As part of the new Google+ service came Huddle, a group texting app available to Android users. This makes mobile group collaboration easier, says Google. So far so good. Except…

There’s already a five-year-old group collaboration startup called Huddle, which has to date raised $14.2m in venture capital and has office in San Francisco and London.

A lot of companies would like to get on the flash games bandwagon but have no core competency to do it. Out of Israel is a new white label solution called Tictacti. The startup has also now raised a $500,000 round led by Kima Ventures and other undisclosed investors. To date the startup has pulled in $1.6m in funding so far.

Tictacti plans to compete with existing players Mochi Media and heyzap, with a platform which enables games developers to monetize their games on Mobile, Web or IPTV with one API/SDK or, in the case of Flash based games. BUt the crucial aspect here is that they can do it without needing to use the the API.

Here in Europe we woke up to find Google had shut down the invitation process to Google +. So after a bit of testing I’ve found out the following how to bring your friends in to it while Google has a lock-down on the service.

If you have an invite to join Google+, right click on the invite link you were sent on email and save the URL. Paste that URL to Twitter or Facebook or email it to some friends. With any luck some of them will get in via that link.

I tried this by Tweeting my own invite link, and magically a few people managed to get an invite of their own. Most did not however, so this is not a full proof work-around. It seems to work if people waited a couple of minutes or refreshed the page after a minute.

The better, more guaranteed hack is one or both of the following.

Flattr appeared almost a year ago. At the time we called it “Facebook Like, but with money”. It’s a little like a wallet for spreading a little money love around, good for micropayments for content, blog posts and the like. At the end of the month your set stash of cash – as little a $2 a month – is split equally among the things you “flattrd”. Flattr is, in effect, a social micropayments platform.

Now Sweden’s second largest broadband provider, Bredbandsbolaget, a subsidiary of Telenor Sweden, is partnering up with Flattr.

The ISP will now allow Flattr account creation via their customer portal but also giving 1,000 new flattr customers 150 Swedish krona (about 15€) each, distributed over three months, to play with.

Startup accelerators are mushrooming all over Europe, but generally in capital cities.

An exception to that rule is the new Oxygen Accelerator, a Birmingham, UK, based investment programme which recently launched.

The 13-week programme will take applications from around the world and has attracted slightly bemused attention for offering an “evergreen soft loan” of £20,000 to start with, in return for a 6% equity stake. But teams don’t need to ‘pay back’ the loan until the startup raises more investment or the business can afford to repay it. After which that £20k is designed to re-circulate back into the programme and keep £200,000 fund, which covers 10 teams, re-circulating for the next year. Word on the streets say VCs are comfortable with the arrangement, so long as the programme creates dealflow.

The first time I ever wrote about carpooling service Comuto was when Iceland’s unpronounceable volcano first errupted in Sping of 2010 (at least this last volcano that errupted in May had an almost pronounceable name). At a time when most of Northern Europe was freaking out – with canceled flights and sold-out trains leaving travelers with little or no hope – Comuto stepped up and saw a massive surge in the use of their carpooling platform; stranded travelers realized that their next best option was to catch a ride in a stranger’s car rather than wait for space to free-up on trains and planes.

Comuto’s platform – which had previously been available in France and Spain – recently launched in the UK under the name Blablacar. The company blog explains that this name is meant to reflect chatty (but not annoying) passengers – but so far, the team has noticed that the average UK driver prefers to carry fewer passengers than their Spanish or French counterparts. Thus, hopefully the name will help inspire British drivers to fill up their cars with more people.

Global WiFi network Fon is partnering up with Belgacom, Belgium’s largest telecommunications company, to create the largest WiFi community in Belgium. Of course, that means Belgacom internet customers now get access to the than 4 million+ hotspots in Fon’s global WiFi network.

Fon allows its WiFi hubs to broadcast two dedicated WiFi signals, one encrypted and private, the public, accessible via password to registered members of the Fon community – they call the “Foneros”.

It’s the latest move from Fon CEO, entrepreneur and internet pioneer Martin Varsavsky who founded Fon in 2006. Fon’s investors include Atomico, British Telecom, the Coral Group, Google, Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Skype.

Forget the awkward moment between TV presenters Zane Lowe and Lauren Laverne. What you really want to is who were the top top artists on social media during Glastonbury – right?

Social media monitoring company Brandwatch tracked the online buzz surrounding the Glastonbury festival for the week leading up to it, from Monday 20th June, tracking 56k mentions between Monday and Friday lunchtime before a chord had been played at the festival, to the end of Beyonce’s set on Sunday night.

The final count of mentions was 169k and the highest number of mentions was during Beyonce (could it have been the Loew/Laverne incident? Could be…), peaking at 39294k compared to around 20k during Coldplay’s Friday night set. Oh dear Coldplay (or maybe people were just too into the music?).

How would you feel about an iPhone app that claimed to be able to tell if that mole on your arm was not looking too healthy? That’s the claim of Skin Scan, an iPhone medical app available now on the Apple App Store. The startups has secured €50,000 Euro in seed funding from Seedmoney.

Either Skin Scan is going to get people to see a doctor earlier, thus potentially saving lives. Or it’s going to make hypochondriacs of us all. I can’t decide which. Suffice it to say this appears to be one clever app. Because it also asks for your location, Skin Scan is also producing a live map of how our moles are looking around the globe. The implication for the app are very interesting – Skin Scan could end up mapping skin cancer rate across the planet, if it gets this right.

The app takes a picture of a mole on the skin, then uses a proprietary algorithm to look at the fractal-like shapes which exist in human skin (have a look up close, you can see little triangles in normal skin, honest). It then calculates if the shape of the mole means it is is developing normally, or abnormally thus in a into a potential cancerous melanoma.

You know you’re in a bubble when tech journalists leave publications to join startups. The other sign of course is MBA graduates turning their nose up at a cozy bank job. But the former has just happened to us, in the shape of my awesome colleague Steve O’Hear, who is leaving Techcrunch Europe to become CEO of a new startup called Beepl.

Annoyingly, Steve isn’t saying publicly what Beepl actually does, although the strap line reads a “smarter way to question the world.” They also call themselves an “expertise platform” and “semantic technology company”, it says here…. Whatever. It’s clearly some lame kind of Quora clone and he’ll be back in 6 months asking for his old job back.

A 60% share of the the leading daily deal site in Switzerland, Deindeal.ch, has been acquired by Ringier, a Swiss media company. Zurich-based Deindeal.ch is said to be larger than Groupon in the region, and continuing on a good growth path. Terms were were not disclosed.

Deindeal.ch has been online since March 2010 and has over 100 employees. It offers daily deals with at least 50 per cent discount on lifestyle products, as per the Groupon model (which has been roundly trashed, but perhaps it’s working in niche markets?).

Management will stay on at the company.

TechCrunch Europe is an interesting gig. There are 27 members of the “European Union”, 48 geographical European countries and territories, and… 51 participating countries in the Eurovision Song Contest (surely, the ultimate gold standard of a chaotic definition of Europe). But we love them all. Whether you are working on a startup in Romania, or with a VC in Mayfair, London, or a teenager in a Berlin bedroom in building the next Google, TechCrunch Europe is interested. But it’s impossible to cover everything going on, so we like to use this platform to give YOU a voice.

KashFlow, the UK startup that competes with the likes of Sage with its cloud-based accounting software for SMEs, is today widening the net: It’s launched a fully re-branded white-label offering aimed at organisations that have existing SME customers and want to get in on the cloud-based action but don’t have the resources or inclination to build their own service.

At first glance this may look like little more than a glorified affiliate type deal but with the lack of self-sign up at KashFlow’s new OEMAccounts.com site and a negotiable revenue share, it’s perhaps more a sign of intent as the company beds down on its growth trajectory minus the ‘strategic investor’ that it recently set out to find.

Mancx, the “transactional knowledge market” where users trade business intelligence (or answers to any question posted to the site), has closed a second round of funding: $1.1m from the startup’s founders and new backers that include Bo Axel Ax:son Johnson (of the well-known Swedish conglomerate Ax:son Johnson) and Nils-Robert Persson.

Per-Arne Nordlander, the Swedish angel investor, remains as an investor and chairman of Mancx, while the company says that the new funds will be used to support further development of its knowledge marketplace and to “drive an aggressive marketing push.”

Something is happening in Europe. The tectonic plates in the startup ecosystem are moving and, like penguins on ice-flows, we all are slithering around trying to get a handle on how things will play out over the next couple of years.

We’re having exits (such as Tweetdeck to Twitter for $40million), large funding rounds (such as Wooga raising $24 million) and higher valuations (like Moshi Monsters).

Events have ramped up considerably. GeeknRolla in London was a blast this year, as was DLD, Founders Forum and the 1,000-strong Dublin Web Summit. And we still have The Europas and Le Web to go.

At the same time the incubator and accelerator scene is booming. A new study named Seedcamp as the top European accelerator with StartupBoootcamp looking like a pretty strong second.

And this week the brand new Oxygen Accelerator in the UK said it would literally give away £75,000 ($84,000 Euro / $120,000) with no equity tie as a prize to the ‘most improved startup on its programme’ (applications close June 30th, apply here).

This goes to show just how white hot the incubator and accelerator market in Europe is right now.

But despite studies I really feel that, amidst the birth pangs of a genuine pan-European tech startup scene, it is far too early to be ranking incubators and accelerators. There remains a huge amount of chaos in the market, and what appears to be a scramble for positions across territories and cities.

Spark Ventures has sold half of its stake in Mind Candy, creators of the online children’s game, Moshi Monsters, for $4.9m, generating a 15x return. The move means that Mind Candy / Moshi Monsters is now valued at $200m. Spark originally invested in 2004.

That means that Mind Candy is now one of the most valuable players in the London startup scene around Silicon Roundabout, after the sale of TweetDeck to Twitter for $40m recently.

Moshi Monsters – used by seven to 14 year olds to create their own pet monsters – has 50m users globally and generates millions in revenue from in-game payments, offline merchandising such as toys, books and trading cards. The “Facebook for kids” now has one in three British children as a player and it has significant traction in the US.

Usabilla, which creates site usability tools, has raised $1 million in a round led by Dutch venture fund Boralis and five undisclosed investors in Europe and the U.S. Customers include Disney, Levi’s and Electronic Arts> The funding will be used to expand customers and to test new platforms like mobile, tablets and TV.

Usabilla is a web-based usability testing tool that allows marketers, analysts, designers and usability experts to collect visual, quantitative user feedback on their website in, they claim “a fun, quick and easy way”:

Flattr, the social micropayment startup founded by ex-Pirate Bay associates, has added Soundcloud integration to make it easy to add the Flattr button (and start receiving payments) to any SoundCloud player, including those embedded anywhere across the web. Interestingly, SoundCloud already has an existing arrangement with Flattr competitor BuySimple.

Flattr’s support for SoundCloud follows a similar recently announced tie-in to Twitter, which makes it easy to tip somebody’s Twitter account with real money, although who on earth would pay for my nonsensical tweets, I’m not so sure. But it does bring into focus the company’s strategy to become a sort of ‘Like’ button but with real money, even if post-launch Flattr has slowly and perhaps stealthily begun to deviate from its more altruistic and slightly idiosyncratic payment model into something more mainstream.

Grey Area, a Finnish smartphone games developer, has now launched its alternative reality game Shadow Cities across thirteen additional European countries, after its North American launch last month. The game can be downloaded for free in the local Apple iTunes App stores in Italy, France, Germany, UK, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark and Norway (iTunes link).

The startup recently raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures, London Venture Partners and Initial Capital.

Outbrain, the content discovery platform, is to power personalisation across a number of Express Newspapers’ online properties in the UK. This follows an initial trial on express.co.uk.

The New York, US-based company with R&D in Israel offers publishers a way to make their content more discoverable by readers and through personalising this content also increase engagement and click-throughs, which in turn increases revenue. Along with generating links to interesting content on a publisher’s own website it can also be used to link to external, revenue-generating, third-party content.