Private equity outfit Dansk Kapitalanlæg has acquired a 31 percent share in Danish IT security firm Secunia.

Secunia, headquartered in Copenhagen, is a provider of “Vulnerability Intelligence and Vulnerability Management tools”. It supplies security intelligence and software to a range of international customers. The company was founded in 2002 by Niels Henrik Rasmussen together with Michael Haddi Zaman, Thomas Kristensen, Jakob Balle, and Thomas Piil.

Dansk Kapitalanlæg’s investment is said to be strategic not just financial, and will aid in the implementation of the “exiting strategy” as well as Secunia’s further development. It also sees a newly elected board in place, chaired by Dansk Kapitalanlæg’s Jesper Johansen.

ShareMyPlaylists, the music social network built on top of Spotify with the specific purpose of sharing playlists, has been given a complete re-write along with a new shiny logo to boot.

Dumping its previous infrastructure based on WordPress and Buddypress (you’d be surprised how many social offerings start off that way such is the low barrier of entry), the site has been re-engineered with scalability in mind.

That’s because, despite Spotify rolling out its own, albeit limited, social features, ShareMyPlaylists now boasts 400,000 unique visitors per month displaying over 1 million page impressions. The site houses 27,000 playlists, listing 4 million tracks, which apparently would take 22 years to listen to. Although you’d probably want to throw yourself under a bus by then as they do vary greatly in musical taste (and quality) but I guess that’s the point.

Spreaker, an Italian music startup that offers an application for creating and sharing live audio content on the Internet, has raised €300k in an angel round. The funding comes from 11 Italian angel investors, and was closed through IAG (Italian Angels for Growth), an independent association born in 2007 with 60 business angels.

With Spreaker, users become Radio DJs and host personal radio shows that can be streamed live and listened to through a widget which supports all the major social media and mobile platforms. Spreaker went live in ‘beta’ at the beginning of the year. They claim 10,000 users transmitting music, news, live sports reports etc. Visitors are around the 200k mark, and they can both listen and interact with the content.

Videoplaza, an ad serving startup for video platforms is partnering with Belgian publisher RTL Newmedia, its first client in the country. In addition, Richard Titus, a long time entrepreneur and investor, is joining Videoplaza’s board, following a minor investment. The partnership means a full integration of ads into online videos and radio for RTL Newmedia, part of RTL Belgium, the country’s largest TV, radio and production company in the French-speaking part of the country.

So, that whole France.fr fiasco this summer was pretty embarrassing for France. But hey, at least the local entrepreneurs got the last laugh. Still, I would’ve thought France would be a little more careful about puting its foot in its mouth, but maybe not. And this time there’s unfortunately nothing particularly funny about the situation.

Back in 2004, France introduced a special tax scheme, called the Jeune Entreprise Innovante (JEI), granting tax breaks for startups meeting a certain criteria (less than 8 years in age, 250 people maximum…) and investing no less than 15% of their turnover in R&D. In a country where it doesn’t exactly rain VC funding, this definitely had a very positive impact and kept companies hiring at home.

We covered Citiservi just over a year ago describing it as a “semantic local search” offering. Since then the company and product has evolved substantially, going through a yellow page, lead generation phase and settling as a consumer platform helping users find or discover local services and offers.

Today, Citiservi has announced a new €1.5m round which includes €500,000 from public funding (ENISA) and €1m from a number of private investors, including Julián Martinez, founder of the international classifieds group Adoos and José Antonio Garrido, Ex-President of Gamesa and ex-CEO de Iberdrola.

Back in April Audioboo, a kind of Twitter for Audio which now has apps for iPhone, Android and the web, launched a voicemail message akin to Twitter Direct Message, but in audio, of course. That means you don’t need to know someone’s phone number, just be connected on Audioboo. The ‘Messages’ function also allows you to attach an image and geotagg your location to each message.

Messaging is ultimately intended for paid-up ‘pro’ members of the service eventually but so far it has worked on Audioboo’s web interface for all.

As of a few minutes ago it went live on the iPhone version.

Anybody who has ever tried losing weight knows that it’s a pain in the ass. But what’s even worse is gaining the same amount of weight in half of the time you’ve achieved your weight loss. This phenomenon, mostly referred to as the “yo-yo effect” is a problem on multiple levels ranging from personal frustration to a global increase in mortality.

These circumstances have led to a plethora of web applications that help people losing weight through online diet coaching to weight tracking and even to real-life products such as the rather successful Wi-fi enabled Withings scale. Sharing your weight with your peers induces pressure and pressure is somewhat necessary for losing weight. Yet most of the available dieting communities out there seem to forget about the yo-yo effect.

Successful and sustainable weight loss is mostly due to multiple factors of lifestyle modification. iJoule, a startup that’s been around since 2007 (!) and used to be backed by Morten Lund, tries to tackle this problem by providing its users with a comprehensive set of features that entails all aspects of dieting, from sports to psychological tests and virtual dietitians that help you achieve your goals.

I’m not going to lie, Bonitasoft‘s success could probably give a lot of American entrepreneurs a run for their money. Based out of Grenoble, France, the 30-person team that specializes in open source business process management (BPM) solutions is on its way to becoming France’s next “open source star”, following in the footsteps of Talend and ExoPlatform. And after 8 years of R&D at INRIA (the French national institute for research in computer science), the company officially founded in June 2009 has announced that it is setting-up shop in the US just a few months after its first birthday – with offices in San Francisco and Boston.

According to CEO and co-founder, Miguel Valdès-Faura, the strategy of the company has been to target customers that are after something less expensive and more flexible than the solutions of bigger BMP players, like IBM-Lombardi, Oracle or Pega.

Favorious is an interesting new web app which tries to make more of your twitter favourites than you might previously have thought possible. Twitter itself has famously done little with Favourites so it’s been left to third party developers like Favstar and more recently Tumbl.in.

Favstar.fm shows a recent leaderboard that can be set to show tweets of only a certain level (10 favorites, for example). If you sign in via Twitter OAuth, you get a whole range of functionality, including the ability to follow people from Favstar.fm and see what tweets your friends are favoriting.

Tumbl.in is more a like a StumbleUpon for Twitter, allowing you to “stumble across” links shared in your Twitter timeline, your Twitter favorites and your Twitter lists.

Oxent, the French startup behind Gamersband, a geo-social network for gamers, has raised $500,000 in a Series A round led by French VC Petit Poucet. Oxtent is founded by Antoine Frankart and Matthieu Dallon, while Gamerband launched in late September and to-date claims 4,000 beta testers.

Gambersband is an interesting proposition in that it’s targeting video gamers with a social network that is ultimately aimed at face-to-face gaming, shunning the trend of networking and competing virtually. Dubbed a geo-social network, the site enables gamers to connect with other gamers living nearby in the belief that gaming is best when it’s not just social but local.

Quno, part of global travel technology group SilverRail Technologies, has exited stealth with the simple aim of bringing airline ticket-style booking to rail journeys in the belief that existing offerings are too unwieldy, displaying a mix of complex fares, times and information.

This is, of course, perhaps a reflection of the industry itself but either way, Quno believes it’s impacting the move to booking train tickets online. Currently, two thirds of rail booking in the UK is done physically at train stations themselves, which compares badly to the rest of the travel industry. Quno (a play on the words “queue” and “no”) is trying to change this.

Stream UK, which provides streaming services for the likes of GMG Radio (Real Radio, Smooth Radio and Rock Radio) and BBC World service, has turned its attention to the Enterprise market.

Specifically, the Camden, London-based company is partnering with CDN provider Level 3 Communications to offer a joint live-streaming solution for enterprise customers using Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming. In particular, video streaming in a way that gets around the common problem of reliably getting through corporate firewalls and managing network strain.

There seems to have been a rash of startups based on Twitter in London. Some of the best known are Tweetdeck and Tweetmeme, but others have appeared like Curated.by (which just moved out to the Valley). But one which has been bubbling under and, like curated.by is focused on curated realtime streams, nsyght.com. We covered their relaunch last year when they announced Angel funding from a group of investors which included Shawn Kernes (co-founder of Stubhub).

Nsyght’s approach is that the product retrieves information from a user’s entire social graph (Twitter, Facebook, digg, Vimeo, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Delicious etc). Turn on the “everyone” firehouse and it updates very, very fast, due to it’s own bespoke search engine. Nsyght differs from Curated.by in that it’s far more geared to archiving realtime streams – Curated.by search is still limited by the same limits Twitter has.

They’ve now released a new feature which focuses on making a combination of twitter’s saved searches and lists searchable. That makes sense. Have you tried making lots of Twitter lists? It’s a pain in the ass. Curating is all very well, but it takes effort. So on Nsyght you create a list and chose to have the list follow just you, then create lists very, very easily.

Uhhh…now I know what you’re thinking : social network meets dressing room = scary and perhaps slightly perverted. But trust me, it’s definitely not. Now, I’m sure that you’ve wondered whether or or not your tie goes with your suit, if your shoes go with your jeans, if your hair looks ridiculous or if your nose is big. Who hasn’t, right? Well, next time you find yourself asking this type of question, consider asking LooknBe‘s online community rather than your not-so-neutral entourage.

LooknBe is a brand-new Paris-based startup for anyone that wants to get honest feedback about how they look. Leveraging its community as well as a team of experts, the platform acts as a “social mirror”. The team has even included a number of tools to protect user identity and reduce embarrassment.

This is a guest post by Suzy Griffin, based in Dublin, Ireland, who is Community Manager for Weedle, “The World’s Trusted Network of People With Skills”. Weedle, founded in 2009, went live in April and already has users in 160 countries.

‘If you build it, they will come.’

Field of Dreams, Phil Alden Robinson, Gordon Company, 1989,

A couple thinking about starting a family will bear this in mind when they’re looking for a place to call home. They will think about what location will suit their unborn children, what amenities are available nearby for children and how the area will cater for their children. You can’t expect a community or family to grow and flourish naturally unless you’re fully prepared for their arrival. If users don’t feel you’re ready for them, that you haven’t put the effort, time or money into taking care of them, they’ll be gone as quick as they arrived.

There’s no doubt that managing and sharing digital assets – photos, videos, music, contacts and other documents – around the home or indeed with friends and family can be a pain. Services such as Dropbox and SugarSync have gone someway to address this problem but, arguably, the problem hasn’t yet been solved. In fact, by some estimates, digital data is increasing tenfold every five years, so it’s actually getting worse.

Enter DAD, a new desktop app and service from DAD Solutions Ltd. founded by UK angel investor Julian Ranger, which is attempting to tackle the problem head on.

CompareDownload.com, the UK mp3 price comparison website, has today launched in the U.S., along with being given a much needed design overhaul.

Starting out as a sort of Kelko-for-mp3s, the site launched to offer a one stop destination for comparing music download prices – surprisingly, they can vary quite a lot. To make the U.S. roll out possible, CompareDownload has tied up deals with Amazon, iTunes, Walmart, Emusic and other smaller U.S. retailers, resulting in what the London headquartered company claims makes them the biggest database of legal music on both sides of the pond. Specifically, boasting access to 50 million tracks for download (via affiliate links, of course).

Club Santa Monica, an invitation only travel club based out of Spain, has just secured €500K in a seed round from a number of renown local Spanish names, including Cabiedes and Partners, serial investor Alejandro Suarez and Real Madrid football player Alvaro Arbeloa, and other private investors from the travel and online sector.

Cabiedes and Partners is the early stage investment group led by Luis Martin Cabiedes, one of the first investors in Privalia, who recently secured an additional €70m in funding. Luis Martin Cabiedes is also the name behind numerous seed rounds in the Spanish startup scene.