MyHeritage.com, a relatively heavily-funded Israeli startup operating a huge family-based social network, has moved to acquire Bliscy.pl from Poland’s Internet publishing company Wirtualna Polska to solidify its position in the Polish family history market.

The acquisition translates to growth of MyHeritage’s family network to 56 million registered users and roughly 760 million profiles.

Mobile social network Flirtomatic (“the world’s number one flirting company”) has appointed Neil Goldberg as its new CEO. He’ll replace outgoing CEO Mark Curtis.

Goldberg is described as having “16 years of leadership experience building global companies in the entertainment and technology industries” and was previously with Silicon Valley’s SayNow, the social, voice-based entertainment platform, which was sold to Google. That’s notable since Flirtomatic is making in-roads in the U.S., attributing success in the States as a key factor in its ability to raise a $9 million Series C round from Nauta Capital and existing investors last July.

As for Curtis’ decision to step down, it’s described as an “amicable departure” and as having unanimous backing from the Board “in the interest of the company’s next growth phase.”

Concur, a provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions and recent purchaser of TripIt, has acquired London-based GlobalExpense, a company that specializes in Web-based end-to-end expense management solutions.

Concur has agreed to cough up £12 million for the acquisition of the privately held company, plus a performance-based earn-out of up to £2 million.

The Financial Times would rather not have Apple take a 30 percent cut of in-app subscriptions for its iOS publications, and has launched a HTML5 Web app that enables readers to access content across tablets and smartphones.

As part of the Web app’s debut, FT will provide free access during launch week.

FT acknowledges that the Web app has been initially optimized for the iPhone and the iPad, but says it will also be adapted for Android-based devices and the BlackBerry PlayBook.

EDITD, the London-based startup that offers a retail monitoring and analytics platform for the fashion industry, has raised a $1.6 million “seed round” led by Index Ventures. Alex Zubillaga, Atlas Venture, High Line Venture Partners, Sylvie Gabriel and Joanne Wilson have also participated.

The new funding will be used to further develop EDITD’s product offering, including increasing the amount of data being analysed, along with entering new markets and expanding the team “globally”. Robin Klein of Index will also join the company’s board as chairman.

Late last year Semetric, the startup behind the Musicmetric analytics service, secured a “significant round” of funding led by Pentech Ventures (terms were undisclosed) but that gave the company a good “two-year runway” to expand its data collection infrastructure and applications and grow the team.

It’s now powering Musicweek’s weekly Artist Buzz Chart, and rolling out its measurement and analytical tools, especially aimed at the music industry, monitoring consumer activity on social networks, P2P file-sharing networks, alongside reviews, comments you name it.

In addition, they are forming part of the substantial group of music-based companies in the ‘Silicon Roundabout’ tech cluster area of East London which includes Last.fm, Soundcloud, Songkick, Fizzback and Mixcloud among others.

We spoke to them as part of our “Roundabout Tapes’ series of interviews.

Social media specialist Punktilio has been acquired by digital media agency Essence, just two years after being founded.

In fact, the accompanying press release carries the line: “From ‘start-up to ‘sold’ in just two years”, which reminds me of the Stuart Baggs quote from the TV show The Apprentice: “Everything I touch, turns to sold”. That’s because, Punktilio’s sale is also just one year after Michael Birch invested in the London-based company. Birch, of course, has seen multiple exits, including Bebo, which he originally sold to AOL for $850 million in March 2008.

Restalo.es, the leading Spanish restaurant reservations site, has raised €1m from Barcelona-based Active Venture Partners. The funding will be used to fuel growth both at home and Internationally. Funded in 2008, the startup currently operates across Spain, along with Paris, London and Rome.

Similar to Toptable in the UK, Restalo lets diners book tables in real-time with immediate confirmation of a booking in addition to offering discounts of up to 70%. To date, the company claims to have taken 500,000 bookings worth €14 million for restaurateurs, while saving over €6m for its users. It has 3 million page views per month and over 300,000 members.

Sports tracking platform Runtastic has announced that it’s crossed the 2 million download mark for its mobile apps, while claiming 400,000 monthly active users in Europe. The Austrian company says that it is now also cashflow positive.

Based in Linz, Austria (near the offices of stealth payment startup Jumio), Runtastic is originally funded through a €150k public grant but has just closed an angel round from a group of undisclosed business angels. The new funding will primarily be used for expansion to the UK and the US.

In December last year Waze, the social traffic and navigation app for smartphones, raised a hefty $25 million Series B round of funding. With growth doubling from 2 million users worldwide in December last year to four million users in 45 countries now, Waze clearly knew it was on a roll. And today it launches its app in the UK [iTunes link]. (Indeed, I’ll be interviewing Waze’s VP Community Geographer Di-Ann Eisnor tonight in London at this event.

To kick off the UK launch Waze CEO Noam Bardin struck a deal with Denver-based Intermap in February to provide users with a base road grid across Britain on which they can play. Intermap has re-mapped entire countries and built uniform national databases for Europe – so expect plenty more European country roll-outs from Waze based on this data (France and Italy are already live).

Mind Technologies plans to do a capital raise of 4 to 5 million Euros in order to fund the development of its advanced EEG (electroencephalography) headset for the BCI (Brain Computer Interface) market. Still confused?

Basically, it wants to develop a smaller, easy to use, EEG device that can be used for mobile smart phones as well as the PC. The upshot is using a small portable headset to run apps on smartphones. Star Trek!

Mind Technologies wants to make their EEG headset and thought controlled software “a household name.” We’ll see. For now, the race is on to replace that bluetooth headset with something a tad more powerful.

It’s been a long time since TechCrunch made its last official event in a german speaking country. Almost exactly two years after TechCrunch Munich and our TCEU Editor Mike Butcher developing a crush on Berlin, we are bringing TechCrunch to Vienna. The event will take place in one of the most prestigious and old-fashioned industrial houses, embedded in an entire week of startups, investors and tech-lovers from all walks.

Brandwatch, the UK social media monitoring startup, has released a free search plugin for Seesmic, the desktop client for companies who want to manage their social media presence.

Aimed at users who want to monitor a particular brand or topic across the whole of the Web, not just the services that Seesmic supports out of the box, the Brandwatch plugin adds additional search/monitoring functionality. This is presented in a new column within the app which updates in real-time to display Brandwatch data alongside the user’s Twitter, Facebook and other social media feeds.

This is a guest post by Nicholas Lovell, director of GAMESbrief, a blog on the business of games, and a consultant who helps companies make money from games. Together with Nic Brisbourne of DFJ Esprit, he is writing a book on 50 questions you should ask when raising venture capital. Every answer is published on either The Equity Kicker or GAMESbrief, and they are up to question 23.

Recently, the UK innovation quango NESTA hosted an event aimed at encouraging investment in games companies.

Ian Livingstone, life president of Square Enix Europe and creator of the Fighting Fantasy game books, argued that the problem lay both with investors, who "have not made an effort to understand what we do as an industry", and "innovators – who don’t understand how to access finance".

Ian is just plain wrong. The problem doesn’t lie with investors.

Next Performance, the online ad company that specialises in “dynamic retargeting”, has raised €16m from UK-based growth equity firm Kennet Partners. The new funds will be used by Next Performance to continue its European expansion, while Michael Elias, Managing Director at Kennet, and Hillel Zidel, Director at Kennet, will join the the Paris, France-based company’s Board of Directors.

Rovio, the Finland-based developer behind the extremely popular Angry Birds franchise, this morning announced on its blog that it has acquired a longtime partner, Finnish animation studio Kombo.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but we understand there was a mix of cash and Rovio stock involved.

Mixcloud, the ‘YouTube of radio’ (see our recent TechCrunch TV interview), has finally brought its offering to the iPhone in the form of a native app.

The Mixcloud iPhone app gives on-the-go access to the London startup’s library of on-demand radio – DJ mixes, radio shows and podcasts, along with 100s of thousands of other “Cloudcasts” that have been uploaded to the service. The app is in Beta and thus is currently being offered for free.

London-based VC focused on mobile, m8 Capital, is to invest in Austin, US mobile and social games publisher, Portalarium. m8 led the funding round with San Francisco-based Founders Fund. Today’s investment is undisclosed but we understand that it takes the total funding raised to date by Portalarium to $3.6 million. This is m8 Capital’s first investment in a US-based business after a year of European investments.

Portalarium develops mobile and social games, virtual worlds and related services to create what it says is an open ecosystem integrated into social networks and gaming communities. But there’s no product yet – that’s coming in the next few months.

Seen as a “last throw of the dice” in 2008 by Michael Acton Smith’s Mind Candy, Moshi Monsters has grown into a phenomenal success. The educational social game for kids is said to be signing up a new player every second and when your online brand is shifting merchandise in the physical world too, you must be doing something right.

It’s no wonder then that a new UK startup would want to pitch itself on the back of Moshi Monsters’ success and Fight My Monster is doing just that, aiming to be a “Moshi Monsters for boys”.

Airbnb just raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, and it’s using some of that cash (and/or stock) to acquire a German ‘equivalent’ dubbed Accoleo. This move signals Airbnb’s willingness to expand worldwide – the startup will establish its first European office in Hamburg, Germany.

Coincidentally, one of its main rivals in Europe, venture-backed 9flats – started by Qype founder Stephan Uhrenbacher – is also based in Germany (Berlin, to be more precise).