For the last few of years TechCrunch has headed to Barcelona for the annual conflab known as Mobile World Congress. But last year we neglected to set up a meetup. That changes this year with the start of, we hope, a regular annual meetup involving startups investors and the mobile industry together in the spirit of innovation and pushing the boundaries of mobile.

Do do this we’re teaming up with the creators of an awesome new event which runs alongside MWC, called Heroes of the Mobile Fringe Festival. Consider this the “Off Broadway” or Fringe Festival of MWC, where you get to actually talk about the real issues in the mobile startup ecosystem in a lively debate format.

While the hand-wringing over the future of journalism, blogging, the nature of conflicts of interest, yada yada, has been deeply interesting (alongside the personal attacks – we all like a good public fight don’t we?), it’s worth recalling that the furore was kicked off by a fairly pertinent point. To whit: Path was uploading user’s address books without their explicit permission.

Yes it was a rare omission by Nick Bilton to not call out the 50 or so other apps that often do this by default. But his essential point remains correct, and it’s kicked off a wave of excellent reporting into which apps behave like this, and why Apple has allowed this to go on for so long.

But while we continue to point the finger at startups with smartphone apps designed to be social, I’d like to remind Silicon Valley about another business which, despite claims to the contrary, is deeply interested in our private affairs, and is unlikely ever to be as contrite as Dave Morin was just recently.

I speak of the sector known as Deep Packet Inspection.

OZON, often dubbed the ‘Amazon of Russia’, has acquired 100% of Sapato.ru, often dubbed the ‘Zappos of Russia’. I hope I don’t really need to remind you that Amazon acquired Zappos back in 2009.

The acquisition of the online shoe and accessories retailer, which had been whispered about for the past few days after e-commerce giant OZON was given the go-ahead for the deal by the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) of the Russian Federation, was confirmed by early Sapato.ru investor Fast Lane Ventures in a press release issued earlier this morning. Sadly, financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

A Lithuanian company has developed a Kinect-based online banking system. Yes, you read that right.

As a trusted developer by Microsoft, ETRONIKA received Kinect for Windows and the SDK before the official announcement, so had time to develop it.

Their solution manages to analyse a user’s face, voice, and gestures to act as a way to control the online banking processes.

In the video below ETRONIKA presented their solution at Finovate Europe 2012 recently in London.

You’ll recall the battles between the RIAA and the technology industry over music licensing. Well something similar as been going on regarding how newspaper content is licensed to commercial clippings agencies, and it’s blowing up on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Associated Press today filed suit against Meltwater News for copyright infringement and misappropriation of its breaking news content. The complaint, filed in a New York federal court, alleges that Meltwater U.S. Holding Inc. and its Meltwater News Service, a news clipping service, have been illegally selling unlicensed AP content that competes directly with AP and its customers.

Meanwhile in the UK, there’s been a ruling today which has relevance for how links to newspapers are shared online.

It would appear Dropbox is building a pretty wide ecosystem around its service and the latest today is an integration with WorldDesk. Who are they? Well they provide desktop virtualisation software, and they’ve just launched a beta cloud-based desktop delivery platform leveraging Dropbox.

Right now WorldDesk lets you access your “desktop” (whatever that is these days) from any device,allowing access to your applications and personalised desktop from your physical machine. Using WorldDesk, you could use a simple USB drive, or access your desktop from a smartphone, for instance.

On-demand car service startup Cabify today announced that it will expand from its base in Madrid, Spain, to Barcelona and 15 new cities in the course of this year. Launched as a sort of ‘Uber of Europe’ for high-end cars a mere 6 weeks ago, Cabify has already signed up 20,000 users and completed nearly 3,000 rides in Madrid alone.

Cabify, which offers smartphone apps and a mobile website, says it plans to expand to the rest of continental Europe first and then Asia and Latin America. Soon, a version of the car ordering app for desktop PCs and tablets will be released, perhaps even as early as this week.

SpeedInvest, an “early-stage super angel fund” headquartered in Austria, has injected $530,000 into Soup.me, which is the reboot service (sounds way nicer than ‘pivot’) of micro-publishing tools maker Soup.io.

The service is invite-only, and I haven’t had the chance to check it out yet, but the description(s) given to Soup.me is actually quite confusing to me.

I’m just back from Riga in Latvia where we held our first ever TechCrunch Baltics meetup (where you will find video of the whole thing). It was a great day of panelists and speakers, (and thanks to all those who organised, participated and attended, especially Andris Berzins). After chatting to a few people at the event I came away with a sense that the tiny Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, triple-sandwiched by Belarus, Poland and Russia, definitely punch above their weight in terms of technology talent. We are all of course familiar with Estonia’s association with the early development of Skype, and lately a clutch of new startups. But that seems to have only served as a rallying call for its two other Baltic neighbours to pick up the pace in developing their own tech ecosystems.

Exclusive - Private shopping club SecretSales has raised £6.3 million in funding from a consortium of investors, including Doughty Hanson, Pentech Ventures and the Partech-managed OCP Innovation fund, TechCrunch has learned.

Launched in the United Kingdom in 2007, SecretSales plans to use the funding to double down on its expansion in the country.