Exclusive – SmallRivers, a fledging Internet startup based out of Switzerland that has developed a Web app called Paper.li that basically lets you turn Twitter streams, tags and lists into daily online newspapers, has landed more cash after inking a $1 million seed funding deal back in 2008.

Investing in this new round are a group of unnamed ‘reputed Web 2.0 business angels’ along with German investment and media group Econa and Kima Ventures, the early-stage investment firm started by French entrepreneurs Xavier Niel and Jeremie Berrebi.

Not unlike Mark Zuckerberg a few years ago, a couple of British Oxford university students realised there had to be a better way to network online – but they took a rather different approach. After studying how their college’s clubs and societies worked – and running a few themselves – David Langer and Andy Young came up with GroupSpaces in 2007. Three years later they’ve expanded beyond university campuses to hit 500,000 group memberships and are now set to go international with the injection of $1.3m investment. The round comes from Index Ventures and leading angel investors including Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Simon Levene, Meagan Marks, Ariel Poler and Quincy Smith of CODE Advisors.

This is the first investment announced from the new Index Seed Fund and as such Index partner, Mike Volpi, will take a board seat. Existing investors Stephen Bullock and Simon and Michael Blakey of Avonmore Developments also participated in the round. That line-up attests to the interest this startup is creating – it’s extremely rare for this many high-profile Silicon Valley angel investors to invest in a UK startup. The cash will be used to expand their engineering and marketing teams in both the UK and US.

And so it begins. The European Commission this morning launched a consultation on key questions regarding the contentious issues of net neutrality and the open Internet.

The consultation covers such issues as whether ISPs should be allowed to adopt traffic management practices, prioritizing one kind of Internet traffic over another. This has become an issue with the onset of broadband and Internet services which require more bandwidth, such as VoIP or online TV. Essentially, the EC wants to find out whether these practices would create any problems (economical, technical or otherwise) and have ‘unfair effects’ for users.

Tradeshift, which has been described as the “Skype for invoicing”, has announced a raft of new partners in the SaaS accounting space, along with plans to open up its API to enable more third-parties to tie into its free invoicing system.

The launch partners who have had access to a beta version of Tradeshift’s API include: ERPLY (free ERP system), E-conomics (a SaaS accounting solution provider), Workbook (a specialized platform for the media business), Office123 (an open-source ERP system), Continia (bank payments systems), Winfinans (Windows-based desktop accounting), and Ibistic (the leading e-invoicing workflow system in Scandinavia).

This, says the company, in which early Skype investor Morten Lund is an adviser, puts it on track to bring “directly integrated electronic invoicing” to more than 100,000 small European businesses over the next 6 months.

EXCLUSIVE – DriveGain, a new startup that opens its doors today, aims to help users learn to drive more efficiently and, in doing so, save on their fuel consumption.

It’s founded by Simon East, an ex-Psion exec and former VP, Technology of Symbian who subsequently founded Cognima (ShoZu), and Dr. Phil Dixon, who has a background in racing car simulations and was a recent Vehicle Performance Engineer with the Renault Formula 1 team.

DriveGain’s first offering is an iPhone app of the same name that, unlike the plethora of sat-nav apps available for Apple’s smartphone, doesn’t bark out turn-by-turn directions but gives a range of visual and audio feedback on what changes are required by the driver to burn less fuel.

Last year we found out Reevoo, the online customer reviews startup which had looked like it was slowing down, was actually signing up partners and getting traction. Today it announces a Series B round of funding from existing investors, though terms were undisclosed. The funding has been secured from existing investors Eden Ventures, Banexi Ventures and business angel Andrew Phillipps. The expansion capital will be used to grow faster across Europe and adding social functionality.

A Series B funding is usually in the range of £8-10m. Prior to this Reevoo had raised over £7m. That means Reevoo is clearly confident of making it in the long term and becoming a pretty big business, although there is also the chance this is a “down round”, which is never great for the founders.

Germany’s Dextrose, the browser-based game engine startup, has acquired California-based Effect Games, which provides developer tools for creating and publishing web-based games. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed.

Dextrose is building what the startup claims will be the first commercial game engine for pluginless browser-based games. Dubbed ‘Aves Engine‘, it enables developers to create games built on the ‘open web stack’ in 2D and 2.5D (pseudo-3D), utilizing modern web standards – HTML, CSS and JavaScript – and negating the need for users to install a separate browser plug-in such as Flash or any other bespoke technology.

Apprupt, an affiliate network for mobile apps, has today launched its self-service platform for “appvertisers” (a slightly silly name).

It enables app developers to sign up to apprupt on a cost-per-install basis, enabling them to track their marketing campaigns for both paid and free apps. Features include account management (including campaign spend), and reports and analytics, providing “the ability to determine the ROI at any given time” by measuring the number of app downloads generated.

Affiliate marketing platform Skimlinks has launched its latest product that aims to make it even easier for publishers to place revenue generating affiliate links in their content.

Dubbed SkimWords, the feature, which is currently in beta, differs slightly from the company’s main offering. Rather than simply converting existing retailer links to affiliate links on-the-fly, it looks at the page’s content and converts any references to known products into fairly non-obtrusive geo-targeted links to retailer sites where the item can be purchased.

The fact that these links are location-aware – at the country level – is perhaps noteworthy since it accommodates a site’s international traffic and therefore hopefully doesn’t leave much money on the table.

Remember Steve Jobs’ advice regarding the iPhone 4′s reported reception issues – it’s all your fault – relayed via an email from the Apple CEO himself (yes, one of those emails). Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, it hasn’t gone down well with UK early adopters of the company’s latest smartphone.

That’s according to a rather opportunistic “flash” survey from rightmobilephone, which found that 63% of respondents were “particularly angered” by Jobs’ email in which he told one early iPhone 4 adopter to “avoid holding [the phone] in that way”.

The mobile phone comparison website polled 836 iPhone 4 users, 93% of whom claimed to have already been affected by a loss of signal whilst gripping the handset to make calls, whilst 78% of owners dubbed the fault “an insult”.

As you’re no doubt aware by now, some iPhone 4 owners have been reporting poor reception and even dropped calls when holding the device by its metal frame, which doubles as the device’s antenna.

Now TechCrunch reader Philip Gradwell checks in to tell us that Orange UK has delayed the delivery of the iPhone 4 he had ordered earlier this week because of the antenna problems.

It’s just one call, one rep, and one user report, and we have a yet unanswered inquiry into Orange. But if it’s true that Orange UK is holding back distribution of the new iPhone because of said issues, that could mean Apple has a larger liability on its hands than originally thought.

Nokia is having a rough month.

First, it saw itself forced to cut its outlook for the second quarter and the full year, and now The Register reports that the Finnish company has lost one of its top tech brains.

Charles Davies, former Symbian CTO and notably the first employee and later managing director of Psion, is leaving the mobile juggernaut to take up an unknown role at navigation giant TomTom.

[Copenhagen] Danish VoIP technology company Vopium has received a $16.5 million capital injection, expanding its group of owners with telecom investor Raghuvinder Kataria, one of the early backers of what is now Bharti Airtel (one of the world’s largest telecommunication service providers).

With the investment, Kataria now owns the majority of shares in Vopium, which will use the funding to expand internationally in an effort to challenge VoIP juggernaut Skype.

Chances are, you’ve already heard of Pearltrees - possibly because the company caught attention when it sponsored LeWeb in Paris or more recently the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. And if you haven’t, now is the right time to acquaint yourself with the service: the French start-up founded in 2008 has just scored another €1.3 million in funding to change the way you navigate the web.

The social book-marking and navigation start-up – which allows users to organize and share their favorite websites via a system of digital “pearls” – has raised roughly €3.5 million to date. The inital €1 million raised was in June 2008 followed by €1.2 in June of the following year (in addition to some public funding from the French government). As the company seems to have a rather consistent annual funding pattern, we only hope that the valutation or shares aren’t being compromised.

More good news from the French open source scene: Paris-based open source enterprise content management (ECM) platform, Nuxeo, has just announced another €2.7 million in funding from OTC Asset Management – one of its principal investors.

After the €2 million raised in December 2008, this additional funding will put the company’s series A round at €4.7 million.

Application store company GetJar this morning announced it has secured $11 million in a Series B funding round led by previous backer Accel Partners, report PaidContent and others.

The company says it plans to use the funding to bolster its consumer-facing sites as well as its professional solutions geared towards app developers and publishers.

It seems that French VCs love e-commerce and after the acquisition of PriceMinister for roughly €200 million last week, it’s probably more understandable than ever. So French VC Ventech didn’t waste any time and just announced a €1.5 million investment in VestiaireDeCopines, a chic online sales depot.

Launched officially in October 2009, the site is essentially a marketplace for fashion clothing and accessory exchange – although not exclusively luxury brands. For example, anyone with a bag in good condition can sell it on VestiaireDeCopines. But let’s be clear, this is not eBay and the team definitely goes out of its way to make sure that users don’t find themselves at an online garage sale with dilapidated products. In fact, roughly 50% of all products are refused for the site as a result of their poor condition.

It’s all the rage these days. You fire off an email to Apple‘s Steve Jobs, the CEO of one of the world’s biggest and most secretive technology companies, and to your astonishment, the great man himself replies.

You then publish said email, sit back and watch as the tech press dissect each and every word.

It’s quite the media spectacle, especially when you factor in that Steve can’t (and doesn’t) reply to every email he receives. But when he does, the replies are usually sparse and occasionally cryptic.

Steve’s reply to my lengthy email was no different.

We will keep making the best computers on the planet. We love it.

Sent from my iPhone

So what did I ask him?

Travel website operator TripAdvisor, an Expedia company, this morning announced it has acquired Holiday Lettings, credited as being the UK’s largest independent vacation rental website.

The seller is Rightmove, a UK-based property website operator, having sold its majority interest in the holding company of Holiday Lettings to TripAdvisor for an undisclosed sum. Rightmove acquired a 66.67% stake in Holiday Lettings in March 2007, and recently said it intended to report Holiday Lettings as a discontinued operation in its half yearly report, with the gross assets disposed of totalling £1 million.

The acquisition follows the launch of vacation rentals on TripAdvisor in 2009, and the purchase of a majority stake in United States-based FlipKey.com in 2008.

Brightpearl (previously Pearl), the cloud-based software suite for SMEs, has raised a $1.5 million funding round from Eden Ventures and Notion Capital.

The UK startup will use the new investment to support its “global expansion”, having already picked up customers for its offering, which integrates accounting, CRM, order and stock management, e-commerce and help desk functionality, in countries as far ranging as China, India, South Africa, Spain and the United States.