Fubles.com, the Italian social sport community just raised €300,000 from well-known Italian investors.

The round was led by Pino Partecipazioni, an investor in Yoox, Tiscali and Venere. Other investors include Marco Magnocavallo, who recently sold Blogo, Gianandrea Cherubini, a partner at Vantage Investment Management and Carmine Giangiulio of Unicredit.

Wooga, which is sometimes referred to as the Zynga of Europe, has moved up two places on the social gaming leader-board, overtaking U.S. rivals Popcap and Digital Chocolate. Or so says the Berlin-based startup, citing data from Facebook metric service Appdata.com.

Interestingly, however, Wooga’s 18 million monthly users are dwarfed by Zynga itself, which holds on to the number one spot with a whopping 259m active users per-month across its social games lineup – and in fact all four slots above Woogla are Silicon Valley-based companies. In other words, Wooga is fighting the good fight for Europe but Facebook gaming is still dominated by the U.S.

Right now the UK media is making a lot of noise about new Visa rules which mean “super-investors” willing to put £5m into a UK bank account will get the right to stay indefinitely in Britain after only three years. This is two years faster than the average migrant who still has to wait five years. Deposit £10m and the time drops to two years. Clearly the new rules are aimed at high-value investors and entrepreneurs.

However, what the media is missing is the new rules governing entrepreneurs wanting to enter the UK. Now, beginning April 6th, “high-potential” entrepreneurs will be allowed to come to the UK so long as they have £50,000 in funding from a reputable organisation.

That is ridiculously good new for tech startups wanting to set up shop in the UK, and startups in the UK wanting to hire in talent they can’t get locally – CTOs for instance. Plus, entrepreneurs will be allowed to enter the UK with their business partners as long as they have access to joint funds.

The French press has been going crazy announcing the opening of Linkedin’s new Paris office. Finally, it looks like Linkedin in stepping-up its game to take on French rival, Viadeo. In France, Viadeo counts 4 million users, which is double that of Linkedin’s French userbase. Then again, Viadeo is trailing behind Linkedin internationally with 35 million users to Linkedin’s 90 million. Ouch.

Linkedin, which has European offices in London, the Netherlands and Ireland is obviously launching this office in France for strategic reasons. Laurence Bret, Linkedin’s new EMEA Marketing Director, seems to be running the Paris office for now. She joined the team in Janaury after spending 2 years with French startup Silentale. Prior to Linkedin and Silentale, Laurence was at AOL and France Télécom…at least, according to her Linkedin profile.

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of visiting Tel Aviv for the first time and meeting some local mobile companies ahead of Mobile World Congress. What I found was an incredible entrepreneurial environment. Just four hours away from London, in Europe, Tel Aviv is almost like having Silicon Valley in your doorstep. Admittedly this is not exactly news. Israel has a long history of producing amazing tech companies, in part due to the foresight of the government in nurturing the local VC scene. However, I plan to write up my experiences further, in due course (little things like MWC and DLD have gotten in the way unfortunately), but suffice it to say that it was great to hang out with Blonde2.0 and many other tech companies at dinner.

But for now I’m really looking forward to heading back to Israel for the awesome Techonomy3 (grab tickets here) event, and before it, Kinnernet.

This year’s Techonomy3 event is taking place on April 5th, 2011, and will be a day filled with tech startup launches out of Israel. Hang on to your hats folks!

French VC firm Alven Capital recently announced it’s second investment since the beginning of year. The firm participated in the €3 million round raised by “online optician” HappyView in February and is now announcing a new €2.5 million ($3.5 million) in Entropysoft.

It’s the first-round of funding for the company specializing in content integration solutions, which will go towards reinforcing Entropysoft’s teams in France and the US. Focusing on the integration of unstructured data, the company’s flagship product, Content Hub, aims to resolve content fragmentation challenges via the synchronization of content repositories, achriving of documents in the cloud and providing cloud-access to documentation services. In addition, Content Hub uses Entropysoft’s 40 CMS connectors, which are at the core of the company’s business.

Wuala, the Zurich-based startup that was acquired by LaCie in early 2009, has brought its secure online storage service to iPhone via a dedicated app. It allows users to access their personal files on-the-go and also share them with others, similar to many other competing cloud-storage services.

Russian search engine Yandex is having a busy week. After flicking the switch on its PayPal competitor Yandex.Money so that it supports other countries in the CIS region beyond Russia, the company has today unveiled Yandex.Translate, an online translation service based on “proprietary machine translation technology.”

The new service – Google Translate, anyone? – translates text or web pages in Russian into English or Ukrainian. It works the other way round too. Text and web pages in English or Ukrainian can also be translated into Russian.

The technology spin-offs of three leading Israeli Universities are to collaborate with Google on research looking at online auctions.

The search giant is sponsoring Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and Technion to conduct over 20 such research projects which will address the opportunities of the Internet economy, posing questions around the economic effects of viral networking, the dynamics of electronic markets, and new formats of selling advertisements, which could be beneficial to the user and the advertisers, according to the press release.

Bordeaux-based Allgoob closed a €1 million round last year with French investment firm Newfund. The funding was to help the search engine publisher expand in Europe and to launch classifieds search engine Wipikit.

Today, Allgoob is announcing the launch of its job search engine, Jobijoba, in Germany. With roughly 3 million monthly unique visitors, Jobijoba is already present in 6 countries – including France, Spain, Belgium, the UK, the US and Australia. The new German site already counts over 245K job offers, thanks to partnerships with job sites like Experteer and Stepstone. Plus, the team has announced that it’s hoping to have some 1 million job offers on this new site by next June.

London based Just-Eat, an online take-out ordering service, has closed a financing round of $48m co-led by two leading VCs, Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures, with existing investor Index Ventures also participating. Although now based out of London it was originally founded in Denmark.

Just-Eat now plans an international roll-out. Right now it’s in ten countries and three continents and working with 15,000 restaurants. The company claims to generate over $500m of revenue for local businesses in 2011 by linking up normal restaurant POS and ordering systems with an aggregator site which takes orders for takeaway food.

Yesterday, Gartner declared that 2011 will be the year of Platform as a Service (PaaS). Not only does this mean we’ll be seeing a wave of innovation but also a consolidation of various offers over the next few years.

Well, we’ve perhaps already witnessed a bit of consolidation. Like with VMware’s acquisition of WaveMaker just last week. This acquisition – which took place only a few months after Cloudbees bought Stax – should naturally strengthen VMware’s PaaS range.

Alternative asset manager, The Carlyle Group, has acquired the visual effects software developer, The Foundry, from Advent Venture Partners and “other stakeholders”. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

London-headquartered The Foundry provides technology to major feature film studios and post production houses in the US and UK, while its software been has used in the production of award-winning and nominated movies such as Avatar, Tron: Legacy, Alice in Wonderland, The King’s Speech, 127 Hours and Black Swan.

GeeknRolla [tickets here] is the annual conference to bring together Europe’s technology startups to network with investors and talk about how they create and build themselves. The watchwords are: Launch startups; give investors dealflow.

As with last year there is a special emphasis on launching startups and connecting them with investors, who will comprise our judging panels. There will also be a “DemoRolla” area of demo tables for startups to showcase their products. The venue will be Park Plaza Victoria, 239 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 1EQ. The now legendary GeeknRolla Afterparty, which will take place at the amazing, world-famous London nightclub, Pacha, will also help the networking. Ticket holders for the main day-long conference will automatically get in to the after-party, so fear not! We will release a limited amount of After-Party-only tickets shortly. Details of how to get these will be available in due course, so stay tuned to the GeeknRolla Twitter feed and the event web site. For sponsorship opportunities please email events director Aléna Dundas ( alena [@] techcrunch.com ) for further details. You can follow any specific updates on the GeeknRolla twitter feed.

I’d strongly advise you get a ticket. Last year we more than sold out. To attend the event, tickets will be only £149. Thus is a stunning price for a conference of this nature. See who we had to speak last year and check out all the video.

Huge thanks to our lead sponsors a href=”http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com”>Microsoft BizSpark, Moonfruit, TechHub and our streaming media partner Bambuser.

PROGRAMME:

Russian search engine Yandex has expanded its online payment system Yandex.Money – a local PayPal competitor – to other CIS countries, including Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

Launched in 2002, Yandex.Money enable users to transfer money between accounts and make payments via the Internet. It currently supports over 3,000 online retailers in Russia and internationally, including Skype.

Yeah, this round of funding is huger than huge. Well, at least for Europe. And while it may be nowhere near Groupon’s, like, billion-dollar-round, it is definitely amongst the bigger deals on this side of the Atlantic.

Multiple sources have confirmed that they are currently in discussion with Luxemburg-based Wikio Groupe, who is in the process of securing a very large round of funding.  While no official information has been released, the 8-figure number could easily hit 9-figures in USD given the current exchange rate. That would make it one of the biggest rounds of funding to take place in Europe this year.

Who do you trust most when it comes to recommendations: an algorithm or your friends? Or perhaps a mixture of machine learning and your social graph. That’s something that a lot of startups are trying to figure out right now.

LoveThis.com, which launches out of Beta today, is firmly in the social camp with its ‘black book’ of your friends’ recommendations, from websites and apps, places to eat and go, or something more practical like a good plumber. That may sound like a very general list of recommendations but the site’s premise is that your friends not only know best but also vouch for products and services all of the time, just not necessarily when you actually need those recommendations. LoveThis attempts to solve this problem of recall by encouraging users to store this info as structured and searchable data for later use.

Mobile media company Neomobile has acquired Onebip, a company that provides mobile payment solutions to online game publishers, social networks and ecommerce companies. The Italian group says the acquisition of Onebip will enhance its offering to international merchants, particularly coupled with its strong mobile carrier relationships throughout Europe and Latin America.

Financial details on the transaction were not disclosed but we’ve learned Onebip’s co-founders, Diego Mortillaro and Marko Maras, will remain on board.

Regular readers will know that I love my Kindle.

And with news today that Amazon’s eReader will be stocked at Carphone Warehouse, the UK’s largest independent mobile phone retailer, along with its sister company Best Buy, that love should get spread a little further.

This is especially true since, as well as selling the device outright, Carphone hopes to entice customers to sign up for a 24 month mobile phone contract by dangling the carrot of a “free” Kindle WiFi edition on tariffs starting from £15 per-month. Or for an extra one-off payment of £15 they can upgrade their free eReader to the 3G version.

Yes, the subsidy merry-go-round has reached the Kindle.

Lovefilm, the so-called ‘Netflix of Europe’, is continuing its expansion to Internet-connected televisions. The company, which was recently fully acquired by Amazon, is partnering with Oregan Networks, makers of the TV-friendly web browser Onyx.