Yahoo will power search and related advertising on the ‘emocion’ portal of Telefónica España, Spain’s largest operator network, the two companies announced this morning.

The agreement builds on the mobile search partnership with O2 Germany launched in November 2009, as well as the larger agreement announced in October 2007 to provide consumers with Yahoo as the primary search service on Telefónica mobile portals in 15 European and Latin-American countries.

[UK] Brownbook, the business directory, has integrated seed data for nearly 4 million businesses for several countries to fill up their pages and grow the site’s index to 34 million listings. A move that is clearly an investment on their part to reach new countries and increase activity where they already have coverage.

Brownbook’s approach is quite different from many well known local business listings sites. The startup boasts their wiki-like approach vs. stale yellow page heavy weights. Anyone can add a business, edit its information and review it. Businesses can then verify and claim their listings, getting their hands on tools to integrate additional content, such as a Facebook profile, Youtube Channel, Flicker photostream, Twitter posts, etc., to dress up and promote their profile.

[Sweden] Stockholm-based Videoplaza, the video ad server startup, has secured a €3.5 million funding round from leading Nordic VCs Creandum and Northzone Ventures.

This follows seed investments of €80,000 and €420,000, bringing the total raised to-date to €4m.

The company, which currently has a staff of 20 based in Sweden, the UK and France, will use the new capital to continue to expand operations in Europe including Germany, Spain and Italy, and attract new customers for its Monetizer ad server platform for managing, displaying and tracking video advertising.

[Russia] The Moscow-based social games company Nival Network, part of the Nival Group, has raised $7 million in new funding from DST, 1C Company and Nival Group founder & CEO Sergey Orlovskiy, according to a report (russian) in the Vedomosti newspaper.

DST have invested $4 million for a 12.5% stake, with software vendor 1C (a previous investor) providing an additional $1 million and Nival Group CEO, Sergey Orlovskiy putting in $2 million. As a result, 1C and Orlovskiy now own a 26.56% and 60.94% stake, respectively.

This gives Nival Network a post-money valuation of $32 million.

[France] Social location-based search service Tellmewhere or Dismoioù has released a new version of its iPhone app as part of its quest to conquer local markets. The Paris-based startup is also preparing for US expansion later this year.

The company’s current platform – a personalized local search engine – grew out of a former wiki map project, officially launched in 2008. Today, the site counts over 500,000 members and allows users to find and share places with their friends. Yet, not only does Tellmewhere identify the places that match a given search criteria, it goes further by ranking the results based on the user’s previous reviews and tastes. The company’s engine thus gets smarter with use – which reflects Tellmewhere’s philosophy: users are more likely to be interested in results that match their taste or are leveraged from their network.

[Germany] The Samwer brothers have done it again.

In December, Germany’s most prolific startup founders pumped millions from France and Sweden into their Internet companies. Now the three brothers have secured a €5 million second round for their Groupon clone Citydeal, which they only founded in December.

The new investment comes from an international group made up of the Swedish Investment AV Kinnevik, along with Germany’s Holtzbrinck Ventures and eVenture Capital Partners and, of course, the Samwers’ own incubator Rocket Internet.

In January, the same set of investors already provided €4 million of funding and a third round is said to be in the making.

There is a tweet being retweeted heavily within the German Twitter community right now which roughly translates as

“BEWARE Nazi-pigs on Twitter! @Heil_Hitler_88 Please block so that the account gets deleted. #nazi #block #rt Please!” (original).

Now, if Twitter had servers in Germany an account like @Heil_Hitler_88 (we’re not linking BTW) would be illegal and would be deleted right away.

[Germany/Poland] Team Europe Ventures, the Berlin-based VC firm focused on early stage Internet companies, has made a minority investment in Infakt. The Polish startup provides web-based accounting and invoicing solutions for small companies locally.

Alongside Team Ventures, angel Christoph Janz also brings new investment, with the combined funding amounting to a 30% stake in Infakt. Polish business angel Krzysztof Nowinski (formerly with the VC firm BMP) is an existing investor.

Al Jazeera’s mobile Media unit has been quite busy lately. After making their iPhone apps free, the broadcaster has added live streaming to their mobile website. Live streaming is supported on the iPhone only for now, but Al Jazeera’s Mobile media unit is planning on adding support for other mobile platforms soon.

The mobile website streaming service works almost as well as the mobile clients and isn’t restricted by location or sitting behind a paywall. Al Jazeera has clearly taken the decision to make their programming available to as many people on as many platforms as possible.

[Germany] Berlin-based aka-aki, the location-based social network for mobiles, has hit something of a milestone. The startup is claiming 500,000 sign-ups, up from 350,00 last October.

Writing on the company’s official blog, CEO Gabriel F. Yoran also revealed that the site is seeing 300,000 aki-messages sent daily with average time spent using the service at “about half an hour daily” per member. But perhaps more noteworthy to aka-aki’s investors, which include Creathor Venture and Innovacom, is the 30 million monthly ad impressions being reported.

[Spain] Just last week, Uvinum a Spanish grown social wine recommendation portal took their first step into the English speaking market with the launch of the UK version.

Today Uvinum uncorks in the US, in a further effort to reach into mature ecommerce markets as part of their very quick, international expansion.

Uvinum, led by founders Nico Bour, Albert Garcia and Albert Lopez (all ex-Softonic), launched in Spain barely 3 months ago, with a current database of 7,400 wines and claiming 30,000 monthly visits. The concept is very similar to US centered Corkd and Snooth.

[France] French startup Stupeflix, the XML-based online video platform, launches its new Stupeflix Play feature today which turns content from a website into a dynamic, broadcast quality video with just “a couple lines of code.”

The company’s aim is to considerably lower the barriers for site owners – from ecommerce to publishers – to add video to their offerings in order to increase stickiness and advertising opportunities.

The way Stupeflix Play works is as follows: First you insert some javascript into a site, then select the bits you want turned into a video and voila, a video appears of your content. The result is that the full static content of a website is transformed into an always up-to-date, video with zero development and integration costs, says the company.

[France] French virtual games company, Owlient, has teamed up with UNESCO and Gut Aiderbichl to allow users to support real causes with virtual goods.

The Paris-based games publisher currently has over 10 million members worldwide. The company’s two most popular games, Babydow and Equideow, enable users to take care of a virtual baby or horse respectively. Throughout the game, virtual goods can be purchased for personalization or care of the online character and virtual space.

One of the company’s newest goods includes virtual UNESCO baby shirts of which it donates 30% of the sales to the organization. €850 has already been raised through this model, to go towards the protection of children who are in danger at school and to support their professional development.

[Germany/Japan] Following Austrian and UK expansion, Germany’s leading buying club Brands4friends has opened shop in Japan with the the launch of brands4friends.jp.

The new site, which is backed by Partech International and Holtzbrinck Ventures along with its German parent company, brands4friends.de, aims to become a market leader locally by applying the same buying club model that is seeing success in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Brands4friends offers members access to major fashion brands and other goods at hugely discounted prices, driven by the overstock market.

Last Thursday saw the third edition of Plugg, a conference I started in my home country Belgium back in 2008 that essentially aims to launch and inspire European tech entrepreneurs and advance the startup ecosystem in these parts. The event is closely tied to TechCrunch, with myself as lead organizer and TC Europe editor Mike Butcher running things on stage.

We invited a host of speakers from all corners of Europe to deliver inspiring keynotes about a wide range of topics, and as every year had 20 (well actually, 19) startups vying for the top prize in an exhilarating pitching competition. All these startups were carefully selected and are some of Europe’s most promising early-stage ventures, so I invite you to take a look at the full list of finalists in our previous post.

In the end, Estonia’s Fits.me won the main award of the show, with RazWar snatching the audience choice prize and Distimo and Inbox2 as runners-up.

If you didn’t attend the event but are interested in finding out what went on on stage, we’ve got you covered: the whole thing was captured on video and in pictures, and we also embedded a handy Nomadesk widget on the Plugg website where you can access a virtual folder carrying all the presentations.

Here’s a selection of videos I think will interest TechCrunch readers most (but please check out all of them):

[UK] AlertMe, the Cambridge-based home energy monitoring service, has hired ex-Tiscali UK boss Mary Turner as its new CEO.

Turner ran the ISP’s UK business from 2001 where she took the company from less than half a million dial-up customers to the third largest DSL provider in Britain with revenues of €608m in 2008, according to the press release.

She also oversaw the acquisitions by Tiscali of npower’s telephone base in 2003, Video Networks IPTV business Homechoice in 2006, and the Pipex broadband and telephone business in 2007. Tiscali UK was sold to The Talk Talk Group in 2009 where Turner has remained an advisor.

[France] Zimbalam, the digital music distributor from Believe Digital, launches in the US today.

The service lets artists submit and distribute their music through 25 of the most popular music platforms, including Apple’s iTunes and Spotify, in addition to “several hundred additional stores worldwide”. This makes Zimbalam the largest music distribution network as measured by number of stores and geographic reach, says the Paris-based company.

To distribute their music via Zimbalam’s network, artists are charged a simple annual fee ($29.99 in year one then $19.98 per year after for an EP or album) and then once the fee is recouped, get to keep 100% of royalties – after, of course, whatever commission is taken by each store. Additionally, following year one, artists won’t be charged by Zimbalam if they don’t make enough sales to cover the annual fee.

Fits.me, a virtual fitting room for internet clothing retailers based on robots (yes really) has won the European startup competition in Brussels, Plugg.

It’s actually even cooler than it sounds. By creating robotic shape-shifting mannequins and testing how people reacted by seeing clothes on the robot with their dimensions, sales actually went up.

Only 7% of all clothing is sold online today, a $36bn market It’s $20bn for computers), because you can’t see how the clothes look on a human body. The fits.me trial with partners showed these pictures of adjustable mannequins wearing clothes increased sales three times and dramatically reduced returns by 28%.

[Israel] FlyScreen, the mobile phone lock-screen replacement from Israeli startup Cellogic, has added Foursquare integration to its Android app ahead of this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) festival.

The new Foursquare widget lets users of the location-based social network access its main features, including the ability to quickly find places nearby, “check-in”, share their location with friends via Foursquare, Twitter and/or Facebook, as well as access their foursquare friends-list.

The company says it’s the first time that a location-based mobile service has been made available on Android’s lock-screen, and that the app now offers the fastest way to “check-in” to Foursquare on a mobile since you can do it without even unlocking the phone. No need to drill down into apps or Android’s web browser.