Vmix, an online video platform provider which lets media sites add video-uploading and social-networking features, says it has received a $2.5-million round of Series C venture funding to speed up its rollout to more markets, in particular Europe and Asia. However it neglects to say where the money is coming from (release).

VMIX says has received a total of $26 Million in venture funding to date and competes with competes with KickApps, VSocial, and Reality Digital, among others.

Clients include NASA, ESPN, Raycom Media, Penguin Books, The McClatchy Company, Toyota-Scion, and Post Newsweek Television Stations.

Socowave, which developes advanced wireless access systems for mobile communications, has secured a €3 million Series A round led by Balderton Capital. The funding will enable the Dublin-based company to accelerate the development of its technology, which is said to substantially increase “the data handling capacity of cellular radio infrastructure whilst reducing the energy consumption.” Barry Maloney, Partner at Balderton Capital, will join Socowave’s board.

Socowave’s Active Antenna System technology allows “a cellular base station to detect the direction of incoming signals from user groups and to actively optimise the radio link using digital techniques.” This is said to increase wireless data handling capacity “five-fold”, while reducing energy consumption of the base station system by 50%.

In April, we announced that French startup fund, ISAI, officially launched with some 24 million euros. The “French entrepreneurs fund” brings together some of the 60 hottest names in French tech, including PriceMinister‘s founder Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet and the former Editor of TechCrunch France, Ouriel Ohayon. The fund announced a first investment in June, putting 1.25 million euros into the France-based, European carpooling platform, Covoiturage.fr - and has just announced a second investment in InstantLuxe, a marketplace for certified authentic luxury goods.

InstantLuxe was founded in 2009 and allows individuals and professionals to buy and sell high-end, second-hand goods from brands like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Rolex, Bulgari, etc. All items sold on the site are delivered with a certificate of authenticity after being inspected by a network of experts. The site sells everything from jewelry to leather goods to accessories – plus, users searching for a particular item can request it for free. If all this sounds familiar, it’s probably because the model isn’t dissimilar to that of Vestiaire de Copines, another French luxury marketplace that happened to raise 1.5 million euros with Ventech in June.

MouseTrace, a service that provides website owners with a visual replay of how visitors interact with their wares, has announced integration with a number of analytics providers.

Support via a Google Chrome plug-in (Firefox and Safari to follow soon) has been added for Chartbeat, Google Analytics, Clicky and Statcounter. Once the plug-in is installed, MouseTrace users can access visitor replays – including mouse movement, clicks and page scrolling (or for pages viewed on an iPhone, recording touch, pinch to zoom, and rotation) – all from within the control panel of those third-party services.

I typically hear from VCs these days when they are either doing a big, growth capital round, a follow-on funding, an investment in concert with a syndicate or…. bleeeeeeeeep (as in not at all). The rise of the “Super Angels”, a trend TechCrunch Europe was first to call in 2008, seems to be putting paid to VC’s involvement in early stage.

Or perhaps not.

Venture capital house Eden Ventures appears to be on something of a roll and has taken to co-investing with angels like a duck to water. Today it announces five (count’em) new investments, which range in size from £100,000 to £1 million.

Seedcamp Week, the week when the startup programme brings its European travels to a head and lands in London, starts next week and they’ve released the startups they will be running through their intense mentoring wringer during the 13th until the 17th of September.

Over 600 teams applied over the year of nine Mini Seedcamps, finally coming up with teams from 16 different countries and 19 different cities. Although Seedcamp pinged to South Africa, Israel and even Asia this year, their hard core remains Europe, and the above data points show just how intense you have to be to suck out startups from such a wide area. If you’re just in Silicon Valley, thank your lucky stars you only have to drive up and down the 101.

Here’s Seedcamp’s summary of the contenders. At the end of the week a handful will win funding of €50,000 for a 5-10% stake in each company, who will get a further 3 months of intensive mentoring.

Jesper Buch who co-founded Just-Eat, the European company that took fast food online, has launched his latest venture: Mentaline, a platform for therapists, life coaches and psychologists to deliver services to clients.

Ambitiously, it’s not a marketplace in which sessions eventually take place offline but instead the whole thing operates on the Web. Users browse the site by specialism to identify the right therapist and then book and pay for an online consultation which is delivered via webcam. In addition, the system scales so that sessions can be delivered to groups of people or couples, and a separate section of the site is tailored to ‘Masterclasses’ or life coaching-style lectures.

According to Middle East tech blog ArabCrunch (no relation) Apple’s new Ping music social network (or perhaps we should call it a customer network since it’s not very social) is censoring the name Osama.

Notes the blog:

We received a tip from one of our readers saying that Apple has censored the word Osama adding *** after the “O” and before the “a” in its new music social network Ping with iTunes.

Mobile apps store operator GetJar this morning announced that it has appointed James Mooney as head of UK sales, to help build and lead its first UK-based team.

Mooney joins GetJar after managing the Agency Sales Business at Microsoft Advertising for the past 6 years, where he was responsible for large accounts such as Publicis, WPP and Omnicom.

Mister Spex, the German online eyewear retailer, has raised over seven million Euros in a second round led by DN Capital. Existing investors Grazia Equity, High-Tech Gründerfonds, Team Europe Ventures and Astutia Ventures have also taken part, while Xange joins DN Capital as a new investor.

The new capital will be use to increase brand awareness in Germany and fuel international expansion, with the company recently opening up shop in France.

Does the world really need another social network? Pete Lawrence, a social entrepreneur and the guy behind The Big Chill Festival, apparently thinks so with the pending launch of Pic-Nic Village. Although, perhaps tellingly, he expects to finance it through crowdfunding, hoping to raise as much as £750,000.

Described as a “modern day co-operative”, the social network aims to connect “like-minded creative thinkers who want to share, enjoy and benefit from each other’s talents, ideas and thoughts of a personal, business or social nature”. Pic-Nic Village will also be “owned and shaped by members”, with the site shunning advertising in favour of a subscription-based model planned to be in the region of £10 per-month.

Good luck with that.

Bike Doctor, as the name somewhat implies, is a simple iPhone app to help cyclists carry out common bike repairs and maintenance, such as fixing a puncture or adjusting brakes.

It’s been developed by Andreas Kambanis who writes the London Cyclist Blog and Ron Forrester, also the developer of Cychosis app, a mobile journal tool for cyclists.

Slash ‘n’ Grab has launched as a simple way to search some of the most popular sites on the web from a single interface.

Simply type the name of the site you want to search, followed by a slash and the term that you’re searching for. So, for example, if you want to search TechCrunch for, say iPhone 4, you would type “TechCrunch/iPhone 4″. If, however, Slash ‘n’ Grab doesn’t know of a site that you try to include in a search query, it defaults to Google.

In this regard, Slash ‘n’ Grab – we like the name by the way – can be thought of as a sort of poor man’s Blekko, the heavily funded U.S. search engine – totaling $20 million – backed by a number of well respected angel and venture investors in Silicon Valley.

Is Facebook testing its location based service Places for imminent rollout in the UK? Notes on Twitter started to surface over the weekend indicating that might be the case. And as you can see from this screengrab from @kierondonoghue on Saturday, it did work for a short time.

However, we’ve checked with Facebook’s official spokespeople and they say “We weren’t testing it this weekend contrary to reports.” And a simple check of the iPhone app reveals that even if some people can access their location via mobile in the UK, most can’t.

So there you go. But, the imminent arrival of Facebook Places in the UK and across the rest of Europe is clearly going to have an interesting impact not least on local location-based startups who already compete with Foursquare and Gowalla, to name the two main US players whose services have migrated to Europe.

“He’s a classic Aussie in the sense that he’s a bit of a male chauvinist.” That quote comes at the end of a piece on the recent escapades of Julian Assange, founder and chief spokesman for Wikileaks. It seems apt, because it’s becoming increasingly clear that an organisation which aspiries to transparency and the high ideals of open information is going to have problems going forward if it continues to entertain an individual who lacks transparency and whose private life is alleged by his female accusers to be be riddled with low ideals.

Because let’s be clear, delicate diplomacy and skirting the choppy waters of international issues which involve thousands of lives – like releasing highly sensitive government information about the Iraq war – is not the kind of thing you want someone who is careless about their personal life to take charge of.

How would you react if you heard this story: A guy sleeps with two women in quick succession, annoys both with his sexual habits, they talk but he dismisses their concerns. When they go to the Police he calls it an “international conspiracy”. Uh… what?

A trusted source has confirmed that French-blogging platform, Overblog, will soon be part of the Wikio family. Rumor has it that the growing Luxembourg-based news portal is apparently trying to develop European Google News for blogs.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with Wikio, all you really have to know is that it’s a news portal founded by Pierre Chappaz in 2005 after his previous company, Kelkoo, was acquired by Yahoo in 2004 for some 475 million euros. For acquisitions à la Française, that’s not too shabby.

Look out Plancast and Upcoming, here comes Lanyrd. Ok, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but if it’s possible to have a SXSW “tipping point” at an event then Lanyrd just had it at dConstruct, a popular design and developer conference in the UK.

So what is it? The guys behind Lanyrd say they are not trying to build a general purpose events site but instead they are just interested in conferences and everything associated with them: speakers, attendees, venues, books, video and audio, twitter conversation, blog coverage – you name it.

Sales of the ‘smartbooks’ category (i.e. like the iPad) are expected to grow from 3.65 million in 2010 to nearly 50 million in 2014, or over 50% of all embedded device sales, according to the latest forecasts from Informa Telecoms & Media analysts.

The losers will be dedicated e-readers, the winners: multifunctional portable devices like the iPad and Android-driven Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Their reasoning with this conclusion is that e-book content is now available on most multifunctional devices like mobiles and tablets, and work “well enough” as book readers, while having other functions.

Open Angel Forum, an event bringing together entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and industry professionals, was started by puckish entrepreneur Jason Calacanis to make it easier for entrepreneurs and investors to meet.

With Open Angel Forum, service providers get charged to attend the event but it’s free for angel investors and very expensive for service providers, in the region of $1,500 each. Companies are not required to be in stealth or launch mode at the event.

Now, the OAF is coming to London on Wednesday, October 06, at the new TechHub space for tech people and startups.

Only five service providers get to go to the event. Of course, this is not dissimilar to just getting sponsors, but I digress…