Bigpoint, the German online gaming outfit, is pointing to some big numbers today, claiming its 200 millionth registered user. This, says the company, puts it on par with Twitter, which is a bit like comparing apples with oranges but whatever.

That said, 200 million users is no mean feat and to put it into context, Bigpoint says that 18 months ago it could only boast 100 million users and is attracting 250,000 new users every day on average. Again, not too shabby at all.

More big numbers from Bigpoint:

Eagle Eye Solutions, which claims to be the market leader in mobile voucher issue and redemption technology for retailers in the UK, has raised £1.5 million in a Series A round of funding.

The round was led by Sir Terry Leahy, the former chief executive of Tesco and who oversaw the introduction of the Tesco Clubcard, and city retail analysts, Bill Currie and Iain McDonald, who have previously invested in the likes of The Hut Group, Metapack, ASOS, QXL Ricardo and Zooplus. The new funding is said to enable Eagle Eye to further expand its team and “consolidate and grow its retail partnerships”, which include Comet, Blockbuster, Aurora Fashions and Virgin Active.

Bluefields.com, a sort of ‘Groupspaces for amateur football’, has scored £100k from seven angel investors including Julian Ranger of iBundle and Jalin Somaiya, Google Sales Project Leader, although Somaiya’s involvement isn’t associated with Google. Both will join Bluefields’ board.

The other five angels are Lee Strafford, co-founder of Plus.Net and ex-Chairman of Sheffield Wednesday FC, along with Mark Wainwright, Brian Lawrence, Jim Mann and Ami Shipro. The funding will be used to launch Bluefields’ football focused player availability and payment applications this August in time for the start of the football season in the UK. The platform is both browser-based and will have mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

Red Karaoke has been around for 4 years now, when based out of Spain, two brothers Miguel Angel y Richard Díez Ferreira first opened it’s online Karaoke doors. They probably had no idea that they were onto something. The service took very quickly and grew not only for the Spanish speaking public, but English and Japanese. Today, with 2 million monthly unique visitors and 1.5 million recordings made, Red Karaoke releases their Facebook app, to socialize their singing experience even more.

A new augmented reality startup launches today. String Augmented Reality claims to be a fast and powerful augmented reality technology for iOS.

String claims to be capable of live two-way broadcast AR capabilities using Kinect, something they developed with Norwegian company Labrat. An application for this might be watching a live concert projected into your living room, in full 3D augmented reality.

CEO and founder Alan Maxwell says the company is releasing an SDK for developers today (a developer licence is £79).

Examples include 3D real-life motion capture AR, developed in partnership with Brighton-based Digicave.

A lot has been written about Groupon recently but have we missed the point? Rob Carter, Director at bookingbug.com, gives his opinion on the value of what they have achieved.

Despite articles to the contrary, many think that Groupon is valuable and still has big potential. I agree, but wonder if my reasons are different. I think that their deep discount model is unsustainable as Groupon’s longevity is reliant on repeat business. Much of what Groupon does is not new; deals, time-limits, coupons. What Groupon has done is more impressive than it may seem; Attribution. The biggest advance that Groupon has made is that it makes an online recommendation of an offline venue (a place). This again in itself is not new; tracking the success of that recommendation is.

Aylus Networks, the US-based company which enables video services over mobile, has secured a $16 million series D (wow, those are rare) investment round. The financing is being lead by m8 Capital, the mobile-focused venture fund running out of London, to the tune of $10million. Joseph Kim, General Partner of m8 Capital, will join the Aylus board. Joining the round are existing investors Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.

Aylus plans to take advantage of the front-facing cameras in smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops and the fact that video calling is going to be big over the next few years. Especially crucial is device interdependence.

Nordeus made quite a stir when their social football game, Top Eleven, beating gaming giant EA’s FIFA Superstars for the most monthly players, attracting over 2.8 million users.

The interesting thing about this Belgrade, Serbia-based startup, however, isn’t the number of users: they’ve had more than 700,000 active users for quite some time now, 200,000 more than FIFA for Facebook. It’s that Nordeous has taken no outside funding to date, bootrapping the company for 2 years, says CEO Branko Milutinovic.

Is the recession over? Are people really really hitting the globe-trotting trails again? Looks like it if news out of WAYN, the travel and lifestyle portal-turned-social-network which has pivoted several times since its launch in 2003 (making it one of the worlds oldest networks).

Back in 2009 they hit 15 million members and introduced a new feature allowing member sot share their future plans – “intention broadcasting” as it’s known in the trade. It’s likely this was the best pivot of all to date.

In those two years they’ve now grown towards a total of 17 million members. But more significantly they’ve been iterating the site to the point where now, they say, the site is generating a new traffic high of over 12.5 million monthly visits, putting it above TripIt and Tripwolf, and neck and neck with Lonely Planet (according to Alexa figures). That’s a tripling of growth since their 3.7 million figure in December 2010.

Day One Capital has launched what it claims to be the first institutional angel fund in Hungary.

The new fund aims to tackle an oh-so-familiar problem faced by much of Europe: the lack of “seed money and management mentoring for innovative early-stage tech startups”, says Day One Capital investment manager Aurel Pasztor. The fund hopes to raise €2-4m and is targeting companies in the IT, telecommunications, energy, biotech and finance sectors with investments between €200-400k.

Silicon Valley’s YuMe has acquired Appealing Media, a leading mobile adverting company in the UK whose customers include ESPN, IPC Media, Bauer Media, and Universal McCann. Terms are undisclosed.

YuMe, which is heavily funded to the tune of $51m (CrunchBase), is also launching YuMe Europe and opening a new office in London. Obviously, the acquisition of Appealing Media is part of this international expansion.

Stipple, which thinks it’s a bit original in allowing people to tag images with Twitter names, has some new competition on the block. ThingLink which also lets you tag any image, is now launching Rich Media Tags, allowing anyone to interact with an image tag which might be embedded music, video, words, pictures and tags for people. Publishers simply connect their site, blog or Flickr account with the ThingLink platform and get an embeddable code to make all or individual images taggable.

These tags have now been created for Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Spotify, Vimeo, Wikipedia, SoundCloud and Twitter. The application is obvious: you can add promotional flyers to a branded product, or anything, thus enabling some kind of engagement of transaction to take place without someone needed to leave a page or site.

Visual search and image recognition startup Cortexica Vision Systems has appointed Iain McCready as new CEO today, while ARM-veteran Malcolm Bird has joined as its non-exec Chairman.

Bird was previously Technical Director with Acorn Computers Ltd. where he is said to have played a key role in business development and negotiation in the joint venture between Apple, Acorn and VLSI Technology that became known as chip company ARM. He went on to become a founding non-executive director of ARM until 1997. Since then Bird has held the post of MD of Phone.com Europe and was a Venture Partner with Deutsche Bank Capital Venture Partners.

Shutl, an on-demand delivery platform that aggregates transportation carriers so they can deliver something in an hour, recently took £650,000 ($1m) investment round from Hummingbird Ventures and others. It’s been piloting its service with Argos, a leading high street retailer in the UK.

Shutl was formed by Tom Allason, previously founder of eCourier.co.uk. We went to interview him at his office near “Silicon Roundabout” – the cluster of tech companies in East London – in our series of videos we’re calling The Roundabout Tapes.

The rise of location-based apps has been so rapid that there are a slew of products coming onto the app stores most of the time. But few have gone to the trouble of realising that by targeting a passionate user base in one area they may get some head-room over the competition. Hey, it works in the Valley, why not elsewhere?

That’s the been strategy of young London-based startup Area Now, which bills itself as a ‘short-notice event recommendation service’ for nearby events. Their iPhone app now in Beta (combined with the site), effectively crowd-sources events from people nearby who want to find out where the latest happening club or event is. You can download the app from iTunes here or start adding events direct on the site.

Babbel, the language learning site, has added four new languages to its vocabulary portfolio: Indonesian, Polish, Turkish and Dutch. This brings the total to eleven, joining Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish and English.

Delivered via a number of themed lessons such as “Holidays”, “Life in the city”, “Free time”, “Culture” and “Digital World” each features basic and advanced vocabulary with words, images and pronunciation examples, designed to be completed within ten to fifteen minutes.

And like other Babbel courses, learners also have access to a personal Review Manager to help them stay on track and acquire language skills in the long term, along with Pronunciation Training via real-time speech recognition using Adobe Flash, which as we’ve noted before, potentially pits the service up against more traditional players such as TellMeMore or Rosetta Stone.

It seems you’re not really up there with the big boys like Sony and Codemasters these days unless you’ve been hacked. The latest victim is the unfortunately named Creditsafe.co.uk which publishes business and consumer credit reports. Specifically the attack is on creditsafe.co.uk not Creditsafeuk.com, which is a totally different company.

We’re not sure how many customers it has but a sign posted on the site this morning says that is was subject to an unauthorized attack but an “initial review indicates that no personally identifiable information has been compromised.” Unfortunately they say the hack means that visitors accessing the site via a search on google may have been redirected to a malicious website “that attempts to install a malicious .exe file.”

Here’s their statement:

Exclusive - TechCrunch has just learned that Wimdu, a recently launched Airbnb clone that has already managed to irk the latter, has raised a whopping $90 million round.

The capital injection comes from European investors Kinnevik and the infamous Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet.

Sindelantal (meaning: without an apron), which launched a year and a half ago to tackle online restaurant take out and delivery in Spain, is announcing a €1m round from Michael Kleindl, VitaminaK and earlier investors.

It follows initial funding of €300k in 2010 from well known angels Alberto Knapp, Iñaki Arrola, Rafael Garrido, Ramón Blanco, Luis Ongil and Alvaro Ortiz, among others, while the new funds will be used to boost growth locally and to start rolling out in Latin America in 2012.

Tradeshift, the free invoicing platform and wider play to become a social network for business, is to provide e-invoicing services to 6,000 suppliers of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).

Although the NHS was already known to be a Tradeshift user, it’s only now that details of the tie-in have emerged, while suppliers to the NHS via Anglia Support Partnership (ASP), the leading shared service provider to the NHS in the east of England, will be told of the initiative this week. Under the arrangement they’ll be asked to start using Tradeshift, which offers a free way to submit invoices electronically and monitor their progress, as the mechanism for which to invoice ASP with the carrot of speedier payments in return.