Cint, which runs a SaaS-based global marketplace for market research sample Cint Panel Exchange, has won a $13m funding round led by Prime Technology Ventures, a Pan-European venture capital firm, along with participation from existing owners including Nordic venture capital firm Creandum.

Cint is based in Stockholm, Sweden and provides market researchers with fully automated access to panels of 4 million profiled individuals across 40 countries.

The Bank of Ireland’s Seed and Early Stage Equity Fund has led a €1.8m investment in software protection and licensing services specialist InishTech, which has a product which allows software companies to protect their code and increase product sales through licensing.

The syndicated investment consists of a €650k investment by the Bank of Ireland Seed Fund, a €400k investment by Enterprise Ireland, a €275k investment by the Halo Business Angel Network (HBAN) with the remainder of the funds provided by the company founders.

This is a guest post by Alan Gleeson is the General Manager of Palo Alto Software, Ltd, creators of Business Plan Pro. He holds an MBA from Oxford University and an MSc from University College, Cork, Ireland.

As someone who works for a U.S. software company with a strong focus on helping entrepreneurs succeed (Palo Alto Software), I am intrigued by the apparent gap between the U.S. and Europe when it comes to the development of successful technology and Web-based start-ups. Judging by US academic Vivek Wadhwa’s recent post ‘Can Russia Build a Silicon Valley?’ I am not alone in my thinking.

When we look at some of the most successful technology/Internet-based companies of the last few years, from Google to Apple to Facebook to YouTube, there is a very strong U.S. bias. In recent months new poster- boy technology start-ups from the U.S. include FourSquare, GoWalla and Groupon.

Facebook’s geo-locational service Facebook Places is now working in the United Kingdom. I just got out of a press conferenvce which was a essentially a re-run of the US launch. It would appear that little is different about the operation of Facebook Places in the UK compared to the US launch other than the geo data itself of course.

Facebook Places product manager Michael Sharon walked British media through the service. As expected, British media started asking questions about privacy and the protection of minors, so expect them to hone in on those aspects.

But outside of the shrill cries about how people will suddenly start to stalk you, I was quite interested in why Facebook even allows minors to share their location in the first place.

The grown-up answer is that many young people do anyway already, so it’s really the controls you give them that matter. Here’s Facebook’s response:

Seedcamp has announced the winners of their annual week-long investor showcase. They typically invest between five and 10 per cent for a set 50,000 Euros a piece. Out of 23 companies, Seedcamp has picked 11, more than the 10 we were told they would invest in. This is a doubling of investments based on the normal five of previous years. The teams will now undergo another three months of intensive mentoring and support to develop their products. The winners are:

European startup programme Seedcamp is bringing in extra fire power to deal with the increasing numbers of startups it plans to fund. In the last four years it’s typically funded between five and six startups at the end of its year long process but that will leap, when tomorrow’s finalists are picked, to around ten of the 23 that are in competition during this Seedcamp Week in London.

As a result it’s clear that CEO Reshma Sohoni is going to need some help. To that end they’ve lured venture capitalist Carlos Espinal from Doughty Hanson.

He becomes a Seedcamp Partner to Sohoni, jointly sharing the burden of sifting the startups and running the organisation. Sohoni told me that they purposely targetted someone who had both investment knowledge and was also strong in deep tech to complement her more business oriented background.

ExpertMaker, which launched in Beta at the DEMO conference earlier this week, wants to democratize the use of Artificial Intelligence, creating AI tools “for the masses”.

That sounds like a lofty mission but the Swedish startup says that its desktop tool is capable of handling complex problems, such as human-like recommendations, advice and diagnosis, but that you don’t need to be a programmer to use it. The result is your very own AI-driven “micro-search engine”.

Vodafone has announced the four finalists of its Mobile Clicks competition to find the best mobile Internet start-ups based in either Spain, The Netherlands, Portugal or the UK. The shortlist includes startups working on field-worker remote reporting; mobile loyalty cards; mobile application “lifecycle management” and so-called ‘2nd screen’ gaming, where you interact with your mobile in conjunction with watching sport through a different medium, such as TV or in person.

Euro RSCG Worldwide this morning announced that it has acquired Turkish digital agency Project House. Based in Istanbul, Project House will now become part of the global Euro RSCG 4D network.

This announcement is the third of its kind in the past two months, following the acquisition of Acmic in India and Congruent in the United States.

Vienna-based social yellow pages startup Tupalo (a European competitor to Qype) has launched in the U.S. in partnership with CityGrid Media, a local media company “connecting the millions of businesses and customers on the web.”

As a result, Tupalo now offers over 1 million business listings across the U.S., adding tens of thousands more on a daily basis. This, of course, also pits the startup against the major local (and International) player Yelp.

KashFlow, the London-based accounting startup, is launching a complementary offering to its core product for small businesses. Targeted at accountants, Orbit Accounts is a fully web-based service to let them “monitor, control and collaborate with their SME clients” and, naturally, it’s powered by the KashFlow engine.

In terms of functionality, accountants can customise the software by “removing features and reports, specifying account codes and locking transactions”, that’s the nuts and bolts side anyway. But, perhaps, equally important, Orbit Accounts also provides accountants with the ability to co-brand the software with their own logo and colours so that it can become a central part of their practice. If that’s not enough, a fully re-brandable white-label option is also available.

Online ad network Collective (formerly Collective Media) has opened its doors in the UK. It’s the first part of an “aggressive growth strategy” to get in to the European market, says the heavily funded U.S. company. As part of that expansion, Steve Filler, former Commercial Director of Unruly Media, has been appointed as managing director to lead the UK wing of Collective.

Launched in 2005, the company offers publishers an ad network management platform to create their own branded, vertical ad networks, letting them use advance audience targeting, manage ad networks, and access analytics.

Although not yet live, German Diapers.com clone Windeln.de is reportedly about to launch with several million euros in the bank. Semi-publicly operated Hightech Gründerfonds and VC firm DN Capital (Shazam, Mister Spex) have invested a 7 figure sum in the startup. What’s more, Windeln.de has former Holtzbrinck Ventures Managing Director Konstantin Urban as part of its founding team.

As you can imagine the site lets you order anything baby-related online. Targeted towards web-savvy mothers and their spouses, the model clearly works in the U.S. According to Diapers.com CEO Marc Lore, the company sold “half a billion diapers this year”.

Spotify is going to announce that it’s hit the 10 million users milestone later this month, according to a “special party” invitation sent to press and partners (image and source: Music Ally). That’s about the same amount of users as there are tracks in its vast music catalog, to put things in perspective.

As you’re no doubt aware, Spotify’s availability is limited to seven counties across Europe, namely UK, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, France and Spain, so it’s not a bad number to boast about.

On the other hand, there’s no indication at this point if that means there are 10 million active users rather than 10 million registered users, which makes a world of difference.

With the rise of the App Store phenomenon, it’s natural that e-commerce sites will want to roll out their own native mobile apps, but the cost of doing so – outsourcing or otherwise – may be prohibitive for boutique-sized and independent online traders. Enter MobiCart, a new UK startup that is offering a platform to build native store fronts for Apple’s iOS and Android at a cost of free. Yep, that’s right, zilch.

It also re-defines the notion of so-called ‘cookie cutter’ apps, as MobiCart offers a fully customized storefront that can operate standalone or tie into a website’s existing e-commerce content management system via the startup’s open API. In other words, it’s a lot less trivial than pulling in an RSS feed.

Teen fashion social world Stardoll has partnered up with OTTO, a Germany language retailer, to launch a store on the site featuring a new teen range and shopping experience. Aiming at markets in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the store follows a test where users made a million visits to a pop up store.

OTTO owns two of the UK’s leading mail order companies, Freemans and Grattan, but wants to update its brand as affordable, trendy and cool with the move into Stardoll. Similar stores have been launched for DKNY, Miss Sixty, Alberta Ferretti and Elle on the site.

Stardoll was launched in 2005, has average age of 15+, 68 million active uniques globally and 2.9 million in German speaking markets.

We’ve speculated that the sudden rush of executive departures from Nokia might be an indication of an ‘Ides of March’ moment at the mobile giant. Now, the former head of Symbian user experience design and Forum Nokia has called for the resignation of 13 key executives and claims Nokia is now following his own plan of re-making the company. Even if he’s an outlier, his suggestions are almost certain to set the cat amongst the pigeons.

Juhani Risku spent nine years at Nokia from 2001 was also head of Nokia Showroom, where operators make their decisions on Nokia systems.

To date long-time CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo has been replaced by Stephen Elop (Mr Microsoft Office), the chairman is going, while Anssi Vanjoki, head of mobile solutions, announced his departure only yesterday.

Back in June The Register published an extensive interview with Risku about his Finnish language book “New Nokia – the manuscript” which has caused a stir of controversy in Finland.

Now UK blog Mobile Industry Review has published an email it’s received from Risku, which calls for a vast resignation program at Nokia, which he calls the “GRO” or “Get-Rid-Of” program in his book.

His suggestions include named individuals with a few surprising suggestions.

With the company in-between CEOs, it was left to Niklas Savander, Executive Vice President, Markets, to deliver the opening keynote at today’s Nokia World in London. And strangely but perhaps appropriately, he was later joined by Anssi Vanjoki, EVP Mobile Solutions and effectively Nokia’s no. 2, who just yesterday handed in his notice.

Admirably, Savander did his best to rally the troops – all 3,000 attendees, apparently – telling the audience that the message is: “Nokia is back”, a direct reference to the Finnish handset maker’s loss of the high end smartphone crown, even if in terms of raw numbers it still dominates the market world wide, depending on how you define smartphone, of course. But we’ll save that debate for another day.

PinkelStar, a service aimed at mobile application developers that allows them to integrate social networks like Facebook and Twitter natively into their iPhone or Android app, has closed a funding round of $500,000 to expand its team and offering.

PinkelStar will integrate more networks like Buzz, Netlog, Orkut and Foursquare to its service, and it will expand its social analytics tools. PinkelStar currently offers native integration of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn in any iOS or Android app.

Interesting move in the Cloud computing/hosting world. Hosted supplier Rackspace has hired David Kelly, cofounder/CEO of mydeco, the online furniture and interior decoration firm he started with Brent Hobermann, the Lastminute.com founder. Mydeco was a a Rackspace customer.

Kelly is a former Amazon and eBay European operations director and will help Rackspace expand into the EMA region against Google and Amazon.

He replaces Brian Thomson heads back to the US office.