Qriously, a service that lets brands measure location-based public opinion, has raised $1.6m in a new funding round led by Accel Partners. Amalfi Capital also participated, while the London-based startup is originally backed by Pacific Tiger Group.

Through its SDK offered to mobile app developers, Qriously lets advertisers display questions instead of traditional mobile ads so that they can measure sentiment in realtime but also based on a user’s location. Those advertisers could be ad agencies, marketers, research companies and eventually small businesses – Qriously wants to “democratize mass insight”, says Christopher Kahler, CEO and co-founder – while app developers get a kick back via a pay-per-answer model rather than pay-per-click or transaction.

It’s hoped, therefore, that Qriously will give developers another revenue stream to enable them to offer their mobile app or service for free.

Kiwibox.com, a social network focused on young adults, has acquired German photo book community site Pixunity.de for an undisclosed sum. Pixunity lets users upload photos, design scrapbooks and share photo books with others.

As a result of the asset acquisition of the online platform, Kiwibox will translate and adapt the website to the US market while continuing to provide support to existing members and the website in Europe. It’s not clear how big the user base of either sites is, exactly, but the Pixunity community apparently grew by 15,000 members in the whole of last quarter, which means it isn’t exactly growing by leaps and bounds.

SocialSafe, the Facebook back-up tool from 1minus1 and Julian Ranger‘s iBundle, has added support for Twitter so that users can make an offline back-up of their tweets, @mentions, Direct Messages, profile and follower structure.

Built using Adobe Air, the app supports both Mac and Windows and, unlike the likes of Backupify, shuns the Cloud for back-ups. Instead all data is stored locally on a user’s PC where, of course, it can still be pushed to the Cloud using a complimentary back-up service but otherwise data integrity and security is left very much in the user’s own hands, which might be a good or bad thing.

Privalia is very serious about becoming a major private online sales club on a global scale, kicking up its European presence up a notch with the acquisition of Germany’s online clothing and apparel retailer Dress for Less. The site was acquired from Palamon Capital Partners, a pan-European private equity firm, and Privalia has disclosed that it raised 88 million euros in new equity financing from General Atlantic, Highland Capital Partners, Index Ventures and Insight Ventures Partners as part of the transaction.

With the acquisition, Privalia has expanded its geographic reach to Germany (it was already operational in Spain, Italy, Mexico and Brazil) but also extends its business model into the open site, discount and full price segments. In other words, Privalia is on its way to becoming a global online fashion retail powerhouse.

After pivoting somewhat to focus on the more economical Internet radio model, the UK’s We7 has launched a new, ad-supported app for Android.

Along with its headline price of free, the Radio app for phones running Google’s mobile OS supports offline playback. This means that personalised radio stations based on a user’s musical tastes or those curated by editors can be cached in advance so that they’ll continue to play outside of a 3G or WiFi connection, a commonly employed trick by mobile music ‘streaming’ services that not only provides uninterrupted playback but also potentially saves on data usage and associated costs, along with battery life. Although for a personalised Internet radio service, We7 is claiming a European first.

Nat Wei (@natwei), is a social entrepreneur and adviser to the UK Government on their “Big Society” project. As one of the youngest people ever to have been made a Life Peer of the House of Lords, Lord Wei is the founding and former lead partner of the Shaftesbury Partnership, and a member of the founding team of Teach First. As “Baron Wei of Shoreditch” he is intensely interested in the emergence of the cluster of startup technology companies in the Shoreditch/Hoxton area of London which has come to be known as Silicon Roundabout and which has informed the UK government’s new “East London Tech City” initiative. This week will be the first in a series of guest posts on the use of technology in re-building civic society.

The Big Society is an approach being championed inside and outside of the government in the UK and increasingly in other countries to enable citizens to take more control over their lives, based on the belief that people often know how to solve the problems they care about and improve their communities better than anyone else. Whilst built on centuries old principles, it is also optimistic about the power of technology, and has been inspired by the more open, inclusive, and effective ways of working expressed through the internet, social media, and crowd sourcing.

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.

If you are a European startup in stealth or in private beta and want to launch at GeeknRolla, then fill out this form. We extended the deadline to tomorrow, March 4th.

We’re today announcing the majority of our speakers:

Yota, the Russian mobile broadband company, has signed a deal with the country’s main network operators – Beeline, Megafon, MTS and Rostelekom – that plots out a 4G future. A future that should benefit local startups.

Under the deal, the signing of which was witnessed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin no less, Yota is to become the 4G network provider for the Russian telco market which will see the roll-out of its LTE network to cover 180 cities by 2014, providing coverage for over 70 million of the population.

It’s not an entirely new idea: offer a way to view trending content shared by your friends via social media. That’s the basic premise of Utopic, the latest project from the team behind Talentag, the “social CV” that we profiled last August.

In its first iteration, Utopic is entirely reliant on Facebook – support for Twitter and YouTube is forthcoming – and after logging in with Facebook Connect provides a nice visual take on the most popular links, videos, music, movies and events shared and liked by your friends. Its competitors include sites such as Postpost and Summify, which does something similar but via email, and to a lesser degree services like Flipboard.

Disney has acquired an HTML5 gaming engine startup called Rocket Pack, based out of Helsinki, Finalnd. A Disney spokesperson told us today, exclusively: “We can confirm that The Walt Disney Company has acquired Rocketpack, an integrated solution for plugin-free browser game development. Through a merger agreement, Rocketpack is now a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company reporting into Disney Interactive Media Group (DIMG).”

Disney has not released the purchase price and asked us not to “speculate”. But we will. One source told us it was between $10 million and $20 million. It’s a fast acquisition – as of Feb 1, Rocket Pack was still developing the engine.

The European Commission has confirmed “unannounced inspections” in the eBook publishing sector in several European countries related to suspicions that said companies have “violated EU antitrust rules that prohibit cartels and other restrictive business practices.”

This is a pretty big deal, although the EC – for obvious reasons – is keen to stress that an investigation doesn’t imply guilt and that this is “preliminary.” It also follows a similar investigation opened last month by the UK’s own Office of Fair Trading after several complaints were received from consumers.

UnLtdWorld, the three year-old social network for social entrepreneurs, has been acquired by Guardian News & Media Limited (part of the Guardian Media Group).

Terms aren’t being disclosed and UnLtdWorld are being tight lipped, which suggests it wasn’t a major pay day. The site itself will be kept live for now but the plan moving forward is to combine the current UnLtdWorld platform with the Guardian Social Enterprise Network “to offer the best content, bloggers and the largest network of people and resources for the sector”, wrote David Mills, Editor, Guardian Social Enterprise Network in an email sent out to UnLtdWorld users.

yaM Labs, a Russian startup not to be confused with Yammer, has secured $500k from Foresight Ventures. The company has developed Cloud-based software to make meetings – both face-to-face and virtual – more efficient by enabling participants to collaborate on the planning, running, and execution of a meeting.

The premise being that traditional offline tools make for a lot of wasted time because meetings lack focus and ‘memory’ – you have to be there to know what went down and even if you were, often the answer is not a lot or there at least exists no actual record. Shifting these tools to the Cloud – the yaM app runs completely in a web browser – and improving them along the way is supposed to help with this. The startup broke cover at our recent TechCrunch Moscow event.

This is a guest post by Olga Slavkina, a digital brand consultant who lives in Brussels, Belgium where she works with innovative companies. She blogs at Schmoozyfox and Tweets as @FunkyBizBabe

Last November, Google was trying to buy Groupon for $5.3 billion, in what would have been its largest acquisition yet.

To everybody’s surprise, Groupon said No.

The deal-of-the-day site, which offers one deal per day in each of the markets it serves, was launched in 2008. By the time of Google’s attempts to buy it, it was operational in 150 markets in North America, and 100 markets in Europe. Its popularity and quick growth was mainly due to supposedly big rewards for the site users, who could get access to various services (such as massage, yoga courses, meals) and products at heavily discounted prices. It was said to be the result of “buyer power” but obviously had more to do with sales promotions for the brands in question.

kaufDa is one of Germany’s leading “promotion search” sites. What’s that? It helps you look for the best sales and mobile couponing running near where you live. So instead of retailers needing to send out huge catalogues, Germans have warmed to kaufDa’s targeted nature.

Admittedly it doesn’t sound that exciting a business. But today European media giant Axel Springer has acquired a 74.9 percent equity interest in the business for $40US million, thus generated a tidy, and significant, European-style exit for the investors concerned.

The story behind the price is that traditional publishing companies are quite simply terrified of kaufDA. It targets the $3bn retail advertising market in Germany, much of which is poised to transfer online, long after classifieds in jobs or car search did so.

And you can talk up Foursquare et al all you like. But kaufDa has been simgled out as Germany’s “Star of Location Based Services” because of its market dominance in local promotions, much of it delivered by mobile.

Some 30% of traffic is mobile already: kaufDA’s iPhone Navigator App has been installed on over 15% of all iPhones and over 20% of all iPads in Germany. kaufDA’s app hit the No. 1 position of most downloaded apps in Apple’s AppStore for several weeks in the past, both on iPhone and iPad.

Amongst VCs it was common knowledge that former Accel partner Simon Levene was ‘borrowing a desk’ at Index Ventures’ Mayfair office after leaving Accel just over a year ago.

But they’ve finally made it official, in a post on their blog today by Neil Rimer, to “formally welcome one of our close friends, Simon Levene, into the Index family.”

Levene will join as a full-time Venture Partner based out of the London office, with special interest in entrepreneurs coming out of “Europe and Israel.” He’s known to have great connections in both.

Pan-european VC Wellington Partners, together with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and angel investor Sherry Coutu have invested in hot new UK startup Artfinder, which is setting out to the ‘the LastFM’ for the global art world, letting people catalogue and follow the art they love.

The first-round funding – which is undisclosed – was led by Wellington (which has invested in Xing, Qype, Spotify, Livebookings, Adconion and others), while Hoffman invested via the Greylock Discovery Fund, their seed fund (Greylock’s main Fund XIII, invested in in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pandora and Groupon among others). Sherry Coutu, best known in the UK as founder of Interactive Investor International (which went public) and serial Angel, will act as Chairman of the company.

Artfinder has partnered with galleries, libraries, museums and artists worldwide to build an extremely comprehensive online catalogue of fine art featuring over 250,000 works from over 400 institutions. I’ve seen the demo and it’s pretty amazing – and you can too as the site goes live today.

Alright Europe, listen up: you have 1 week left to apply to the Founder Institute’s Spring programs in Berlin, Brussels and Paris. Applications for the 17-week startup mentoring program are due March 6th.

But this time, Adeo Ressi‘s Founder Institute is going to kick off it’s European program a little differently with a 3-day European Bootcamp in Berlin for all the European participants. From Friday, March 25 through Sunday, March 27, all entrepreneurs enrolled in the upcoming Spring sessions will meet former graduates and some of the institute’s top mentors, including Evernote’s Phil Libin and Gamification pioneer Gabe Zichermann.

Qype, the location-based reviews and recommendation service, is to get in on the local coupon market. This is via an acquisition of Munich-based Cooledeals.de, which the company announced today. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed.

The acquisition is enabling Qype, which is the largest user-generated local review site in Europe (ahead of Yelp), to add coupons and discount vouchers to its offering. This comes in the form of QypeDeals.com, initially launching in Germany but with plans to “rapidly roll-out” in other European territories through 2011.

In other words, watch out Groupon and DailyDeal and a host of other local discount providers and aggregators throughout Europe. Cooledeals already sits third in the German coupon space. Then there’s Facebook, of course, and upstarts like Foursquare. It seems that the local coupon and discounts battle has only just begun.

How influential are the people who check in to your startup space? Physical tech incubators and startup spaces like Dog Patch Labs or Kicks Labs, and counterparts like TechHub and WhiteBearYard in London or Innovation Works in Beijing often make a lot of the hot young talent they attract. But there’s never really been a way to sort the wheat from the chaff – until now.