Yatego, the German e-commerce platform, has received investment from Acton Capital Partners. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, although the remaining share capital is held solely by the company’s management. Yatego says it will use the funding to accelerate growth and improve its offering to retailers and consumers.

Founded in 2003, the St. Georgen, Germany-headquartered company offers retailers a one-stop solution for business-to-consumer e-commerce – an online shopping mall, if you will. It basically does the heavy lifting so that retailers can easily set up shop online. Yatego offers online marketing, payment and IT-systems, allowing its clients to benefit from economies of scale.

This week the UK’s Technology Strategy Board, run by the government as a booster of the tech business world, unveiled a new £1m fund to support “digital businesses” in the area around Old Street and Shoreditch in east London (‘Silicon Roundabout’ to you and me) which the government has decided to call “TechCity” as a way of ‘branding’ an area which has over the years produced a natural cluster without any government help. Announced by Universities and Science Minister David Willetts, the news has left a number of people confused as to the real down and dirty detail of how it will all work. They could of course read the PDF, but we decided to give them the chance to explain it on TechCrunch Europe. If anyone still has questions they can email the guys running the competion, David.Bott[AT]tsb.gov.uk and/or Nick.Appleyard[AT]tsb.gov.uk

The TechCity LaunchPad is designed to support and extend the cluster that has grown up in the East End of London. Companies will have the opportunity to apply for funding of up to £100,000 for their projects through a competitive process.

Google has just announced its very first clean energy project investment in Europe, and hopefully not its last. The Internet giant is pumping 3.5 million euros (roughly $5 million) in a solar photovoltaic power plant in a town near Berlin, Germany. Google isn’t investing in the plant on its own – it has sided with German private equity company Capital Stage.

The company is quick to point that the transaction still requires the formal approval of the German competition authorities, and is subject to other customary closing conditions.

Described as a “transactional knowledge market”, Mancx has launched today as a sort of classified ads site for business intelligence. Or to think of it another way: a kind of paid-for LinkedIn Answers where each request for specific information comes attached with a bounty.

In fact, Mancx offers users the option of linking their LinkedIn accounts for additional credibility, while at the other end of the spectrum, users can also choose to remain completely anonymous.

Each question or knowledge request has a price tag attached to it, although the platform allows for further private negotiation between users, and Mancx sits in the middle, taking a 20% commission. In that sense, the business model is obvious. But will it work?

Norway-headquartered Colibria, which provides instant messaging, presence and network address book solutions to the mobile industry, has been acquired by Metaswitch Networks, which also offers services and applications to operators. The terms aren’t being disclosed. Colibria has previously received investment from Verdane Capital, Ferd Venture, and Bjørgvin.

Colibria provides scalable solutions for mobile instant messaging, real-time social networking and other value-added content services targeted at operators who in turn can offer these to consumers. It’s main pitch is interoperability between devices and platforms and helping operators “turn up the heat” and compete with so-called ‘over-the-top’ applications and services i.e. direct consumer-facing offerings from Internet players and independent app developers.

Populis, the formerly public on-demand content company formerly known as GoAdv, has reported record revenues of 58 million euros ($83 million) for 2010. Its network of blogs and ecommerce sites now reach over 26 million unique visitors per month, says the company, which is often dubbed Europe’s equivalent of Demand Media or Associated Content.

Populis posits that it’s been profitable since day one, and that it still has about 20 million euros in the bank, with which it hopes to realize more acquisitions this year. Content production is up to 35,000 articles and videos per month, says the company, adding that it is hungry for more expansion within Europe and South America through 2011.

.eu, the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the European Union, originally launched 7 December 2005, but full public registration started on 7 April 2006. One day early, EURid, the non-profit that operates the .eu TLD, issued a press release celebrating its fifth birthday.

According to EURid, registration of .eu domain names have doubled in five years, which puts it ninth on the list of most popular TLDs in the world. “This proves that .eu gives companies an effective means to present themselves online as open for business across Europe, “said Marc Van Wesemael, General Manager of EURid.

But is it really an achievement worth crowing about? I beg to differ.

Russia’s Oktogo.ru, the online travel company and hotel aggregator, has raised $5m. The round was led by Mangrove Capital, while ABRT and French fund Ventech VC also participated. Additionally, the founder of OLX, Fabrice Grinda and Jose Marin of IG Expansion will be joining the board.

The new investment will be used by Oktogo to pick up more Russian hotels as customers (7,000 apparently), accelerate growth and build the company’s brand awareness.

“Shpigler the Shark” is a Tel Aviv-based advisor to startups. Whether fictional or real, this guy is funny. He’s already given his advice to Yahoo back when it might even have been listening. Today at Techonomy, he debuted his latest missive, this time to Mark Zuckerberg.

What is the future of Facebook? Ask Shpigler!

“From here you can only go down. Don’t be Myspace,” he starts, gently.

Mobile ad network madvertise is continuing its European expansion, opening dedicated offices in London, Barcelona, Madrid and Milan.

That’s because the Berlin-headquartered startup is seeing 35% of its revenues coming from international campaigns, coupled with the fact that ad sales, even online, need a certain amount of actual feet on the ground. This is especially true if you’re targeting major international brands, which in the case of madvertise include Google, Ford and Footlocker. Madvertise offers customers like these “expert consulting advice” and help with media planning, even though its product includes a self-service platform to manage campaigns.

TechCrunch Europe occasionally partners with other media outlets in Europe in order to support the European ecosystem. Last December we agreed to link up with the London Telegraph newspaper, which planned to put some time and resources into a ranking of promising technology companies in Europe. The Telegraph Tech Start-Up 100 lists 100 top European tech companies. This year, TechCrunch Europe chaired the Telegraph’s judging panel, put together by Milo Yiannopoulos, Technology columnist, which included many familiar faces from the European emerging technology industry. The list includes trailblazers like Wonga, SoundCloud and Songkick, as well as start-ups who are aggressively expanding into the US market like Huddle and Skimlinks. I think the way to think about this list is that it’s a wrap-up of some still early companies, while including a number of tech companies who are really motoring now after their initial startup phase. It’s a great list, you should check it out.

There are hundreds of millions of toddlers and babies who are not online. Some would say that’s just fine and dandy. But, in truth, kids are already ‘using’ media in the form of TV shows aimed at them, so why not create an interface to apps designed especially for them?

Step forward Jumboard, which launched today at Techonomy3 in Israel.

Interface is clearly a problem, a toddler’s motor skills not up to speed for touch screen tablets and computer mice. But they can press big buttons. Thus, Jumboard has a big USB board which plugs into the keyboard of a PC and create a big red, yellow, blue, green button interface to Flash apps on the Jumboard site.

Ever wanted to get more information about a TV show, film or advert on TV? Of course you have. But Googling what you can see is easier said than done. What we need is something which recognises the show and can take you to more info – even let you share what you’re watching on social networks.

TVTak does exactly this. Download the app, point your iPhone at the TV, take a picture and TVTak will present more information, links and a way to Tweet or Facebook what you are watching. It’s literally magic.

This is like like Shazam for video in realtime, on a live broadcast. The app works out the location of the iphone via GPS, thus suggesting which country you are in.

We talk about the ‘Internet of things’ in places like TechCrunch a lot but the vision is still some way of. However, It’s fair to say that someone might come up with a way to give life to billions of every day products. Tingiz wants to be in that space.

This is a platform that enables manufacturers of physical products to create a mobile microsite connected to that product. The idea is that Tingiz wil generate a QR code for a product, and that is used to send people to a mobile site where they can watch a video or see a Facebook page. Think of an Ikea product where you can look up instructions. It’s a mobile site and not an app because who wants to download an app for one product?

HouseTrip, the holiday lettings marketplace, has raised $2.7m from Index Ventures. The deal was led by Index co-founder Neil Rimer who will also take a seat on HouseTrip’s board. This paves the way for a major relaunch of the site that has gone live today.

Established in late 2009, HouseTrip is another play in the holiday apartments space. It lets homeowners put up their holiday homes for rental but tries to differentiate itself by removing the need for guests to negotiate directly, thus building in a degree of security – no more international money transfer – and removing the administrative hassle for both parties.

We are all now videoing huge amounts of material on our mobiles and other devices, but the ‘best bits’ – like your friend successfully doing an olly on a skateboard – rarely see the light of day because they are buried in 10 minutes or more of otherwise dull footage.

Few people have the time – or even the skill – to trawl through and edit those good bits down into a real sequence. So with one click Magisto finds the good edited highlights automatically.

This is effectively Animoto for the lazy or unskilled. Hooray for us.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit Tel Aviv and get a brief taster of the startup scene here. At one point I was interviewed by The Marker, a business newspaper and, after a couple of days of trying to find someone who wasn’t in a startup (outside of the hotel staff) I had to admit to the journalist “If you threw a stone in Tel Aviv, it would probably hit a high-tech entrepreneur.”

Today, six new startups launch at Techonomy3 in Tel Aviv, joining the mass of startups here, and I would say all of them are pretty interesting one way or another. Here are the individual write-ups on each of the startups which launched (the names of the companies links will go live as they launch): HitPad, Dapsem, Magisto, Tingiz, TVTak and Jumboard.

First a quick culture lesson for anyone not aware. To ‘Dap’ someone is to ‘fist-bump’ them, a la Michelle and Barack Obama in a famous move during the last US election. It’s about giving someone some appreciation or respect.

So what would happen if you put that natural human behaviour into an iPhone app? Well for starters you might just create the kind of economy that the Whuffie Bank tried to kick start but this time is a far more natural manner. Why not “Daps’em” instead of just Tweeting you like someone or some thing?

We’ve seen Pulse and Flipboard take off as media apps on the iPad but there is plenty of space left to innovate. Launching today at Techonomy3 in Tel Aviv is Hitpad, a new entrant which will attempt to take news consumption more mainstream. It’s a lot nicer than using an RSS reader at any rate and the kind of thing ‘your granny’ could use easily. It launches in the next few hours on the US iPad app store here.

Hitpad is, as the name suggests, a ‘quick hit’ of what’s going on in the news on the iPad. It’s a sort of antidote to single source news apps, like the iPad app for the New York Times, as it pulls in many different sources and presents them in a visual way, not unlike a sort of ‘Tweetdeck for news’. But if Tweetdeck is just the streams, Hitpad is closer to active curation without you needing to do anything.

With gas at roughly $4/gallon, French carpooling site Covoiturage.fr has just announced some 1 million carpoolers on its site. Now, its competitor Tickengo has just scored a seed round with Kima Ventures. Coincidence?

The rather active seed fund of Xavier Niel and Jeremie Berrebi did not reveal the exact amount invested in Tickengo’s platform, which was initially launched in 2006 in only 4 French cities: Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Toulouse. It wasn’t until 2008 that the platform opened up to all of France and later became available to the US, Canada, the UK and Belgium.