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.

For many technology startups today, Silicon Valley remains the quintessential place to look towards for inspiration, trends and – for some – a place to set up shop at some point in their startup’s life cycle. That remains true of some European entrepreneurs as well. But with the Valley “mindset” of fast-paced innovation and the global Internet explosion, some eco-systems are looking to vie to become at least as significant. For a long time New York was the poor relation to the Valley in this respect, but with tech startups back in vogue the city is building its own community. As a European looking at the city with fresh eyes, I’ve ben rattling around New York this week, tagging along with a number of European entrepreneurs. ‘World to NYC‘ is a programme organised by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and, from the London side, put together by TheGlasshouse/TakeOut, the networks founded by the uber-connected, and now New York resident, Judith Clegg.

As I mentioned the other day, the startup competition aspect of GeeknRolla and the Dublin Web Summit, have come together to create the London Web Summit on March 19th in The Brewery Venue, London.

I’ll be co-curating the Summit along with Paddy Cosgrave and chairing the start up competition, which you can apply to enter by clicking here.

The first speakers for the event are below. We’ll be announcing more shortly.

Fits.me, the Estonian “biorobotics virtual fitting room” startup for e-commerce clothing retailers and shoppers, has been around for a while. We first covered them in 2010 when they secured €1.3 million, taking their total cash to €2.6 million. They’ve now taken another €1.5 million, taking their funding to €4.1 million.

Fits.me lets customers “try on” clothing before buying from online clothes retailers. They can see how different sized bodies fit the the clothes on sale – like in real-world fitting rooms. One barrier to fashion e-commerce growth is ensuring that customers can accurately select their body size and shape. The Fits.me robotic body does it for them.

Early last year we pointed out that implementing the proposed EU cookie law would profoundly affect European technology companies and anyone running a business online out of Europe. Let’s review why.

First of all, it could mean that a staggering 90% of a site’s visitors would run a mile rather than saying yes to accepting a simple Google Analytics cookie. This is what happened when the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) implemented the EU advise on their own web site.

Bringing US business models to Europe might seem an obvious move for some – but it’s frequently far harder than it might appear. US incumbents can indeed try to expand, but some fall at the first hurdle. Exactly this happened on January 20 when Shoedazzle announced its closure in the UK. UK head Nigel Whiteoak has since admitted to me that the company was looking to make more of the continued opportunity in the US, versus trying to expand in the UK. Shades of the Romans over-reaching their borders? Maybe. Whatever the case, the news has been a boon to Stylistpick, the local UK player which is making hay in the UK and now heading to other markets with a war chest.

StylistPick has now raised an $11million B round led by Fidelity Growth Partners Europe. The subscription-based fast fashion brand, kept existing investors Accel Partners and Index Ventures on board, who invested $8 million in a Series A in April 2011. The board of directors is now Davor Hebel (Fidelity), Sonali de Rycker (Accel), Robin Klein (Index) and Eileen Burbidge (Passion Capital).

We covered the launch of Summly an application that summarises text last year, but I recently caught up with Nick D’Aloisio, the16 year year-old programmer who came up with the application for a video interview.

Its sounds almost boringly simple but the sheer amount of online content means the eco-system for these apps is rising. Formerly known as Trimit (which we covered back in July), Summly was developed by D’Aloisio from his bedroom in South London over a Summer break from school.

With the huge rise in the consumption of online video it follows that services to monetize that video are becoming hot properties. To that end, today Videoplaza, a ‘sell side’ ad management platform for video, has secured a Series B round of $12million led by Qualcomm Ventures and Innovacom. The company previously received rounds from VCs Creandum and Northzone, which also participated, which means VideoPlaza has received $18 million to date.

Accelerators, Accelerator, Accelerators! There’s a rash of them appearing everywhere, and the latest is the Rockstart Accelerator, a new startup program aimed at Europe’s most promising startups that want to hit a global scale (but then don’t they all?). However, this one has some credible partners in the shape of Google, Microsoft BizSpark, Mozilla WebFWD and StartupHouse in San Francisco.

Oscar Kneppers, founder of Rockstart says the program is for startups from the whole of Europe. Based in Amsterdam, it’s looking for 10 teams of founders and will subject them to 99 mentors for 100 days, and combine that with an additional three-month summer program that culminates with a 25-day Silicon Valley road trip. That last point is probably not a bad idea, for obvious reasons, though Seedcamp has done this for the last few years.

Way back in 2009 there was no large event dedicated to technology startups in the UK. TechCrunch, under Mike Arrington, was busy trying to get its TechCrunch50/Disrupt programme going in the US, and outside of local meetups, the TC event juggernaut still had yet to arrive in Europe. My friend and colleague Robin Wauters was doing Plugg in Brussels, but there wasn’t a startup event in London. So I launched a personal project, an event I called GeeknRolla, the name for which I literally dreamt up in a London pub. Despite those amateurish beginnings, about 400 people turned up that year, and I ran it again for the next couple of years as a fun side project. But times move on and after running it single-handedly for three years in a row, I’m going to bring the GeeknRolla “mojo” to a new event (while we wait for the TC event machine to spin up in Europe, and more on that later so stay tuned).

Thus, GeeknRolla and the Dublin Web Summit, are merging to create the London Web Summit. It’ll be on March 19th in The Brewery Venue, in London’s “Tech City” area.

Chicago-based but Israeli-founded Future Simple, a startup that creates products aimed at small businesses, has released an Android app which hooks into their small business CRM. It’s the first Small Business CRM with a true full native Android app and appears to be the first CRM in the Android Market. They already had an iPhone app.

We first reviewed online workspace startup Podio on its launch in March last year, and it looked pretty promising. A little like Box.net or 37Signals, Podio is closer to a more sophisticated Yammer, with lots of customising possible via its own internal ‘app’ store. Today it launches in two new language, Brazilian Portuguese and Italian, adding to its existing English, German, French, Danish and Spanish translations. Spilt between San Francisco and Copenhagen offices, Podio is now in use in 170 countries so, as CEO Tommy Ahlers says, the translations now make a lot of sense. Though you would think Chinese might also be a good addition?

Paulo Coelho, the world famous author of The Pilgrimage, The Alchemist and many other works which have in many ways become an inspiration for entrepreneurs, gave an exclusive and rare interview to TechCrunch at the World Economic Forum in Davos last night, the recording of which is published below. Coelho and I had previously been moderators at a dinner curated by Loic Le Meur on the future of social status and the interview took place in a taxi to another venue. (My write-up from the dinner will come later, suffice it to say that it was most entertaining and enlightening).

Coelho last gave an interview to Mike Arrington in 2008 where he said “MySpace Is My wife, Facebook Is my mistress”.

Coelho has oft-repeated his view that artists and artistic works do no suffer when they are copied, quite the opposite. Their distribution becomes greater and the artist comes off better as a result. Coelho has even taken to pirating his own books on The Pirate Bay.

What is interesting about our interview is his continuing vehement repudiation of the traditional book publishing industry’s response to the new platform of the Internet.

When Siri arrived on the iPhone 4S I thought to myself, who else could do this? It would need to be a search engine with natural language processing, but also behave in the manner of artificial intelligence and respond to voice recognition. One company that sprung to mind was True Knowledge. I pinged them. Are you working on a Siri type application, I asked? Interesting question, was their response. And then they went quiet.

Now they can reveal what they’ve been building. Evi is a new iPhone (iTunes link) and Android app in Beta (link) which might just give Apple’s Siri a run for her money. She – we’ll call this Artificial Intelligence a she – returns amazing results when consulted. Given that Siri is just not very good at giving answers which aren’t about the US, Evi might just be the Siri for the rest of the world, especially since Evi wil run on any Andoid or iPhone, and not just the 4S. I’ve seen her in action and Evi is very, very smart.

SoundCloud still isn’t conforming our story that they recently raised a $50 million round led by Kleiner Perkins – but today at the DLD conference in Munich they have announced a pretty significant milestone – hitting 10 million users. SoundCloud is gunning to be a kind of YouTube for sound, but with a wide variety of apps that can plug into its platform, and a business model which encourages upgrades to a premium paid experience. It competes with the like of Audioboo to some extent, but that is on a much lower 300,000 users and focuses on speech.

Fantasy Shopper is a social shopping game where players discover and share the latest fashion from real-world online and offline retailers. It’s gained a lot of traction since it’s launch last October, especially amongst women and we’ve heard on the grapevine that it was piquing the interest of investors for some months since emerging from the European Seed accelerator HackFWD.

Today that intense interest has been confirmed with a first round of funding led by top tier venture firms Accel Partners and NEA (one of the key investors in Groupon) to enable it to build out engineering and expand into new cities other than London. With NEA co-leading the investment, clearly there is a big opportunity to scale in US cities and elsewhere. The investment is based on a convertible note not equity, which is standard practise when investors want in fast and the round is hotly contested.

It’s only day one of DLD, the annual TED-like conference in Munich thrown by German media giant Burda, and already we have a few misunderstandings brewing. Amid the furore surrounding the SOPA protests and lobbying form media companies, at the other end of the debate-spectrum, the European Commission, in the shape of EC vice-president Viviane Reding, has been looking at harmonising privacy and personal data in Europe.

Rocket Internet, the Berlin-based incubator most famous for slavishly cloning US companies like Zappos, AirBnB and now Pinterest in Germany, now faces a new competitor – in the form of some of its key employees. As we reported recently the core team of Rocket, led by Oliver Samwer and his two other brothers, left to set up something new, and now we know what it is.

As a social network aimed at helping you meet new people – don’t mention the phrase ‘hooking up’ – Tagged’s vice president of sales and marketing Steve Sarner claims other companies are only now catching onto ‘social discovery’ and the site is “by far the largest” in the social discovery space. Ex-squeeze me?

I’m afraid we’ll have to balance this, and perhaps educate Mr Sarner a little, in case he hasn’t heard of a little site called Badoo.