PeerIndex, which was previously known as Viewsflow while it was in alpha, has now re-launched and gone into Beta.

As it was billed as a sort of high-brow filtering mechanism for Twitter users. It’s now moving in the direction of a platform for “ranking authority on the social web.” It plain English it looks at your social and “reputation capital” to work out if you really do know what you are talking about.

Of course many have tried such a feat and failed, or at least had limited success. Some obvious competitors to PeerIndex are Klout, twittergrader and twitalyzer. But Twitter influence monitors like Klout look mainly at followers. PeerIndex will look at how a particular person is part of a diffusion network for interesting content. Founder Azeem Azhar calls it a way to “identify from millions of users the opinion leaders from the merely opinionated.”

Silentale publicly launched its “Dropbox for communications” service only a few months ago. The Paris-based start-up is now announcing the release of its iPhone application, so users can have access to the personal CRM service on the go.

With Silentale’s solution, users have full access to their contacts and conversation history from all major social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin) in one, centralized location. As contacts and address books are an integral part of mobile phone usage, the company has integrated additional features into its iPhone app that aren’t yet available on its web application.

Lovefilm, the Netflix-of-Europe, looks set to beef up its multi-platform play via a newly signed agreement with DRM and adaptive streaming technology provider Widevine.

The deal will see the US-based company become Lovefilm’s “preferred provider of digital rights management and video optimisation solutions”, enabling the video subscription service to continue to break out from its ‘DVDs by post’ legacy into the video-on-demand market, ensuring that its digital content is “playable on many new devices.”

The Widevine platform is said to be deployed by major Internet content services and large cable, satellite and telecommunication companies “launching over-the-top strategies”, with support extending to “nearly all major brands and types of network connected consumer electronics including televisions, Blu-ray players, mobile devices, gaming systems and more.”

MusiXmatch, a “lyrics in the cloud” company, has announced €400k of new seed funding.

The Italian company is tackling the online music lyrics space, and whilst there are already tons of websites offering free lyrics, very few, if any, actually have the rights to do so. Additionally, Max Ciociola, MusiXmatch’s founder and CEO noticed that the word “lyrics” is one of the most searched for terms on Google in the US and worldwide.

In what is potentially a big win for Software-as-a-Service accounting startup KashFlow, Barclaycard is inviting its business customers to join an e-invoicing pilot powered by the London-based company’s wares.

According to an email that has been circulated by Barclaycard that we’ve seen, the credit card company, which is owned by UK bank Barclays, is inviting merchants to apply on a first come first served basis with the pilot scheme being limited to 100 places. This would seem to indicate that Barclaycard is taking a somewhat cautious approach, although we understand it to be the first time that a major bank has backed an SaaS accounting package from a UK tech start-up.

We’ve reached out to KashFlow who have confirmed the existence of the pilot but declined to give further details. However, here’s what else we do know.

Vodafone has launched Mobile Clicks 2010, a competition to identify and reward innovative mobile Internet startups. Now in its third year, the competition will be open to any fledgling mobile Web startup – provided your market is The Netherlands, Portugal or the UK.

Vodafone has set aside a prize fund of €150,000 (2/3 of which will go to the overall winner, the remaining €50,000 to the runner-up), based on these five criteria: originality, creativity and innovation; technical and operational feasibility; economic and financial viability; value to end-users; and the quality of the management team.

Startups can apply here until midnight, August 22nd, 2010.

Back in April, we announced that Los Angeles-based DIY mobile apps creation platform, Mobile Roadie, announced it was setting-up shop in Europe. But the company hasn’t just been focused on developing its European business and presence. In fact, today Mobile Roadie is also announcing the release of its pro platform. Yes, fancy mobile app creation just got that much easier.

So to break it down, Mobile Roadie now offers 3 versions of its platform for iPhone and Android app creation and management: Core, Plus and Pro.

eDreams, the Spanish online travel giant, has changed private equity hands once again. In a deal reportedly worth €250-300 million, the UK’s Permira has acquired a majority share in the site from its previous owner US private equity firm TA Associates.

TA paid €153 million for the company in 2006 from its original VC backers, which included Apax Partners, Atlas Venture, BSCH, Doll Capital Management (DCM), Net Partners and 3I. While Permira is said to be on the lookout for other, smaller online travel startups in Europe.

GoodData is rapidly becoming a key example of the technology innovation emerging from Central Europe – and laying a bet on Europe seems to be paying off for Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, the venture and growth equity investor, which backs European entrepreneurs exclusively.

It’s invested $2 million in the startup, the second investment for the £100 million fund, leading an overall $6.5 million investment round. GoodData provides an on-demand business intelligence services. Other returning investors include General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz and Windcrest Partners.

European VC funding has bounced back. That’s according to Q2 figures produced by Dow Jones VentureSource which reports that investment is up by 50 percent compared to the record low of this time last year. €1.1 billion into 289 deals against 252 deals, which raised just €735 million.

But specifically, says Dow Jones, the Information Technology (IT) industry, which apparently accounted for much of the venture market’s losses during the economic downturn, was the “star performer” in the most recent quarter. IT saw a 69% increase in investment from the second quarter last year to €334 million, as well as a 13% increase in deal flow to 90 completed deals. For the first time in two years, the report notes, IT was Europe’s largest industry for venture investment, taking 31% of overall investment.

Here’s a few more interesting tidbits quoted from the report:

When we first profiled Map My Tracks, a web service which provides real-time GPS tracking for cyclists, runners and other sporting types, we liked the concept and user experience but were critical of the subscription model employed. That was back in February 2008 and since then the service, developed by UK-based digital agency Tinderhouse, has ditched premium for a combination of free for unlimited live tracking and a one-off fee for its iPhone app.

This week also sees the fruition of its first major partnership: An official iPhone/iPod touch app for Team Sky that helps fans stay up-to-date with all of the pro cycling team’s activities. Additionally, and this is potentially the clever part, the Team Sky app includes a feature called ‘pro rider tracking’, which as you may have guessed is a white labeled version of the training aspect of Map My Tracks.

Buy now, pay later. We’re all too familiar with the way “cheap” or sometimes 0% finance is offered by bricks ‘n’ mortar stores at the point of purchase, and some of us are no doubt paying for the privilege right now. Online, however, buying on credit isn’t always quite as easy to come by or at least not at smaller e-commerce outlets. Pay4Later, in the UK at least, hopes to change that.

Today, the London-based company launched its “retail finance solution”, which enables UK online retailers to offer customers credit including interest free and traditional finance. Claiming to offer “seamless checkout integration” and instant credit decisions, other features include real time reporting and account management, support for multiple sales channels and integrated fraud screening.

Listiki (a portmanteau of the words “list” and “wiki”) lets you crowdsource lists of, well, anything. This could be something as trivial as a list of the ‘top ten horror movies’ or something more self-serving like, I don’t know, ’5 must-read tech bloggers’. Lists can be as short or as long as you like and each item may also include a URL.

But here’s the clever bit: any list can, effectively, be cloned so that you can re-order items to your own taste (via drag ‘n’ drop) or even add, delete and/or replace them. Any changes made are interpreted in real time and ripple through to a ‘master’ list, aggregating the opinions of all contributors but without destroying your own version of the list. You can also, of course, view the original lists of other contributors to that subject. It’s pretty neat.

It’s a trend that is highly unlikely to happen in the US due to its ubiquitous privatization of, well, everything. However in good old Europe, where control of the media is often under the hood of governmental institutions such as the BBC in the UK, or ARD in Germany, on the one hand, and in the hands of private media companies on the other, problems can arise.

More recently this has happened to a highly respected and, in German speaking countries, well known property called “Futurezone“, which is operated by the Austrian Broadcasting cooperation (ORF) – an institution comparable to the BBC. A few months ago the Austrian parliament passed a law that limits revenue generation from online properties that derive from ORFs online activities. Futurezone has not only been a cash cow, but is also a highly respected media outlet covering a wide range of tech topics from Startup stories to privacy and overall web trends.

I was struck by how small, inaccurate and out of date this recent list of Angel investors in tech startups in Europe was. It’s time we published one on TechCrunch Europe. So feel free to leave your own nominations in the comments below. Meanwhile you can also contact me on mike AT mbites dot com to nominate tech angel investors, but remember to name the recent deals they’ve done.

Frackulous is an online video show dedicated to all things apps. We mention it because it’s a new show coming out of Europe, London specifically. It’s been created by Fixation Video, a.k.a. long-time online video journalist and presenter Susi Weaser and Will Head, a respected tech journalist and online video expert. Aimed at a more mainstream audience, it’s worth catching as a good catchup on the latest news.

ProcessOne has launched a new hosted instant messaging (IM) service aimed at SMEs. Dubbed Hosted.IM, it allows businesses to easily create a “business-class” IM capability using their own domain name without the cost of managing the required hardware and software in-house.

It’s free for up to 5 users after which ‘packs’ can be purchased for up to 10, 25, 50, 75 or 100 users and are “priced accordingly” – although I couldn’t actually find pricing details anywhere on ProcessOne’s website. That said, IM is regarded by consumers as a free service so why would small businesses want to actually pay for such functionality?

AudioBox.fm, the cloud-based music service that lets users upload their music collection and access it anywhere, has added the iPhone/iPod touch to its list of supported devices through a native application.

Previously, iPhone users could only access AudioBox via Mobile Safari, a bit of a kludge since the QuickTime Player plugin effectively takes over the phone’s browser. There’s also existing support for Android, a nifty HTML5-based browser version and a Windows desktop app, with the Italy-based company touting itself as an open platform to store a user’s media library in the cloud, giving them “access to uploaded media from anywhere through the highest number of devices possible.”

MadBid, a fast growing “pay-to-bid” auction site has secured £4 million in a Series A funding from Atomico Ventures. Launched in 2008, MadBid is one of a number of pay-to-bid auction sites which have appeared in the last couple of years, with Swoopo among them. CEO Juha Koski says the Atomico investment will be spent on technology and expanding in Europe. Mattias Ljungman of Atomico has joined the board.

MadBid is claiming 1 million users since launch and says customers are attracted by brand products with the possibility of saving of 80% on the RRP of an item. That drives people to bid of course and so the site makes its money off the customers who are not successful, not unlike a casino.