Spil Games, the casual gaming portal, has rolled out mobile versions of its games based on HTML5, making them accessible on a range of Android handsets, as well as the iPhone and iPad. Additionally, the Netherlands-based company is launching a developer contest to help fuel new HTML5 games, with prizes totaling $50,000 for the best new titles.

Claiming to be ranked as a top 60 most visited online property (citing comScore Media Metrix), Spil Games currently sees 130 million unique visitors to its array of casual gaming sites, which include games.co.uk (for families), agame.co.uk (for teens), and GirlsGoGames.co.uk (for girls). In total the company offers 47 localized online gaming destinations in 19 languages, although, until now, these target desktop web users only.

SellMyMobile.com, the UK mobile phone recycling price comparison site, is launching a white label service which enables partner sites to offer their own branded version of the service and take a cut in any revenue generated.

Like similar price comparisons sites for other sectors, SellMyMobile works by comparing the prices from all of the leading aftermarket mobile phone buying sites: a user enters the make and model of their phone and SellMyMobile checks prices from 28 services, such as envirofone, fonebank and muzuma, to provide what it claims to be the most comprehensive and accurate price comparison.

Internet investment group Digital Sky Technologies (DST) today formally announced the acquisition of Russian social network Odnoklassniki.ru, which we reported on last week.

DST has bought out out the minority shareholders in Forticom Group Limited – which it now fully owns – and Odnoklassniki, and interestingly transferred its interest in the Polish social network Nasza-Klasa.pl to the previous minority shareholders of Forticom as part of the deal.

Zalando, the Zappos clone started by the Samwer brothers through their investment vehicle Rocket Internet, has closed a new round of funding. The amount remains undisclosed but according to multiple sources it’s designed to supercharge the German e-commerce behemoth to the next level. Although speculative, when looking at the site’s traffic and data from similar sized companies, the pre-round-valuation is thought to be around €100 million.

The new shareholder for the online fashion and shoe store is Swedish Investment bank AB Kinnevik who previously invested €5m in Citydeal, another Samwer startup, which was recently acquired by U.S. Groupon. Aside from AB Kinnevik, other participants in the round include Tengelmann and Holtzbrinck Ventures, an investor in Zalando from its early days.

This is a guest post by Alain Raynaud, Director of the Founder Institute Paris, an incubator that bridges Silicon Valley and France. He is also the founder and CEO of FairSoftware, a TechCrunch50 Finalist, and the organizer of the Founder Conference.

Ask any European entrepreneur why they don’t move to Silicon Valley, and you are guaranteed to start an intense discussion.

I have lived in Silicon Valley for 10 years, but in 2010 started the French branch of a famous Silicon Valley incubator called the Founder Institute. As such, I witnessed firsthand the pros and cons of doing a startup in Europe. So I couldn’t resist sharing my impressions when we graduated the first class of the Founder Institute with Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the French Minister for the Digital Economy. While I can’t share what she told me afterward, I can disclose the points I made publicly.

Showroomprive, which claims to have the No. 2 spot in European private sales sites after Vente Privee, has raised 37 million euros from Accel Partners for a minority stake. The members’ only fashion e-commerce site which sells designer brands at discount prices was founded in France but entered the Spanish market this year and is growing quickly.

Three years after launch Showroomprive claims to be the second online sales site in France with 3 million members and 75 millions euros of revenue in 2009. It’s now aiming for 140 millions euros and
6 millions members. In 2010 it partnered with Orange.fr for “privileged sales,” launched in Spain and is soon launching a mobile app. Showroomprive will invest in a new warehouse to increase capacity and also look to acquire.

Yes folks, it’s time to roll-up all those private sales sites in Europe.

You know how it is. You see people in your Twitter stream all retweeting some cut new Twitter app so you go and try it out. Even the great @StephenFry tried out Twifficiency, which supposedly told you how efficient you were on Twitter, but with scant explanation as to why.

Today, the same has happened with TwitterNation, and I include myself in that. TwitterNation Counter purported to tell us who was the first in a country to join Twitter.

ShoutEm, a white-label mobile and location social network startup, has secured $1.2 million in a second round investment from Slovenian venture capital fund RSG Capital. With the advent of hyperlocal news, Shout’Em will let smaller websites and business monetize their communities through local advertising as well as vouchers.

As part of the funding round, ShoutEm is being spun off into a separate company – Shout Ltd – and plans to open offices in London and New York for business development and sales, while keeping their core development team in Croatia. ShoutEm previously raised seed round of funding of $500,000 from Bicro in late 2008.

You might say the company’s just a tad late to the party, but Miniclip has finally seen the light and is expanding its casual gaming empire by entering the world of mobile games.

With a self-declared user base of more than 57 million casual gamers worldwide and a library of more than 600 online games, it’s a wonder really that the London-based company hasn’t made the move sooner.

After all, Apple’s App Store for one now offers roughly 250,000 apps, many of which are of course casual games and have been available for years.

There’s a brand new tech awards in town called the Bully Award (no, it’s not for rewarding the big angry kid at school) and it’s being put together by the people behind a new European tech event organiser, White Bull Summits. Although you could be forgiven for commenting that there are plenty of tech events in Europe already, the Bully Awards are out to find Europe’s leading TMT companies. They sound a bit like the Red Herring 100 Europe, but at least they’ll have more credibility than that “title” which retains a rump of events while feeding off the long dead carcass of its editorial brand. Note that until the fall of 2009, White Bull founder Farley Duvall led all EMEA operations for Red Herring Magazine, so they’ve clearly lost one of their best people to a new and more agile startup. Bully White Bull then, huh.

Some sixty European companies are finalists in these awards. The advisors (one of whom is Robin Wauters of TechCrunch) picked a list which contains 10 Dutch companies, nine German and nine UK companies. The remaining European countries and companies represented include: Austria (1), Belgium (1), Denmark (3), Estonia (2), Finland (5), France (3), Israel (2), Lithuania (1), Luxembourg (1), Norway (1), Spain (5), Sweden (1), and Switzerland (6). So what are the Dutch putting in their water?

UK startup Blinkbox is to get a shot in the arm after securing a partnership with YouTube’s new UK movies service. YouTube has created a new Movies section of the site, allowing UK viewers watch over 400 films for free, by striking deals with US film studios including Sony Pictures, as well as Blickbox.

The content is past mainstream hits and cult classics. The move follows the launch of a Movies section for its US audience in April last year and YouTube is already running catch-up TV programmes made available by Channel 4 and Five at www.youtube.com/shows.

Blinkbox is making 165 films available as part of the new Movies section. Since it normally charges £1.99 to rent movies and TV shows, in this instance it will get revenue from ads surrounding the films with pre-rolls and mid-rolls ads, and of course get exposure to YouTube’s audience. The site was founded by Michael Comish and Adrian Letts with investment from Eden Ventures, Nordic Venture Partners and others.

Nurph, the boostrapped startup working on a platform which turns Twitter into realtime chat, has closed it’s first round of angel funding from a private investor. Terms were undisclosed.

You can already try out Nurph, which has been developed by Elliott Kember and Neil Cauldwell, although, to be frank there’s not a lot to see just yet since Nurph Channels are based on Twitter profiles and you have to have people using it to see something.

Crafty commerce site Etsy just raised another $20 million in its fifth venture round (that would be the Series E). London-based Index Ventures is the new investor leading the round, with partner Danny Rimer getting an observer’s seat on the board. (The board is made up of founder Rob Kalin, Caterina Fake, Accel partner Jim Breyer and Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson). Previous investors Accel and Hubert Burda Media put in some money as well in this round.

The Founders Club, essentially a vehicle for startup founders to invest their own equity in other startups, has added to its pot by pulling in an angel investment round from some high-profile investors.

These include Edmund Truell (formely of Duke Street Capital, Hambro European Ventures and the former chairman of the British Venture Capital Association), Jon Moulton (Better Capital, Alchemy Partners, Apax), André Jaeggi (a funds of funds veteran), telecoms chief Chris Burke (BlackBerry & Vodafone) and a smattering of other CEOs and VCs have made “undisclosed personal cash investments”. An additional portion of equity in the Club has been reserved for new members. The club invest in tech and cleantech companies.

Andrew Romans, founder and general partner, says they have created a formalized process for the normally informal one where existing CEOs and VCs invest in other startups. That’s the simple way of putting it.

A Swiss startup offering mobile visual search and augmented reality technology, kooaba, landed about $3 million venture funding (from undisclosed Swiss investors) the company’s co-founder and chief executive Herbert Bay reported this morning.

Kooaba was spun out of the Computer Vision Lab at a top science and technology university in Switzerland, ETH Zurich.

The company’s mobile phone apps allow users to take a snapshot of print ads, DVD and book covers, movie posters and physical goods, to derive product information, best available prices, and possibly coupons or associated digital extras.

Facebook Places, launched last week in the US only, is clearly poised to go global at some point. Facebook has already been through the wringer on privacy, and back again. In privacy-obsessed Europe it gets a double-dose of controversy every time it tweaks the openness of the social graph. So how would you feel about shaking your phone to set the privacy level of your location?

The idea is simple. Navigating menus on a mobile to adjust your privacy levels for that moment in time is pretty tedious.

So Lukasz Jedrzejczyk, a researcher at the the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK (and his and colleagues) have come up with a new take on tweaking your settings. Shake it baby!

I was prepared to ignore the first few Facebook emails from my contacts there imploring me to visit web sites that were totally out of character for them. “Hey, change you password, you’ve been hacked” I would email them. But no more. Things are getting out of hand.

Just now I had an IM conversation with a former TechCrunch analyst and colleague, Daniel Kimerling. Daniel is no slouch, having worked at places like the Center for Strategic and International Studies. So I was surprised to get a a Facebook IM out of the blue from him. It ran like this:

This is a guest post by Ulf Weihbold, Head of Profit Development and SEM Analyst for Smarter Ecommerce, in Linz, Austria.

When it comes to e-commerce there is a general understanding that Europe by far is not as advanced as the US. Sometimes you even hear that Europe is several months or even years behind. This might not actually be entirely true. Maybe a better question to ask should be: are these two big markets even comparable?

Videoplaza, the video ad server startup, has announced its working with the UK digital advertising network Unanimis.

The “strategic partnership” will see the two companies offer “seamless integration of advertisements” into online videos for Unanimis’ clients, which include Orange.co.uk, Sony’s Crackle.com and WWE.

Videoplaza, headquartered in Stockholm, targets broadcasters, newspaper publishers and other premium media owners and has to-date partnered with several leading European media companies including Sweden’s TV4 Group, Denmark’s Ekstrabladet, La Vanguardia in Spain, and Myvideorights.com and Incisive Media in the UK (see TCE coverage).

MouseTrace has launched as a way for website owners to optimize their sites “to better suit their customers and visitors.” It does this via a single line of javascript which gives the owner the ability to spy on their visitors, literally, through a visual replay of how they’ve interacted with the site, including mouse movement, clicks and page scrolling. Additionally, MouseTrace works for pages viewed on an iPhone, recording touch, pinch to zoom, and rotation.