The Chicago-based Groupon has been valued at $280 million after closing their recent $30 million venture round with Accel Partners and previous investors. Clearly Groupon’s new take on group buying is a hot space right now.

Now DailyDeal.de in Berlin, a Groupon-like startup, has attracted Stefan Glänzer (an early investor in Last.fm), Michael Brehm (Ex-StudiVZ) and Jochen Maaß as seed investors. No figure has been released but sources say the seed round is in the €300,000 vicinity. This investment effectively fires the starting gun on the race to build the European “take” on Groupon.

Meanwhile – even while at least five other UK startups prep their own versions – Groupon has already rolled out a London service, showing a London landing page to UK visitors to its .com site via IP targeting.

The launch of the Nexus One handest yesterday was Google’s iPhone moment. Heck, even Andy Rubin – the genius behind Android – is being talked about as if he were The New Steve Jobs.

So this was a very important moment. The world continues to compare and contrast the Nexus One and the iPhone, and argue about whether Apple is competing with Google, or not.

So you would think that Google might have bought the domain NexusOne.com. Wouldn’t you?

[UK] TweetSwitch is a new project from the team behind London-based Comufy, the communications platform for businesses. Built on top of Comufy’s technology, TweetSwitch provides a simple but deceptively powerful service, enabling you to send and receive Twitter updates via various Instant Messaging (IM) clients.

At its most basic, the functionality provided by TweetSwitch is similar to Twitter’s original support for IM, which the company was later forced to pull due to too much strain on its servers. Others have stepped in to fill the void, such as tweet.im, excla.im and potentially IMified. In that sense TweetSwitch has plenty of competition. But it’s the way in which you can filter tweets and send them to multiple IM clients that sets the service apart.

Business social network LinkedIn has set up its first office in Continental Europe, and announced today that it will be led by Eugenie van Wiechen, who previously led eBay.nl / Marktplaats.nl in the Netherlands as Managing Director. The new offices were set up at the World Trade Center in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.

The move comes nearly two years after LinkedIn first established an office in London and appointed Kevin Eyres, previously MD of SideStep Europe and GM of AltaVista as European MD.

Badoo, a social network popular in emerging markets like Russia and Brazil, has been banned in Iran. As of December 2009 Badoo says it had broken the 50 million user mark globally, with 250,000 of those coming from Iran. Pictured is the text that comes up when trying to access Badoo from inside Iran.

Badoo runs a fine line between a social network and a dating or (more accurately) a flirting site, but it is not at all political. It may be this flirtatious aspect of the site which has inflamed the ire of the strict Islamic authorities – however, there has been no official reason given.

In January 2008 Badoo pulled in $30m from Russian investor Finam for a 10% stake. The money was to build the service in Russia and other emerging markets.

The site had been been working with mobile network Turkcell, which has ties to Irancell, Iran’s predominant mobile network. Because Badoo’s social system is based largely on premium SMS, it sent its payment services through Irancell. However, the current politics over the site’s ban has stalled this operation. Badoo is currently trying to come up with a plan to circumvent the ban to reach its users again.

[Germany] While others hunted for presents, Germany’s most prolific startup founders used the holiday season to collect even more investor money and to start another company. Shortly after Christmas eve, the Samwer brothers switched on MyCityDeal. The Groupon clone will offer daily deals with up to 50 per cent discounts on stuff to do, see, eat and buy in cities across Germany. But until now the site only covers Berlin.

The offers on MyCityDeal change every day. If enough people sign up before midnight they get a voucher by email for a €60 dinner at only €30 or a nicely discounted wellness treatment, for example. Monday’s deal was a hot stone massage with warm salt from the Himalaya. 200 people signed up to get it for €37 instead of €50. People have to reserve their coupon by leaving their credit card details but will not be charged if not enough people sign up and the deal doesn’t take place.

Let’s see now, where are we? There are about 1,000 apps on the Palm Pre. About 20,000 on Google’s Android app store. On the Apple iPhone App Store there are over 100,000 apps. But today Apple says more than three billion iPhone/Touch apps have been downloaded in less than 18 months. That is a hell of a lot of apps.

For some context, Nokia has been saying the Ovi Store is currently registering around 1 million downloads each day and hit 10 million downloads three months after launch. But we all know Symbian is on its way out, if the buzz about the Maemo-driven N900 is anything to go by.

Of course what is frustrating about these types of releases from Apple is that they are essentially meaningless. Who knows how many of these apps were deleted after download or simply languish unused? That’s the beauty of the mobile web, as opposed to apps. You can quantify use more easily.

[UK] Tracking time spent on work for clients and customers in order to invoice them correctly can be a real headache for freelancers and companies alike. Which would also explain why time tracking solutions is a very crowded market. But that isn’t stopping 1DayLater, a feisty new startup from the North East of England founded by David and Paul King.

The two brothers say that having worked as freelancers themselves they decided to “scratch their own itch” after finding it hard to keep track of how much time they were spending on behalf of their clients and the difficulty this created when it was time to invoice them. The resulting product, says Paul King, distinguishes itself from the competition, which includes the likes of Toggl, Lets Freckle, Harvest and Klok, through the ability to log time, money and mileage via a single entry, as well as better visualization tools and search, and the browser-based application’s overall ease-of-use.

The service is currently in Beta and will remain free of charge until at least February. After which 1DayLater will cost between £10-20 per month.

I’m sure there may be longer histories written about Shozu. The service was founded way, way back in 2001 and was initially most exciting for allowing you to post mobile phone pictures to sites like Flickr. I remember people coming up to me and simply raving about this service in the early part of the decade. In many ways it was the “UK’s Twitter” for the early 2000s. And perhaps it could have had that potential going forward. But although it expanded into allowing you to exchange video, pictures, social networks, and information resources, somehow it lost its – and I can’t think of a better word – mojo? Perhaps like other early play mobile startups it was just too early. By the time exciting platforms like the iPhone came out, Shozu felt like old news and seemed unable to excite people about it’s still quite comprehensive offering.

Plus the business model always seemed just that little bit too far away. Although it managed to cut deals to get pre-installed on mobile network handsets that didn’t seem to be enough. And the white label aspect was cracked better by others, which is why today’s acquisition by Critical Path – which is gunning for the enterprise – seems very much like the right fit.

[Spain] I like writing about startups coming out of Spain that clearly have international competition, and not just in the US. It’s a very good sign. Clearly, if more than one company in different parts of the world sees the need for a solution, then they’re probably onto something. It also makes it really interesting to see which ones will succeed and which ones will fail and why. Hotel reputation management service ReviewPro, based in Barcelona, Spain, is one such startup.

Like US-based Review Analysist and Brand Karma, Germany’s TrustYou, and Escuchatucliente (also from Spain), ReviewPro provides hotels and chains with a platform for business intelligence, analyzing what customers are saying about them and helping then to react strategically. ReviewPro believes that both the number and the type of hotel reviews directly impact revenues. The company’s technology aims to dissect this data for hotel management and marketers in such a way that they can effectively manage their reputation and sales derived from it.

Our earlier report about Critical Path buying mobile services startup ShoZu turns out to have been right on the money. Tomorrow morning, both companies will jointly announce that they have come to an agreement for Critical Path to acquire all of ShoZu for an undisclosed sum. We’re trying to get a hold of the price the London company, which was backed by $36 million in venture capital, sold for.

The release is below, but here are more details, including some deal terms:

(after the jump)

[Austria] Franz Enzenhofer, an Austrian developer, has merged two current Internet trends and created something pretty neat: MiniQR, a URL shortening service for QR Codes.

Imagine you are a company and want to create your very own QR code for a product, service or any other use. MiniQR enables you to do just that but also adds a URL shortening feature to the mix. Enter techcrunch.com as the source to be encoded, for example, and MiniQR provides a unique and clean QR Code which points to a shortened version of the URL – miniqr.com/techcrunch.

Information entered (in this case the domain) is also amended to the shortened URL, which Enzenhofer claims helps to prevent “QR domain grabbing”.

[UK] We’ve confirmed that towards the end of the last year UK-based startup oneDrum, which launched the beta of its free, real-time collaboration platform for Microsoft Office users, secured £1 million in funding. This comprises £900,000 from Amadeus Capital Partners and £100,000 in grants from the UK Technology Strategy Board (creative industries fund) and Scottish Enterprise.

oneDrum adds secure, synchronised file sharing and collaboration (version management, multi-author document creation and editing, and communication and co-ordination tools) to existing Microsoft Office applications which are, obviously, used by millions of people. You can try the software out with this invite code for TechCrunch readers.

[Spain] TagUin, a vertical social network for video gamers, has secured a first funding round of €200.000. 19 investors in total have taken part and comprise of friends and family, and some renown Spanish angels, such as François Derbaix (of Toprural, among others), José Luis Vallejo and Juan Pané (Buyvip co-founders), Carlos Blanco via Grupo ITNet and Axel Serena via BeGreat.

The above business angels will join Javier Fernandez (CTO), Alberto Rodriguez, Andrés Fernández-Longo and Daniel Brandi (CEO) on the board.

TagUin, which competes with US-based Raptr and the UK’s Playfire, adds a social experience to traditional video gaming, with content targeted at games on the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PSP, DS, along with the desktop PC. Users can follow, vote, discuss games, platforms, game consoles, create and manage game clans and challenge fellow members to matches. A specialized social network, essentially. The new funding will help TagUin grow the team and invest in an online marketing strategy to expand the site’s user base.

Tomorrow Google will unveil at a press conference, well, something. Most of the press and blog coverage surrounds the speculation that it will be about Google selling the Nexus One (running Android) directly from its site. This will likely be an unlocked handset. The reason this is big news in the US is a) it would mean Google selling hardware direct b) most handsets there are sold locked to a network. In Europe? Meh. You can easily get an unlocked handset, if you want to pay through the nose. But what few seem to have noticed is that this Nexus One is going to have to have some kind of network to, er, work. There’s speculation that it will be T-Mobile in the US.

But there is little speculation as yet about what Google might do with the Nexus One internationally. And with the mobile market booming in BRIC nations, for instance, why would Google ignore the rest of the world?

[Austria] Smoopr, a new project by former Six Apart employee Gregor Einetter, recently went into private beta. The service, which “automatically analyzes text and instantly serves up the relevant status of Now”, acts as a real-time content recommendation engine for any piece of text on the web. At first sight Smoopr seems to be similar to 2007 Seedcamp Winner Zemanta, although its capabilities are still at a very early stage. However, Einetter says that they are planning to move into a more B2B direction, where such a real-time stream acts as an add-on for enterprise software.

[Croatia] Lots of politicians have been “inspired” by Obama’s messaging, branding and marketing techniques. However, there’s a fine line between inspiration and stealing. Unfortunately, the creative team behind the visual identity and website of Nadan Vidosevic, a very popular Croatian presidential candidate, crossed that line.