Prolific European venture capital firm Index Ventures has finalized raising a €500 million growth fund (roughly $700 million), its second such fund meant for later-stage investments.

The firm will tap the new fund to invest anything from €10 million to €50 million in ventures with proven business and revenue models located around the globe, but primarily companies based in Europe or U.S. companies with international ambitions, partners Saul Klein and Bernard Dallé tell me.

A 48-hour Hackathon this weekend will bring web and app based games to life in aid for Children in Need – and if you’re an iOS and Android developer or graphic designer, you can lend a hand.

The project is due to take place at Birmingham Science Park Aston (BSPA) and hopefully result in lots of creative games to be submitted for sale in the Apple Store and Android Market Place. Ideas for the games were submitted by primary school kids across the West Midlands who were asked to sketch plots and characters they’d like to see come to life.

It’s counterintuitive to the electric-obsessed world we live in today. But dammit, it just might work. On my recent trip to Dublin Web Simmit and Founders, I was struck by the amazing entrepreneurship behind Buzzing Bicycles, a Dublin startup created by student of Trinity College Dublin, Colm Moore.

He’s been working with small engines and bicycle engines for the last 10 years and now he’s started selling and installing bicycle engine kits over the last few months and is hoping to expand across Ireland and beyond.

Advertising and content network operator Adconion this morning announced that it has acquired smartclip, a European digital video advertising startup.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but sources tell us this was an all-stock deal and no cash is changing hands in the transaction.

The 600 participants at last weekend’s Mozilla Festival were a crowd of filmmakers, educators, coders, tech-savvy media professionals, media-sceptical hackers, hacking-ignorant journalists, gamers, government advisors – I could go on, but I think you get the idea. It was diverse. All of them however were thinkers and makers ready to explore the frontiers of the open web.

Under the tagline ‘Media, Freedom and the Web’ non-profit organisation Mozilla designed this round of their yearly festival around the challenge of using the web for a more creative and collaborative media landscape. Plenty of ideas were spread, challenges were conquered, solutions were crowdsourced, a fair share of awesome new stuff presented and TechCrunch picked out the highlights for you.

In recent years the fashion of incubating companies in physical spaces (desk, Wifi, funding combinations) has faded in favour of The Accelerator. These are typically a programme of a few weeks combined with teaching, networking and funding. In the UK we’ve seen Seedcamp, then SpringBoard then The Oxygen Accelerator appear, among others. Today another joins the pack, The Accelerator Academy, out of London. This time, however, it’s attempting to up the accelerator ‘arms race’ with only post-exit mentors, although it’s charging model is unconventional for something that bills itself as an accelerator (see update below).

BagThat, a new online store that leverages social networks to benefit consumers and suppliers alike through the power and economics of collective buying, this morning announced funding of £2 million from a private EIS fund.

BagThat debuts today on a limited basis and will officially launch in January 2012. Already, the fledgling company has signed up Halfords, Thomas Cook, Neilsons and Champneys; the first high street brands to join the venture.

Netflix and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM) this morning announced a multi-year licensing agreement that will make Netflix the exclusive subscription streaming service in the UK and Ireland for most first-run feature films from the movie studio.

Starting in early 2012, when Netflix is set to make its debut in the UK and Ireland, registered members will be able to watch available content instantly on their television sets, tablets, game consoles, computers and mobile phones.

In August last year Zalando, the shoe-retailing Zappos clone started by the Samwer brothers through their investment vehicle Rocket Internet, closed an undisclosed funding round thought to be in the realm of €100 million. This is very ‘Samwer’. Supercharge a clone site in order that it can scale as fast as possible before a competitor – such as the US site they are cloning – can enter the market. By the time the US startups has realised it needs to scale in Europe, Rocket Internet has the market sown up. Kerching!

Thus Zalando took that funding round and invested massively in the execution of scaling in other markets. It’s something to behold the Samwers in operation, and if you are a fan of a sort of MBA-oriented innovation in execution – as opposed to Silicon Valley’s ‘conceptual innovation’ – then it’s pretty impressive.

So a year later Zalando is today claiming it is now the market leader in France. In September, Zalando.fr’s monthly sales revenues in France surpassed the EUR 12 million mark and the company expects a total turnover of EUR 120 million for the year. That makes France the online merchant’s 3rd largest market, after Germany and the Netherlands. Competitors include Spartoo, Sarenza, Otto, Asos and a couple of smaller German etailers (Mirapodo, Frontlineshop).

UK electronics retailer Carphone Warehouse is pulling the plug on its 11 Best Buy stores in the UK to concentrate on its own stores. The Best Buy UK joint venture with the US-based retail giant has a few “big box” (e.g. TVs, washing machines etc) stores across the south east and Midlands, aimed at hitting the electronics market with cheaper prices. It made a loss of £62m in its first year in the UK and analysts expect it to report a loss of £35m in the first half of 2011.

Semiconductor chip maker Quantenna Communications has a new strategic investor on board, and her name is Telefónica.

Through its investment arm Telefónica Ventures, a division of Telefónica Digital, the Spanish broadband and telecom company has made an equity investment to gain access to the latest Quantenna technology for the deployment of video services to the home.

Confirming rumors earlier reported by Bloomberg, mobile carrier France Télécom-Orange and advertising juggernaut Publicis Groupe have teamed up to launch a venture capital fund.

The companies have committed to jointly put in 150 million euros (presumably split 50/50), and are seeking outside investors to double the size of the fund, which will focus on backing budding entrepreneurs building digital companies in France and the rest of Europe.

Bloomberg pegged the size of the fund at ‘more than 100 million euros’. If enough investors line up to back the new fund, it will reach its actual target size of 300 million euros.

Back in June image tagging startup ThingLink launched launched Rich Media Tags for publishers, allowing anyone to interact with an image tag which might be embedded music, video, words, pictures and tags for people. But this is still a product aimed at publishers. The real power to come from image tagging is going to be setting it free. Thus today it’s launching a rich media tag creator enabling app developers to build custom ThingLink-powered applications.

MADS, a provider of mobile display and messaging ad serving solutions, has raised €1 million – or roughly $1.4 million – in funding in a Series B round led by OTM Investments (both the company and the investor are based in The Netherlands).

MADS says it will use the fresh capital to take its business beyond mobile ad serving and set up sales offices in the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain to support clients in their local languages.

Masabi, which develops mobile ticketing technology for the transport sector, has secured $4 million from London-based m8 Capital, the majority-owned affiliate of AGC Equity Partners that targets mobile startups and technology. This is a B-round, following the $2m A-round of last year.

In June last year, m8 invested $800k in the location-based startup Rummble, the startup which pre-dated Foursquare but which is now focusing on the B2B market.

The launch of the iPhone 4 and its arial problems suddenly created a massive interest in the quality and reach of mobile phone and WiFi networks across the planet. The issue has only increased as smartphones have proliferated. So being able to work out which mobile carrier was best for you based on where you are, in real time would be a dream come true for many. OpenSignalMaps launched at the start of this year to do just that, and now they have hit a million downloads on the Android app store.

The data is also producing some interesting results. Lately they’ve been picking up some unreleased devices being used with the application. For example, it appears AT&T is testing some phones on their new 4G network (which was only released recently and currently has no released 4G phones that work). Their data shows that the network is – at least right now – blazing fast (but this could slow down once more people are using it of course).

Coull, the video advertising network, has closed of a $2m equity round led by Peter Hargreaves (co-founder of Hargreaves Lansdown). That is a sizeable chuck of cash for one guy, but Hargreaves is famously known as an investor who does not follow the pack, instead going with businesses with proven traction.

Coull has avoided VC route because, as CEO and founder Irfon Watkins says, “it’s too long winded and you get conservative valuations within UK. I chose angel investment as opposed to VC because they had cash and experience with friendly legal terms.” Alas, it’s a view often espoused by UK startups, although the VCs argue back that they are often restricted by their funds from taking on risk. The debate continues…

Last year I attended a brand new event in Dublin called Founders (or F.ounders if you prefer the branding). I duly wrote it up here as an “overnight must-attend” and a welcome addition to the European tech events scene.

As one of the few writers to attend the first one, it was indeed a pretty damn good event, and an amazing achievement for 27 year old entrepreneur Paddy Cosgrave. And I see various others coming out with a bunch of superlatives to describe the events, which was run alongside the Dublin Web Summit.

First I’ll say what happened, then I’ll have something to say about what I think is going on here.

Trustpilot, a site which rates the trustworthiness of shopping sites via a toolbar, has raised €3.3 million from two Nordic venture funds, SEED Capital and Northzone Ventures. The money will be used to scale internationally. Right now it’s available in 10 European countries but plans further rollouts.

Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine, has joined Google, Bing and Yahoo! to collaborate on Schema.org. The initiative was set up in June 2011 to help web developers tag their websites to improve the display of the search results, which should make it easier for people to find the right web pages.

Schema.org aims to achieve that by adding specific HTML code into the webpage, which helps differentiate between things, persons, events, places, businesses and creative works amongst others. The full list of tags can be found here.