Private equity firm Tiger Global Management has acquired a 50% stake in Russian online mall Wikimart, reports local newspaper Vedomosti (via blog Quintura). The deal actually took place in May, according to the report but only came to light recently.

Wikimart targets countries in the previous Soviet Union, letting individuals and small retailers set up shop online, offering features such as an order-fulfillment interface, accounting and legal support, and ecommerce marketing tools. It’s free to set up a store, but the company charges a 3 percent transaction fee per sale.

Although I haven’t signed up to the ‘Nokia is doomed‘ story, I’m the first to recognise that the Finnish handset giant is facing many challenges, having been wrong-footed by the iPhone’s success and the subsequent shift to touch, followed by the the rise of the app store. Or, more specifically, the growing importance of third-party developers and the perception of an app eco-system amongst brands and consumers.

Perhaps surprisingly, however, I’m not overly concerned about the need for an iPhone killer or a refreshed touch-based UI. It’s apps where Nokia faces its biggest challenge.

Aupeo, the music streaming service, has partnered with Acer so that its application will come pre-installed on the latter company’s future line of Android phones. The first of which is Acer’s recently launch flagship, appropriately named ‘Stream,’ a device that features an AMOLED 3.7 inch screen, HDMI port, 1GHz processor, and Dolby Digital sound, amongst its impressive specs.

Aupeo integration goes a bit deeper than simply having the app ‘on-deck’ as it were, with it becoming part of the phone’s media player, enabling users to pick from the service’s 100 editorially-maintained channels offering “music for every taste and mood”. That’s the free version but there’s also a premium component too.

Forgot your Facebook password recently ? How about Linkedin ? Twitter ? Having tons of overly complicated passwords to protect every last online account isn’t easy. Which is where MobileGov comes in. The company based in Sophia-Anitpolis offers a solution that could really be appealing to companies and internet users -especially those who struggle every time they have to re-enter yet another login and password.

The company’s fingerprinting technology uses 2 criteria to identify users: habitual login information for each individual site as well as the device that they’re on. The first time users access the company’s newly rebranded portal, TheDigitalDNA.com, they register their hardware and their login information for sites like Linkedin, Twitter, Yelp, Skype, etc.

It’s been roughly a year since Jolicloud‘s alpha release and the company founded by Netvibes founder, Tariq Krim, has just launched Jolicloud 1.0 to the public.

The iPhonesque open source OS oriented towards netbooks has more than just an incredibly sexy interface, with an App Store-like selection of over 700 apps (going on 1,000 before the end of the year) – giving users access to everything from Spotify to DropBox in a simple click. Jolicloud has also blended in a bit of social, allowing users a practical way to discover the best applications out there according to what their friends download and rate.

Having launched in eleven locations worldwide The Founder Institute, set up by Adeo Ressi as a sort of global-wide bootcamp for tech entrepreneurs, is launching two new locations today across Europe: Brussels and Berlin.

The other location already up and running in Europe is Paris where a second semester launches this Fall. There is an August 13th admissions deadline for the European programmes.

The Berlin and Brussels programmes will be the last expansion for the Founder Institute until the end of the year, when they plan to announce two more cities for a total of fifteen locations.

I know we Brits love our iPhones but this could start to get a tad silly. According to the latest data published by mobile research agency mobileSquared, it’s predicted that one in ten smartphones that are active in the UK will be an iPhone by the end of 2012.

Further still, as 2015 wraps up – bare with me here – the market will top 9.4 million iPhones or 11% of the total devices used in the UK.

Now if that’s just a little too much future gazing, the number of iPhones in the UK is forecast to rise 195% from 2.17 million at the end of 2009 to 6.4 million by the end of this year. That’s 7.9% of the market in the UK touting Apple’s smartphone – death grip and all.

Interestingly, the report does, however, peg this year as a spike, suggesting that in the years to come iPhone growth will slow as Android phones continue to flood the market.

Productivity apps are two-a-penny, but productivity is one of the major boons of the iPad’s large touchscreen interface. Tapping and moving things around is a very natural human way to approach things. And yet productivity apps often remain stuck in the click and point world of the mouse, and refuse to make the best of a visual and spacial approach.

Indeed, on a laptop I often find myself resorting to a fast, simple text-based To-Do list just because I can cut and paste items on the list up or down depending on priority.

But I’ve recently tried out a productivity app on the iPad which might actually convert me over.

iNow [iTunes link] is an iPad app which does one simple thing. It lets you create a To Do list you can move around and re-order very, very simply and easily. And the developers, Stone Soup Software, have taken a clever approach, that of air traffic controllers. Say what?

Is it possible to make online ads “sticky” so that users engage with them longer? That’s the aim of a new partnership between CBS-owned Last.fm and MXP4, the interactive music startup.

Using MXP4′s technology, Last.fm is to begin offering brands the option to create ads that users of the music streaming and discovery service can interact with, such as remixing a track in realtime or “singing along in karaoke mode”, all within the ad itself. In a way it’s similar in concept to Apple’s new iAds in the sense that ads become fully blown apps. And obviously, a music oriented app is a perfect fit for Last.fm.

This is a guest post by Jeff Lynn, the Chairman of The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec) and Co-Founder and CEO of Seedrs. In this piece he argues that if we want to encourage angel investing in the UK, the discussion in the angel community needs to focus more on the returns investors can achieve.

Last week saw the release of two significant reports on angel investing. In the US, super-angel Ron Conway presented the results of an audit his company, SV Angel, had conducted on the 500+ investments it has made over the past 12 years. Meanwhile, in the UK, Professors Colin Mason and Richard Harrison published an annual report on the state of angel investing in Britain.

Truphone has updated its application for iPad. The new version lets users place and receive calls over their 3G network and includes Truphone’s new Instant Messenger feature which was already built into the iPhone version.

With the addition of 3G calling, users now have the option to make calls as part of their data package when out of Wi-Fi range, using 3G. This feature hit the iPhone version of the app back in June.

Nearly every company has a social media presence these days, right? And, naturally, tech companies execute best. Although perhaps not.

A somewhat self-serving study by PR and marketing agency Wildfire, which analysed the social media activity of the 2009 Deloitte Fast Tech 50, found that 90% of the UK tech companies featured had a presence on two or more social networks but the majority fail to actually use social media in a social way. Instead, far too many brands are treating the likes of Twitter and Facebook as a traditional marketing channel.

Staggeringly (or maybe not), while 74% of companies operated an official Twitter account, 43% of brands had never replied to a single tweet. Overall, the study found that 57% used Twitter solely for one-way marketing activity.

C2Call, the free browser-based Internet phone solution, has just raised an additional $2 million in Series A funding from Draper Investment Company, High-Tech Gründerfonds and Mr. Klaus Wecken, co-founder of KHK Software AG, for international expansion of their their VoIP offering, FriendCaller as well as their mobile apps.

The big difference compared to Skype or Jajah is that you don’t have to install a local VoIP client or use a phone, but can make calls directly from the web, through a light Java and JavaFX applet. Avoiding the hassle of installation, C2Call expects to reach higher adoption globally.

What do pilots say when they hand over to the other guy? You have control? Well at any rate that’s what happening next week and the week after. Contributing Editor Steve O’Hear is taking the reigns of TechCrunch Europe while I take my wife and kids on vacation.

Here’s how to contact Steve with pitches for stories while I’m away (although I’ll try to check email etc, assuming I’m not first killed by my family):

Email: steve[at]ohear[dot][net]
Twitter: @sohear

Lonely Planet, the BBC World-owned travel guide company, has rolled out an Augmented Reality option for Android users.

Now targeting 25 popular European, US and Asian cities, its AR-supported ‘Compass Guides’ use a combination of GPS, compass and the phone’s camera to enable users to see their current location and nearby points of interest. The app then overlays information on top of the device’s view finder, as it were.

Most of the information is preloaded into the city specific app, meaning that travelers don’t need a data plan unless, of course, they wish to use the mapping feature, says the company, which I’m presuming is powered by the data-hungry Google Maps.

Shutl, the home delivery startup that offers speedier options for Internet shoppers, is to trial its service with Argos, the shopping catalogue company that now claims to be Britain’s number one online high street retailer. And should the trial resonate with customers – the retailer did £4.3 billion of sales last year – it’s potentially a big win for the UK company.

The Shutl service will offer Argos’ online shoppers in Central London the option to receive their orders within as little as 90 minutes, says the company, using its ‘Shutl Now’ service, or pick a one-hour delivery window from 9am to 9pm, seven days a week. As well as location, however, the trial is also being limited to Argos’ 14,000 items that are currently available for ‘reserve and collect’ at the retailer’s brick ‘n’ mortar stores.

Once a customer selects Shutl as their delivery option, including agreeing to the delivery quote, they can track their order in ‘real-time’ via a GPS-powered online map, which is pretty neat.

Mopapp, a Software-as-a-Service that allows application developers to retrieve, analyze and chart the downloads, upgrades, sales, revenues and profit of their mobile applications, just launched its private beta. And we have invites.

The most interesting aspect of the product is that it’s cross-platform and cross-store, and it automatically integrates with most major stores (Apple iTunes App Store, Google Android Market, RIM App World, Handango, MobiHand and counting), to allow developers to compare their sales on the different platforms and stores. It also creates reports and detailed analytics by country, device and currency.

Back in May we reported a rumor that Telefonica was in talks to acquire Tuenti, the ‘Spanish Facebook’, for €80 million” ($104 million). At least that was the buzz around the Spanish blogosphere. Tuenti vehemently denied it at the time but it looks like the bloggers were right.

According to Spanish news site Expansion, the two sides have “virtually sealed the deal” whereby Telefonica will take 90% of the share capital of Tuenti, valuing the company at around €75 million or close to $99 million. In October 2008, Qualitas Equity Partners paid €9.5 million for 17% of Tuenti, which valued it at €55.88 million.