MessengerFX, a major player from Turkey, looks to be making good use of the investment recently received from Golden Horn Ventures and is coming out with a whole new face and name. Rebranded LiveGO, the messaging service is actually a completely redeveloped version, although both brands will stay alive for a while, says founder Yusuf Yildirim.

Started in 2006 as an online IM service, MessengerFX now reaches 10 million users worldwide. With LiveGO, the team plans to build on this success with a enhanced social experience.

Groupon is accelerating pretty fast. It’s signed a partnership deal with eBay recently and there continue to be rumours of a Yahoo acquisition.

However, just as Mike Arrington confirmed in the above analysis piece, we’ve heard today that Yahoo is in the process of implementing a global distribution deal with Groupon, not an acquisition.

On the other side of the Atlantic, TechCrunch events have been causing all kinds of disruption (yes, lame joke, I know) this year. Back in May, Disrupt unleashed the infamous linguistic talent of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and just last month, the Bin 38 crew and MC Hammer rocked the show just prior to the announcement of our acquisition by AOL. From New York to San Francisco, Disrupt has definitely proved to be one tech’s hottest events…but now what about in Europe ?

Europe definitely counts a number of absolutely fantastic tech events – with one of my all-time favorites, LeWeb, coming-up right before the holidays. But this year, both TechCrunch France and TechCrunch Europe are also puting a little startup kick in pre-holiday events with the Europas and Remix.

It’s not long since local reviews site Yelp made its first step into German speaking territory with the launch of a localised version for Germany. But now we’re hearing that the US company is about to embark on the next logical step by launching in Austria, Germany’s smaller neighbour.

Right now, Yelp.at is still redirecting to its Top Level Domain, but we expect that to change at midnight tonight, a move that has probably been long expected by local competitors Qype and Tupalo. Both companies have a significant userbase in Austria where Tupalo is in fact headquartered.

Rockabox Media has secured an undisclosed Series A round from Frog Capital to enhance its Shutters video technology and Viewshare online content distribution platform. The new funding will also see Frog Capital Partner, Mike Reid, join the Rockabox Media board.

Founded in 2008 by technology entrepreneur James Booth and TV executive Torie Chilcott, Rockabox, described as a new breed of cross-media IP-creation and exploitation business, creates and delivers “engaging cross-media entertainment formats” that are supported by the company’s marketing methodology and technology platform.

Busuu.com, the language learning community, is partnering with British publisher Collins to offer a range of grammar guides.

It represents the second traditional publisher tie-up for Madrid-based busuu following a similar arrangement with PONS Publishing Group, the second biggest publisher in Germany as part of the Klett Group. It’s also interesting as Collins already has a partnership with busuu’s much better funded and US-based rival livemocha.com ($14m vs approx. $1.4m), suggesting, perhaps, that busuu is punching above its weight.

Bathrooms.com
 has
 raised a
 “significant
” Series
 A
 round
 from
 Dawn
 Capital,
 the
 European
 VC firm.


The new funding, details of which aren’t being disclosed, will
 enable
 the
 company
 to
 “boost
 its
 growth
 trajectory
”, adding additional brands
 and
 ranges to
 enhance
 the
 product
s on offer,
 as well as to increase its exposure in various marketing channels with an eye on expanding into “key international markets.”

Sometimes it feels that the likes of Brightcove and Ooyala, and their myriad competitors, are something of a hammer to crack a nut in the world of enterprise video platforms. To small and medium sized firms these players can appear pretty expensive and complex in their pricing, so smaller businesses often grudgingly revert to cheap or free consumer platforms like YouTube where the the constraints don’t suit enterprises. It’s a little like the days when online publishing was ruled by CMS systems like Interwoven, before platforms like Typepad and Wordpress came along. So a new video platform launches today with the aim of bringing a simpler, all-you-can-eat pricing and service package which could well attract a lot of firms.

The 23Video startup has come up with it’s own technology platform to allow companies to create a full, out-of-the-box video site, mapped to your own domain, with a branded videoplayer for $675 a month, which includes 1 Terabyte of traffic (equivalent to an average of 160,000 videos a month). Extra traffic is $250 per TB. While Ooyala offers a $500/month package, you need to contact their sales people. And the same sales process happens over at Brightcove, where your $99 / mo will get you just 50 Videos and 40 GB of bandwidth, though they do have a credit-card-driven Express option. With 23Video the process is pretty easy and cards are also accepted.

Hellotxt has launched a version of its ‘social dashboard’ for Android. The app’s main feature is to offer an aggregated view of a user’s social networking activity on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, functionality that isn’t too dissimilar to the kind of thing that HTC’s Sense or Motorola’s MotoBlur provide as a way to differentiate their Android offerings from the rest of the market.

That said, Hellotxt has been in the social networking aggregator space for quite some time and the app represents a nice option for social network users and delivers a few unique features of its own:

I’m excited to announce the members of The Europas Awards Advisory Board.

What’s so great about this year’s board (just as with last year’s) is that we have a fantastic spread of experience across the spectrum of the tech scene in Europe, and people who really know the scene inside and out.

Shopping online has become standard to most people on the web. While browsing through the thousands of available e-commerce sites can be a tedious and time consuming task, meta shopping sites aim to take the hassle out of a potentially very long search for the best, cheapest and most adequate product out there.

Imagine you could access all of a product’s distributed and decentralized information on the web right when looking at it on Amazon or any other shopping site. That’s where Ciuvo comes in. The Austrian company has developed a nifty add-on for any browser out there (in Beta it’s only available for Chrome and Firefox), that lets you pull in product-related information in real time and smoothly on the top of the site that you are shopping at.

ProsiebenSat1 Media Group, one of Europe’s largest TV networks, has quietly launched a daily deal site with the cumbersome name prosiebenproducts.de. The application is a simple and straight forward clone of the now well-known and exhausted Groupon concept, where collective buying efforts lead to great deals on a daily basis.

Yet this approach seems somewhat desperate and, to be honest, late. The Groupon model has showed some serious flaws lately and aside from CityDeal’s exit, which Groupon financed through its latest funding round, the hype seems to have abated.

It’s not the first film to be shot on a mobile phone but Nokia’s latest marketing push for its new flagship N8 smartphone is a good opportunity to take stock of how far camera phone technology has come.

The short film entitled ‘The Commuter’, which stars Dev Patel, Charles Dance, Ed Westwick and Pamela Anderson – yes, the Baywatch star of yesteryear – was shot in 720p HD entirely on the Nokia N8 over four days in London, plus plenty of post-production I’m sure.

We’re hearing from two separate sources that Nasza Klasa, the largest Polish social networking platform, is on the block for €130 million.

Launched in November 2006, at its height the service had over 27 million registered users. But figures have been nose-diving this year as Facebook eats into its core social networking user base. It may be that heat from Facebook which is prompting the sale. We’ve reached out to Nasza Klasa for comment.

The American investment fund Tiger Global is the current owner of Nasza Klasa, however there is also a stake owned by Excolimp, based in Cyprus (frankly the ownership is byzantine). From January 2008, the Polish portal belonged to Forticom, an investment vehicle belonging to Digital Sky Technologies (DST), which acquired a 62% stake, but divested itself of the NK interest to focus on Russia.

Part of the YCombinator class of 2006, Xobni only recently launched its first non-English language version in German after partnering with the German Linkedin, Xing. Yet, given the high number of French users, the company has decided to make France it’s 2nd international market and is rolling-out the French version of its product today. But still, don’t try spelling the French word for email inbox (boîte de réception) backwards – you’re likely to get a word way uglier than Xobni.

Xobni’s solution, which aims at facilitating search and management of contacts within Outlook and on the Blackberry, will definitely face a bit of competition in the French market – especially from Silentale’s personal CRM, which has also been called “the Dropbox of communications.”

A small Turkish startup called lunar technologies has raised $1 million for one of its ventures, Trend.ly, managing director Ercan Yaris tells me. The money comes from undisclosed angel investors, two of them partners in one of the biggest telecom companies in Turkey.

Trend.ly is a very basic site any way you look at it. Visitors can go to the site to enter any two-element poll (live examples: love vs. sex and Jessica Biel vs. Scarlett Johansson) and have the community vote on them by ‘liking’ one of the other.

Then again, the site has been live for less than 2 months now. Yes, that’s two months.

With the extremely high house prices and rents in certain parts of the UK, particularly in cities like London, flatsharing is a popular alternative even if it often means moving in with total strangers. One of the most popular sites to address this need is ten year veteran Easyroommate.co.uk, and today it launches on iPhone.

The idea is pretty simple: users can survey the area that they’d like to move into, using the Easyroommate app on their iPhone to locate potential flatshares in the vicinity. Details of available flatshare offers are displayed on a map of the local area, along with contact details (phone number or email), making it possible to arrange a viewing without the need to be in front of a PC.

In what looks like a very good fit, location-based service WorkSnug is partnering with Skype to help mobile workers locate Skype Access-supported WiFi locations in coffee shops using its augmented reality app for iPhone.

Skype Access lets users pay for WiFi on a per-minute basis using their Skype credentials and credit at 200,000 hotspots, provided by the likes of BT Openzone, Boingo, and Barnes & Noble. While WorkSnug’s iPhone app and service helps mobile workers locate potential working spaces – coffee shops, libraries, formal co-working spaces etc. – and provides ratings on such things as Internet connectivity, “community feel”, power sockets, and, more to the point, the quality of coffee.

It’s a question I’ve been asked many times: How to watch UK television abroad over the Internet. Never mind the legal ramifications of accessing copyrighted content outside of its licensed jurisdiction, it can also be a technical kludge, involving setting up proxy servers and engaging in a cat and mouse game as the likes of the BBC’s iPlayer block access. As a result, it’s generally not for the feint-hearted.

Enter ‘Expat Shield‘ from US-based AnchorFree, maker of the popular HotSpot Shield. The updated version of the free and ad-supported software – Windows-only for now – offers the option to assign a UK IP address, providing an “at-home” web experience for Brits, says the company, coded talk for accessing sites such as iPlayer and, presumably, the full gamut of simulcasts and catch-up services provided by the major British broadcasters.