While startups across the world are doing their best to disrupt mobile networks with clever voice call apps, like Viber, there remains the basic issues of actual voice and data access which still requires some chipping away at. It’s a particular issue in places like Europe where you can drive for only a couple of hours and cross two or even three borders and see your mobile roaming bill spin up or down like a yo-yo. For the past few years we’ve seen players like Truphone and Maxroam attempt to gnaw away at the telcos, but now Maxroam is going one further, launching a virtual network operator of its own.

Today at Techcrunch Baltics, we’re hearing a lot about the need for cooperation between the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. While the latter has won a lot of PR juice from its association with Skype over the last few years, there is no less talent in this other neighbouring countries, so its interesting to see a new initiative appear to cross those borders.

The so-called #BalticMafia – startups people from the region – gets another boost in the form the StartupWiseGuys

They are now offering cold hard cash of €500 to anyone who refers a team to their startup program (which invests up to €15.000 per team) of 13 weeks in Tallinn, Estonia. That referral fee sounds a little low – until you realise exactly how much €500 gets you in Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia…

European accelerator HackFwd just announced that Infogr.am from Riga in Latvia as its latest investment. Infogr.am’s product is gunning to be a kind of adobe illustrator for online, allowing anyone to create cool info-graphics.

The web-based application needs no programming or design skills, and works in the same way that you can snap a photo and share it on your social networks. Users make a statement or an argument graphically and then share it. An infographic can be embedded on a page or shared as a link or an image directly.

BaltCap, a leading venture investor in startups in the Baltics region, has signed a €1 million investment in Clusterpoint, an enterprise software startup created by Latvian programmers and backed by seed investors in the UK and Baltics.

Clusterpoint has built a database platform designed for cloud computing infrastructure which they claim is highly scalable. They are competing against open source solutions such as MongoDB.

We’re running the first ever TechCrunch Baltics meetup today with a mini-conference and pitch contest in the lovely city of Riga, Latvia. The Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are tiny countries, but punch above their weight in terms of their technical prowess. Estonia in particular was made famous as being the base from which Skype was developed, and now the rest of the region is coming alive with startups and accelerators. You can find the agenda here. Up to 8 selected Baltic startups will pitch to a jury and audience that includes many key investors in the region and beyond. We also have a dedicated twitter account @TCBaltics and the hashtag is #TCBaltics.

It’s been a long and winding road since Tariq Krim created and eventually left Netvibes, but today Netvibes has been acquired by huge French engineering giant Dassault Systèmes for an undisclosed amount. Krim continues to pursue his original dream of organising the social web on Jolicloud.

Netvibes had an early lead back in the era when ‘personal start pages’ were the new new thing, but (and we won;t go into the long story here) a large pivot towards enterprise saw it moving into more of a dashboard for Fortune 500 brands, enterprises and agencies (including Coca Cola, HP, L`Oreal, US Dept. of Energy, Digitas, McCann Worldgroup, Edelman, Lufthansa, Sage). Although you’d be forgiven for not tracking its growth in that other world, it’s in fact turned into a decent enterprise story, serving over 250,000 Web apps directly into businesses and connecting internal enterprise systems (like Salesforce, SQL, ERP, etc.) with the real-time Web.

We were a little concerned at the end of last year that one of Europe’s better VCs, Paul Jozefak (@pjozefak) had parted ways with his firm Neuhaus Partners in Hamburg, and that there was no news on his next move.

Now the word on the street appears to be that he’s working on something pretty interesting. I’ve heard through the grapevine that he’s told people about a new project called Liquid Labs. I reached out for comment but he politely declined.

I love it when a startup I’ve been covering for literally years suddenly finds itself in the spotlight, and for the right reasons. In this case, Skimlinks, originally from London but now with a growing US base, has been revealed as powering the affiliate links behind Pinterest, one of the hottest startups on the map right now. For some that appears to be a little bit of scandal, at least for Pinterest, though not for Skimlinks.

LLSocial uncovered the practice, whereby if a post on Pinterest happens to link to a commerce site with an affiliate program, Pinterest uses Skimlinks – a third party service – to modifiy the link to add their own affiliate tracking code. Anyone making a purchase from that click through sends affiliate revenue, via Skimlinks, back to Pinterest. Kerching, everyone benefits.

I have fallen into a habit of reading online with the help of Evernote Clearly, a browser extension that creates a layer on top of a web page, showing text in large font and neutral colors. No matter how small or large my monitor is, Clearly creates a peaceful environment, in which I can read without the distractions of flashing images, related links and even advertisement.

As TechCrunch TV reported recently, Clearly comes from Romania. Before it was acquired by Evernote last summer, Clearly was known as Readable, developed by Gabriel Coarna, a Bucharest-based Romanian without formal IT training.

The Netherlands-based BoosterMedia has raised €1.75 million in funding from previous backers Truffle Capital and Solid Ventures to boost its HTML5 mobile games distribution network and expand it internationally. By providing mobile gaming destinations to online media and gaming brands, BoosterMedia aims to reach gamers beyond the traditional
channels (such as the many app stores).