Audioboo, the ‘Twitter for Audio’, has closed its first major funding round, having ridden out a “monthly cash crisis”, the company tells TechCrunch Europe.

And while the actual amount of new funding isn’t being disclosed, we’ve learned that it’s somewhere in the region of £1.5m.

Audioboo’s investors now include Channel 4′s digital media fund 4iP, which provided the UK startup’s initial funding which will be converted in to equity, along with UBC Media (an existing Pro customer), Imagination Technologies (owners of PURE Radio and who have both Apple and Intel as backers), and angel investors including Qualcom’s Sir Don Cruickshank, who will become Audioboo’s new Chairman.

There were several reports this morning about Turkish authorities blocking most if not all Google services, but it turns out there’s some confusion on the matter.

We’ve learned that Turkey’s Telecommunication and Communication Ministry (TIB), a government body that oversees Internet accessibility in the country, is attempting a blanket ban of a range of IP addresses belonging to Google in an effort to stop people from visiting YouTube.

According to our sources, this move was made because Google altered the IP addresses for the popular Internet video service.

Since Monday a lot of Internet users haven’t had access to Google services (except Gmail and Search). Just to be clear, Turkey is a country of 75 million people and is the third biggest nation on Facebook.

What we’re hearing from people on the ground is that it looked like a problem from Google’s side, but today a Turkish newspaper is reporting that TIB (the government’s telcommunications and technology department) has decided to slow down some applications run by Google such as Google Analytics and Google Maps.

British Sky Broadcasting (aka Sky) has agreed to acquire Virgin Media’s VMtv, the companies jointly announced this morning. Sky will buy VMtv for a total consideration of up to £160 million in cash, with £105 million paid on completion and the remainder paid following the regulatory process.

The acquisition is to expand Sky’s portfolio of basic pay TV channels and eliminate the carriage fees it currently pays for distributing VMtv channels on its TV services.

Sky has agreed to start selling advertising for the VMtv channels from January 2011 onwards.

[Amsterdam] SoGeo, provider of a context aware platform for mobile and Web, this morning announced that it has secured €1 million (roughly $1.2 million) in funding from investor group BlueBubbleLab.

SoGeo is in the midst of building a location-aware information sharing platform and API with social and community features, including a suite of mobile and web apps that interface with it.

SoGeo is targeting businesses interested in the platform, essentially a set of technologies that collects, analyzes and stores location data, photos and videos, user accounts and attention data, to engage with their customers.

Oonair, a live video streaming startup, recently secured 2 million euros in a series A round from bcnHighgrowth. bcnHighgrowth was also behind the recent round in Nuroa. Oonair comes out of a Barcelona based company called Visual Engineering and its technology is mainly aimed at businesses that want to capture, transfer and publish geo-tagged live or recorded video material from the mobile onto the web. As such it is compatible with major content management systems and video players.  The pricing is based on a SaaS monthly subscription model per user.  For the time being, Oonair is available for Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Symbian.

This month’s Wired UK magazine has pulled out the stops and put Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley on the cover. In spades. Crowley is pictured wearing a crown and is dubbed “The New King of Social Media”. The subhead is “Why Google, Yahoo and Facebook want to unlock his world.”

That’s a pretty big accolade and, indeed, Crowley has written a long explanation about how the cover story and shoot came about. He says “not to nerd out, but this is the stuff that Little Denny College dreamed big about back in 1997 (for real)… so I’m pretty happy with it ”

As you can see, the photographer made him wear some makeup “but I think my luscious lips and forearms are photoshopped,” says Crowley.

Not everyone is happy with Wired’s angle, but more of that later. Meantime, here’s Crowley take:

European music startup Spotify has all its “ducks lined up” for a U.S. launch, we’ve heard from multiple sources. It has servers ready to go in the US and, crucially, users already there, even though it has not yet officially launched. It fact it has 30,000 users in the U.S., according to the chatter coming out of the Stockholm tech scene where the company has its main development arm. But these users are being kept quiet.

So why isn’t Spotify launching in the U.S. right now?

Rummble has raised $800k from m8 Capital. The social mobile location startup will use the new funding to further develop its recommendation engine for “finding places nearby”, focusing in particular on User Experience. The round follows on from Rummble’s previous angel investment.

Notably, it’s also the first investment of London-based m8 Capital, a majority-owned affiliate of AGC Equity Partners, which is targeting mobile startups and technology. As a result, m8′s Joe Kim will be joining Rummble’s board as Chairman.

App Store GetJar announced today that web and mobile messaging service provider eBuddy has surpassed the 50 million downloads mark for its eBuddy Mobile Messenger app. At the time of writing, the product page shows 50,655,934 downloads to date.

eBuddy thus joins the ranks of Facebook as the second mobile app to exceed 50 million downloads on GetJar.

Notably, the milestone was reached less than 15 months after hitting 10m downloads.

Kieron Donoghue, the guy behind ShareMyPlaylists, appears to be riding the Spotify wave again.

Today he launches BigAudioAds.com, a service designed to make it easier to produce a professional sounding audio ad ready for ‘broadcast’ on ad-supported music streaming services such as Spotify and the UK’s We7. Although, of course, the resulting ads can be placed anywhere. Right now Spotify is available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands, with a US launch “planned”.

Global investment group Digital Sky Technologies (aka DST), who has famously invested in major Internet companies such as Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, has made another key hire.

The latest finance whiz to join the Russian investment firm as partner is John Lindfors, who will start there next September.

leNewz, developed by Paris-based Triviumsoft, offers a more visual way of browsing news on the iPhone.

A “DemoPit Audience Choice” at TechCrunch Europe’s recent GeeknRolla event, the app is built on Triviumsoft’s ‘Eaagle‘ text mining and mapping technologies to deliver a real time keyword map of the most important topics in each of six news categories: Sports, Economy, Politics, Life, Technology and Celebrities.

Users can then tap on the topic they are interested in whereby they’re presented with a coverflow-style way of navigating the individual headlines and articles. Visually, it’s quite a fun way to consume news – see video below.

According to the theory of the Third Disruptive Wave the next phase of innovation will be around mobile platforms, the social graph (particularly Facebook, but it could be any kind) and commerce. So if mobile applications are combined with social and then combined with social/flash ecommerce then in theory you have a killer combination. That at least is the pitch of an interesting new startup which I’ve seen a preview of, called Pleet (Pleet.me). You can sign up for access to the Alpha version here or log in with a Twitter account.

The simplest way to describe Pleet is that it’s a cross between Plancast and Tripit with voucher style offers. Think an “Urban Tripit” for shorter journeys and time spans designed to be a new way to “Plan and Meet” (hence “Pleet”). Initially Pleet plans to launch in the UK and US markets.

Tengelmann Group has a acquired a 49.9% stake in Baby-Markt.de, the Dortmund-based baby products e-tailer. The financial details are undisclosed and the deal, in which Parklane Capital advised, is subject to regulatory approval.

Tengelmann has recently stepped up its investment activity with interests in fashion retailers brands4friends and Zalando through its subsidiary Tengelmann E-Commerce-Beteiligungs, which is focusing on e-commerce, social commerce as well as Internet and Web 2.0 technologies.

Sometimes there are bizarre clashes in the tech world which just have to be stomached. In Europe the scene is so distributed that at any one moment there is some tech event in one country while an identical event is happening over the border. People have to make choices. But to have two almost identical events happen in the same large European city, aimed at the same audience, at the same time seems at best tragic and at worse careless on the behalf of the two organisers.

TechCrunch likes to see events which promote startups and are accessible. Both Launch48, a home-grown UK-based initiative to mentor startup teams and the somewhat older, international Startup Weekend network are very similar.

But this Friday in London they are both on at the same time, and aiming at the same audience, for the same weekend. How did that happen?

Pushnote wants to make web browsing social by enabling users to leave comments, in the form of notes, on any site they visit.

It’s not a new idea and isn’t dissimilar in concept to Google Sidewiki, for example, which is perhaps more aimed at academic researchers. Pushnote on the other hand is intended to have greater consumer appeal, the site gives example use-cases such as the ability to leave a note saying that “this site is a scam” or “there are better deals elsewhere”, and so on. Or perhaps commenting on a news story or resource with a link to a more accurate or updated article.

As we saw at GeeknRolla in London this year, there are an increasing number of music startups appearing on the market. Now, online music service tunesBaghas joined the pack, joining INiTS incubator attached to Vienna University. INiTS offers funding, coaching and networking and is seen as a path to later VC investment.

The market for music is gaining traction with investors again and there is evidence that investments have nearly doubled in the last two years.

tunesBag just released some new features including images while listening to music and the Facebook “Like” button for artists to feed your friends with update on your favourite artists.

Remember MSN? No? Ok, here’s the skinny. It’s a “portal” site from back in the 90s owned by a large technology company.

Anyway, this is it’s new look.

It features a more integrated social networking section, more video content, more news (if that was possible) and adds access to Facebook and Twitter as well as Microsoft services like Hotmail and Windows Live.

Videos play in Silverlight…

But seriously, they get 20.6 million unique users every month (comScore, March 2010). No really! Ah, come on guys work with me here…

We’ve been wondering what direction Qype would take recently after rumours that it was in potential acquisition talks with various parties, one of which may have been Nokia, although nothing was ever confirmed. What we do know is that there has been an internal “debate” about whether to enter into a strategic partnership (usually code for acquisition) or whether to double down on becoming the go-to local reviews site in Europe. It’s already in a commanding position in Germany and markets like the UK have been good to Qype. And so far it’s held it’s own against Yelp on this side of the pond.

But today it’s become clear that this “exit or grow” debate had reached an impasse. We knew from sources that CEO Stephen Taylor, a former Yahoo! Europe head, favoured a partnership/acquisition. But Founder and Chairman Stephan Uhrenbacher, who remains Qype’s largest private shareholder, favoured the go for growth / home run approach. One VC source told us this had been the source of some tension. Whatever the case last Friday Taylor departed, for shores we know not where (likely a break but we’re checking). He had been at Qype for one and half years.

Uhrenbacher tells me that Taylor left on “extremely good terms” and we are “going to see a very big partnership very soon due to Steven’s work”. But Qype has moved quickly to install a new CEO, namely Ian Brotherston, a former executive of France-based video site, DailyMotion.