symbian, Windows Phone and Linux.

Online marketing is now so mainstream and so prevalent that the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has finally – after about 15 years – decided to step in and start subjecting online advertising to the same regulations as ads that appear on TV, in newspapers or other media. The new rules will target ads that sell products. But the big news is they will also regulate ads on social media services. This will of course also mean advertisers may have to police what customers are writing on their Facebook pages. The rules will even encompass YouTube videos where ordinary people are asked to pimp a product.

Good luck with tracking that one.

It will clearly cost more to do this but Google is staying on the right side of the regulator by contributing £200,000. There will also be an extension of the 0.1% voluntary levy on paid-for advertisements across all media which has so far funded the ASA to date. According to the ASA, Google “pondered for a while” before agreeing to sign up to the system.

The CEO of T-shirt customisation startup Spreadshirt has stepped down amid difficult financial performance of the company and a tough economy for items like customised T-shirts. Jana Eggers had spent the last four years at Spreadshirt, the Germany-based startup which crowd-sources t-shirt designs, three of them as as CEO. Eggers posted the news on the Spreadshirt blog, but didn’t give a reason, according to local startup blog Gruenderszene.

Spreadshirt is a platform for design-your-own clothing and print-on-demand and is considered to be one of the pioneers in this space in the German market.