[Germany] Serial entrepreneurs and investors Christoph Janz and Mark Gazecki have invested in Momox, Germany’s leading online trade-in service for media products. Momox has run on revenues since 2003, but is now pulling in around €10m a year. The German-only site, which lets users trade-in their used books, CDs, DVDs and games for cash, will use the investment to expand (and hopefully get a UI makeover, geez). Terms were not disclosed.

Private individual traders enter the barcode of the CDs, DVDs or video game into the site and then get a trade-in offer from Momox immediately. If the person is happy with the price they send in the item and Momox pays the shipping cost and then pays the trader. Many eBay sellers switch to Momox, finding it much easier. Around ten thousand new items are added every day.

[Germany] Bab.la, the wiki-style language portal, has created a Twitter app that effectively turns the microblogging service into a real-time translation dictionary.

The Hamburg-based startup says that the idea was suggested by users, which seems appropriate given the crowdsourced nature of bab.la itself.

[Germany/France] Creathor Venture, the Germany-based VC firm has invested “several million” euros in the French mobile advertising company Sofialys. The Paris-based startup, launched in 2002, provides mobile marketing and advertising solutions for operators, publishers, agencies and advertisers.

One perceived weakness of Spotify is its music recommendation features. Let’s just say it’s no Last.fm, appearing to make very little use of users’ listening data to help other users discover new music. That’s about to change, to some degree at least, as the European music streaming service rolls out an improved artist discovery feature.

Last summer, at the inaugural Europas Awards, we launched the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 Index of the most innovative and highest-potential European tech companies. This has been the first time anyone has tried to actually track, in a pre-defined way, early stage tech companies in Europe. We’ve now updated the Index, which is focused on mobile and web companies in the EMEA region, once more.

As you can see, there are companies that are staying in the Index, some arriving and some, alas, leaving. The companies that have made great progress in the last few months are ones that have being doing important things like generating revenue. It’s quite clear from the refreshed Index that European startups know how to make money (in particular through e-commerce, private shopping, lead-generation and games). The Silicon Valley business model of scale and user acquisition, while still a hugely important arrow in the European startups quiver, is still just part of the equation, especially in a wide European market so divided by language and regulation. Although I’d like to see more European startups thinking globally from the start, and going for growth, no-one is saying one shouldn’t have at least half an eye trained on where the business model is going to come from.

In general, the companies we took out of the list were not bad companies as such, but were simply trumped by those startups that have greater traffic, funding or revenue traction.

[Israel] Israeli genealogy site MyHeritage has completed its third acquisition, buying Germany’s OSN. OSN operates seven genealogy sites including Verwandt.de in Germany, Moikrewni.pl in Poland and Dynastree.com in the US. It was launched in 2007 just after LA-based Geni and, at first, it was just your typical German clone. But it added features and grew fast in older European markets like Germany and Poland, and even emerging markets like Brazil. In a clone-rarity, OSN grew twice as fast as Geni in the early days according to TechCrunch.

[Paris] French game developer Gameloft, listed on Euronext Paris, this afternoon shared its 2009 financial results with the world. The video game publisher achieved consolidated sales of €122.0 million – roughly $170 million – for 2009, up 11% compared to 2008.

The company also specified ‘iPhone revenue’, which presumably means its income from distribution of its games on both the iPhone and iPod Touch: in 2009, that number jumped 231% YOY to reach €17.6 million (approximately $25 million).

[France] Spotify is no longer invitiation-only in France. The streaming music startup now lets anyone register, but for some reason – probably to make sure you actually live in France – they’ll allow you to register only by verifying your phone number first.

The company says it’s now because they are sure they can “maintain the quality of service for many users.”

Despite scepticism from TechCrunch that Spotify is going to have a tough time launching in the US, it seems to be on its way to rolling out across Europe, at least.

The news is going to come as body-blow to its main French competitor, Deezer, which has been going through all sorts of problems lately.

[Ukraine] The 10th Startup Crash Test event took place on February 29 in Kiev, Ukraine. Startup Crash Test (SCT) is a monthly event aimed at “stress testing” Ukrainian web-related startups’ market strategy, business model, distribution, roadmap, etc. Apart from that, each SCT event provides pre-selected startups with feedback and practical advice. SCT also brings together startups and angel/VC investors and serves as a screening and investment vehicle for local angels/VCs, thereby creating opportunities for both investment and entrepreneurial community in Ukraine.

Since its inception about a year ago, SCT has established itself as the major monthly event for Ukrainian startups, and a steadily growing audience of each new SCT event testifies to the growing popularity of SCT with Ukrainian tech entrepreneurs and angel/VC investors. A further evidence of the SCT model success and popularity is its spread to Russia, were the first SCT event will be held on February 6 in Saint Petersburg.

France’s Resto’in just scored €2 million investment from NextStage Capital to develop their online platform for high-quality food delivery.

Founded in 2006, the young founders, Clément Benoît and Pilar Granell, claim to have stumbled upon the idea for the company after a visit to Boston, where they noticed Americans ordering food online. Rather than offering fast-food, however, the dealt with outlets offering restaurant-quality food and a wide variety of international foods.

[Italy] BuskerLabel thinks it has a new take on crowd-financing for unsigned bands. The Roma, Italy-based startup lets fans sponsor an artist’s upcoming album not at the point of pre-production but ramping up to its release. In return for pledging cash, fans get early access to the music and, upon release, are rewarded with a credit on the album’s digital sleeve notes and a high quality ‘lossless’ download. The bands themselves are able to build fan loyalty and get to keep 80% of any cash pledged with BuskerLabel taking the remainder.

Interestingly, all of the music released through the site is Creative Commons licensed, meaning that it is free to download and distribute for personal, non-commercial use. In other words, fans aren’t required to pay anything to download the music once its released, only if they want early access and the additional perks.

[Russia] Yandex, the leading search engine and contextual advertising company in Russia, has reported a decline in USD revenue for the first time in the company’s history. Although it’s not quite as it seems.

In 2009 revenue was actually up 14% year-on-year to 8.7 billion Rubles but due to weakness in the local currency, this translated into a decrease in USD revenue of 9% year-on-year from $300 million in 2008 to $274 million in 2009, reports Quintura.

[UK] This has vested interest written all over it but the claims made still seem plausible enough.

According to The Cloud, Europe’s largest mobile WiFi provider, 3G networks are at a breaking point. To blame is the rise in smartphone usage and the accompanying ‘unlimited’ data plans, along with social networking, online video and music streaming, all of which encourage data usage.

The result is “poor 3G connection in densely populated areas”, evidenced, says The Cloud, by Telefónica-owned O2′s own admission in the UK that they’ve not been able to cope with iPhone usage in parts of London. Ironically, O2 partners with The Cloud to provide WiFi access to iPhone and Palm Pre users in Britain, so I guess it’s a way of saying to the mobile networks: you need us more than ever, which is obviously the whole point of the press release. But it still raises an interesting question.

[Spain] Teambox, a collaborative project management platform, is another Spanish home-grown initiative that aims to compete on an international scale, with the likes of Basecamp, incorporating a social, Yammer-like model. The startup has recently secured €140,000 in a small round through Keiretsu Forum Barcelona, a large international business angels network, mainly from Albert Feliu, ex-CTO from Infojobs, previously Grupo Intercom, Diego Mariño, Abiquo’s CEO and private investor, Jordi Priu.

Teambox is taking a Wordpress-like deployment approach. They offer an open source platform, alongside a hosted and white label solution, something that could position them well against some other well known players.

This one is bound to send web publishers’ heads spinning.

While ad-blockers are nothing new, those who install such browser pug-ins tend to be geeks and/or those who believe that the web should remain commerce-free. But what if users could replace ads on any site they visit with ones for a variety of good causes and generate money for those causes at the same time.

That’s the functionality offered by DoGood Headquarters via their free browser plug-in, the DoGooder, which serves up campaigns related to green initiatives and social causes, with the company donating 50% of any profits to charity. The new ads are also highly targeted since anybody installing the plug-in will, presumably, be interested in ‘doing good’.

What’s even more disruptive, however, is that publishers, apparently, won’t notice a thing. The original ads aren’t so much blocked as obstructed as the underlying ads still get served, resulting in publishers still getting paid. The only ones to lose out are the original advertisers, obviously.

As long as this all goes unnoticed.

[France] Music site Mxp4 is pushing out a new feature called “Max it”, which creates dynamic remixes of tracks in real-time.

Founded in 2007 in Paris, France, MXP4 has done two rounds of funding with Sofinnova Partners and Ventech, reaching €7 million in backing. MXP4 develops interactive music solutions that are changing the music experience for consumers by allowing them to play with the music. The ambition of the company is to completely change the way the music is consumed, creating this new format “mxp’4″.

Nokia and education company Pearson have formed a joint venture in China dubbed Beijing Mobiledu Technologies to grow MobilEdu, the wireless education service that the Finnish mobile giant launched in China back in 2007.

Mobiledu is a mobile service that essentially provides English-language learning materials and other educational content, from a variety of content providers, directly to mobile phones. Customers can access the content through an application preloaded on new Nokia handsets, or by visiting the service’s mobile website and most other WAP portals in China.

TechCrunch Paris – Paris – 24th March 2010
TechCrunch Europe will return to Paris for its 2nd annual afternoon seminar on March 24 featuring yet another interactive and live-streamed session featuring some of the most innovative and interesting web / mobile startups and investors in France. We are releasing a limited number of early bird tickets now and you can get yours here.

To submit your idea for a speech/presentation, apply to be a panelist, or apply to pitch your startup please contact editorial via email with a short A4 length pitch.

Sponsorship Opportunities
Please contact Petra Johansson petra (at) twistedtree.co.uk for further details.