Recently Yahoo attempted to bring the search fight back to Google Instant and Bing’s guided search by packaging up searches related to music, movies, or news, into a box with vertical tabs along the side. This is similar to Google’s Universal Search Onebox and the Bing Box. The organic results are from Bing (of course), but this works best when Yahoo is able to bring in very targeted content from partners, thus improving their wow factor for users. For movies for instance, you get an overview with links to trailers and it’s partnership with Netflix creates link directly to that movie on Netflix, where it can be added to your queue. Yahoo did this also for nearby events, albums, videos, and Twitter search.

And as of right now Yahoo has also now integrated data from the API belonging to Songkick, a UK-based startup which has focused lazer-like on gig listings and everything surrounding those events from fan buzz to ticketing to even preserving your excited tweets from the gig.

The effect means that if you search for Lady Gaga, you’ll get direct links to Songkick where you can see her latest gigs, but also the gigs closest to you. Because Songkick can work out where you’re searching from via IP address.

Videoplaza, the video ad server startup, has announced a partnership with leading UK consumer publisher Dennis Publishing, whose magazine titles include Maxim, Evo, Auto Express and Kontraband. Videoplaza will help Dennis grow and better monetise its video inventory.

Specifically, Videoplaza’s ‘Monetizer’ product has been chosen for its ability to target video advertising on mobile devices, tablets, digital magazines and other formats/platforms that Dennis may choose to enter in the future.

T-Venture, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom, and e42, have invested in the taxi booking system 1TouchTaxi developed by German startup Intelligent Apps. The terms remain undisclosed.

Currently limited to Hamburg, 1TouchTaxi is a smartphone-based system that lets customers hail and book a taxi via the mobile web and the company’s Android and iPhone apps. The new funding from T-Venture and e42 will be used by 1TouchTaxi to roll out and establish the system in other German cities and to expand its feature set.

Smilebox, the U.S. photo and video sharing service that lets users create greeting ‘cards’, slideshows, scrapbooks, collages and the like, has officially launched in the U.K.

This comes after the heavily funded company’s most recent “follow-on” round where it raised $2m specifically for international expansion. Its previous series B round in December 2007 led by Bessemer Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures saw Smilebox raise $7m, having previously received $5m from Frazier and a host of prominent angels. In case you’re not paying attention, that totals no less than $14m.

Molten Technologies, a provider of cloud-based desktop infrastructure services, has launched its Desktops as a Service (DaaS) platform.

Riding the current wave of IT moving to the cloud, the new service offers businesses a “secure and scalable” route to outsourcing costly desktop infrastructure, while still allowing them to retain full control over their data, applications, provisioning and security.

Furthermore, users can access their desktop environment from any connected device including “thin clients, tablet PCs, smart phones and PCs from any location.”

AlertMe, the consumer home energy management startup, has closed its second round of funding, raising £15 million and bringing in British Gas as a new investor and strategic partner, who is putting in £5.7 million for a 15.96% stake. Existing investors Good Energies, Index Ventures, SET Venture Partners and VantagePoint Venture Partners also participated. British Gas will also now deploy AlertMe products and services to its customers in the UK, a deal worth a notional £20m, rolling out two million AlertMe smart meters by 2012.

AlertMe plans to use the cash to expand its partner and channel program in the UK, Europe and the USA, and extend its platform.

joiz, a cross-media content platform, has secured funding from Creathor Venture. Terms were undisclosed other than a reference to “several million” Swiss francs. Based in Zurich, joiz produces cross-media entertainment content and is largely consumed by teenagers in Switzerland aged 15 to 29. It combines classic TV with with Web, Mobile and social media to target a largely difficult audience to reach.

TV Mobile and Web are synchronized in real-time allowing joiz to create interactive formats and cross-media advertising campaigns. It’s thus established partnerships with Publicitas, a subsidiary of PubliGroupe.

In what is possibly the best presented and above all realistic exposition I’ve yet seen on what it’s like to extend a European startup into Silicon Valley, Andy McLoughlin, co-founder with Alastair Mitchell, of Huddle, socked it to the crowd at the annual Future of Web Apps London event this week.

“Fighting and Thriving in the Valley” is a step-by-step look at what it’s like to take a startup from outside the Valley – in this case Huddle’s roots in London – and create a footprint in the US via San Francisco. It was an excellent speech. But since Carsonified, the people behind FOWA, have gone down the road of locking down video for the preserve of their paid-for online conferences (as is their right), we haven’t seen any online video of the talk.

However, here’s a point by point run down of Andy’s presentation.

Zingaya, the UK-based VoIP startup, has launched a fun new service today that makes it easy for your Twitter followers to call you. I’m calling it tweet-to-call in reference to the company’s main offering, its click-to-call widget that can be embedded on any web page. Dubbed zin.to, here’s how the new service works:

After logging in through Twitter, you’re asked to link your account with either a phone number (U.S.-only for now) or your Skype username. Next you choose whether to let any of your followers call you or only a specific Twitter user. And finally, you specify the window of opportunity or how long you want the tweet-to-call option to be open. The service then sends out a tweet along the lines of “@sohear please call me within 30 minutes via http://zin.to/”.

Pretty neat, huh.

German trade publication W&V is reporting that Holtzbrinck, one of Germany and Europe’s leading publishing groups, is shutting down their incubator “Holtzbrinck eLab”, launched in 2006.

Holtzbrinck is famous for backing some of the most successful German Internet startups and also for acquiring not so successful companies. Most notably, StudiVZ, the early Facebook clone, which it purchased for roughly €100m, and although generating significant revenue it looks like Facebook is ultimately the winner in Germany too.

SponsorPay, the European leader in virtual currency monetization, has received a “seven-digit” euro investment from Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB), the development bank of the Federal Land of Berlin.

The precise terms aren’t being disclosed, as much as we’ve tried, which is a little odd considering that in its previous funding round the company wasn’t shy of shouting the figure: €3.8m raised in June from Hasso Plattner Ventures, Moscow’s Kite Ventures, and Team Europe Ventures who are the original backers of the Berlin-based startup. We’ll let you draw your own conclusion.

Following last year’s huge success, it’s back. “The Europas” – The European Startup Awards 2010 – will honour the best tech companies and startups across the web and mobile scene from across Europe. The Europas is all about geting together and celebrating the tech scene in Europe with an awards event which we can really call our own (see last year’s amazing event). So put the evening of Friday, November 19 in your diary now. The first tranche of tickets are now on sale here.

These awards will recognise and celebrate the most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations of the past year, with the tech community invited to have a say in which finalists should be recognised. Leading lights of the the tech startup and investor scene will be invited to give away the awards to the winners, so you’ll have the opportunity to meet your tech heroes and heroines. The initial filtering will be done by referencing our database on European companies on CrunchBase (so make sure you are in it), then by public vote online, with the final Award winners to be determined based both on the popular votes received through website voting and by The Europas Advisory Board. You’ll be able to vote shortly.

Flook, a sort of StumbleUpon for location-based discovery from Ambient Industries, has extended its content creation tool beyond the iPhone so that users can create ‘cards’ via a standard web browser.

The new Web Card Creator takes advantage of modern web browsers’ support for HTML5. You can upload a photo, have your browser detect your approximate location (or tell flook the location that you want to create the card for), add a title and description etc. for your point of interest and you’re good to go. If you don’t have a photo for your discovery, the app will automatically search for suitable photos on the web with the applicable Creative Commons Licenses.

Thinglink, the product tagging startup founded by design blogger Ulla-Maaria Engeström (wife of Jaiku co-founder Jyri Engestrom, who is also an adviser), has raised $1 million in seed funding from Nordic investors Inventure and Lifeline Ventures. The new funds will be used to develop an in-image advertising network for brands, retailers and other product advertisers, says the company.

Thinglink started life by defining a new standard for identifying both virtual and physical objects and linking them to information on the Internet, and then evolved into a sort of social catalogue that enabled designers, brands, and consumers to identify and converse around products. Today the company is pitching itself as a tool for online publishers who want to add interactive images (via special tags) to their content.

Hands across the water everyone! It appears that pulling together a combination of European and U.S. investors is creating some interesting synergies for young startups. UK-startup GroupSpaces, which recently announced new funding, has partnered with WePay, a ycombinator startup billing itself as the “Paypal for groups”. With some deep API integration, GroupSpace users can now sign up to WePay within GroupSpaces and collect money for their groups. This gives groups a U.S. bank account with a debit card, something even PayPal doesn’t do.

Since its launch in 2007, GroupSpaces has hit 500,000 group memberships and recently secured a $1.3m investment from Index Seed Fund and leading angel investors including Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Simon Levene, Meagan Marks, Ariel Poler and Quincy Smith of CODE Advisors.

Note that it’s extremely rare for this many high-profile Silicon Valley angel investors to invest in a U.K. startup, and it appears these U.S. links are paying dividends for GroupSpaces in enabling it to set up deals with U.S. partners like WePay. Let’s have more of the same.

UK furniture and design retailer mydeco has launched ‘mydeco Kitchenshop’, new marketplace ecommerce platform powered by Ixtens, a Russian startup. The marketplace of kitchenware and accessories will be sold directly through the mydeco online basket. TheKitchenshop is basically an Ecommerce marketplace powered by Ixtens. The idea being that manufacturers and retailers can sell direct to the consumer through the mydeco.com platform, just like on Amazon.

The Ixtens marketplace platform, provides a standardised way for online retailers to manage supplier and drop-shipper relations. The idea is to enable them to expand their ‘virtual’ inventory. The marketplace includes ten manufacturers with 2,500 products.

The phrase jumping a sinking ship springs to mind, although that’s perhaps a little too simple for these muddy waters. But certainly something is up at Nokia as another VP quits, this time Ari Jaaksi, the guy in charge of MeeGo devices, who tells Finland’s Talous Sanomat that he resigned last week. This follows the exit of Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s smartphone champion.

Was Jaaksi made to walk the plank or did he go voluntarily, that’s a legitimate question in light of the recent change at the very top as new CEO Stephen Elop perhaps begins to assert his authority. We’ll probably never know, but it raises a more immediate question: Is Nokia still on track to ship its first MeeGo smartphone powered by the next generation mobile OS being developed in partnership with Intel, which is scheduled for the end of the year.

Skobbler, maker of the free iPhone Sat-Nav solution based on the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, is at it again.

This time the Hamburg, Germany-based company is gunning for Google Maps with the release of ForeverMap, also powered by data from OMS, which although a paid-for app, bests the search giant’s offering in one significant area: it supports offline use since the maps, which cover Europe, are pre-loaded.

Fon, the company with a fairly simple but extremely bold and tough mission (to cover the entire globe with free Wi-Fi), now boasts over 2.5 million hotspots located around the planet. In a brief blog post, entrepreneur, teacher and philanthropist Martin Varsavsky – who founded the company back in 2006 – makes it clear that this is a huge number.

He estimates that the company, which is backed by the likes of Google, Index Ventures, BT, Skype and Sequoia, “grows a T-Mobile every month”, by which he means that as many Fon hotspots light up in various parts of the world as T-Mobile has activated to date.

California, U.S.-based VeriFone Systems, a secure electronic payment solutions provider, has acquired an 80% majority stake in Italy’s All Business Solutions (ABS) from ABS’ founders and from ACI Informatica, the IT body of ACI (Automobile Club d’Italia) Group, which will retain a minority share. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed.