[UK] Digital Mission returns for a second year to dispatch some the UK’s leading digital/tech companies to the US.

Organised by Chinwag and UK Trade & Investment (UKTI), 39 ‘digital’ SMEs have been selected to attend South by South West interactive (SXSWi), the well regarded conference for interactive media which takes place in Austin, Texas. This year’s event runs from the 11-17th of March.

[UK] Flirtomatic, the mobile social network that lets users “flirt, meet new people and have fun”, says it sold 28,000 virtual gifts in five days over the Christmas break, between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve. In total the company says it shifted over 1 million virtual gifts in 2009, selling around 82,000 virtual gifts in December alone.

This would tally with a wider trend that saw Brits reportedly spend over £500 million on virtual goods last year.

Unsurprisingly, Flirtomatic’s Christmas Stocking was one the FlirtShop’s best sellers, despite being one of the most expensive gifts, selling over 16,000. Other top items included Candy Canes (just under 9,000), Mistletoe (around 8,300) and Rednose Reindeer (over 7,000). The company’s PR were also keen to let us know that Snowwomen outsold Snowmen by almost 2-1, although we’re not sure why this is significant. Either way, the pointless and trivial nature of these gifts does provide compelling evidence that virtual gifts and mobile micropayments have come of age.

Ooyala, a US-based provider of video platform applications and services, and Telegraph Media Group (TMG) are today announcing that they have signed an agreement for Ooyala to power online video on the publisher’s websites, which includes news site Telegraph.co.uk.

In addition, Ooyala and TMG’s “Euston Project” team will co-develop new technologies to improve the way information is delivered and consumed online.

[Greece] After the creation of OpenFund in mid 2009, Greece is ready to welcome another new investment Fund that aims to help promising tech companies to go to the next level.

Driin Ventures, which officially started its operations last week, wants to ‘wake up’ technology startups from Greece and South Eastern Europe through its investments in order to help them develop their products and ideas.

TechCrunch Europe is proud to announce the first tranche of events we’re planning this year. Now, before anyone gets upset that their city or event is not on this list, please be aware this is what we are putting our efforts into right now. We are working on adding more events at other times in the year. We’ve set up ticketing sites for you now so you can actually go and get early bird ticket prices right now. See below for details.

From now on, each month we’ll be doing an ‘Upcoming Event’ post covering our own upcoming events, those we’re partnering with and those we think are of particular, special interest to the tech community. To enquire about formal media partnership with TechCrunch Europe please contact our commercial partnerships manager Petra(@)TwistedTree.co.uk in the first instance. To keep TechCrunch Europe informed of your upcoming event, get in touch with editorial. Also see our RSS and Twitter feed to keep up to date.

We all know the crisis in the venture capital community is starting to have real word effects, but for some it means totally changing how they run. Today Atlas Ventures announced it is moving its entire operation to Boston, bringing together its US and European teams in one place, and reducing its headcount.

Atlas says its fundamental international early stage investment strategy “will not change” nor will its plans to “add new European investments” to its international portfolio. However, being based in Boston – with the normally European-based partner Fred Destin moving there as well – still deals a blow to the European startup eco-system and potentially calls into question Atlas’ position in the longer term. It is however, a boost for the U.S. East Coast system.

[Sweden] Bambuser, the Stockholm-based videocasting service that rivals the likes of Silicon Valley’s Qik, has announced a partnership with Finland’s YLE. The public service broadcaster represents Bambuser’s first major customer in 2010 and the company is hoping it will lead to other major media companies adopting its platform.

YLE, which has never been shy of experimenting with social media, wants to better understand how its audience are using consumer-facing services such as Bambuser to break the ‘monopoly’ of traditional media, and to connect with viewers in new ways. The broadcaster is running a pilot in which several teams of journalists will be using the mobile video streaming service as a way to “document everyday work life” as well as to file live reports.

[Germany] Acton Capital Partners, a Munich-based growth equity fund, has acquired a stake in online fashion retailer mytheresa.com, also based in Munich.

The terms of the deal were undisclosed, although the investment leaves the fund as a minority stake holder. The remaining shares are held by the startup’s founders and managing directors.

You’re a tech company in ecommerce that can donate a percentage of sales. You’re a social platform with a large amount of spare ad inventory. Whatever kind of tech company you are, you can do something for Haiti, whose recent earthquake has been described by the UN as the worst crisis it has ever faced.

So all this week we plan to update this post with information on acts of generosity by the tech startup community in Europe. Every-time your company does something to help Haiti, we’ll add you to the top of this post and retweet it. Here’s the start of the list. Contact editorial or leave a comment and we’ll update it.

[France] The Founders Club, a reverse venture capital fund, is opening its doors to VC-backed startups in France. The fund enables CEOs and founders of companies to “use their shares and stock options to become limited partner investors”, essentially betting a small percentage of their personal future equity through investing in a wider portfolio than just the startup that they are involved with.

The fund will target the areas of healthcare, technology and cleantech.

From the press release:

We first covered Wahanda, a social network for people who use spas and other “wellness” products, way, way back in 2008 and haven’t heard much from them. It turns out they’ve been busy, no bad thing.

After raising £1.5 million, in large part from Ambient Sound Investments (the fund created by the former founding engineers from Skype) Wahanda set it’s goal on effectively becoming the ‘Amazon of wellness’. In the same way Yelp built a horizontal database of venues, Wahanda has now built the world’s biggest vertical database of health and beauty spas. It now has 10,000 venues listed globally (4,600 in the UK alone), while main competitor, the US-based SpaFinder has just over 6,000. Wahanda soft launched in the US in October 2009.

Now, this is no ordinary market. In common with other internet plays aimed at the luxury market, the global spa economy is worth a lot – an estimated $60 billion, with $18 billion of that in Europe alone.

Today Wahanda will now combine this database with the fashionable but also profitable business model of group buying power with time-limited daily offers, along the lines of Groupon.

[Spain] Red CPA, an advertising network based in Spain, reckons that they have seen a gap in the market with regards to the reports produced by the popular open source ad server OpenX.

Adtelligence gives OpenX a lot more color if you will, by providing visual reporting and analytics on top of OpenX, which is currently used by around 50,000 publishers and serves up 300 billion impressions per month. Adtelligence wants to become the reporting platform of choice for OpenX’s thousands of publishers by being a whole lot more manageable through its visual approach.

Private online shopping clubs are springing up like mushrooms all around the world in light of the successes companies like Vente Privée has been seeing, and venture capital firms are increasingly starting to invest in companies who are bringing the concept to specific niches or introducing the private online sales model to interesting geographical markets.

In the latter category falls Russian KupiVIP.ru, which has just raised a monster round of $20 million in venture funding led by Accel Partners and joined by prior investors Mangrove Capital Partners, ARLAN, Direct Group and angel Oliver Jung.

Oxford University has taken a fairly drastic measure against music startup Spotify. It’s banned it.

The University’s computing services, OUCS, says the service is using too much bandwidth for their networks to handle. But no warning was given and students are understandably rather annoyed.

Spanish startup 11870, a geo-localized content provider, has launched their iPhone app. 11870 is probably the most well known social restaurant directory and guide in Spain and competes locally with services like Qype.

Though the general public associates the 11870 brand with restaurants, the company is evolving, from a Yelp-like restaurant guide to a lead generation platform for local small & medium sized service providers, similar to Servicemagic for instance.

[France] Eyeka, which connects brands and creative consumers, has raised €3 million in a second round of financing. The company already had €5 million in backing in 2006 with Ventech, DN Capital and SFR Developpement, while the company was focused on a platform to enhance pictures and videos management from mobiles. For this new round, previous investors are joined by French VC I-Source. This new round is to accelerate their international development and develop new product. Essentially speaking it’s a platform for corwd-sourcing ad campaigns for ad agencies and brands.

[UK] In case you weren’t already convinced by the level of pent up demand for an alternative to O2′s iPhone monopoly in the UK, more evidence comes from Vodafone today. The mobile operator has begun selling the iPhone 3G and 3GS, including shipping 50,000 units to customers who have pre-ordered.

That’s a pretty healthy number for Day One but it doesn’t look quite so impressive when compared to the number of pre-orders – 65,000 – that Orange is said to have clocked up in its first few days after announcing it would offer the device. It’s likely that Vodafone, initially at least, has been impacted by Orange breaking O2′s monopoly first and, perhaps crucially, in time for the holiday season. Especially since there is little to distinguish all three offerings price-wise. Apple still commands an unprecedented amount of control over the iPhone brand and pricing. The retail monopoly has been broken by the supply monopoly remains nicely intact.

This has got to be one of the fastest exits we’ve seen for a while. Simplified online CV builder CeeVee has actually now been sold after only launching into a public beta in July last year. Then again, it was only started by Romania-based and British ex-pat entrepreneur Lee Wilkins as a pet project.

Lateral Romania, a technology software provider, has acquired the site. Terms were undisclosed. Lateral runs sites like Jobberbase.com (open-source job board software) and job aggregators Job-job.co.uk, Jobjob.ro and Jobber.ro (an IT specialist recruitment website in Romania).

When Guardian News & Media acquired ContentNext Media, owner of tech and media blog PaidContent and other blogs in July 2008, various reports claimed the price as ‘north of $30 million’, including earn-out and dependent on future performance of the young media company started by journalist and Internet entrepreneur Rafat Ali.

This morning, industry trade outlet PressGazette revealed that the price that was actually paid for ContentNext Media was £4 million, which would today convert to roughly $6.5 million. Accounts filed with Companies House by the Guardian Media Group subsidiary earlier this week revealed the previously undisclosed terms of the deal.

So where did that £15 million ($30 million) figure come from?