Although Android adoption is growing at a huge clip compared to the iPhone (not hard, since there are so many more devices and plans), iPhone apps still remain the benchmark for the smartphone app experience. In part this is down to the fact that many companies build an iPhone app first and an Android version some time later, which is often inferior in user experience. Part of the reason is that little things like the pull-down-to-refresh features that are often in Phone apps come default with the iOS platform. But to make that kind of feature work in an Android app you have to build it from the ground up.

That means there is a space for a creator of ridiculously good Android apps. Step forward Thai Tran and Nilesh Patel with Lightbox, their new startup which has taken a $1.1 million seed round from some of the top VCs and Angels in the UK and US. A private beta of their first app, Lightbox Photos, launches this week at SXSW, with the founders in attendance handing out invitation codes to the private beta. The app will be presented at the Team Android Choice Awards. You can sign up here to get on the invite list for the app here.

Radian6, which has been making waves in social media monitoring space for the past few years, has extended its global reach with the acquisition of UK-based social media firm 6Consulting. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

6Consulting’s clients include Kellogg’s, EDF, Dyson, Fujitsu, Sony Ericsson, the Metropolitan Police as well as many of the region’s PR and ad agencies. The firm has been an official reseller for Radian6 since 2009.

As with all breaking news today, social tools like Twitter are showing their strength in getting the breaking news out there about the awful events in Japan. Just as everyone else is, I am glue to Twitter right now to see what’s happening, but reports are coming in via many other means.

One of those is Audioboo, which has long had a page of the latest “boos” streaming in from users. Here’s three from Tristan Mathers in Japan just 30 minutes ago who details how phone services are going down and confusion has engulfed the area:

Groupola, which originally launched as a Groupon-clone in the UK but has since pivoted to become a daily deal aggregator, has been found by the UK’s Office of Fair Trading of operating ‘bait pricing’ in its much publicised iPhone promotion held last year.

At the time, Groupola’s biggest crime was that its website crashed throughout much of the day of the group buying promotion, leading some consumers to suggest it was a scam. How many iPhones were actually on sale was what most hopeful punters wanted to know, so we asked. Two hundred handsets was the official answer – also repeated on Groupola’s Facebook page – when in actual fact, says the OFT, it was just eight.

Oh dear.

Txtr, the eBook white label platform and maker of the txtr Reader, Germany’s answer to the Kindle, has hired a new content chief: Klaus Fuereder will be responsible for international content strategy and, specifically, courting publishers who might be interested in jumping on the “growing eReading bandwagon”, as txtr quite aptly puts it.

Fifty-two years old, Fuereder is a veteran of the publishing industry. He joins from Ulstein-Buchverlagen, where he was the General Manager Marketing and Operations. Prior to Ulstein-Buchverlagen he worked at Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Rovio, the Finnish entertainment media company who famously operates the Angry Birds franchise, has raised $42 million in Series A funding.

The round was co-led by Accel Partners and Atomico Ventures, the VC firm created by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, who will be joining Rovio’s board. ‘Super angel fund’ Felicis Ventures also participated.

Currently, Angry Birds is played by 40 million monthly active users.

You got to love the smell of a pending IPO.

Perform Group, which webcasts and provides content for various sports both as a white label service and its own consumer-facing offering, has announced its intention to float on the London Stock Exchange.

Chicisimo, the Spanish born social platform for fashion fanatics is planting its high heels into new markets, launching chicisimo.pl and chicisimo.de and now available in a total of 6 markets, including US, UK, France and Spain.

Girls share their own personal styles, tag brands, colors, styles. And others can discover them, interact, and find inspiration for breand new style ideas. The concept is much like Weardrobe, Polyvore, Chictopia and Looklet.

The rumors are true. The Samwer brothers, who are famous for executing the perfect copycat startup, have now jumped onto the BirchBox train, creating GlossyBox, their own European clone of the beauty product subscription service. The news was first reported by the German site Gruenderszene.

Over the last few months there have been several investors, incubators and entrepreneurs thinking about bringing the BirchBox model to Europe. The U.S. original has raised €1.4 million from several angels and institutional investors and seems to have a proven business model.

Tesco Mobile, the joint venture between mobile operator O2 and British supermarket Tesco, caused quite a stir back in late in 2009 when it announced that it would be selling Apple’s iPhone in its stores and online.

And while Tesco Mobile’s pricing of Apple’s premium smartphone wasn’t quite as disruptive as was hoped, the supermarket chain did differentiate itself somewhat by offering a 12 month contract and, if I remember correctly, one of the first pre-pay iPhone deals. Nearly a year and a half later, however, Tesco Mobile is declaring 2011 as “the year of the Android”.

Avangate, an Amsterdam, The Netherlands-based company that enables software makers to sell their products online as well as to manage a solid distribution network, has raised €4 million euros in funding.

Eastern European venture capitalist 3TS Capital Partners has acquired a minority stake in Avangate, out of what it is informally known as the 3TS Cisco Growth Fund.

Founded in 2005, Avangate offers a combination of an eCommerce platform, a partner management system and a worldwide affiliate network.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion this morning announced that it will launch its PlayBook tablet computer with 7digital‘s music store pre-installed.

The music store will come installed on the tablet at its launch in the United States and Canada, with further international roll out in 2011, the companies said.

As if European startups weren’t already at a notional disadvantage in addressing smaller markets, having access to less venture capital and being geographically spread out, a new EU-wide law proposes to hobble its innovation companies by slapping big privacy warning signs all over their sites.

From 25 May, new European laws will dictate that “explicit consent” must be gathered from web users who are being tracked via cookies. That translates into warnings which will put off consumers from EU sites, while US-based startups will be free to continue as they are. How convenient huh.

Although businesses are being urged to work out how they gain ‘consent’ from users, this is bound to cause consternation.

The new European e-Privacy directive is supposedly to protect privacy, although seems to be operating in a bubble. Privacy controls have existed in Web browsers for years. Indeed there are even privacy specific browsers. But consumers have consistently ignored them and carried on happily using cookies, with many people knowing that cookies actually help the browsing experience.

OpenText this morning announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire London-based weComm, which offers cross-platform mobile application deployment software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

According to OpenText CTO Eugene Roman, weComm’s technology supports the mobility strategy it debuted in 2010 with the introduction of OpenText Everywhere.

Skobbler has ported ForeverMap, its Google Maps competitor, to Android. Previously an iOS-only offering, the app provides maps for Europe and differentiates itself from Google Maps with full support for offline usage. That’s because maps are fully downloaded and stored on the phone rather than relying on a persistent connection to the Cloud.

Curious, however, is Skobbler’s business model for ForeverMap on Android: Two versions exist, a free and paid-for (£1.37) offering. The latter providing faster downloads with the former relying on potentially slower peer-to-peer.

Onefinestay, the ‘unhotel’ service that lets travelers stay in someone’s real home while the owner is out of town, has raised $3.7 million in Series A led by Index Ventures.

PROfounders Capital also participated, along with Brent Hoberman, co-founder of Lastminute.com; Andy Phillipps, co-founder of Active Hotels; Jonathan Eilian, a founding investor in Starwood Hotels; and David Magliano, former Director of Marketing for London 2012. So that’s a pretty strong line up with connections to the travel and hospitality sectors online.

Furthermore, Index Ventures partner Robin Klein will take a seat on onefinestay’s board. Of course, the Index connection goes back further: Onefinestay co-founder and CEO Greg Marsh was previously on the investment team at the European VC firm.

ThingLink, which provides tools to let users embed links into images, has partnered with SoundCloud to add audio as an option.

The idea is that those who work primarily in audio – musicians, bands, sound designers etc. – can now include images in their work, perhaps as part of a promotional campaign, flyer or as album art work. But also, given SoundCloud’s recent pivot to become a more mainstream audio sharing platform, ThingLink could be used to annotate or add voice notes or background sounds to any photograph in all sorts of use cases, such as a memorable family photograph, for example. And because the SoundCloud link is embedded into a ThingLink image, that audio interactivity travels with the image, meaning it can be shared on social networks.

Wow, that was fast. TechStars’ first international affiliate, Startupbootcamp, literally just announced its plans to expand the Copenhagen-based startup mentoring program into Madrid, London and Berlin later this year. And now Dublin has been added to the list! Guess Ireland’s rather grim economic situation didn’t phase anyone.

But unlike the other Startupbootcamp programs to date, the Dublin program is kicking it up a notch and integrating multinationals. With IBM and Citi as partners for the event (along with Enterprise Ireland and Dublin City Council), the Dublin program will be oriented more towards the application and commercialization of specific technologies developed by the teams.

The AIM-listed investment company Brainspark has acquired a 30% stake in the Italian location-based social network Mobnotes. The deal will see Brainspark hand over €600k equally split between cash and stock.

Similar to Loopt and other location-based social networks, Mobnotes (‘mobile notes’) lets users locate nearby friends, shops and restaurants etc. and send location notifications. It has mobile apps for iPhone, Nokia (Symbian), Android and Vodafone 360 as well as a generic mobile site, and claims 150,000 registered users in Italy, “working in conjunction with the major mobile handset manufacturers and networks.”

Breaking: Google has acquired the financial product comparison site BeatThatQuote.com for £37.7m. The news was first outed by the blog money.co.uk but has since been made official.

Writing on the UK company’s site, BeatThatQuote Managing Director, John Paleomylites, says that the acquisition offers the opportunity to “develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK” by making use of Google’s engineering muscle. Of course, like almost any Google purchase these days, the deal could raise the eyebrows of regulators, especially in regards to how it places the comparison site’s content in its search index.

With that in mind, perhaps, Paleomylites talks up the possibility to “offer more transparency and better pricing information than existing online offerings.”