I’m betting the touch-paper has been lit on a round of mobile acquisitions and consolidation with the news that Google has bought AdMob, the mobile advertising network for $750m in stock. The network was founded by Germany-based British expat Russell Buckley and CEO Omar Hamoui, among others. Admob was one of the few serious players in the market of any scale to be of interest to the likes of Google and it looks like their long-play of building and scaling their reach has paid off.

Ever since an exclusive gathering of startups and VCs at a Hampshire Hotel last year, Kristian Segerstrale, CEO and Co-founder of Playfish, has made no secret of his desire to take the social gaming fight into the very heart of the established gaming industry.

At the Founder’s Forum at the Four Seasons Hampshire last year, Segerstrale stood up in front of the assembled crowd and, as part of his presentation, showed a slide with a picture of a dinosaur, referring explicitly to Electronic Arts. He’s also reputed to have said he was going to “kill EA”.

So the PRO Founders Capital web site just went live. Since we broke the news last Summer that this new Seed stage fund for tech startups was launching on the European scene they have kept pretty quiet. Until today there was literally no Web site for this fund. Now they have one. So what can we learn about them?

Well, we know where they live now, though entrepreneurs desperate to get funding would be advised not to stumble in with a business plan unannounced.

More interesting is their strategy. Here’s their take on things:

So much for the coming mobile nirvana of free mobile content – at least for iPhone users in Germany. Today Europe’s biggest newspaper, the German newspaper BILD-Zeitung intends to use, in effect, brute force to force users buy its new iPhone app. The paper tabloid is going to block anyone using an iPhone browser from accessing its website.

Now, readers will not only have to pay for the dedicated BILD iPhone app, but they also need to pony-up recurring fees for new articles. The same is planned for Springer’s quality paper Die Welt. Users of Nokia, Blackberry, HTC or other smartphone brands will not be blocked – but only for as long as it takes for Springer to develop an app for each device.

It is time for the second annual TechCrunch Europe ChristmasCrunch! Yes folks it’s our annual TechCrunch Europe meetup and Festive Christmas party, in one handy package. This year we’re taking a different tack – basing it around one of the the hottest themes right now, namely the rise of realtime streams. We’ve seen the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, Friendfieed and Google Wave but it’s clear that this is only just the beginning of the world going realtime. TechCrunch is running the Realtime Crunchup of course, but this event in London will also feature some of the hottest realtime startups in the world today.

The event will start with registration from 14.00 on December 15 for the seminar programme consisting of keynote presentation, panel discussions and startup pitches followed by TechCrunch Pitch! Once the seminar programme has come to an end, it will turn into your very own startup Christmas party, with DJs and entertainment until late.

Get your tickets here

[UK] Much-hyped digital music service Spotify recently announced a deal with carrier 3 UK that would bring its mobile service to 3 customers. Well, that offer is now live, as announced on the Spotify blog minutes ago.

Spotify Mobile will initially be available only on the HTC Hero, the first Android handset to launch on 3 UK. To buy, head on over to the webstore or any of 3′s retail stores.

[France] Paris-based Deezer is not waiting for Spotify to expand into new territories and is moving forward with its own plans pretty quickly. The French startup recently raised $9.5 million (€6.5 million), bringing the total invested into the company to nearly $20 million, and today the company’s launching its previously rumored premium offering and a couple of new products.

Basically, the Deezer website, where users can listen to streaming music and create playlists, will remain free of charge while users who would like better sound quality (up to 320 kb/s) and no more advertisements can opt to pay €4.99 per month for Deezer HQ. The Premium offering (€9.99 / month) is the most interesting though, since it gives users the opportunity to download a full-fledged Adobe AIR desktop application and lets them gain access to their accounts through a wide range of mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPod Touch and multiple Android-run and Blackberry devices.

[France] Wozaik, a Paris-based startup which is developing a dynamic bookmarking system, is giving away 200 invites for an exclusive preview of their platform to Techcrunch Europe readers. You can grab one here on a first-come-first-serve basis.

Despite still being in private alpha (a beta should launch soon), Wozaik has garnered some early attention in the French startup scene after becoming the the winners of Mini Seedcamp Paris 2009, where they first demoed their product.

[Sweden/Finland] Following the poaching of an exec to strengthen its UK operation, there’s more good news from Stockholm-based Videoplaza this week. The ad server company has picked up its first major customer in Finland.

CityVice Network, which distributes ad sponsored premium video content to various media partners in Finland, such as Sanoma Plc and Talentum Plc, has begun using Videoplaza’s ad server product Monetizer. The first campaign kicked off in September and involved seven of the top Finnish fashion bloggers who created and displayed their own fashion videos and was sponsored by H&M.

Good news Foursquare fans or those in Europe who want to get in on the action. Co-founder Dennis Crowley has confirmed that they have “a big round of European cities coming out today (!! – Nov 4) and then some ‘Worldwide’ cities after that.” He made the comment in a support forum (hat tip to The Next Web).

[Ireland] What started off life as a couple of blog posts and a few tweets and then escalated to a full 140 character-driven fund raising campaign, Outvesting.org has begun inviting applications from Irish entrepreneurs and startups who could benefit from €5,000′s worth of a gifted, no-strings-attached funding.

[Bulgaria] One of the biggest problems Internet users face everyday is how difficult it has become to follow news streams from many different sources without getting lost in the noise — from mainstream media, to the millions of blogs, YouTube and other social media such as Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter.

But as (perhaps) unlikely as it sounds favit, a new startup from Bulgaria, thinks it has the answer. At the very least it’s a very nice implementation of a service which enables you to define, filter and organise information streams.

[UK] Taking responsibility for one’s own health records, let alone storing then online, is a pretty alien concept to most Brits, considering the National Health Service (NHS) and the centrally stored patient database that’s being rolled out on our behalf. That isn’t stopping Scotland-based MyVaccs, however, which is hoping to persuade parents, students and frequent travelers in the UK to upload their vaccination history and utilise the site’s ability to help them stay up to date with any required jabs.

[UK] The latest benefactors of Cambridge-based Red Gate‘s startup incubator have been unveiled. But before we get to this year’s teams, a quick reminder of how Springboard works.

Over the course of ten weeks, Red Gate provides startups with office space, money to live on, food and mentoring, including weekly talks from successful entrepreneurs. In return, they don’t take equity or seats on the board but instead hope that the program will benefit the tech eco-system in Cambridge in general and help Red Gate forge useful relationships for the future. Anyway, without further ado, here are this year’s Springboard teams.

[UK] This is a guest post by Doug Richard, the American-born but UK based entrepreneur and formerly of the BBC’s Dragon’s Den show. Doug is the Founder and Vice-Chairman of the Cambridge Angels and Chairman of the Conservative Party Small Business Task Force. Between 1996 and 2000 he was President and CEO of Micrografx, a US publicly quoted software company. Prior to that he also founded and subsequently sold two other companies: Visual Software and ITAL Computers. Doug is a long time proponent of startup culture in the UK and to that end has recently created the School for Startups. Their next event will be on November 18th at the Royal Institution.

I have been writing a series of articles recently entitled “The Price of Money” that grew out of my unease that people neither understood how great the cost of capital is nor the enormous difficulty involved in pricing capital. I was further dis-enchanted by the rhetoric amongst government ministers reciting mantras of entrepreneurship and access to capital as though their wholesale theft of the language of the Schumpterian community absolved them from actually doing anything effective in support of small business growth.

[Serbia] BudMate is a Serbian stealth project which deals with personal finances. The name is effectively a cut-down from “Budget Mate”, which is the working title of the project. The guys behind it are hoping to provide behavior-based personal finance advice and more for the South Eastern European region – although an English/international version may also happen.

Some key features will include: automated personal budget planning, tracking and optimizing personal budget goals, user-generated hints and advices, easy expenditure management with alerts, and advice based on your behavior.

[Ireland] Social media consultants Simplyzesty started using Twitter Lists to list blogs. However, a brainwave has lead them to take Twitter Lists to their logical conclusion: creating lists of Twitter users in entire countries. They’ve launched a Twitter list for the UK and the list of users in Ireland is currently going crazy. They call it “crowdsourcing populations”. Who knows – this could end up being a sort of crowd-sourced yellow pages/people directory.

A couple of hours ago they launched a USA version with a script built to make the listings automatic. The plan is to do is to cover the USA in 72 hours.