StrikeAd, the mobile ad startup, has raised a Series A round from German VC firm eValue, which has also backed the European video ad network, smartclip. As is often the case with regards to European investment, the actual amount remains undisclosed. However, it’s said to enable StrikeAd to “accelerate the development and deployment of its technology platform as well as help drive the company’s strategy for international expansion.”

In addition, StrikeAd has announced its new advisory board, which includes ex-CEO of Qype, Stephen Taylor (also formerly of Overture and Yahoo Europe), and Reza Behnam, previously a partner at IDG Ventures and the founder of online ad buying platform ADZ.

This is pretty cool. Sculpteo, the online 3D printing service, has launched a new product that lets users turn two photographs of a person into a real-life figure – a mini me or physical avatar if you will.

The Paris-based company is interesting in that it’s in-part positioning 3D printing, a relatively new method of producing a real-life object from a 3D file, as a consumer-facing proposition. The result is that it’s as easy to print 3D models as it is to print old-fashioned photographs or related 2D-printed merchandise such as t-shirts, mugs or mouse-mats and the like. Here’s how it works:

Lateral, the pan-European software development company, has signed a three year deal with NASDAQ-listed Travelzoo to becomes its “technology Solutions provider”.

Prior to today’s announcement, the two companies had already been working together with Lateral powering Travelzoo’s attempt at getting into the daily deals space with its own Groupon-clone. The newly formed partnership will also see Lateral’s co-founder and CEO Ciprian Morar serve as Vice President, Innovation at Travelzoo reporting to its CEO, Chris Loughlin.

Social CRM startup Silentale used to be called the “Dropbox of communication.” It used to compete with the likes of Xobni, Gist and Rapportive. But those days are over. Starting today, Silentale will be ending its former contact management service and rolling out SocialReplay, a B2B social backup solution.

Last week, Silentale’s founder, Laurent Féral-Pierssens, announced the change in strategy on the company’s website (below). In short, starting today, Silentale will no longer update user accounts and all free accounts will be erased on February 14th. For anyone with a Pro or Pro Plus account, their information will be stored for an additional 60 days after the February 14th extermination date. Anyone who wants to get ahold of their data should contact Silentale’s team.

AOL Europe has lead an acquision of video distribution network Goviral today, to the tune of $96.7 million. Goviral distributes branded video content for mainstream brands, as well as content producers and advertising agencies. Originally out of Copenhagen, the company now has offices across Europe. The initial purchase is for $74.1 million and $22.6 million in a two year earn out. It joins others AOL acquisitions in the last year including, StudioNow, 5min Media, Thing Labs, Pictela, about.me and, er, TechCrunch.

We’re hearing this deal was lead directly by Kate Burns, SVP, AOL Europe. René Rechtman, CEO, goviral secured $8.82 million Series A funding from European VC Kennet Partners in 2009.

There is something amiss in the European media and I fear it’s going to start confusing the hell out of people. At the press conference for the launch of Facebook Places Deals in Europe, several questions from the amassed press corp indicated that one or two either thought the Deals offers were the same as Groupon flash offers, or that they would turn into Groupon style offers.

Now, I really don’t think my esteemed colleagues in the media are wilfully making this mistake. But in the excitement of a new launch, and the repeated denials of Facebook people like Joanna Shields (head of Europe) that this was Groupon-u-like, it feels like this is a great angle to go with. The trouble is – it’s wrong. If anything Facebook Deals will almost certainly kill off the ability of Foursquare to scale in Europe now – not Groupon. Facebook has boots on the ground in Europe. It has a ridiculously powerful team in Shields and partnerships chief Christian Hernandez, and they are doing deals with major partners like Starbucks like there is no tomorrow.

Spil Games, the casual gaming portal, has unveiled a new logo, err, “brand identity”. The revamp includes a redesigned corporate website and the drawing up of the Dutch company’s manifesto, which contains bold statements like “We play … by our own rules.”

But I shouldn’t mock, the “corporate rebrand” is a big deal to Spil Games apparently. The new site features dedicated sections for the company’s products, advertisers, developers, and publishers along with feeds for news, events, and job openings. That’s playing by your own rules alright.

The freshly inked Spil Games manifesto also contains such wonders as:

Facebook is today launching ‘Places Deals’ in the UK and Europe. Facebook users will be able to get discounts and special deals in shops, cafes and restaurants by checking in on Facebook Places on their smartphone.

We’re live broadcasting the press conference above.

The Telegraph broke an early story on this this morning.

‘Places Deals’ launched in the US last November with Macys, Gap and Starbucks.

European partners will be: Starbucks, Yo Sushi, Mazda (Mazda 20% off an MX5), O2, Argos, Debenhams, Alton Towers and Benetton.

Live now in Germany, France, Italy, Spain.

Meetup, a long time go-to place to create local online groups, has undergone a major re-launch in the past day. However, it may have missed a trick: not consulting the meetup organizers who pay through the nose for the service. There now appears to be something of a revolt going on amongst some organisers, who are vociferously protesting about the changes.

The reaction of annoyed organisers and members has turned into two, count-em, Twitter hashtags: #newmeetup and #meetuporganizersunite.

Alternatives to Meetup like BigTent are being touted, as is GroupSpaces – a startup which last year raised $1.3 million from the likes of Index Ventures and Angels like Dave McClure and Chris Sacca. It is is already gunning for “FormerMeetupOrganizers” with its own group and a blog post on the subject.

In the seemingly never-ending discussions about Europe vs. Silicon Valley – how much digital ink can be spilled on ‘why Europe will never be the next Silicon Valley’, ‘why Europe will definitely become the next Silicon Valley’ and ‘Silicon Valley and Europe: a comparative look at fauna and flora’ anyway? – I’m quite amazed by how often pundits point out we could use more role models in Europe’s tech industry.

The idea seems to be that, inspired by their story of how their startup became the next Google, aspiring entrepreneurs need only look at people who’ve built or even exited companies and became fabulously famous and wealthy in the process. I disagree.

Nokia this morning announced two deals with leading Chinese Internet companies SINA and Tencent, who will be integrating with Nokia’s Ovi Maps in China.

Millions of users of SINA’s microbloging service and Tencent’s massively popular online community QQ (636 million users and counting) will be able to share their location through Nokia mobile devices, check-in to locations and upload content tied to location, such as recommendations and reviews of restaurants, shops and movie theatres.

Some worrying reports are coming out Egypt right now – to add to all the other worrying reports I guess.

Respected blog The Arabist reports that DSL and 3G services have been taken offline in Cairo. This is confirmed by CNN correspondent Ben Wedeman, on the ground in Cairo.

Now, coincidentally or not, this has come literally within the hour after AP TV posted a video of a man being shot point blank by police. The man appears to be dead, though that is not confirmed.

The main ISPs in Egypt at TEDATA, whose own site appears to be down, Vodafone, and Egynet. In addition, Italy-based Seabone has reported that there was no Internet traffic going into or out of Egypt after 12:30 a.m. local time.

Boticca, which launched out of London late last year, is an ecommerce startup which creates a marketplace for limited edition designer original jewellery and other accessories. Created by former Accel Partners associate Avid Larizadeh and co-founder Kiyan Foroughi it’s in a similar space to Gemvara and Jewelmint, but emphasises design, especially creating an emotional connection between its designers and its customers.

I met with with Larizadeh at DLD who explained on TCTV some of the thinking behind the site, which has been designed to be super user friendly and to tell a story behind the designs.

Mendeley, dubbed “the Last.fm of research”, is on a roll right now.

The startup offers a secure online database for scientists, academics and researchers to store their research papers in the ‘cloud’, making it easier to share those documents with peers. The system also helps researchers find and connect to like-minded academics in similar fields by looking at and extracting relevant meta-data from the millions of research papers stored in its database.

Last year it rolled out new premium packages after customers requested features such as more storage.

ScreenReach, maker of the Screach app and accompanying platform for creating interactive experiences on smartphones, has raised a second round of funding: £500,000 from Hotspur Capital Partners. This follows earlier investment from Tom Maxfield, a founder of Sage, shortly after ScreenReach graduated from the Difference Engine accelerator program. The new funds announced today will be used to “spearhead global growth”, says the Newcastle, UK-based company.

Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone maker by volume, this morning reported another profit fall, its third in a row. Net earnings dropped 21 percent in the fourth quarter, from 948 million euros in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 745 million euros in Q4 2010.

Nokia said its estimated market share shrunk to 31 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, down from 35 percent a year before. The silver lining: market share actually went up one percent compared to the third quarter of 2010. Sales came in at 12.65 billion euros.

In a separate release, Nokia announced a reshuffle in its board of directors.

Russian search engine Yandex has acquired Loginza, a local startup whose service allows developers to implement user authentication via the likes of Facebook, Twitter or OpenID-supported sites, without additional registration. Terms of the deal, which came about through Yandex’s “open days for startups”, an initiative as part of the Yandex.Start program, remain undisclosed.

As noted, Loginza’s single sign-in plugin supports authentication via Facebook and Twitter, along with Blogger, WordPress, VeriSign, AOL, Yahoo!, Flickr, Last.fm, LiveJournal, myOpenID and OpenID. It also supports authorization schemes of a number of Russian services: Yandex, Mail.Ru, Vkontakte, Rambler, WebMoney, Diary.ru and Loginza itself.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by David Langer, co-founder of GroupSpaces. It was originally published as part of The Telegraph’s Tech Start-Up 100 debate series in response to TechCrunch writer Paul Carr’s views on European clones.

Having observed first-hand the transformation of the European start-up ecosystem over the past few years, I am frequently surprised by the cynicism still displayed by some journalists and entrepreneurs about the prospects for European start-ups. Since 2004, 8 out of the 30-or-so technology companies that went public or were acquired for at least $1billion were European, including Skype, Betfair and TomTom. In addition to these exits, there are literally hundreds founded since 2000 that now have over $10million in annual revenue.

You’ve got to hand it to Alex Tew. The guy who came up with the MillionDollarHomePage to fund his university education, flamed out with another idea, and came back with another, still has a feel for the zeitgeist. I would not call him a traditional startup guy – more a creative working in the mass medium of the web.

His latest cleverly conceived idea, literally titled DoNothingFor2minutes, where you must not move the mouse of touch the keyboard for 2 minutes as an antidote for internet addiction, has become an internet property in it’s own right.

As you can see from the below, the site has gone from zero to 1 million unique visitors in 6 days, according to Tew, with the average time on site being 46 secs, or 836,401 minutes (580 days) of… nothing. It’s also been Re-tweeted 18,424 times.