This is a guest post by Luke Miller, Founder and CEO of Offset Options, a Barcelona & London-based startup using web services to fight climate change.

The majority of today’s start-ups are focused on making an action, a process, purchase or communications easier, cheaper and more efficient. This efficiency can offer great reduction in environmental impact – for your industry and to your consumer. Being aware of your environmental impact – and the value you provide for customers in reducing theirs – from the early stage enables you to understand how you can build this in consciously so it has the lowest cost and largest benefit.

Collaboration startup Podio, which is taking on the worlds of Yammer and BaseCamp, allows users to create easy-to-build apps (closer to widgets) on their platform.

Today it’s launched the ability to do the same on its iPhone app and revealed it now has over 40,000 organisations on the platform. Podio’s CEO Tommy Ahlers is the former founder of Zyb which sold to Vodafone for $49 million.

TrustYou, a social media monitoring and semantic technologies startup, has raised a $5 million Series A round. It’s also acquiring Dallas-based competitor ReviewAnalyst. The round was led by Credit Agricole Private Equity and will be used to expand worldwide operations out of its base in Munich Germany. Its “sentiment search platform” is aimed at the hotel, restaurant and travel industries in the United States and Europe.

Exclusive - Right on the heels of Populis acquiring mokono for €8.2 million, the latter completed an acquisition of its own. Mokono over the weekend closed the purchase of German premium blog network Adnation, TechCrunch has learned.

The acquisition adds another 3 million unique monthly visitors to the mokono / Populis network, mostly readers from a number of popular German blogs like Spreeblick.com, BILDblog.de and crackajack.de. Mokono’s network now reaches 17 million unique monthly users.

NICE Systems this morning announced that it is to acquire UK company Fizzback, which is backed by Advent Venture Partners, Nauta Capital and TAG, for approximately $80 million in cash.

Fizzback sends consumers requests for feedback relating to a specific interaction or transaction via mobile, web or social media. The feedback is then analyzed by Fizzback to determine a relevant response, and the company subsequently engages the consumer at the contact center, branch, point of sale, mobile app, or on the Web.

DailyDeal.de, a German Groupon clone launched in Berlin in December 2009, has been acquired by Google, the company says in a message on its website (see below). TheNextWeb reported the acquisition first (in English, at least).

Google hasn’t yet announced or confirmed the acquisition. DailyDeal did not disclose the financial terms of the agreement.

NOTE: This is a ‘cross-post’ to a post on TechCrunch.com

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark —that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. – Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I’ll get right to the point: this is my last post on TechCrunch. And it’s my resignation letter. The first resignation letter I’ve ever written, in fact. Usually I get fired.

To those who have been following the recent TechCrunch drama, this post won’t come as much of a surprise. A little over a week ago I wrote that, unless Mike Arrington was allowed to choose his own successor as editor of TechCrunch, I would no longer write for the site. Sure enough, this past Monday, a statement from AOL announced Erick Schonfeld as the new editor.

A lot of outside observers assume that Schonfeld, who has been with TechCrunch since 2007, was Mike’s choice to take over. But, in the interests of transparency, it’s important to clarify what really happened. The truth is, Erick was Arianna Huffington’s choice, not TechCrunch’s.

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This is a guest post by Adam Wynne: founder and Geek-in-chief of StreamScience. He co-founded a startup in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2000 and exited in 2004. In 2005 he came to London and worked in the IT dept of a prominent investment bank for a year, and then as a quantitative analyst for another four. He has now given it all up to found StreamScience and is Entrepreneur-in-residence in his second-bedroom.

Working on a trading floor in an investment bank taught me two things: to deliver things that work, as quickly as possible; and to avoid the Cos lettuce at the canteen salad bar (I once found a live worm in it covered in salad dressing, inching for its life – true story). Now I’m not going to lie to you: these past 5 years have given me some delicious problems to work on, and have rewarded me handsomely for doing so, so why, you might rightly ask, would I give it all up for the tumult, terrors and triumphs of founding another startup? “Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.”

While the retail or ‘high street’ fashion world has been gradually populated by startups looking to create communities of fashion lovers (such as WIWT), the more rarified world of high fashion has remained largely untouched by online. This is an anomaly, because if there is one thing to be said about high fashion it’s that it has passionate followers. Done right, that ought to translate into passionate users of online services.

Lyst, a startup founded by Chris Morton, Sebastjan Trepca and Devin Hunt, is gaining traction with high fashionistas and looking to achieve just that. It’s latest enhancement – launched to coincide with London Fashion Week – is designed to allow fashion fans to be alerted as soon as clothes on the catwalk become available to purchase, usually some weeks later.

Does the world need another social network? Arguably, nooooo, but I happen to believe there’s room for a lot more niche social networks to complement the existing social media juggernauts.

Enter Island X, an invitation-only social network for ‘international people’, i.e. people that have grown up internationally.

Apprupt, which operates a performance network for mobile in-content ads, this morning announced that it has raised more funding from existing backers T-Venture (a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom), Neuhaus Partners and KfW. The size of the financing round was not disclosed, although the company says it involves a “seven-digit Euro investment”.

The new funding will be used to increase the startup’s headcount in sales, international expansion and to invest in its mobile advertising technology.

Online vertical media publisher Populis, which we’ve likened to Europe’s Demand Media or Associated Content in the past, this morning announced that it has acquired Berlin-based mokono, Germany’s largest blog network and and social media advertising specialist.

Populis (formerly GoAdv) paid 8.2 million euros for the company, adding 14 million unique monthly users to its network of websites as well as 700,000 registered blogs and writers to its portfolio of media brands, including Blog.co.uk and Blog.de.

Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com this morning announced the appointment of Miguel Milano to the position of president, EMEA and executive vice president, EMEA sales. Milano hails from Oracle, where he served as senior vice president and headed European sales for Exadata.

Prior to Oracle, worked at McKinsey, i2, Telefonica and PeopleSoft.

ReadMIll, a young Berlin-based startup subjected themselves to a withering interrogation by YCombinator founder Paul Graham at yesterday’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference ni an on-sage Office Hours session. They haven’t launched yet, and Graham repeatedly told them should launch now – “Why wait?” he said.

Indeed, why wait. So today ReadMill has taken that advice to heart and is opening up to the world. You can grab an invite here. It’s also announcing it’s had seed investment from Index Seed, Passion Capital to the tune of €280,000.

As I wrote last week when Seedcamp made a flurry of announcements, including fresh funding and ambitious plans for international expansion, I spent some time in London last week to get acquainted with a bunch of interesting European startups.

Below is an overview of all 20 Seedcamp Week 2011 finalists, starting with the 3 (well, actually, 4 winners).

But first, it’s worth noting that Seedcamp, which had already financially and otherwise backed 16 of the 20 companies that presented their wares during Seedcamp Week 2011 – over and over, I might add – held interviews with the four remaining startups and decided to inject some seed capital into them, too. So, in a way, everyone kinda sorta ‘won’.

Mobile Interactive Group (MIG) this morning announced that it has acquired global mobile payments business Zaypay, a startup based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. MIG says it will continue to operate Zaypay as a standalone business, but declined to disclose financial terms of the agreement, other than to reveal that it was an all-cash deal.

Zaypay enables third-party developers to process international micropayments through SMS, phone calls, in-app and other alternative payment methods. ZayPay was founded by Dutch entrepreneur Adriaan Mol (27) in 2006 and is currently operational in 44 countries.

A group of investors led by Juha Pinomaa, former President of Suunto and a former Nokia exec, has acquired the connected watch business of a company called Meta Watch, as well as related IP assets.

Joining Pinomaa as investors and key managers are Bill Geiser and David Rosales, who previously led the Watch Technology Division of Fossil, the now-former owner of Meta Watch.

Connected watches are nothing new, but Meta Watch has made a name for itself with its developer-friendly approach. Aiming to reinvent the wrist watch as a simple but powerful mobile accessory, the company’s platforms enable developers to extend the interfaces of a range of mobile devices and applications to their products.

With a new NFL season starting tomorrow, it’s good timing for daily fantasy sports operator FanDuel to close a $4 million Series B investment round led by venture capital firm Piton Capital. Existing investors Pentech Ventures and the Scottish Investment Bank. The company will use the majority of the funds on product development and hiring.

FanDuel’s growth is reflected in its payouts going up from $1.5 million last season to over $10 million in league winnings.The company has also just opened an office in New York, complementing existing offices in Edinburgh and San Francisco.