What do you do after you’ve raised £2m? Put a grown up in charge, of course.

OK, I’m being a little unkind but that’s sort of the message coming through from e-commerce platform eSellerPro, which following a £2m investment from Notion Capital has announced the appointment of a new CEO: Keith Bird, described as a “26 year industry veteran”, will be charged with driving the company’s European and U.S. expansion. He joins from Internet security company SonicWALL where he was VP EMEA.

Meanwhile, previous CEO and founder Chris Farrelly moves over to the role of CTO where he’ll continue to focus on the technology itself.

Last year realtime analytics startup Chartbeat raised an impressive $3 million Series A financing with a glittering array of backers including Betaworks and Ron Conway. Realtime analytics of sites, especially publisher sites like TechCrunch where we use Chartbeat, is a hot space right now, since anything slower is just no longer viable. Having a realtime dashboard that shows you what stories, pages, or items are hot and where traffic is coming from, or how fast your pages are loading is crucial to just about any site today.

Chartbeat launched in launch in April, 2009, got 2,500 paying corporate customers, largely on 5 employees.

However a new upstart of just three young guys is poised to produce, I would say, at least as good a product on a fraction of the backing and resources. GoSquared provides real-time website analytics that lets you to see who’s on your website right now. It has two products: LiveStats and Trends. LiveStats gives a real-time dashboard of a site’s traffic information, while Trends stores all of this useful information and builds simple, easy to understand graphs and tables.

Searchmetrics, a Berlin-based company which works out where you should be spending your budget on SEO and analytics, has secured a growth / C-stage funding round of $6.75 million, led by Paris-based growth capital fund Iris Capital and current investors Holtzbrinck Digital and Neuhaus Partners in Germany.

Searchmetrics was founded in late 2007 and financed by Holtzbrinck Digital in a Seed round financing. In January 2010 Neuhaus Partners joined in a B-round.
The latest round brings the company’s total funds raised to approximately $11 million. The funds will be used for its continued international expansion.

MarketMeSuite, the social media marketing dashboard that has been flying somewhat under the radar of TechCrunch Europe, is keen to trumpet some stats today, claiming growth of over 500% in the last 6 months or most recently, 30% month on month. Of course, these percentages are pretty meaningless on their own – more on that in a bit. But first, what exactly is MarketMeSuite.

The paid-for subscription-only service – yes, they’ve shunned the popular freemium model to head straight for a pay day – enables businesses to manage their marketing campaigns on Twitter and Facebook via a desktop application, which competes to varying degrees with something like TweetDeck or more directly Hootsuite and CoTweet.

We’ve just learned that German VC Holtzbrinck Ventures will announce that it’s closed a whopping €177 million early stage fund tomorrow. The Holtzbrinck Ventures Fund IV is backed by both Georg von Holtzbrinck publishing group and funds managed by HarbourVest Partners, a global private equity investment firm.

This is a significant new fund for European standards and will fundamentally help prosper and establish consumer web startups from all walks. Current investments and holdings include highly successful ventures, such as Zalando, Groupon or the freshly exited brands4friends.

Although browser-based apps and moving everything to the cloud is very much in vogue these days, there’s something reassuring about a desktop application and the robustness that offline access brings. This is particularly true when there’s a lot of data entry involved. Or so says Kashflow, the UK-based online accounting software company, which today released RapidFire, its first foray into desktop software.

Aimed at accountants and bookkeepers using KashFlow’s existing Orbit Accounts software-as-a-service, the desktop application enables offline data entry into its web-based accounting package – with the speed and keyboard short-cut familiarity of more traditional offerings. KashFlow even goes as far as to name check rival Sage, suggesting that users of Sage 50 “should be instantly familiar with RapidFire.”

Saul Klein is a partner at European VC firm Index Ventures, previously worked for Skype, co-founded Video Island and is founder of Seedcamp. In this guest post he responds to recent posts by TechCrunch US writer Paul Carr regarding the position of London as a startup hub.

SMEStorage, which focuses on cloud data access and management, has received a capital investment from private investors – undisclosed but described as a “six figure sum” that will be used to grow the business. It also says that it achieved profitability in Q4 2010.

Targeting multiple operating systems and mobile devices, SMEStorage enables an open platform in which any of over 15 storage providers, such as Amazon S3 and Google Docs, can be accessed simultaneously with aggregated data being presented in a virtual cloud file system. In this way, individuals and businesses can move their fileserver to the cloud.

To date, 120,000 consumers and over 350 small businesses are using the platform, which includes several large US companies and one Fortune 50 company using SMEStorage’s on site Cloud Gateway aggregation appliance.

London-based m8 Capital has announced its latest investment: leading a $4.2 million round in SCHAD, which produces mobile technology to enable engineers to remotely access, monitor and manage company plants, systems and facilities. The German company’s customers include Ford, BASF, Vanderlande Industries, FRoSTA, Deutsche Lufthansa, Volkswagen and the Airports of Cologne Bonn, Munich and Berlin. Original seed investor High-Tech Gründerfonds has also participated in the round, although an exact break down remains elusive.

SCHAD represents the third investment for m8, the majority-owned affiliate of AGC Equity Partners that targets mobile startups and technology. In June 2010, it invested $800k in the location-based startup Rummble, while more recently $2 million was put into Masabi, which develops mobile ticketing technology for the transport sector.

Good news for Europeans and those U.S. users (perhaps as many as 30,000) of music streaming service Spotify. In a similar deal to the one signed last year with Sonos, users will soon be able to listen to streaming Spotify music through their Logitech devices. That means being able to listen to music files stored on any computer in your home as well as Spotify, and other music services you might subscribe to.

As we hinted predicted four days ago, SoundCloud was indeed talking to Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures about investing. It’s confirmed today on their blog that both firms have made undisclosed investments.

SoundCloud was looking to raise another round since its last was in April 2009, from Doughty Hanson Ventures for EUR 2.5 million. Since then it has scaled in adoption and taken on bigger offices and more staff.

We’ve become used to the idea of sharing photos on Twitter (from Twitpic to Instagr.am), video (YouTube to Qik) and audio (Cinch to Soundcloud). But have we done much file-sharing via Twitter? Not to date.

There’s Tweetshare, Filesocial and Tweetcube but they are not something you will see in the average user’s stream – or at least not mine, and I follow nearly 4,000 accounts.

Twileshare is still in beta and launched just before Christmas but already it’s seen a lot of viral traffic from what I can see. There are now 24,000 mentions of it on Google.

MUBI, the online cinema platform, says it’s hit a significant growth curve recently, crossing one million registered users. It’s also raised $2.4 million from Angels to strengthen its balance sheet and grow the team in a round round led by Eduardo Costantini and which includes existing investors, Martin Varsavsky (founder of Fon), and Alec Oxenford.

The investment was joined by Aydin Senkut, Georges Harik, Joel Peterson, Bart Decrem, Eduardo Costantini, and Jose Marin. There were no institutional investors.

This is a guest post by Iqbal Gandham (@IqbalGandham), a serial Entrepreneur, with two out of his last three companies having been listed on various exchanges. Currently he splits his time between his pet project Addpiks, due diligence for investors and mentoring the odd startup.

What do the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus and Bootstrapping have in common? We are all told they are real, but with experience, we learn they are really figments of our imagination, and the sooner we accept reality the better prepared for the real world we might be, and that is the purpose of this article: a little reality check for 2011.

For the sake of clarity, the Tooth Fairy I am referring to is the one who was supposed to turn up when my molars fell out, and Santa, well the guy who was to tumble down my chimney a couple of weeks ago and leave an iPad, as opposed to the fat red guy or St. Nicholas.

Which brings me to Bootstrapping, again to avoid a flame war, I refer to the Wikipedia definition:

“Startups that bootstrap their business fund development of their company through internal cash flow and are cautious with their expenses”

Of course you’re not reading this for a discourse on Tooth Fairies and Santa, at least I hope not, so let’s bench those two for another post, and look at bootstrapping in more detail, and see if there is any truth behind the claims.

Should you be on Quora, one of the most hyped startups recently?

Cwora, created by tech comedian and speaker Tom Scott, says no, for the following reasons:

It is only the 6th of January and I’ve already been able to announce 3 French startups who have raised funding in the New Year on TechCrunch France: MyFacture, Bon-Privé and now Yakarouler. This last one has just announced a first round of funding of €3 million round with Serena Captial, the same French VC firm that is behind EspaceMax.

Yakarouler is a Paris-based startup of 33 people that sells new car parts online. With over 400,000 products from some of the best-known manufacturers, Yakarouler will be continuing its development in France. The company founded in 2006 not only provides new car parts for all kinds of cars but also delivers them to a network of over 500 fitting stations throughout the country. Furthermore, the site is also able to put customers in touch with the nearest car garage. It’s most likely this last element that really completes the service and distinguishes Yakarouler from other local c

Perhaps now that Groupon is happily being valued at $4.75 billion, investors all over the world are getting all the more interested in the local group daily deal platforms. Brand new Moroccan clone MyDeal is rumored to be raising a round and France’s Dealissime closed its first round of funding back in July. And now another French Groupon clone, Bon-Privé, is announcing that it has raised €1.5 million.

This is the first round of funding for the French startup founded back in February 2010. In-line with most of the Groupon clones, Bon-Privé offers between 40 and 90% discounts on exclusive offers to bars, restaurants, shows, etc. The site is currently live in 4 French cities – Paris, Toulouse, Nantes and Nice – and is planning to cover 10 French cities by the end of the year, starting with Bordeaux, Lille, Marseille, Lyon and Strasbourg.

Floxx, the re-branded Fitfinder we covered recently, re-emerged after a difficult birth on the campus of a UK university after being banned as leading young mids astray from their studies.

To re-cap: Floxx allows students to “spot” attractive people in at their college and post a message about them in the hope they will get a response. Womens groups have criticised the site while supporters call it merely tongue-in-cheek.

You can post 140 character messages that describe anyone you think is “hot” that has caught your eye. With the new Floxx, you can post on a map, effectively plotting where the “fittest” (as in good looking) people have been hanging out. Kinda creepy I guess.

However, in a similar manner to Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (you know, the FashMash scene), Floxx is causing a stink at UK universities yet again, raising questions about whether it will take off at all.

This is a guest post by Alan Gleeson is the General Manager of Palo Alto Software, Ltd, creators of Business Plan Pro. He holds an MBA from Oxford University and an MSc from University College, Cork, Ireland.

While the phrase ‘traction’ has typically been associated with tyres, friction and slippery driving conditions, its use is increasingly common in entrepreneurship and Venture Capital circles. This article explores what it means and why it is an important concept for entrepreneurs to be familiar with.

The Entrepreneurship Journey

The typical entrepreneurship journey moves through various stages i.e. from idea conception to business plan to execution and then to growth (or failure). For most entrepreneurs the journey is challenging not least because they need to perform many activities simultaneously while always being conscious that they may run out of money in the very near future. While sound planning can help with the former, early stage investment is often used to fund the latter i.e. the investment gap and it is at this point that the concept of traction often comes up.

Shiply, the online transport marketplace, has signed an exclusive agreement with eBay Motors UK that will see it become the site’s transport partner.

Like uShip, which entered the UK via its purchase of competitor Boxby last year, Shiply matches those requiring goods to be transported with transport companies that have spare capacity and are heading to the same destination anyway. And by doing so, prices are driven down and it’s a win for the environment. That’s the pitch, anyway.