InnoGames out of Germany has raised a round of funding from Fidelity Growth Partners Europe to expand its browser-based games portfolio.

InnoGames has titles which now streatch across 50 million registered players worldwide such as Tribal Wars, The West, and Grepolis. The company was founded in 2007 by Eike and Hendrik Klindworth along with Michael Zillmer.

All the games are free-to-play with the business model based on virtual goods like being able to upgrade to better (virtual) weapons. Bigpoint and GameForge are rivals in the space.

Google Acquisition Holdings, a Google subsidiary, is to make a public cash offer to acquire all shares of Global IP Solutions for $2.12 in cash per share, which represents an aggregate price of approximately $68.2 million based on the currently issued and outstanding share capital of GIPS.

Global IP Solutions, formerly known as Global IP Sound, was founded in July 1999 in Stockholm, Sweden and is currently headquartered in San Francisco. The company develops real-time voice and video processing software for IP networks and is known for developing the narrowband iLBC and wideband iSAC speech codecs.

The Mayor of London, yes, they have a mayor, revealed the long-awaited new London bus today. For those of you unaware that the Old London Bus needed updating, I can assure you it did. And the long bendy ones favoured by other countries just would not do for Ye Olde London – aside from their habit of killing cyclists on tight corners and bursting into flames.

The old Routemaster bus is an icon on London, but the iconic 1954 design needed a revamp. It needed that crucial Fifth Element look cities really ought to be buying into in 2010.

Skype this morning announced that it has expanded its senior management team with a new Chief Legal and Regulatory Officer (Neal Goldman) and a fresh Chief Marketing Officer (Doug Bewsher).

Both men will be based in Luxembourg and report to CEO Josh Silverman.

Former Joost CEO Matt Zelesko, meanwhile, has landed the CTO position at semantic web technology company Inform Technologies.

Here in Europe we’re a little preoccupied with the volcanic ash cloud but apparently there was a major oil spill over in The Gulf of Mexico. Once again, social media is coming to the rescue.

As we discovered recently, a group of a dozen or so organizations including BP, the EPA, the U.S. Department of Interior, the Department of Defense, and OSHA have set up Deepwater Horizon Response, a “Unified Command” established to “manage response operations.” This also involves several social media accounts.

And now there’s a theory that if enough people tweet information using the hashtag #gulfspill the environmental mess will clear itself up. OK, perhaps not, but the newly launched Gulf Coast Spill Coalition thinks that using social media to record and share information related to the oil spill can make a difference. And that’s exactly what Gulfcoastspill.com has been setup to do.

Right now entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and Google executives are milling around in a swanky hotel outside of London at Google Zeitgeist.

Last year we were there too and managed to even break some news.

But this year we’re not allowed in. Why? There’s not enough room.

Here’s my email exchange with their PR people.

Ogone, a European electronic payments service provider, has received an undisclosed majority investment from US-based growth equity firm Summit Partners.

In conjunction with the transaction, which is expected to close by the end of this month, Christian Strain, a Principal of Summit Partners, and Scott Collins, a Managing Director with Summit, will join Ogone’s board of directors.

Discussion forums are broken and threaded comments found on blogs don’t cut it either. Too much of the conversation gets lost and any lasting knowledge is buried. That’s the view taken by yoomoot, a new startup just out of private beta.

The standalone site aims to make public online discussions more productive and useful, although in the future yoomoot is planning a subscription-based version for organisations who want to hold private discussions and a plugin for other publishing platforms, such as Wordpress.

nugg.ad, is a advertising platform for behavioral targeting with a twist. It does this by predicting user behaviour but doesn’t use any user identifiable data. So it surfs the current wave of privacy issues right now. It’s now wisely placing the focus of its international activities on the UK advertising market, the strongest in Europe, despite the recession. Ajay Daved today joins as sales director for UK and Ireland, reporting to Vice President of Sales Christian Elsner. Prior to nugg.ad, Daved was sales manager at the German ad serving provider ADTECH.

In 2008 nugg.ad won AdLINK Media’s French and UK business to offer its technology to their customers, and now has offices in London, Warsaw and Paris.

We have just learned that German Groupon clone CityDeal has been acquired by the world’s original and leading collective coupon buying platform Groupon.

CityDeal, which was invested in by Rocket Internet, the incubator of the Samwer brothers, has raised around 20 million Euros and was heavily competing with their counterpart DailyDeal – another german Groupon clone backed by various internet celebrities such as Stefan Glänzer (Last.fm) and Michael Brehm (Studi.vz).

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, yet since CityDeal has only been active for around six months the trade-sale must have been worth it for it’s investors and shareholders. CityDeal is currently active in 80 cities, 16 countries and employs around 600 people around Europe. Within the next months CityDeal is going to pull on Groupon’s skin for their various country specific sites – including its name.

The iPad’s international release is just weeks away and it divides opinion. There are those that love it, and those that remain to be convinced.

But it’s clear you’ll need a case to keep it protected. So so why not get a case with a keyboard?

That’s the concept behind the ClamCase which features a bluetooth keyboard, an iPad case, and a stand in a simple design. It is set to come out after the Summer and no price has been announced yet.

So while the rest of the world was busy making Chatroulette clones, French start-up ToRoulette decided to kick-it up a notch; that’s right, the company decided it was time to develop a professionally-oriented version of Chatroulette destined for Facebook Fan Pages.

Sure, there are already a number of Chatroulette applications hiding out on Facebook, like Chat-o-Rama or what-have-you, that simply leverage users’ personal profiles to create a more secure (aka clothed) environment. Well, ToRoulette goes a little further. The start-up’s platform essentially allows you to integrate Chatroulette into your Fan Page and to organize chat-events with your community of fans. In other words, if successful, ToRoulette believes it should ultimately help to develop a stronger fan base and thus clientele.

While the debate rages on about Facebook’s attitude to privacy, and in particular the views of Mark Zuckerberg, the current situation is that an awful lot of people make their status updates public, whether they realise the full implications or not. A stark reminder of this comes today in the form of a new search engine thrown together by two developers.

FacebookSearch simply takes those public status updates and makes them searchable, outside of Facebook. The guys behind it, Peter Burns and Will Moffat, have posted a simple explanation: “This is a simple example of just how open facebook has made your information. This data is wide open, and this is one of the least scary uses that anyone will make. If nothing changes, it’s only to get worse.” There’s an interesting discussion over at Hacker News on the morality of what they are doing.

This guest post was written by Jeff Lynn, Chairman of The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec). Jeff is also CEO and Co-Founder of Seedrs. He explains how the coalition government between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats could result in Britain being spared from the effects of a harmful new law, namely the Digital Economy Act.

The UK tech startup community and the government tend not to cross paths all that often. Aside from setting up a handful of more-or-less helpful funding schemes and tax incentives, the folks in Westminster and Whitehall direct most of their commercial energies toward the world of large banks and industrials and, thankfully, let us entrepreneurs go about our business of creating and innovating and driving forward the UK digital economy.

In the waning days of the last Parliament, however, we collided head on when a piece of legislation called the Digital Economy Bill (now the Digital Economy Act) was rushed into law with minimal scrutiny or debate. The Act includes a hodgepodge of unobjectionable provisions on things like the digital radio switchover and broadcasting in Gaelic, but front and centre is a set of copyright infringement measures with significant negative ramifications. Largely drafted by music industry lobbyists, these provisions were nominally designed to target large-scale file-sharers but in practice will have severe consequences for anyone who uses the Internet to innovate. Among its effects are:

Google is weird. I mean seriously weird. Or maybe it’s just Google Buzz.

With all the Facebook privacy issues going on right now I thought I’d go and check out Google Buzz. I’d heard a rumour you couldn’t delete your profile. On the face of it, it would appear you can. At the bottom of the Edit Profile page, there is a link to deleting your Buzz profile which says “This will disable Google Buzz integration in Gmail and delete your Google profile and Buzz posts. It will also disconnect any connected sites and unfollow you from anyone you are following.”

Fine, that’s good enough for me. It may well be that Google retains data whether I know it or not. I pretty much assume Google keeps everything. That’s not what caught my eye.

What got my attention were the other profiles Google was “suggesting” I add to mine.

Web consultant Colin Tatehas launched a site to track how long will it take to repeal the controversial Digital economy Act, which was drawn up largely to favour music companies, threatens web site blocking and could lead to users being disconnected form the Internet.

The Repeal The Digital Economy Act site does what it says on the tin, featuring a big clock.

Last summer, plista closed a Series B round with Dumont Ventures and Hightech Gründerfonds. Now the company is preparing to raise more capital.

TechCrunch Europe sat down with CEO Dominik Matyka at this week’s Next2010 in Berlin. According to Matyka, who heads up a team of about 30, they have 4 VC term sheets on their desk and the new round is expected to happen within the next 8 weeks. The aim is outperform the last round and raise $5 million.

The new financing round is likely to fund plista’s expansion into the French and Austrian markets within the coming months and their larger plan to expand their reach into continental Europe later this year.

Founder and CEO Alex Savic presented his company NextWidgets at this week’s next2010 in Berlin. The company’s product creates fully transactional banners for websites and facebook pages that enables anyone to integrate their online retail store into a banner.

TechCrunch Europe took the opportunity to talk to Savic about what is next for the Swiss startup, including details of a new less intrusive side tab widget.

NextWidgets says it is the first company that lets users to embed a store into their social media profile in an effortless way. This makes the recruitment of fan-based affiliates very cost effective. NextWidgets reads the text of a website and then pulls in the keywords to create a customized offering that is relevant to the context of the content. This means that if you are a car parts retailer, the content of the e-commerce widget will match the blog or site’s content in which it is embedded.

This is guest post by Paul Jozefak who is a managing partner at VC firm Neuhaus Partners. In this post he gives his impressions of the Next10 conference, which just took place in Berlin, and takes the current pulse of the European startup scene, along with sharing some tips on how to make the most out of attending a conference like Next10.

What is it with German events? Take an established event, put it in the capital city, invite lots of people and you should have a party, right? That’s what I thought initially.

Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoyed the two days I spent at Next10 in Berlin. It’s almost become like a class reunion of sorts. You basically know everyone who shows up and you get the chance to catch up. Finally, folks from outside of Germany are making the trek to attend this show (if ash clouds aren’t setting their travel plans askew). You have a ton of speakers on the agenda. Food is available as is coffee and other drinks. Hey, even the wireless was good. For those of you who like to keep your insides as tarred as the Mexican Gulf coast, Dunhill was passing out free cigarettes at their lounge near the entrance.

So why the low energy?