This is a guest post by Oliver Holle who founded his first web startup, SYSIS, in 1992, taking smart, interactive games to the exploding online market. Later, Oliver focused SYSIS’ on mobile content, which resulted in a 3-way merger that created a leading European mobile services player which was successfully acquired 2006 by VeriSign Inc. After working a few years in Silicon Valley, Oliver started his new company, The Merger in 2008 that works with Central European startups in the internet and mobile space.

Guys like Dave McClure or Mike Maples are the current rockstars in the US tech blogosphere. Coined as “Super Angels”, there is quite a lot of hype around this new form of seed investing and there is good reason for that. There are quite a few things that these guys are doing right:

MXP4 is not Zynga. It’s not even close to being Zynga. But recently, the Paris-based startup that specializes in interactive music solutions has started to look a whole lot more like the social gaming star. Well, kinda.

When Zynga first launched CityVille back in December, it only took the company 8 days to make it to 6 million users. Impressive. As for MXP4, the company has just announced that its new social game, Pump It, already has 1 million active users for the game launched back in December.

I’m a big fan of music streaming startup Rdio, but one thing it does not do (and probably never will): let me upload the music I already owned before I subscribed to their service so I can stream it on the go (it does have an iTunes syncing feature, but it’s limited to the music they’ve licensed).

Enter mSpot, a music locker service that does exactly that: let people carry around the music they’ve already paid for. And today, mSpot is formally launching in Europe.

The living room and, specifically, television is Shazam‘s next growth target. That’s something we’ve known for a while as the service aims to expand beyond its music recognition roots to become a wider discovery technology for all sorts of content. And today, the London-headquartered company has announced its latest television tie-in, partnering with Syfy for a series-long “TV tagging initiative” for the cable channel’s new U.S. show Being Human.

The way it will work is as follows: The Shazam logo will be ‘embedded’ into the program ready for users to tag the show. This entails them holding their phone up so that it can listen to and recognise the episode in question from which Shazam will provide links to exclusive video and previews of upcoming episodes, access to playlists from the series, downloads and competitions. One way to think of the technology is as an audio barcode, which instead of relating to a particular song, points to a TV episode.

Shopperhive has launched today as yet-another price comparison site for the UK.

Founded by Marcin Rosinski, an employee at TwitJobSearch, which has its own “in-house incubator program”, the site’s main pitch is that along with a proprietary shopping engine it aggregates video product reviews from YouTube and the like, as well as finding any available discount codes.

These are found using “semantic tools and indexing protocols” from the Web in general but also via links embedded in social media. That probably means Twitter, given Rosinski’s employer. So far Shopperhive has indexed 22,000 product reviews from YouTube.

Is it just me, or is everyone and their mother talking about startup accelerators these days? I seriously feel like we’re in some kind of Paul Graham era. Y Combinator-made startups like Dropbox, Xobni, Loopt, AirBnB, WePay, etc. have gotten all kinds of attention and similar programs seem to be popping up all over the place, even in London.

When I asked Graham, he didn’t seem necessarily sure if the Y Combinator model would work outside of Silicon Valley, where there is a high density of active business angels and investors. Then again, progams like Seedcamp and TechStars - which behind the likes of Foodzie and Graphic.ly – may’ve proved that the model can work elsewhere; the program now operates in Bouler, New York, Boston and Seattle – and made took its first international step last year with Startupbootcamp.

Sportpost.com, the social network for sports fans whose launch we covered back in March, has unveiled a new version of the site today that specifically adds its own Facebook-style ‘Like’ button.

The ‘Post Up’ button, which can also be compared to Digg, lets users vote up the best content posted on the site, consisting of both user generated and submitted content, along with content from branded channels (see below). But interestingly and more ambitiously, the ‘Post Up’ button is now available to website owners and bloggers who want to encourage their readers to submit their content to Sportpost.

With Amazon’s purchase of the remaining shares of European video streaming and rental business Lovefilm, comes a welcome exit for the latter’s long-suffering investors, many of whom have been invested in the company since it started way back in the early 2000s. Terms were not disclosed, but we have it on good authority that Lovefilm was valued at around $312 million (here in London we also heard a £200 million figure) for the purposes of the acquisition. Which means that the VC institutions that invested in Lovefilm (Balderton Capital, DFJ Esprit, and Index Ventures) have all now managed to exit.

The investors have put out a joint statement thanking the team and acknowledging, in particular, “the contribution that Alex Chesterman, Mark Livingston, Saul Klein and William Reeve played in laying the foundations.” Fair comment: LoveFilm has over 1.5 million subscribers across the UK, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Of course, now Amazon’s has a number of bases covered now: books with kindle, music and now VOD with Lovefilm.

But a few individuals will have benefitted as well. Some will have had their liquidity event in 2008 when Amazon bought into Lovefilm originally, some earlier when it merged with Video Island. Some will even wince at this post, wishing they’d not exited long ago. And some will be buying the round of drinks tonight. We’ll let you speculate in the comments as to whom…

BREAKING: Amazon will acquire the remaining shares in the pan-European movie rental and streaming service LoveFilm. Terms have not been disclosed but we believe the valuation was around $312 million. Amazon already owned 42 percent of LoveFilm which acquired Amazon’s DVD rental business in 2008.

Amazon has had a large minority shareholding in LoveFilm for some time and this deal has been in the offing for what seems like forever. The talks have been going on since at least September last year, and Lovefilm investors has been looking for an exit since, oh, 2009?

Assuming regulatory approvals are all fine the deal should close in the first quarter of 2011.

In the US, Amazon has a video-on-demand service but now it gets Lovefilm’s presences in the European online video streaming and rental markets of the UK, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. LoveFilm recently expanded to stream into Sony Playstation 3 and Sony and Samsung TVs, Blu-Ray players and other home theatre devices.

One year ago, French startup Eyeka announced that it had raised €3 million ($4 million) to take its online alternative to the traditional focus group international. The company had raised €8 million to date and had already opened offices in Singapore. Last year, the 40-person company set-up shop in the UK and now it’s officially launching in the US, with offices in San Francisco and New York.

Eyeka was initially launched in 2006 by French serial entrepreneur, Gilles Babinet. The platfrom often gets compared to the likes of participative creative agencies (like Creads, who has also been eyeing the US market since last year) but is really more of a consumer engagement community.

Anssi Vanjoki, who you’ll recall was supposed to be the saviour of Nokia before he dramatically resigned the day before a major show, has clearly decided not to retire into history, head off into the sunset and play golf. Instead, it would appear that after many years at the top of Nokia’s hierarchy, he has built up enough personal wealth to turn his hand towards startup investing.

He’s now invested not in his golf swing, but in Finnish start-up called GameBook, a social technology for golfers created with golf pros. Vanjoki is joining the board, but the terms of his investment have not been disclosed.

Money Dashboard, which can be thought of as a Mint.com for the UK, gets its consumer launch today.

Running in some form of beta since December 2009, the startup, which is funded to the tune of £2m, provides an online service for consumers to manage their finances via a dashboard that aggregates data – balances and transactions – from online bank accounts and credit cards etc. It’s powered by Yodlee, as was Money Dashboard’s, ultimately unsuccessful, competitor Kublax.

Money Dashboard’s features include the ability to track and categorise spending, and set budgets, along with email alerts to warn users if they exceed their set budget or are about go into overdraft. And in future, says the company, it will also be possible to alert users to suspicious transactions on their accounts.

Boo.ly, which launched in late December last year, is another attempt at making online shopping more efficient. It takes the form of a browser plugin that supercharges searches on the likes of Google, Bing and Amazon (and a host of other online retailers) to offer on-the-fly price comparisons from a database of 10,000 merchants, along with any known available discount coupons. Notably, the two person startup based in Hampshire, UK appears to be targeting the U.S. from the get go, as well as its home territory.

Suddenly people are talking about Hipster.

Ok, let’s clarify that. A group of tech enthusiasts in San Francisco are talking about what Hipster might actually be, since Hipster CEO Doug Ludlow has so far refused to say what Hipster is about. And it’s producing what appears to be a case study in viral marketing.

Luckily, all this talk is producing answers and sure enough TechCrunch readers have come up with the answers in our comments.

For Hipster appears to be a Q&A site built around your current location. Let’s call it a ‘Quora for location.’ And it even looks like Quora. Check out the beloe screen grab from Google cache.

It’s hardly an original idea: Natter has launched as yet-another-attempt to create a “safe’ Chatroulette-style video chat site.

Just like Andrey Ternovskiy‘s creation, the site lets strangers find each other via webcam, only this time – and similar to vChatter, which also powers social network Bebo’s own take on the idea – users have to log-in via Facebook, therefore insisting on a certain amount of real identity accountability. There’s an over eighteen user policy too and users also specify whether they’d like to chat to women, men or either. The site’s founders have an online dating site background.

Netbiscuits, which enables development, publication and monetization of cross-platform mobile websites and apps, has raised ‘several millions of Euros’ worth of funding from T-Venture, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom, and Creathor Venture.

The extra capital will be used to grow Netbiscuits’ business in the United States, and for expansion in key markets like Asia and Europe.

In France, it seems January is always full of surprises. This time last year, new seed funds Kima Ventures and Jaina Capital were announcing their plans to fill a gaping void in the French investment landscape.  And now the same French internet titans (more or less) are announcing the launch of the Ecole Européenne des Métiers de l’Internet (EEMI), a European internet startup school set to kick-off in fall 2011.

The news first broke in Paris Match (not traditionally known for tech news, but hey) in December. The initiative comes from the founders of three of the most well known companies in France: Meetic (Marc Simoncini), Vente-Privée (Jacques-Antoine Granjon) and Iliad (Xavier Niel)…

Populis (formerly GoAdv), which we’ve previously described as the “European Associated Content”, has just announced that it’s acquiring Blogo, a blog network that operates in Europe and South America owned by Dada, the Italian web publisher part owned by RCS MediaGroup. The acquisition price is pegged at €6 million.

The “thematic blog network” consists of over 250 bloggers who cover 70 niches spanning subjects such as automotive, sport, finance and the arts. It targets the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Brazil, boasting around 100 million page views a month, says Populis, citing Nielsen stats as of November 2010.

Described as a Swiss Army knife for techie travellers, FourEyesUp has launched its London Guide for iPhone.

The app boasts, amongst other things, a geek shopping guide covering “London’s best technology, photography, comic book and home entertainment stores”, along with listing high-tech hotels and London-based technology events and attractions. These cover categories such as science museums and computer sightseeing, tagged to highlight the work of science and technology icons, such as Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, Guglielmo Marconi, Alan Turing or John Logie Baird.

One of the biggest misconceptions about the European tech scene is that it should operate exactly like the Silicon Valley tech scene. This is just plain dunderheaded. The truth – far too too seldom stated – is that as well as operating in a ‘Valley’ manner, equally European startups can come out of a sector-specific business context. Thus, music startups like Last.FM, Songkick and others have continued to emerge from London and Berlin where the music and creative scene in Europe is hugely strong. London is also becoming a center for fashion startups like Editd and Garmz. In that same vein, London is a big financial centre.

To that end today OpenGamma is a new kind of financial startup, based in London, which has an open source analytics and risk management platform for the financial services industry. Today it’s completed a $6 million Series B round of equity financing led by FirstMark Capital, a New York-based VC. Accel Partners joins the round as a return investor. OpenGamma previously had a Series A round of $6m from Accel Partners.