For the last few weeks I’ve become increasingly fascinated by someone at Nokia. That person is Anssi Vanjoki.

Vanjoki is an interesting guy. Last year he was named as one of the 25 most influential people on the Web. Why? He is Nokia’s most visible advocate of what Nokia still, perhaps rather quaintly, calls its “multimedia computers”.

And he’s not some grey executive. Back in 2002 he was awarded what was believed at the time to be the most expensive speeding ticket ever, $103,600, after being caught breaking the speed limit on his Harley Davidson motorcycle in Helsinki.

But this week he hasn’t been quite so visible. As Apple and Steve Jobs unveiled the fourth generation of the iPhone in San Francisco, there appeared to be not a murmur from Nokia, still the world’s largest maker of cell phones. Where was Anssi’s thundering response?

SponsorPay, Europe’s leading provider of advertisement-based payment systems, has secured a further €3.8m of funding.

The new round comes from Hasso Plattner Ventures, Moscow’s Kite Ventures, and Team Europe Ventures who are the original backers of the Berlin-based startup.

The injection of capital solidifies SponsorPay’s dominant position in Eurpope, having recently acquired its equally young rival, Hamburg-based GratisPay, in early February. The combined properties’ customers cover the majority of the major online and social game publishers across Europe, including Gameforge, Bigpoint, InnoGames and Frogster.

We’ve seen how The New York Times became enraged by the audacity of the Pulse iPad application [iTunes] to use its RSS feed in one of the best news readers to appear on that device. Controversially, the app was pulled by Apple after the NYT complained, despite being lauded by Steve Jobs. It’s now been reinstated, without the NYT as a default feed. So consider a different scenario: the newspaper that embraces new technology and new ways of reading to the betterment of its audience and the subsequent deep engagement it could garner.

Reports are coming in that Google Maps Navigation, the search giant’s free satellite navigation app for Android, is now available in and supports much of mainland Europe.

The list of countries confirmed so far include Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium. This follows support for the UK and Ireland rolled out in late April after initially only being available in the US.

Exalead, the search engine that (no kidding) underlies Friendster and has been behind French government attempts to build a platform to rival Google (yes), has been acquired by Dassault Systèmes, a leader in 3D software for big company processes for about €135 million ($161.5m).

Exalead’s, which has a platform to apply advanced semantic processing to Web-scale data, include the World Bank among its clients. It was owned by a holding company, Qualis.

Flirtomatic, the mobile social network aimed at young adults, has launched an Android app available as a free download from the Android Marketplace.

This follows the success of its iPhone app, rolled out in January, which has since become the “largest single source of inflow of new users”, says the UK company. BlackBerry and Nokia Ovi apps are promised this summer.

Flirtomatic has also furthered its Facebook integration – the service already supports Facebook Connect – adding “Like” buttons on user profiles browsed on its website. This means that its 2m users can now “Like” their favourite profiles, pushing these to their Facebook newsfeed, a sure way to increase the service’s visibility and viral potential.

Let’s annotate just released their iPad version for real-time collaboration for PDFs. The service is still in alpha and takes full advantage of the iPad’s HTML5 capabilities. The app practially runs within the iPads browser and also let’s you make use of native iPad elements such as multi-touch.

We’ve got VIP invites for TechCrunch readers to test it!

Invideous, the online video monetization platform from London-based Swiffen, has left beta, adding support for in-video payments of content hosted by Brightcove and JW player. The new feature supplements its existing video hotspot ad and e-commerce offering.

The startup has also announced new funding in the “low six figures” from private investors from the digital and television sectors. Prior to this, Swiffen, which was founded in late 2008, was entirely bootstrapped.

Invideous’ new micro-payments feature enables video publishers to charge viewers by the minute, by view or via a monthly subscription. They can also set a small fee that users can pay to not see any video ads. That’s a nice set of options for both the publisher and viewer, although I’m far from convinced that running a meter on viewing time is something that fits with viewer behavior. Others have tried this approach and failed.

Mobile App stores have been dominated by Apple and Android with Nokia’s Ovi a distant third, but there is an independent store out there which cuts across all except Apple. GetJar, which claims to be the the world’s second largest mobile app store, says it has just broken the 1 billion app download barrier. This is the only time a cross-platform apps store has clocked over 1 billion downloads and the second time after Apple did it a few months ago.

The message, of course, is that mobile apps, which have benefitted from the marketplace approach and the ability for developers to profit, are here to stay.

Something crazy happened in the last 36 hours. Literally three tech startup events happened in London, each with multiple startups attempting to get real product out into the marketplace. However, while Launch48 and London Startup Weekend happened over the last weekend (and more of them in posts to follow), The Difference Engine, a seed accelerator program based in the North East of England, has spent the last few months, not days, nurturing some early stage startups.

Publicly funded, The Difference Engine selects about ten companies and provides funding of £20,000 per team, as well as support and mentorship. This year was its inaugural programme. This week, the programme debuted nine new start-ups which were presented to VCs and angel investors in London for the first time. These companies are between three months or more old and tend to have about two or three founder employees each. The application process for the second Difference Engine programme later this year now re-opens again.

Here’s a run-down about each one they sent us and our brief take:

Hitwise, the web analytics firm, has a report out today that claims that social networks now receive more UK Internet visits than search engines.

Which, if the case, would imply that Google should be considerably worried about its future battle with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, as online marketing spend will surely follow Internet foot-through. Or does it?

According to Hitwise, during May, social networks accounted for 11.88% of UK Internet visits and search engines accounted for 11.33%, representing the first ever month that social networks have been more popular than search engines in the UK.

Yahoo is partnering with iconic football star David Beckham to offer exclusive content for its coverage of the upcoming World Cup as well as the 2010/11 football season, we’ve just learned.

Beckham will also be featured in the second phase of the company’s global integrated marketing campaign, which focuses on showcasing specific Yahoo products and services, throughout the duration of the World Cup in select markets.

The goal of the campaign, according to the press release, is “to drive more people to search, use and talk about Yahoo! through exciting and experiential demonstrations of our unique ability to bring my world and the world together”.

Like a Klingon Romulan starship de-cloaking in the middle of Europe, Lars Hinrichs the founder of LinkedIn competitor XING who exited for €48.3 million last year is putting his efforts onto a new startup investment vehicle dubbed HackFwd. But although the web site for the new venture is packed with advisors and mentors, HackFwd will take 27% of a company it invests in – that’s a sizeable chunk. In the US, Ycombinator takes around 6% but can do anywhere from 2%-10% while TechStars take around 6-10%, whereas the London-based Seedcamp takes 8-10%. However, those latter programmes only last months, while HackFwd’s backing will be designed to last a year.

Hinrichs is also clearly basing this calculations on how much a startup product builder might have to give away to a product marketplace, not an investor. He says: “We have done many tests and this resonated most. It’s actually in line with Adsense, Itunes and Google Marketplace.” But in return for taking 27%, Hinrichs also points out that “we give much more money than Ycombinator & Techstars,” and the funding lasts a year. This is likely to be a attractive to a number of founders not currently served by the existing startup programmes which put in seed funding but must be then backed by a follow-on funding round quite quickly, assuming they attract any.

Here’s the detail about HackFwd.

Flimmit, an Austrian online movie service, which initially started off as a “Voddler for the GSA region” recently relaunched their entire product. The company now offers an extensiv library of US and European movies, with the availability to stream or download them.

When Flimmit launched more than a year ago, it had contracted with various local film distributors to license their content for VOD or streaming purposes. With an initial stock of around 30 movies, from more well-known to absolut indie productions, there plan was to grow from their and establish collaborations with producers and ultimately with pan-european distributors to act as an online distribution arm for them.

Flook, the location-based application from Ambient Industries which has now has a total of £1.65m in funding from Amadeus Capital Partners and Eden Ventures has always puzzled me.

Flook is a location-based service that has a web app and an iPhone app [iTunes link here].. We’ve described it in the past as a StumbleUpon for location-based discovery, and it’s the iPhone app which works best. Users create “cards,” which contain a title, a picture, caption, category, then tag it to a location. Others then find the cards when they fire up the app and you can “collect” the cards in the app or follow the people who created them.

It’s basically a dead-letter box on an iphone.

Which is probably why I dislike it. For me, that’s pretty much all it is. In fact, there are some Flickr apps for the iPhone which do a better job for me and are better looking. In my opinion Flook has a CD-Rom like approach to interface design which grates.

But apparently I’m wrong about Flook. Because, says Ambient, it’s getting a lot of uptake.

In Europe we don’t have too many decent cloud storage competitors to, say, Dropbox or Apple’s MobileMe. And Wuala is busy integrating into hardware devices. But today Fiabee, which runs real-time cloud storage for backing up files, launches a handy new service.

Fiabee for iPhone [iTunes link] allows you to access whatever you’ve backed up onto the service. What is most useful however is that users can share any of their files with someone, without having to download them locally to the iPhone.

Mobile Interactive Group (MIG) this morning announced that it has acquired mobile marketing and CRM software provider Piri Limited for an undisclosed sum.

MIG says it purchased Manchester-based Piri, which was launched in 2006, because of its technology assets, which include integrated cross platform CRM and a self serve web interface mobile marketing platform.

Digital media company The GoAdv Group is today announcing (PDF) a “strategic delisting” from France’s stock exchange, the Alternext of NYSE Euronext, where it has been trading since August 2007.

Luca Ascani, chairman of GoAdv, in a statement made it very clear that the decision was driven by the wave of consolidation in the mass-production and distribution of online content and the opportunities that brings for the company he co-founded in 2004:

“GoAdv is experiencing phenomenal growth in the emerging content on demand sector which is fundamentally changing the way content is produced, distributed and monetised online. With the recent acquisition of Associated Content by Yahoo Inc and other consolidation activity, we believe the company will be better positioned for growth and other strategic opportunities as a private entity.

Due to GoAdv’s strong cash position, our delisting will allow us to pursue expansion opportunities while continuing to increase cost efficiencies in our business.“

In short, looks like GoAdv wants to make itself more attractive for potential buyers.

Anything you can do we can do too.

WiMP, Norway’s local competitor to Spotify, has released an iPhone app that replicates most of the music streaming service’s features including, crucially, cached playlists for off-line playback. It’s a further sign that Spotify may have defined this type of service but that there is nothing stopping others from offering something similar or duplicating it locally.

Erply, a business software firm, which raised $2 million in funding from Redpoint and Index Ventures among a set of other stellar investors back in March, is now making its inventory API available to developers. Through Erply’s Inventory API businesses will now be able to fully customise Erply and create applications that work alongside any inventory software and hardware already being used.