You remember Bad Piggy Bank, the in-game payment model for Rovio‘s Angry Birds on Android which lets users either remove the ad on the free version of the game or buy the pending Mighty Eagle update. Yes, the one that circumvents Android’s own app store payment system in favour of carrier billing.

Well, it’s actually powered by European mobile payments provider Fortumo, which today has announced that it’s cracking open the Piggy Bank some more by adding support for offline payments (via SMS text messaging) to its Android library.

That’s the same in-app payments library as used by Angry Birds, which any Android developer can now have free access to.

Nokia-owned Navteq (technically the handset maker’s mapping division) has acquired crowdsourced traffic data app Trapster. Details remain undisclosed.

The San Diego, USA-based company’s app, which runs on multiple mobile platforms – iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Symbian, WebOS and JAVA-compatible feature phones – as well as network aware dedicated Sat-Nav devices, lets drivers alert other drivers to things like speed trap cameras and other “hazards”. This involves pressing a button on the phone or calling in via a toll free number, while the back end takes this aggregate data to alert other drivers nearby. It’s part of a wider trend where Sat-Nav systems are becoming smarter thanks to crowdsourced data and the opportunities offered by always-on connectivity.

Hotelyo, a “Vente Privée” for exclusive and luxurious hotels, has raised close to €1 million in an angel round. That’s pretty impressive for Italy’s standards.

The company already has a turnover of around €500,000 and to-date provides offers for 14 heavily discounted luxury hotels every seven days with more expected to come on board in the next few months. Hotelyo has around 300,000 members, mostly thanks to word of mouth. Properties are selected from a range of beautiful hotels throughout all of Europe and often include exotic destinations from around the world. Availability for these offers is limited and the fastest bookings receive additional discounts, while membership is free and the site guarantees new offers twice a week.

European online ad company Admeta has bagged a bunch of new investors and put in place a new CEO.

Chalmers Innovation Seed Fund, Layline Partners and KL Ventures, together with two founders Leif Jägerbrand and Fredrik Strauss plus Ola Tiverman have acquired a majority stake in Admeta from the Sixth Pension. They have also made a capital injection to ensure the “continued software development and business support” for its Whitebox Tango and Whitebox Echo clients, as well as continued market growth.

DN Capital, which invests in media and technology companies at the growth and early stages, has led a first round of investment in Performance Horizon Group (PHG), a provider of online performance marketing technology. The size of the round remains undisclosed.

Headquartered in the North East of England with offices in London and Luton, PHG’s founders include Malcolm Cowley and Paul Fellows who previously co-founded affiliate network buy.at which they sold to AOL for $125 million in 2008, who subsequently offloaded it for considerably less to London-based Digital Window. While more recently, Cowley and Fellows themselves invested in ShareMyPlaylists, the music social network built on top of Spotify founded by Kieron Donoghue.

If Pablo Picasso or Belgian surrealist, René Magritte, were alive and on Facebook, their profiles would probably be a terrific work of art. Yes, that’s right, Magritte is the one who did this painting. With a little inspiration from the Treachery of Images, I bet he’d also write something along the lines of “This is not a Facebook profile” or “Ceci n’est pas un profil Facebook” somewhere on his Facebook page.

Yet, while Picasso and Magritte may not be around to wow us with a little contemporary Facebook art, the profile of French artist Alexandre Oudin is probably the next best thing.

What started out as a simple idea to try to explore Russia’s emerging Internet technology over an afternoon event in Moscow quickly gathered momentum. Which is why, on Monday December 13, TechCrunch Europe is coming to Moscow, Russia, for our first ever TechCrunch Moscow (to be held in English).

But we also decided that it would be awesome to have some Silicon Valley players attend virtually, either by video feed or via the telepresence equipment kindly provided by Cisco from their Valley offices. It beats traveling from the US.

So this is an unashamed appeal: if you are Mark Zuckerburg, Steve Jobs or someone of that elite level, then we’d love you to appear on stage via video link. Let’s build some links between Russia and the Valley. Maybe Ron Conway or Evan Williams / Biz Stone is available? We don’t know – that’s why we’re making this appeal. So, Ron, Biz, Steve or Mark – if you’re free, then contact TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher (mikebutcher AT techcrunch.com). Thanks.

The French entrepreneurs’ fund, ISAI, has just announced that its investing in Commerce Guys, a Franco-American company that develops open source Drupal e-commerce solutions. This is the third investment for the fund run by some 70 French entrepreneurs from these companies, which previously invested in carpooling platform Covoiturage and the high-class online marketplace, InstantLuxe. And while the transaction amount has not been disclosed, I’ll venture a wild guess that it most likely lies between the €500,000 and €1.5 million range – which would be in-line with the rest of ISAI’s investments.

Viber, a new free iPhone application (iTunes link that works like an always-on version of skype on your iPhone has been a smash hit – getting three million downloads after we broke it’s launch on TechCrunch.

Viber lets you make 100% free calls to other Viber users over 3G and WiFi runs in the background without draining your battery. It’s not about to overtake Skype, but then again, it’s doing something we’d all like Skype to do, right?

I spoke to Viber Media founder Talmon Marco at Le Web about what’s happened since the launch.

Priceminister is France’s most visited e-commerce site, accessed by over 12 million users per month and was bought by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten in June for about €200 million. Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, CEO, spoke to TechCrunch TV about his plans for the next year and the general trends in e-commerce we should expect to look out for.

It’s been a big year for Evernote. It raised a $20 million round from Sequoia Capital and Morgenthaler Ventures and also announced that it had hit 5 million users – and that was only 83 days after reaching 4 million users. It also released an Android app.

I caught up with Evernote CEO Phil Libin at Le Web, where we talked about Evernote’s growth to date, and it’s intriguing connections with Russia, where much of its deep core algorithms are developed by its team there, before making it over to the more product-oriented half of the company in the US.

Idosyncratic Rovio, the company behind the smash hit Angry Birds game, likes to do things differently. Today they live streamed a press announcement about the game’s latest achievements, which featured an indie band, The Ran.

The main announcement was about “Bad Piggy Bank”. This is an in-game payment model for Angry Birds on Android which lets users either remove the ad on the free version of the game or buy the Mighty Eagle update that’s on its way.

Bad Piggy Bank will not require credit card details, and downloads purchases instantly. It does this by charging in-app purchases to your mobile phone bill. But that’s not all.

It’s not quite on the level of Steve Jobs returning to Apple, but every time a founder comes home it leaves me feeling all warm and fuzzy. This time it’s the turn of Michael Birch who has re-joined Bebo as a strategic advisor, along with investing in the social network which he co-founded with his wife Xochi in early 2005 before selling the company to AOL in 2008 for $850 million.

Since then, of course, Bebo has seen another change of hands: After being left to languish by AOL, who eventually shut it down for tax purposes, the social network was sold to Criterion Capital Partners for about $10m in June of this year.

The Le Web startup competition filtered over 400 startups down to a final 16. We covered a few of the companies here, here, here and here. Today the last three finalists got the opportunity to pitch their startups to the assembled crowd at the conference, after which the judges retired to deliberate live their pick for the winner.

Chairman of the judges David Hornik said the judges changed the format of the awards and decided they wanted a winner with great originality, technology and virality. But decided all three should win.

Germany-based business social networking site XING is acquiring also Germany-based online event management and ticketing services company Amiando, we’ve just learned.

XING is paying 5.1 million euros initially, and an additional payment of up to 5.25 million euros will be made on March 31, 2013, provided various conditions are met (such as the current management team remaining within the company and the achievement of specific financial performance targets).

Seatwave, the European aftermarket ticket exchange, is trumpeting somewhat of a landmark today, announcing that one million tickets have been traded through the site. However, it’s a number that is brought sharply into focus when you consider how well funded the UK startup is – thought to be a massive $53 million – and that it’s been operating for coming up to four years. That number doesn’t seem to have quite the same wow-factor now.

Like similar marketplaces, Seatwave, which operates in the UK and several places in mainland Europe, provides what it describes as a fan-to-fan ticket exchange, essentially an aftermarket where people can buy and sell tickets to theatre, sport and music events. The company’s pitch, however, is that its online marketplace ensures that ticket sales and purchases are 100% safe, presumably with proven mechanisms in place to counteract fraud and unreliable buyers and sellers.

Just like every other country, France has its share of Groupon clones, including the likes of Bon Privé, Zanytude (now closed) and Dealissime. This last one has probably caught the most attention, especially when it announced its first round of funding in July with A-list French business angels Oleg Tscheltzoff (Fotolia), Jonathan Benassaya (Deezer) and 26-year-old Simon Istolainen (MyMajorCompany, PeopleForCinema). And now the Paris-based startup is taking its technology abroad and officially supplying the tech behind the first Moroccan Groupon clone, MyDeal.ma.

It doesn’t really take more than a second glance to see the traces of Dealissime on MyDeal’s platform (seriously, take a look below). The site has officially launched its very first offer for the city of Casablanca this morning – with offers for Marrakech and Rabat to come shortly.

Mobile social network Flirtomatic (“the world’s number one flirting company”) continues to notch up users: It’s now passed the 3.5 million registered user mark, a trajectory the company has been on for a while, operating its free service across the UK, US, Germany, Australia, with Spain launching next.

Flirtomatic has also announced a bunch of new hires.