Bigpoint, the German online gaming outfit, has signed a partnership with Russia’s Mail.Ru Group, which will see the two companies offer select gaming titles on each of their respective portals. The idea is to help Bigpoint expose its wares to the Russian speaking markets, while Mail.Ru gets broader European distribution.

Targeting Russian speaking gamers, Mail.Ru will house Bigpoint games including Farmerama, DarkOrbit, Seafight and Battlestar Galactica Online. Additionally, they’ll be integrated into the Mail.Ru Group’s social networks, Odnoklassniki and My World.

In return, visitors to Bigpoint.com, which claims 200 million registered users, will be able to access MMORPGs such as Legend Legacy of the Dragons, Juggernaut, Empire Craft, and GodsWar Online.

Blinklearning, the e-tutoring platform, has raised €350k of public money from the Spanish CDTI NEOTEC program for further R&D into how Artificial Intelligence can be leveraged to offer a more personalised education for learners.

Based on the premise that education must be adapted to the needs of each individual student who may learn at a different pace to their peers, the Spain and UK-based startup currently gives teachers better tools to create learning content along with technology to “track the individual performance of every student and subsequently provide those students with tailor-made content and exercises.”

Zibaba, the Tel Aviv-based social commerce company, has been chosen to power retailer Marks & Spencer’s Facebook storefront.

Leveraging M&S’ over 300,000 Facebook fans, the Father’s Day-themed so-called ‘f-Commerce’ store (if you can stomach that phrase) lets users shop within Facebook itself, offering items such as Mens clothing, electrical appliances, gifts, and travel accessories. However, Zibaba says that its technology allows for automated catalogue updates (via an XML feed), so the inventory that M&S are currently displaying can be dynamically updated post Father’s Day.

Towards the end of the 1990s I was the best despatch-rider that ever lived. I sped around London occasionally breaking a leg or knee, fighting with car-drivers that regularly tried to kill me and and lived at 1,000 mph.

As my despatch-riding days dwindled to an end after a decade of insanity and injuries, I landed the best job there was to be had; a retirement home for old bikers. Instead of sitting outside advertising companies on St Martins Lane waiting for my controller to give me a random job to a random place, I started delivering mobile phones.

The company was called TNT, the office was in Vauxhall, very close to the M16 building and everybody in that office was doing cocaine, even some of the riders were doing cocaine. It was bonkers, but it was easy money; you could have made a movie about it. The company had an exclusive contract with Orange to deliver mobiles to anybody within the M25 who had lost or had a dysfunctional mobile.

Next week, I’ll proudly be attending the first Digital Agenda assembly, hosted by the European Commission, in Brussels, Belgium. The purpose of the two-day event is to discuss Europe’s strategy for a strong and growing digital economy by 2020.

In an effort to increase the standards of living for all Europeans, the European Commission is looking to make proposals for actions that need to be taken to “get Europe back on track for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth”.

You can take a look at the current plans outlined here – I swear they’re actually quite an interesting read if you’re interested in the European Internet and mobile startup scene.

The European Commission yesterday granted French entertainment and telecommunication services conglomerate Vivendi approval for its acquisition of Vodafone’s 44% stake in SFR, the company announced this morning. The transaction, which is valued at 7.95 billion euros (roughly $11.5 billion), should be completed in the next few days.

Vivendi will then own 100 percent of SFR, a French mobile phone and Internet services company with over 20 million customers and more than 12,6 billion euros in revenue for 2010.

Kinnernet in Israel did a lipdub. DLD in Germany did a lipdub.

But at Founders Forum, the annual meeting of European startups CEOs who’ve (for want of a better phrase) “made it”, they like to go one better.

Last night attendees were treated to “On Her Founder’s Secret Service”, which features; Jason Gissing (co-founder of Ocado), Tessa Jowell (MP), Irra K (model & entrepreneur), Marc Worth (WGSN), Gerorge Milford Haven, Eliz Watson, Ola Ahlvarsson, Charlie Muirhead, Lisa Bilton, Jonnie Goodwin, Brent Hoberman, Jimmy Wales and the whole thing was cast by Poppy Gaye. It was produced by Magma Group.

It’s pretty awesome.

Mubi has signed a deal with Sony Bravia to be inside its connected TVs. The announcement was made by Efe Cakarel, Founder & CEO, Mubi, at the annual European-focused Founders Forum near London. This is significant as Sony alone expects to sell 24m connected TVs this year and they are not even the market leader, Samsung is.

Mubi bills itself an “an online cinema, anytime, anywhere” and effectively socialises the experience so you can “find a girl in Tokyo who loves Kubrick” as they put it. Mubi has $3.15m in venture backing from the likes of Georges Harik, Aydin Senkut, Joel Peterson, Metin Anter and Eduardo Costantini.

Team Europe Ventures, the investment arm of German incubator Team Europe, is being rebranded as Point Nine Capital (PNC). Additionally, serial entrepreneur and angel investor Christoph Janz is joining its leadership team.

To date, the fund, which focuses on early-stage companies in the Internet and mobile space, has invested in over 10 startups, including inFakt, Lieferheld, Madvertise, MisterSpex, myGengo and SponsorPay.

Russian geolocation service AlterGeo has reportedly raised $10m from Intel Capital and Almaz Capital – a 25% share increase – and values the company at around $20-25m.

Serial investor Esther Dyson, who has a track record in Russia, having previously invested in Russian search engine Yandex (a partner of AlterGeo‘s), is also said to have participated.

The company plans to use the new financing to expand its user base and develop new services.

While Square is believed to be raising $50 million or more, say sources, at a valuation of $1 billion plus, and processing more than $3 million per day in mobile payments, others are noticing their traction. In China.

To that end iBOXpay is advertising its development of a “free mobile payment platform”, although it doesn’t appear to be on sale yet.

Anil Hansjee, long time Head of Corporate Development at Google EMEA has left, effective today. This is quite a big change in the European startup eco-system, as Hansjee was effectively the guy who startups and VCs in Europe went to to sell their companies to Google. We’ve reached out to Google to check whether he will be replaced.

In an email to colleagues – which TechCrunch Europe has seen -Hansjee said:

“I most definitely won’t find anything like this job in any other corporate development role (and I mean ANY) so I’m not even going to try. Instead for now, I’m going to take some time and do some advisory work (and maybe raise a different kind of fund – but more on that later!)”

I rang him up to quiz him on this, and it turns out his plans to raise a fund to back early stage startups are more than a “maybe”.

Sapato.ru, a Russian online shoe retailer, this morning announced that it has secured $12 million in additional capital from Intel Capital, with existing investors Direct Group, eVenture Capital Partners and Kinnevik participating. The round brings Sapato.ru’s total of funding to approximately $20 million.

The investments will be used for expanding the assortment range, marketing and to improve customer service through enhancement of the startup’s CRM platform.

ImpulsePay, the mobile payment service in the UK, has launched PublishPay, which is designed to help publishers charge for their content on mobiles. It does this in two ways.

On the content side, the platform is able to turn any RSS feed (which can be kelp private) into a mobile-friendly website, a potentially cheaper option than building a native app. In turn, that content can then be charged for – and to a reader’s mobile phone bill or pre-pay credit – through ImpulsePay’s support for Payforit, the mobile payments service backed by all the UK’s mobile operators. This provides a fairly frictionless alternative to Premium SMS or credit card payments — see our previous coverage.

I have a confession to make. I’m a fan of live bands, but what with one thing or another, I just don’t get to see enough. I signed up to all the obvious sites to get emails about upcoming gigs. I don’t read their emails. I’ve scrobbled and playlisted and put in my preferences multiple times on numerous sites. Do I go back to visit? No. What I’ve been waiting for is an app which you can pull out in front of friends when they say “Yeah, let’s go and see [band name]…” on the spur of the moment. This would be the ‘last mile’ connection to bands and where you are.

But no apps on the iPhone have got substantial traction for concert discovery. Ticketmaster/LiveNations’ app is only in the US, only presents Ticketmaster concerts and iLike’s ‘local concerts’ app has been in life-support mode since they were acquired by MySpace. The odd thing is movie discover apps like Flixster have had 30 million downloads

So I’m excited that Songkick the social platform for live music is launching an iPhone app today. It was developed for the startup by Shape in Denmark.

Remember Ericsson? Yeah, they used to make mobile phones on their own. Then they realised they couldn’t compete against Nokia, Motorola and the rest, and spun out their mobile division to hook up with Sony, who also realised that they were getting squeezed. Sony Ericcson mobile has trundled along for a few years and are even coming out with handheld mashups like the Xperia Play. But the mothership of Ericsson itself has largely turned into a telecoms and services company. Today, however they are doing something unusually disruptive.

Ericsson Money is launching across seven European countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Sweden) and allows anyone to send and receive money via mobile. Eventually there will be a commission fee for sending money but for a limited time it’s free.

MarketMeSuite is partnering with PeerIndex to integrate influence rankings into its social media dashboard. Through the partnership, MarketMeSuite users will be able to utilise PeerIndex’s topic-specific “social media rankings” in order to identify influencers and experts in the markets that they are targeting.

So, for example, if you’re pitching something technology-based (or perhaps coffee), I’m probably worth a shot (no pun intended) but go too far off the beaten track and my potential influence will soon drop off. That’s because UK-based PeerIndex, which competes most directly with Klout, identifies influential individuals online according to specific topics.

Social networks have contributed to the Arab Spring, people getting arrested for jokes, you name it.

Now one Facebok user has taken the social network to heart – or rather to her body. A woman in the Netherlands has had 152 profile images of her Facebook friends tattooed onto her arm.

You Tube user Suzyj87 now has a permanent collection of her friends right to hand, as it were. Who need a smartphone?

This really is the stuff of Sci-Fi movies: Build a computer program that can see as the human eye does. Based on the principles of the human visual cortex, Cortexica Vision Systems claims to have done just that.

The London startup, which was spun out of Imperial College London in February 2009 after six and a half years of research to understand how humans see and two years building algorithms to accurately mimic human visual recognition, today releases its VisualSearch API, which has been in private Beta for a while. It’s aimed at brands who want to “directly engage with consumers” via their mobile device while bypassing the need to use QR codes or other barcodes or more traditional text search.

Recently floated Russian search engine Yandex has been busy looking for startups to fund and acquire, thus creating it’s own eco-system around it. Today it’s financing the Zenmoney project – a personal accounting and budget planning service. Financing (amounts undisclosed) will be provided under Yandex.Factory, the company’s investment program which launched in April 2011.

It’s a quick funding. Zenmoney team only presented their project on March 15th, 2011 at Yandex.Start, Yandex’s open-door event for startups. As Yandex blogs today the startup will use the Yandex search API.