Earlier today, the official Twitter account of Flattr, the micropayment startup founded by ex-Pirate Bay associates, tweeted that they were “excited excited excited …”, so we knew something was up. Now we’ve learned that the service, which enables users to ‘Like’ sites and content but with real money, is indeed rolling out something new: the ability to donate specific amounts of money to Flattr users directly.

So rather than relying solely on the albeit innovate model of simply divvying up a pre-allocated monthly pool of cash (starting from €2), no matter how thinly that’s spread if a user chooses to “Flattr” a high number of sites, a chunk of that change can now be sliced off at will. And while any user will be able to receive donations, Wikileaks, which amid controversy has been shunned by traditional players MasterCard, PayPal and Visa, stands to benefit from the new feature greatly – donations are anonymous with a minimum payment of 2 euros.

Swedish music company X5 Music has secured a 7 million Euro investment from Northzone Ventures, which also happens to the be the lead investor in that other Scandinavian music startup you’ve probably heard of, Spotify.

X5 Music is a digital record label operating largely in Europe. It plans to use the funding to sign American artists and to increase X5 Music´s current catalogue. This USA expansion makes them the first Swedish “record label” in 50 years to do so. It will also be opening up a new office in New York at the beginning of 2011 and investing in music catalogues. It’s business plan is to be the “best alternative for major American artists” says Johan Lagerlöf CEO at X5 Music.

The wonderful thing about Twitter is that is can be used in many different ways. @ShitMyDadSays was a simple account which recounted the saying of a New York pensioner in all their unfiltered glory, and even became a TV show. But corporate entities – and it has to be said, startups – rarely do anything so brave.

Not so Betfair which, fresh from it’s IPO has been running a Twitter account to promote its Poker section. Except the link to the Poker section on the profile is just about all you’ll see to associate it with the world of betting, poker, or anything so mundane and temporal.

Angry Birds, the wildly popular game on a raft of smartphones, has made its way to the PC.

Sometime overnight a version for Windows XP/7 became available via Intel’s AppUp store, which specifically targets Netbooks.

The app costs $9.99/£5.99/€7.99, although for a limited time gamers can get in on the action for $4.99. The choice to launch on Intel’s desktop app store, which very much borrows from the smartphone model of ‘on-deck’ offerings, is also interesting in light of Apple’s own pending Mac store. Angry Birds has established itself as an iPhone classic so we’ll likely see it fly off the shelves (pun intended) if or when it lands (sorry, again) on Macbooks and the like.

An interesting debate about the cult of the ‘celebrity entrepreneur’ piqued my interest today. The Telegraph argues that since “we live in an age of aggressive, vacuous self-promotion” this has helped produce a kind of entrepreneur who is far more media figure than credible business person. In particular it says this is happening “especially within the technology industry”.

I agree with the view that as a society we do now tend to hear a lot more about people who are doing nothing in particular other than just look good or sing the odd song (Cheryl Cole et al) versus the people who actually make shit happen. My own theory is that this is just a function of the fragmentation of media. As more media arrived to fill ever-growing niches, it required more and more people to write about in order to fill each niche of print and air-time. Thus we’ve ended up with a situation where we require a constant turnover of ‘celebrity’ (or more accurately, notoriety), in any form we the media can get, in order to fill all that space, thus generating ad and subscription revenue.

But back to ‘tech celebs’.

ContactZilla is another take on the unified address book. Or more specifically, it’s being pitched as an online ‘Contact Management System’ for businesses designed with the Social Web in mind and the ability to merge contacts from the likes of Twitter and LinkedIn with more traditional sources. The service, built by Bristol, UK-based web development agency Simpleweb, is currently in private Beta but TechCrunch Europe has 200 invites.

Of course, this kind of offering has been tried before – and many startups are playing in and around the social CRM space. However, ContactZilla hopes to differentiate itself by remaining free compared to more traditional offerings such as Gist or Capsule.

LoveFilm, currently the source of speculation over whether it is about to be sold to Amazon or not, has boosted its streaming content following an exclusive agreement with Icon Film Distribution. LoveFilm members will be able to access new releases from Icon through the sites media player.

The deal means that Icon films not sen before on any subscription or TV movie service will be available only to LoveFilm members for one year, on PCs and direct-to-TV through Samsung and Sony internet-enabled devices and, most recently, PlayStation 3.

LeadMedia, the European online performance marketing company with headquarters in Paris, has acquired Sao Paulo, Brazil-based MediaFactory.

Founded by Stephane Darracq (a French serial technology entrepreneur) and backed by private equity firm Truffle Capital, LeadMedia provides clients with Internet marketing solutions, including qualified traffic generation, lead and traffic re-targeting, online customer relationship management (CRM), lead generation and technology solutions for “behavioural and semantic targeting”.

I won’t get into the “women in tech” debate but any help for startups is definitely a good thing. On that note, Astia, the not-for-profit “venture accelerator for women-led high-growth companies”, is calling for applications from UK and European startups for its Entrepreneur Programme, to be held in London in March 2011. Specifically, it’s targeting Technology, Life Science and Clean Technology companies.

Held annually in Silicon Valley, New York, and London, Astia’s Entrepreneur Programme provides women entrepreneurs with access to resources and experts in the pursuit of the capital needed to grow their startups. Participants this year will spend five days in London (between 14-18 March 2011), attending a series of workshops, one-on-one sessions and discussions with investors, entrepreneurs and the like who’ll help to show the way to successful fundraising and “growth strategies”.

SoundCloud is courting more investment in the form of offers from Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures, if German startup blog Gruenderszene is to be believed. We’ve reached out to the company for comment. It’s likely that SoundCloud is 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.

Real estate startup Zoopla continues it land grab today, announcing that it’s acquired Houseprices.co.uk, which when launched in 2005 was one of the first sites to offer free property price data for the UK and is currently the leader in the space. The terms of the deal are undisclosed but, having secured a further £3.25 million in funding in December (adding to the £3.75 million already raised in January 2009), Zoopla would appear to have deep enough pockets to roll up competitors and complementary sites in equal measure – something that it’s already been doing plenty of.

MyFacture, a little French startup situated in La Rochelle has just announced that it has raised €1 million with Alto Invest. Not to worry if you haven’t heard of many startups from La Rochelle, the town’s entrepreneurial activity isn’t exactly that of Paris, Nantes or elsewhere. Still, this company – founded in January 2010 – managed to score funding in order to bring its invoicing software to mobile platforms – namely smartphones and tablets. I guess this means entrepreneurs will now be happily sending invoices directly from their mobile phones while on the go.

Floxx, the re-launched Fitfinder now backed by serial UK Angel investor Doug Richard, has re-emerged after a difficult birth on the campus of a UK university. To rewind quickly:

Last year Rich Martell, 21, a final-year computer sciences student at University College London, founded of a UK site integrated with Facebook and Twitter allowing students to flirt. Sounds like The Facebook huh? Except this student was fined £300 for bringing his university into disrepute. FitFinder only started in May but rapidly expanded to universities across the country before having to be taken down.

It’s reported that Amazon is in talks to acquire LoveFilm, the UK-DVD rental and online movie-streaming company. The deal is said to be worth $312 million, but in all honesty we are not surprised. The talks have been going on since at least September, and Lovefilm has been looking for an exit since, oh, 2009?