Runa Capital, the Russian VC fund that launched in August last year, has announced that it’s increased its fund from 30 to $50 million.

Runa Capital’s mission is to back early-stage Russian and CIS-region technology companies so that they can compete globally, a vision that has attracted other investors both in Russia and globally (including the U.S.), says the VC firm, hence the increase in the size of the fund. Specifically, Runa targets startups in the “rapid growth tech sectors” of cloud computing, machine learning, virtualisation and mobile/Internet applications.

BraveNewTalent, the ‘social recruitment’ platform, has secured an undisclosed amount of venture capital funding from Northzone Ventures and two angels noted for their experience in the recruiting industry: Pierce Casey and Mike Bourne. However, we understand the funding puts the startup within site of a full Series A round, with a further round of funding-raising in the offing.

Lucian Tarnowski, BraveNewTalent’s Founder & CEO said the investment would be used to hire and scale in the US market. BraveNewTalent already has a network of corporate clients starting in London which has brought in revenues and pushed the startup towards profitability already. Clients include IBM, Tesco, L’Oreal and McAfee.

Northzone, one of Europe’s leading venture funds which invested in Spotify and Lastminute.com, has experience in this market, previously backing Stepstone, the recruitment site launched during the dotcom boom.

Idio, the content analytics platform which is sold in to publishers, has acquired thrudigital, a social media development agency. The sum was undisclosed.

Idio blogs today that the acquisition gives idio a client delivery location in London for its clients, including ITV, Sky, ASOS.com, the NHS, and Macmillan.

Admittedly a social media agency is not really a product, but what’s interesting here that the Thrudigital team, experienced in ‘big data’, will help extend idio’s platform, which integrates enterprise content management and CRM.

At this year’s DLD there was a presentation from Virgin Galactic, the venture with the rocket-powered SpaceShipOne (pictured). It turns out it’s $200,000 for a sub orbital flight.

At one point someone asked, “How much to go around the moon?”. The answer was $1.5 million. But not on Virgin – that’s elon Musk’s spaceX program, which will be in 2013/4.

But right after that the conference whispers confirmed that someone in the audience had actually bought a ticket on Virgin’s sub-orbital flight.

European business angel investors Javier Pérez-Tenessa (founder of online travel agency eDreams), Michael van Swaaij (former CEO of Skype) and other angels have invested in travel shopping club HipClub.ru, reports Russian blog Quintura.

Like other “private sales” clubs, HipClub.ru offers discounted tours and hotel stays in Russia and abroad to members. It’s a natural fit for the founders as they launched travel site HipWay.ru in 2009.

Groupalia, the Groupon-clone that operates in Spain, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Chile, has put out what at first glance seems like some impressive figures. The headline number: the group buying site now has 4.5 million users. And, perhaps better still, the company is expecting to record a turnover of $100m in 2011.

As I say, impressive.

Except I had no idea how you measure users of a group buying site. Were these monthly visitors to the website, those that had actually put money down on one or more daily deals, or simply names on Groupalia’s mailing list. So I asked for clarification.

The company issued the following response:

A lot of people would argue that there are 3 key elements to creating an environment that breeds innovation: bright and talented people, patient money that’s capable of taking risks and an environment that is not just tolerant but accepting of failure. Ok, I’m perhaps dramatically oversimplifying the list just a tad but still, these are definitely key ingredients in the magical land of innovation.

Now, let’s consider whether or not these elements are present in the French tech ecosystem. Smart people? Check. Patient, risk-taking money? Eh, OK, it’s disputable. Honestly a lot of people like to give European investors a hard time (not just the French) for being more risk averse than their American counterparts. And while it may be the case to a certain extent, one could also argue that the French investment scene is going through a bit of an evolution in the right direction, with a handful of active business angels popping up, new seed funds and now Y Combinator-like mentoring programs.

Fon, the WiFi network company backed by Google and Skype, says you can find 3.35 million Fon hotspots all across the globe these days. That’s impressive growth, which comes down to more to 200 percent year-over-year. Last time Fon shared numbers, the company revealed that it tracked 2.5 million hotspots (this was in October 2010).

Clearly, growth is accelerating for the company, in large part thanks to distribution partnerships it has struck with telecommunication companies all over the world.

Fon also reveals that they’ve ended 2010 with revenues of €28 million, up from €5 million the year before, growth it attributes to the surge in use of WiFi devices worldwide.

Google has gone all high brow on us, unveiling its Art Project, a collaboration with art museums around the world to enable people to enjoy their collections without leaving the house. It’s powered in-part by Google’s Street View ‘indoor’ technology and started off as a ’20% project’ – the time set aside for Google engineers to work on their own ideas.

Eighteen months in the making, Google says it’s worked with 17 art museums including, Altes Nationalgalerie, The Freer Gallery of Art Smithsonian, National Gallery (London), The Frick Collection, Gemäldegalerie, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Museo Reina Sofia, Museo Thyseen – Bornemisza, Museum Kampa, Palace of Versailles, Rijksmuseum, The State Hermitage Museum, State Tretyakov Gallery, Tate, Uffizi and Van Gogh Museum.

Internet startups have a lot on their plate and much of it is outside of their core business. Things like government red tape, raising funding, recruitment, and other peripheral but necessary activities add to the pain of building great products and suck up scarce bandwidth. But what about the need to make your website accessible to people with various disabilities?

A new browser toolbar – it’s actually a bookmarklet – from the campaign ‘Fix the Web‘ aims to make it easier for users with a disability and volunteers supporting the campaign to report when a website falls foul of making it accessible to all. It’s based on the ATBar, developed by researchers from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and basically makes it a lot quicker to report an issue to the Fix the Web campaign who will then investigate and alert (and work with) the offending website to find a fix.

Voddler, the Netflix / Hulu / Spotify of Scandinavia, whichever comparison you fancy, has raised $8 million in funding in a round led by Nokia’s venture capital arm Nokia Growth Partners.

The video-on-demand company’s previous backers (undisclosed private individual investors) also participated.