Although this isn’t on the same level as Wooga’s $24m Series B round announced today, it’s more evidence that social gaming remains a hot space.

Pixonic, the social games publisher, has raised a $5 million round from VCs Ventech, Kite Ventures, and TA Ventures. This follows earlier funding of $1m secured last year. The new investment will be used to expand the Russian startup’s social game lineup through new titles published via its PixAPI platform on to various social networks, including Facebook.

Billed as a sort of affordable TED, The Inspire Conference is coming to London on 7-8 June.

The event, organised by the team behind Launch48, promises to bring “the most brilliant minds” together in Technology, Creativity and Entrepreneurship. And on that note our very own Mike Butcher is making an appearance. He’ll be doing an on-stage discussion/interview with Peter Vesterbacka of Rovio, makers of the phenomenon that is Angry Birds. You don’t get much more brilliant than that.

Overall, the event will feature 30+ speakers including representatives from The Times, Mozilla Labs, Spotify, MediaSift, Ogilvy, YouGov, Mendeley, Ushahidi, Soundcloud and others.

Continuing our series of interviews with companies in the Silicon Roundabout area of London (we’re calling this The Roundabout Tapes), we went to interview Mixcloud.

The on-demand radio service wants to be the ‘YouTube of radio’. Online radio is very much a digital media orphan; languishing in a fragmented space while innovations in other aspects of streaming media have come thick and fast over the last few years.

Magma, the platform that helps magazine publishers (both dead tree and online) streamline their workflow, has secured $350k from Syddansk Teknologisk Innovation (SDTI).

A sort of ‘Basecamp for magazine publishers’, Magma was founded in July 2010 by Andrew Dahl, whose had stints at Amazon, Expedia and PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Sebastian Stockmarr, a User Experience Designer who has worked with Benjamin Media, one of Denmark’s largest publishers. It helps streamline magazine publishing – an area that is said to be seeing a resurgence because of new digital devices like the iPad – by offering collaborative tools for copywriters, editorial, layout designers and ad planning.

This is guest post by Ian Hogarth, co-founder of Songkick, relates how 45 startups in London’s East End got tired of being over-shadowed by the financial sector in London and created their own event to lure wanna-be startupers.

Sunday 15th May was a significant event for the London start-up community. 45 start-ups from across London gathered in one room with a single purpose – preventing banks and consultancies hiring the best UK engineering and computer science talent.

In the Bay Area the biggest recruitment challenge start-ups face is how to stand out from the crowd, with so many start-ups and a hiring boom. In London the start-up ecosystem has a different problem – developers aren’t aware start-ups exist. Most UK graduates in computer science assess their options via the ‘Milkround’, a giant careers fair held every year on university campuses across the UK. Banks, consultancies, Google, Microsoft and others spend tens of millions advertising to graduates and without the density of Silicon Valley, smaller start-ups are drowned out.

Ever since my first TechCrunch meetup in Berlin in 2008 and 2009 I’ve been keeping a watchful eye on this city as I travelled around Europe covering startups and explaining the scene to anyone who would listen. But since then it’s quite clear that a couple of things have happened. The whole European scene has improved massively. There are now startup events, activity and fundraising across Europe in an ongoing manner. Sure, it’s not Silicon Valley (I’m sorry, but who cares?) – in fact we should really be comparing ourselves to our own progress, not to other places. And the news is good. The ‘Valley Virus’ has spread, and Europe is now starting to boast some amazing startups.

Continuing our series of interviews with companies in the Silicon Roundabout area of London (we’re calling this The Roundabout Tapes), we interviewed Clearer Partners.

Clearer is a specialised tech/media consulting company but is also doing a startup. The soon to launch Frameblast is aimed at SOHO companies who want to handle video in a smarter way along the lines of Media Silo. Companies can upload their archives into the cloud and use it like a Google search engine for their archive, with tags galore.

This is guest post by Mohamed El Dahshan, an economist and writer who also advises governments and IGOs on entrepreneurship in developing countries, with a focus on post-conflict nations. He has been been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, Al-Masry Al-Youm, the Huffington Post, Daily News Hurriyet, among others. Mohamed has maintained his blog www.travellerwithin.com and Twitter account as anonymous until the end of the January 25th 2011 revolution in Egypt, in which he took part from day one. Most recently he was a speaker at the inaugural TEDxRamallah conference.

They say Palestinians are more passionate about the Spanish football league than Spaniards.

Not here, though.

“The Barcelona-Real game? No, we’re not really the football watching type.” Mohammad and Mourad laugh. “We did read the results on Twitter though”.

Welcome to Bazinga!, the first Palestinian tech hub, offering a workspace and support to technology and internet entrepreneurs.

The brainchild of five friends, Bazinga! has in a few months established itself as a central address for internet and mobile applications startups, and its founding fathers (and mother) unavoidable figures of the Palestinian tech scene.

Well known US VC house Greylock Partners is launching a brand new $160 million fund aimed at internet technology companies, with the fund being deployed between Europe and Israel. Greylock is best known for its stakes in Facebook, Groupon and LinkedIn and European investments including Wonga. Greylock’s move will be a shot in the arm for European tech companies looking for more options when raising financing.

We’ve confirmed that the fund will be represented in London by Laurel Bowden, a Partner, and will cover investments from early stage and beyond.

Stepan Pachikov, founder of Evernote, is a fascinating individual and very much the model of the Russian intellectual who was driven by sheer curiosity to create the concepts behind Evernote and thus one of today’s most successful startups. A founder of ParaGraph, ParaScript, he studied at the Academy of Sciences of the old USSR where his dissertation was the use of fuzzy logic. And in some sense his work has pre-figured what Evernote eventually became.

In the mid-1980s he doubtless helped foster the growth of the Russian tech scene by founding the Moscow Children Computer club. ParaGraph, in 1988 was one of the first Soviet-American Joint Ventures which eventually signed a multimillion contract with Apple to develop digital ink software.

While at the Lint Conference in Moscow this week I stumbled across something quite special. Two of the authors behind a new how-to-guide for Russians all about Twitter.

This is significant – after all, no-one would even bother with writing an entire book, unless there was a growing curiosity about the platform both amongst consumers and business people wanting to learn more about using it as a marketing and communications channel.

The book’s title is suitably direct (as Russians are want to be): “140 symbols of self-expression in social media.” I managed to catch up with two of the three Julia Fedotchenko (@Moscowholic), Elena Sorokina (@esorokina), Ksenia Chabanenko (@pr_a_tak) authors of the book , and chatted to about the step-by-step guide.

Respected European venture capital associate Katy Turner is leaving Eden Ventures to join video advertising startup Videoplaza, working as their head of marketing out of London. Turner told us on email:

“Working with the fantastic team at Eden has been a great experience – the early stage startup space in Europe is hugely dynamic right now and I have had the luck to work with some really exciting entrepreneurs and investors. I will continue to be involved in supporting the startup community but I’m hugely looking forward to joining the brilliant team at Videoplaza.”

The startups is making a name for itself delivering video advertising across the the web and into other devices like TV.

The trend towards online browser-based games continues to attract the attention of VCs who recognise that this will be the platform of choice going forward. Thus it is that Finnish game developer Supercell has secured a large series A investment of $12 million from Accel Partners which has already invested in Rovio (maker of Angry Birds), Playfish, Gameforge and Mind Candy (Moshi Monsters). Such a large Series A Joining the round is Klaas Kersting, founder of German browser-game giant Gameforge and currently CEO of flaregames. London Venture Partners, one of Supercell’s previous investors, also participated. Previous investors include Initial Capital, Cerval Investments and Lifeline Ventures.

Supercell’s has so far created 165 games across 12 platforms, aiming at a sweet spot in social games which are also easier to deal with than massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft.

There has been some interesting speculation regarding the relationship between hot (at least in Europe) music streaming service Spotify and gargantuan social platform Facebook. Now Forbes is reporting that Facebook has partnered with Spotify on a streaming service that “could be launched in as little as two weeks” via a Spotify icon in a user’s newsfeed.

However, our sources are pouring ice cold water on the idea. The reasons are thus: Even through Spotify is doing very well on its home turf of Sweden… and has launched in Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and the UK – it has yet to launch in the US. And a launch in the next two weeks looks highly optimistic.

Our sources say the reason is that Spotify has in fact secured two big unnamed record labels – but needs two more labels to come on board before it can launch in the US.

There’s an argument that says that more enterprises would adopt cloud-based alternatives to legacy desktop software if it wasn’t for those pesky users. That’s presuming that you can get buy in from the IT department first.

But presuming that is the case, Huddle has an interesting offer: the company is introducing the ‘Huddle Adoption Guarantee’ for its cloud-based collaboration platform in which enterprises adopting the service who don’t see 100% user adoption across the organisation can expect to get their money back, with a few caveats, of course. The idea, says Huddle, is to enable IT buyers to “make the leap to cloud computing without the investment risk or concerns about low user adoption.”

On the surface at least, it’s a bold offer and likely coded talk for saying we’ll give you more help in weaning users off of Microsoft SharePoint, the company’s closest legacy competitor.

Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance at the E-G8 Forum today in Paris. The largely PR-filled event created by French President Nicholas Sarkosy to address the effects the Internet is having on the G8′s agenda of globailsation witnessed possibly the softest interview Zuckerberg has ever had, and that’s saying something. Interviewer Maurice Levy, as head of Publicis, is a powerful man, but the interview was less than satisfying.

Despite this, Zuckerberg revealed a couple of things.

Significantly he appeared to kill any likelihood of a “Facebook phone”.

Whatser, the location-based service that lets users share their favorite locations with friends and discover new ones, is rolling out a new money-making feature today: Brands can now create collections of their favourite locations, which users of the platform can then ‘follow’.

Collections are a form of location curation so in this sense brands get to put their stamp on places that are worth checking out, perhaps around a certain theme that, conveniently, ties-in with the brand’s own offering. So, for example, Heineken could start a collection with rooftop bars around the world that a user can follow. Or Red Bull could host a collection of skateparks around the world.

Good news for Scotland. Amazon is to create 900 jobs in Edinburgh, some 500 permanent and 400 temporary jobs. The new centre will handle both internet and telephone customer queries for Amazon.co.uk including technical support for Amazon Kindle and MP3 services.

There’s something of an incentive to do this: The new facility is being supported by a £1.8m grant from Scottish Development International to help train new staff and support the construction fit-out of the new premises, expected to open in August 2011.

Customer services jobs are common in Scotland given the well educated population, plus Scottish accents are often cited as the most ‘trustworthy’ by UK customers.

In January, Amazon announced that it would create a further 750 jobs in Dunfermline and 200 jobs in Gourock.

Brightpearl, which provides a cloud-based integrated suite of applications for SMEs, has secured $5 million in Series A funding from Notion Capital and Eden Ventures. Both VC firms have previously backed the Bristol, UK-based startup to the tune of $1.5m.

Founded in 2007 by Chris Tanner, Brightpearl’s pitch to SMEs is that its SaaS helps take away the pain of implementing information systems and lets business owners get on with actually running their business. The new investment will be used by the company to expand faster in the U.S. and other markets and further its cloud offering that includes accounting, CRM, order and stock management, ecommerce and helpdesk capability.