[UK] Adfonic, a London-based global operator of what it refers to as a self-service mobile advertising marketplace, has raised $600,000 (£360k) in its first round of financing. The funding comes from cleantech entrepreneur Gordon Shields, founder of Shields Environmental.

In a statement, Adfonic says Shields will not only provide capital but also ‘leadership and mentoring’. It’s unclear if butter cookies were also part of the deal.

As Microsoft shed its beta tag for the launch of the UK version of Bing today, TechCrunch Europe has learnt that it held a secret meeting with a group of big European publishers, mainly newspapers.

The meeting came literally days after Rupoert Murdoch said he was considering withdrawing his vast newspaper empire from Google’s index, despite the possibility of losing a lot of traffic.

What was discussed provides a glimpse of what newspaper publishers may do next, and how Bing will collude in this new war on Google.

[Ireland] This is big news for people who experienced the dotcom crash, survived and brought home a t-shirt: Boo.com, once an online fashion retail outlet that went spectacularly bust in early 2000 after burning through approximately $135 million in VC money in about a year and a half, just got acquired (once again).

Actually, it’s Boo.com’s latest parent company Web Reservations International that was purchased by affiliates of private equity investment firm Hellman and Friedman for an undisclosed amount. But it’s Boo.com, people!

Dave McClure has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for almost twenty years as a software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, angel investor, blogger, and internet marketing nerd. He currently runs a seed-stage investment program for Founders Fund. He is an advisor or investor for several companies including Mint, RichRelevance, Simply Hired, SlideShare and Twilio, among others. He’s also founder of Startup2Startup and GeeksOnAPlane, a tech tour that connects global tech entrepreneurs. I spoke to him at the recent global geek meetup, Rethink Hawaii about his impressions of the European startup scene following his recent travels here.

Microsoft is shedding the beta tag for its custom Bing search engine that caters to users in the United Kingdom with a localized offering.

At the same time, the company is releasing Bing Maps UK and thus no longer redirecting users to Multimap.com.

[Germany] Hamburg based business social network Xing, similar to LinkedIn in Europe, continued to grow revenue and EBIDTA in the first nine months of 2009 while profits were smaller than last year.

Total revenues from January to September amounted to €33.2 million – or $49 million – up 32 percent from the same period last year (€25.1 million). But the cumulative group profits were lower than those for the same period last year (€2.5 million for 2009 vs. €4.7 million for 2008), due to “investment costs and the assignment of €1 million in one-off tax reserves for Q3″.

IMImobile has closed a $13 million round of financing. The financing round was led by Sequoia Capital India and includes participation from existing investor FirstMark Capital.

The significance for European venture is that IMImobile is the largest portfolio investment of SPARK Ventures, the UK-based early stage VC. SPARK did not participate in this round of financing but already holds a 28% stake in IMImobile, with a book value of £13 million. Sequoia already has interests in india including SKS Microfinance and Naukri.com.

Whether you’re a fan of Twitter’s new list feature or not, it has proven to be a great way to discover people of interest one can mass-follow. But keeping track of Twitter lists can prove cumbersome and overwhelming.

Recently, Listiti launched, combining the concept of Google Alerts with Twitter Lists by sending out e-mail notifications based on the appearance of keywords in tweets from lists you keep track of. This is particularly useful for marketers who’d like to keep track of conversations about a company, product or brand, but only from a specific subset of Twitter users.

Listiti just pushed a new version of the service live, and has added a useful new feature that makes it even more worth checking out: badges.

[Germany] It seems that social gaming is where the action is right now, and we’re not just hearing that from the kids. Following Electronic Arts’ $300 million acquisition of Playfish, and the just-reported $43 million further investment that Playdom has raised, we’ve caught wind that Berlin-based wooga has secured €5 million ($7.5m) of additional funding. The round is being led by Balderton Capital, although earlier investor Holtzbrinck Ventures has also participated.

[Germany] For years the music industry said that video killed the radiostar, but now the homework of two 7th semester students from Stuttgart could do away with MTV. Their website plays music videos too, but Semsix is more convenient than Viacom’s TV station that tortures with crappy tunes and annoying ads while you have to wait for one good song. A product of the 80′s, MTV still lacks the personalisation and interactive features fit for the internet age. That’s why at Semsix the user is the VJ and can choose the songs that play. It’s kind of like Last.FM but for music videos, or similar to Simfy or Spotify in that the user is in charge of the playlist. As of yesterday, Semsix is also available in English.

[Germany] Munich-based metaio, a developer of visual interaction software products, is today launching a consumer-oriented iPhone application (iTunes link) and complementary website that combines the fun and usefulness of augmented reality with social networking.

The application, dubbed junaio, is billed by the company as the ‘world’s first augmented reality platform’ but bears some resemblance to what other European startups like Layar and Wikitude have been putting out there lately.

[Germany] SoundCloud – there’s now an app for that too. The audio sharing site that’s geared towards those who work in the music industry, has released a dedicated iPhone app. The Berlin-based company has also announced new price plans and a bunch of other enhancements to its overall service. First, however, let’s deal with the iPhone.

[Spain] European buying clubs remain a hot item, along with the fashion brands they sell at a discount. Barcelona-based Venture Capital firm Debaeque has acquired a 10% stake in BuyVIP, although the actual price is undisclosed. In April, however, the company raised about $20 million in its third round of funding, led by Kennet Partners, along with Mangrove, Bertelsmann, 3i and Molins Capital.

BuyVIP claims to be the leading buyers’ club in Europe, the invitation-only e-commerce site says it’s established 600 brand relationships across the region – the company has operations in Spain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland and Portugal – and that the ‘club’ itself has garnered more than 4.5 million members. Partner brands include Calvin Klein, Ed Hardy, Diesel, Adidas, Puma, Nudie, Gucci and Fendi.

Web designers, rejoice! Typekit, the project of noted designer Jeffrey Veen and Small Batch, launched today. Typekit offers web designers a way to use a wide array of fonts on their websites. Most websites today limit their use of fonts to those available on all three of the major operating systems – Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. There are only a dozen of those, Verdana and Arial come to mind. Investors such as Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg think Veen and his team at Small Batch have the solution.

Well, after a tonne of entries and a pretty intense sifting process, Le Web, the annual gathering of the tech tribes in Paris, has announced the names of the 16 startups that will present during the startup competition — organised for the first time this year in partnership with TechCrunch Europe.

The companies selected are either existing companies launching new products or new startups entirely. As you can probably tell from the list, Le Web is very much going back to its roots. This is Le Web’s 6th edition and the startup competition has been going on since 2006 (the 4th edition is this year). So we’ll be using this platform to help some of the earliest stage companies get traction with their ideas. I think it’s going to be exciting to watch.

Today Saul Klein, chairman and co-founder of Seedcamp, the pan-European programme for early stage startups, blogged a long post about Seedcamp’s structure and history. But over the last few weeks I’ve been meeting Saul to tease out, over long conversations, where Seedcamp is at and where it’s going. The debate is an important one, in part because Seedcamp, as the only Pan-european YCombinator-style organisation, now has a position that is largely unmatched at this level. That is at once a great thing for Europe – afterall, there was nothing else like it before, and Europe really needed a pan-European Seed fund which could also educate young startups. It’s also a potential challenge both for Seedcamp to explain how it operates – afterall, despite its laudable openness to date, let’s not forget it’s a business – and for those that want to sit outside the burgeoning Seedcamp ecosystem. The below is a lightly edited transcript of our recorded conversations so is subject to the usual caveats, though I’ve tried to keep it as faithful to our actual words as possible.

[UK] Playfire, a social network for gamers, has secured $2.1m (£1.3m) of Series A funding. The news was first reported this weekend in the Sunday Times newspaper but, as is their usual form, with key details missing, including the full list of investors. What else do you expect from a newspaper that doesn’t even use Twitter properly?

The round was led by Atomico Ventures (founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis of Skype fame), in conjunction with Michael Birch (founder of Bebo), Brent Hoberman (co-founder of LastMinute.com), William Reeve and Alex Chesterman (co-founders of LOVEFiLM) and David Gardner (former COO of Electronic Arts and now CEO of Atari).

[UK] Online booking and reservation system BookingBug has left beta, been given a new look and announced a raft of new partners, including the UK’s Trusted Places and voucher and discount search engine BView.

BookingBug enables businesses to share their availability – by hour, day, week or as classes, courses or events – and take bookings and enquiries online. The system is both realtime and distributed: BookingBug provides booking and enquiry widgets that businesses can embed onto their own sites, or those of their affiliate partners and through social media.

We recently profiled competitor Bookfresh but this site is a lot more limited in terms of the number of business it can be used for (they only work for small one-man-bands offering minutes/hour based services). BookingBug has the potential to scale across a much broader range of service businesses. Bookfresh also lacks BookingBug’s affiliate program angle which lets destination sites earn revenue for showing bookings for businesses that are relevant to their market. Libersy is another competitor, but this too lacks the innovative affiliates model.

[UK] Collaboration startup Huddle has secured something of a first for a company of its size, and location. It’s signed a two-year deal with Hewlett Packard to enable direct access to its service on the 25 million business PCs HP sells annually.

Huddle will be in a suite of five trial applications included on every HP business computer, starting in the U.S. and extending to the rest of the world. That’s quite a big deal for a startup this size – and relatively unusual for one not even based in the U.S.

The deal is based on a revenue split with HP on new signups to the service, which effectively offers a discount for HP customers on Huddle’s tools. The other programs will include three HP- services and antivirus software from Symantec.

[Germany] The new version of Babbel, the language learning startup, is released today, but there’s a sting in the tail for the existing 500,000 users who thought it was a Freemium service: they will now all have to pay to use it. “Babbel is now a paid service. Freemium doesn’t work for us,” confirms managing director Markus Witte. Now only the first part of any given course can be taken for free, as a trial demo. Full access now costs between $6.65 and $11.95 per month.