At first glance this may look like little more than a glorified affiliate type deal but with the lack of self-sign up at KashFlow’s new OEMAccounts.com site and a negotiable revenue share, it’s perhaps more a sign of intent as the company beds down on its growth trajectory minus the ‘strategic investor’ that it recently set out to find.

In February, we reported that KashFlow founder Duane Jackson was even considering selling a majority stake in the business in order to step on the gas, but having put those fund raising plans on hold (at least for now), it would appear that the company is forging ahead regardless and in doing so is casting its net for strategic partners instead by letting companies sell its online accounting software as if it were their own.

Similar to its Orbit Accounts service aimed at accounting firms who want to integrate KashFlow, the company is offering to do all of the heavy lifting for resellers: KashFlow will re-skin its software with the organisation’s own branding including a name of their choice and take care of the hosting infrastructure, upgrades, support and customer billing. In return, via a revenue share, partners are encouraged to market the hell out the service.

Meanwhile, KashFlow claims 10,000 customers of its own but is hoping that today’s launch will accelerate growth beyond the current 7% per-month.

Per-Arne Nordlander, the Swedish angel investor, remains as an investor and chairman of Mancx, while the company says that the new funds will be used to support further development of its knowledge marketplace and to “drive an aggressive marketing push.”

On that note, Mancx has appointed Jonas Bergström as Head of Development. Bergström’s background is in the online games and gambling sector, where he was previously the lead developer of global online gaming provider bwin.

When Stockholm, Sweden-based Mancx launched back in April, we described it as a sort of classified ads site for business intelligence. Or to think of it another way: a paid-for LinkedIn Answers where each request for specific information comes attached with a bounty in which Mancx itself takes a 20% commission. Those requests can also be made anonymously and range from marketing leads and sales-oriented data to more practical information, such as recommendations for good iPhone developers.

Flattr’s support for SoundCloud follows a similar recently announced tie-in to Twitter, which makes it easy to tip somebody’s Twitter account with real money, although who on earth would pay for my nonsensical tweets, I’m not so sure. But it does bring into focus the company’s strategy to become a sort of ‘Like’ button but with real money, even if post-launch Flattr has slowly and perhaps stealthily begun to deviate from its more altruistic and slightly idiosyncratic payment model into something more mainstream.

In January, the service began letting users donate specific amounts of cash directly rather than relying solely on the albeit innovate model of simply divvying up a pre-allocated monthly pool of cash (starting from €2), no matter how thinly that’s spread if a user chooses to “Flattr” a high number of sites.

More recently, Flattr dropped another one if its oddities, no longer requiring new users to add credit to their accounts in order to run the Flattr button on their own sites and start receiving payments. A move that we noted at the time paves the way for Flattr to migrate further towards the holy grail of peer-to-peer payments (think: mobile phone as wallet) in which handing over cash digitally becomes as easy, if not easier than it is physically. With regards to Twitter and now SoundCloud that may already be case.

The New York, US-based company with R&D in Israel offers publishers a way to make their content more discoverable by readers and through personalising this content also increase engagement and click-throughs, which in turn increases revenue. Along with generating links to interesting content on a publisher’s own website it can also be used to link to external, revenue-generating, third-party content.

Outbrain recently launched in the UK where it is now powering more than 35 sites, while Express Newspapers is now planning to run Outbrain across Dailystar.co.uk New-magazine.co.uk, Star-magazine.co.uk and Ok.co.uk. In the US Outbrain works with the likes of Condé Nast, USA Today, iVillage, TMZ, Newsweek and Slate.

The company is backed by Carmel Ventures, Gemini Israel Funds, GlenRock Israel, Rhodium and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The new equity investment will be used to support the company’s continued growth and global expansion, which includes plans to expand into North America and further European markets while consolidating its presence in the UK and Asia Pacific region. This will be realised through a boost in sales and marketing capabilities, and growing Site Intelligence’s development and consulting teams and customer support.

Carles Ferrer and Al Sisto from Nauta Capital and Colin Watts from Oxford Capital Partners will join the Site Intelligence Board.

Pitched on the premise that online is becoming a major driver of offline customer behaviour, Site Intelligence services the need for “multi-channel customer intelligence and associated data integration”, which includes online analytics, to give businesses a single view of their customers. Thus offering insights into how customers move across multiple domains, how they access via multiple devices and which channels they ultimately choose to purchase through. The idea is that access to this intelligence enables marketers to improve the bottom line.

Site Intelligence has offices in Philadelphia (Americas), Oxford (Europe) and Sydney (Asia Pacific).

Users get full access to emails from their Yandex.Mail account, along with an IM feature and camera integration so that they take and send a photo all without leaving the iOS app. In addition, there’s support for external personal email accounts and a nifty location feature.

The app is “always ready with an answer to the ‘where are you?’ question”, says Anton Zabannykh, head of networking services at Yandex. This is delivered via a ‘Locate me’ option, which automatically creates a link to a Yandex map with the user’s current location, which can be instantly emailed from the phone. It’s another example of the integrated approach that Yandex can deliver given it’s Google-like array of consumer-facing web services.

Yandex.Mail’s iPhone app joins existing offerings for competing mobile platforms: Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Java.

Perhaps similar to PeerIndex or Klout, the Labels Weight attempts to measure a job candidate’s “online professional authority” by measuring the impact of their social web activity – Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and the site’s own internal metrics. However, Labels.io says it’s different from other such systems in that it only factors in relevant content by filtering out social web updates that don’t correlate with a user’s specified skills (or tags) as filled out in their Labels.io profile.

So, for example, my endless tweets about coffee and related @ replies won’t increase my Labels Weight as they’ll be deemed to be off topic because I haven’t tagged ‘coffee’ as a skill. In contrast, conversations on Twitter about technology or the media that I partake in should help to boost that score especially if they are deemed to have authority. That said, Labels.io says its algorithm is designed to avoid being a popularity contest so, presumably, number of followers has less impact but perhaps ‘engagement’ more so.

So how might this be useful to recruiters? The idea, says the company, is that when a search for a candidate with specific skills and experience brings up two or more matching results, it could be that their Labels Weight is the clincher. That’s if online authority is thought to be important in relation to the job in question.

All in all it’s a pretty neat addition to Labels.io, although it wouldn’t be hard for other recruitment sites to replicate to some degree given that both PeerIndex and Klout offer an API and pitch themselves on the ability for users to take their social capital or reputation score with them. On that note, Labels.io also offers a widget so that a user’s Labels Weight can be embedded elsewhere.

Interestingly, Zoopla already has existing partnerships with AOL competitors MSN, Yahoo and Sky, in addition to the likes of Homes24 and UpMyStreet.

Under the terms of the AOL deal, all properties listed on Zoopla.co.uk will now also be available on AOL UK, which Zoopla says should send more leads to agents and property developers that advertise on its site. The exposure that AOL brings to the table also encompasses brands such as Walletpop and Daily Finance where property related articles will automatically incorporate the property search functionality.

Zoopla’s search provides free valuations for every UK home with sold prices, along with local market information and “hundreds of thousands” of properties available for sale and to rent. The company is backed by Atlas Venture and Octopus Ventures.

Full disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL.

The new investment comes from existing investors Peter Gabriel and Eden Ventures, along with Qualcomm Incorporated (via its venture capital function) and Pentech Ventures, and will be used primarily for further European expansion (“multiple countries”) and to consolidate its position in the UK.

We7 currently boasts over 3 million unique monthly users and has already began expanding beyond its home country of the UK to launch in Ireland, while CEO Steve Purdham is hard talking up the opportunities for Cloud-based music services, which he believes are on the cusp of going mainstream: “In the next 24 months digital music listening will move rapidly from the early adopters and music obsessives we have seen to date, into the mass market and general music listening communities”, he says.

And there’s no doubt that with smartphone penetration along with other connected devices, combined with the likes of Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft marketing the benefits of the Cloud for consumers, it would seem that we’re close to a tipping point. Spotify’s high valuation is evidence that investors think the same, as is today’s announcement from We7.

Purdham also believes that We7 has found the right mass market formula too with its Internet radio Plus model, which provides a more lean back experience akin to traditional radio but with most of the benefits of on-demand.

This is particularly interesting with regards to iOS as it gives app developers a fairly easy way to implement an alternative payment solution to the App Store, something that doesn’t infringe on Apple’s in-app purchasing policy if the goods being sold are physical not digital. It’s this scenario that Adyen is targeting.

As for the payment method itself, it accepts credit cards, PayPal and a range of other payments within mobile applications (native apps) and mobile websites. Of course, offering a HTML (browser-based) version of an app or service rather than a dedicated iOS app is another way of bypassing Apple’s cut.

Other benefits of Adyen’s payment platform is that merchants and developers can take advantage of a “fully integrated service that removes the burden of security and PCI compliance”, says the company. In addition, app developers can “skin” the mobile payment and checkout process, gaining control of the look and feel, which is said to be an important driver for increased conversion rates.

Merchants already using the new mobile payment platform include Pathe, the largest chain of cinemas in the Europe, via its iPhone app, and Greetz, the online greetings card retailer.

That said, 200 million users is no mean feat and to put it into context, Bigpoint says that 18 months ago it could only boast 100 million users and is attracting 250,000 new users every day on average. Again, not too shabby at all.

More big numbers from Bigpoint:

• The company says that it integrates over 180 payment solutions worldwide.
• 100% of revenue is generated through in-game sales of digital items – otherwise all of its titles are free to play.
• It has over 1,000 media partners, including MTV, Myspace, AOL and Mail.ru (see our coverage)
• Bigpoint’s hit online game, Battlestar Galactica Online, generated over 2 million registrations in just 3 months.
• The company processes over one billion transactions every day.

So there you have it. Big numbers to back up Bigpoint’s big talk after it took a $350m majority share investment from Summit Partners and TA Associates in late April. At the time, co-CEO Heiko Hubertz said: (yes, the company has two people in the top job) “I see the potential in Bigpoint to exceed a value of one billion dollars and become the top online gaming company in the world.”

Could Bigpoint be next to join the Billion dollar club?

The round was led by Sir Terry Leahy, the former chief executive of Tesco and who oversaw the introduction of the Tesco Clubcard, and city retail analysts, Bill Currie and Iain McDonald, who have previously invested in the likes of The Hut Group, Metapack, ASOS, QXL Ricardo and Zooplus. The new funding is said to enable Eagle Eye to further expand its team and “consolidate and grow its retail partnerships”, which include Comet, Blockbuster, Aurora Fashions and Virgin Active.

Eagle Eye’s technology enables retailers with physical stores to use digital marketing via digitally redeemed mobile coupons and gift vouchers in a way that utilises existing payment infrastructure. It does this by using the Chip and PIN pad already in retail stores, therefore bypassing the need for extensive upgrades of retail/EPoS systems, while the digital voucher is redeemable “simply and securely, in real time and with the ability to track customer usage.”

Today’s funding news follows the recent appointments of Simon Burke, the former Chief Executive of Virgin Entertainment Group and Chairman of Hamleys PLC, as Chairman and of Russell Buckley, former VP of Global Alliances at AdMob (which was acquired by Google) as Chief Marketing Officer at Eagle Eye Solutions.

The other five angels are Lee Strafford, co-founder of Plus.Net and ex-Chairman of Sheffield Wednesday FC, along with Mark Wainwright, Brian Lawrence, Jim Mann and Ami Shipro. The funding will be used to launch Bluefields’ football focused player availability and payment applications this August in time for the start of the football season in the UK. The platform is both browser-based and will have mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

Bluefields, which along with Groupspaces competes with the likes of Pitchero and Teamer, aims to help amateur football managers better organise games through a mix of social networking and mobile, in particular solving the two biggest bug bears: player availability and the collection of money. It does this by offering fixture and payment notifications sent via email, SMS, Facebook and through the Android and iPhone apps, while player responses are aggregated for the manager to help streamline the organisation of matches.

Collecting subs and other costs is also made much easier through the ability to take payments online and, perhaps crucially, also lets players pay via those mobile apps.

The new fund aims to tackle an oh-so-familiar problem faced by much of Europe: the lack of “seed money and management mentoring for innovative early-stage tech startups”, says Day One Capital investment manager Aurel Pasztor. The fund hopes to raise €2-4m and is targeting companies in the IT, telecommunications, energy, biotech and finance sectors with investments between €200-400k.

Its founders include two former top executives at Hungary’s leading telecoms group, Magyar Telekom. The former chairman-CEO Elek Straub and György Simó who is credited with setting up the leading Hungarian news portal Origo. But perhaps more interesting is Csaba Kakosy who was the country’s economy and transport minister in late 2007 and early 2008, while Molnar is an investment director at Hungarian venture capital fund PortfoLion, owned by banking group OTP.

As for Day One Capital’s pitch, along with seed capital and “management know-how” it claims to offer a regional business network to “the best local and regional tech entrepreneurs.”

YuMe, which is heavily funded to the tune of $51m (CrunchBase), is also launching YuMe Europe and opening a new office in London. Obviously, the acquisition of Appealing Media is part of this international expansion.

YuMe is described as a “relevant” (targeted) video advertising platform, with its flagship technology dubbed the YuMe Relevance Engine. It’s designed to match “the right ad to the right audience on whatever screen they are viewing” whether that be PC, mobile, or connected TV. It’s used in both YuMe’s own ad network at its broader ad management offering. YuMe Europe will offer this technology to advertisers and publishers in the region.

Meanwhile, the purchase of Appealing Media is said to bring “seasoned executives and tested technology and network properties” to YuMe.

YuMe is backed by Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Intel Capital.

Bird was previously Technical Director with Acorn Computers Ltd. where he is said to have played a key role in business development and negotiation in the joint venture between Apple, Acorn and VLSI Technology that became known as chip company ARM. He went on to become a founding non-executive director of ARM until 1997. Since then Bird has held the post of MD of Phone.com Europe and was a Venture Partner with Deutsche Bank Capital Venture Partners.

Meanwhile, new CEO McCready joins Cortexica from NeoMedia Inc., a “world leader” in barcode creation, capture, delivery and reading technology for use in the ticketing, couponing, publishing and marketing sectors. He’s also held stints with mobile barcode company Mobiqa Limited, technology management company ScoLocate, and KSCL, a supplier of billing applications to mobile operators.

On paper at least, McCready and Bird would appear to be great recruits for a startup that is born out of academia. Cortexica was spun out of Imperial College London in February 2009 after six and a half years of research to understand how humans see and two years building algorithms to accurately mimic human visual recognition.

Just last week the company released its VisualSearch API, which has been in private Beta for a while. It’s aimed at brands who want to “directly engage with consumers” via their mobile device while bypassing the need to use QR codes or other barcodes or more traditional text search.

Delivered via a number of themed lessons such as “Holidays”, “Life in the city”, “Free time”, “Culture” and “Digital World” each features basic and advanced vocabulary with words, images and pronunciation examples, designed to be completed within ten to fifteen minutes.

And like other Babbel courses, learners also have access to a personal Review Manager to help them stay on track and acquire language skills in the long term, along with Pronunciation Training via real-time speech recognition using Adobe Flash, which as we’ve noted before, potentially pits the service up against more traditional players such as TellMeMore or Rosetta Stone.

The company says that the new languages, which inline with Babbel’s premium model costs €3.30 a month via a three month subscription or free for a single lesson, will be continuously “revisited and enhanced, supported by a team of more than 50 teachers, authors, editors, native speakers and experts, responsible for content.”

Babbel claims 1 million users from over 200 countries have registered with the service, while the iPhone app has passed the 900,000 download mark.

Although the NHS was already known to be a Tradeshift user, it’s only now that details of the tie-in have emerged, while suppliers to the NHS via Anglia Support Partnership (ASP), the leading shared service provider to the NHS in the east of England, will be told of the initiative this week. Under the arrangement they’ll be asked to start using Tradeshift, which offers a free way to submit invoices electronically and monitor their progress, as the mechanism for which to invoice ASP with the carrot of speedier payments in return.

That’s because there is a guarantee that invoices will be accepted or rejected within five working days so it’s potentially quite an attractive proposition especially for smaller suppliers who may have less capacity in their cash flow. That’s the pitch anyway.

In terms of what ASP gets from using Tradeshift’s e-invoicing service, it’s said to reduce the cost of processing the 425,000 invoices it deals with each year. This is based on the fact that invoices are submitted in a chaotic mix of physical and electronic formats, which have to be manually scanned. The benefits of streamlining this through one online system are obvious.

But of course, Tradeshift, which has been dubbed “Skype for invoicing” based on its disruptive potential also offers business social networking features as well as its own app store and it’s here where the startup aims to make money. Companies are able to connect to customers, leave comments, make changes to documents, and request credit notes. Tradeshift offers additional business applications where organisations can find apps to help extend a company’s business processes “such as purchase orders and quotes.”

The company is well funded too. Back in May, Tradeshift raised a $7m round from Notion Capital. This was after reports that the Denmark and London, UK-based startup was rumoured to be courting VC funding at an $80-100 million valuation after scoring angel investment from former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos and founding investor in Last.fm Stefan Glaenzer. PayPal, which is integrated into the platform, is also thought to be an investor.

Targeting Russian speaking gamers, Mail.Ru will house Bigpoint games including Farmerama, DarkOrbit, Seafight and Battlestar Galactica Online. Additionally, they’ll be integrated into the Mail.Ru Group’s social networks, Odnoklassniki and My World.

In return, visitors to Bigpoint.com, which claims 200 million registered users, will be able to access MMORPGs such as Legend Legacy of the Dragons, Juggernaut, Empire Craft, and GodsWar Online.

It’s a smart deal for both companies but Bigpoint potentially has the most to gain. Russia’s Internet economy is fast growing and hooking up with Mail.Ru is a way to fast track entrance to Russian speaking markets, which is bound to please the company’s latest investors.

As recent as this April, Bigpoint took a $350m majority share investment from Summit Partners and TA Associates in what was described as a recapitalization of the company, while co-CEO and founder Heiko Hubertz (yes, the company has two people in the top job) is talking up Bigpoint as having the potential to grow to a billion dollar company. Big talk indeed, although today’s partnership with Mail.Ru adds more weight to that claim.

Bigpoint has over 700 employees and offices in Hamburg, Berlin, San Francisco, São Paolo and Malta. Free to play, it generates 100% of its revenue through virtual in-game sales.

Based on the premise that education must be adapted to the needs of each individual student who may learn at a different pace to their peers, the Spain and UK-based startup currently gives teachers better tools to create learning content along with technology to “track the individual performance of every student and subsequently provide those students with tailor-made content and exercises.”

The new funding will enable Blinklearning to conduct R&D into new product developments with the goal to help teachers to reduce underachievement and the failure of school for many students. The company is also in the process signing agreements with additional publishers and international expansion in markets like Colombia, Peru and Chile.

NEOTEC is a Spanish initiative launched by Centre for Industrial Technological Development and aims to support the “creation and consolidation of new technology-based firms”. This includes soft loans, professional training and coaching, and business plan development.

(via Loogic)

Leveraging M&S’ over 300,000 Facebook fans, the Father’s Day-themed so-called ‘f-Commerce’ store (if you can stomach that phrase) lets users shop within Facebook itself, offering items such as Mens clothing, electrical appliances, gifts, and travel accessories. However, Zibaba says that its technology allows for automated catalogue updates (via an XML feed), so the inventory that M&S are currently displaying can be dynamically updated post Father’s Day.

With many companies offering Facebook storefront solutions, Zibaba hopes to standout through the flexibility of its platform, which boasts features such as giving merchants the choice of keeping the checkout within Facebook or redirecting back to their own site. But perhaps more interesting is that Zibaba-powered Facebook stores can offer Groupon-style “Group Offer” deals together with “Group Coupons” which can be redeemed both online and offline.

In addition to Marks & Spencer, Zibaba claims HMV and Dell UK as customers. The company was founded in 2008 by Ronen Shlomo (CEO) and Arie Fishler (CTO).

To date, the fund, which focuses on early-stage companies in the Internet and mobile space, has invested in over 10 startups, including inFakt, Lieferheld, Madvertise, MisterSpex, myGengo and SponsorPay.

The newly named Point Nine Capital will be led by Pawel Chudzinski and Janz as Managing Directors, while Team Europeʼs Partners Lukasz Gadowski (founder of Spreadshirt, co-founder of StudiVZ) and Kolja Hebenstreit (early employee at Spreadshirt, seed investor in StudiVZ) will continue their involvement in PNC’s activities as Venture Partners.

As well as being an angel investor, including working with Team Europe Ventures on a number of investments, Janz has co-founded several startups, such as comparison shopping engine DealPilot.com (funded by Bertelsmann, acquired by Shopping.com) and personalized startpage Pageflakes (funded by Balderton Capital, acquired by LiveUniverse). His investments include Zendesk, FreeAgent Central, Clio, and Propertybase.

Serial investor Esther Dyson, who has a track record in Russia, having previously invested in Russian search engine Yandex (a partner of AlterGeo‘s), is also said to have participated.

The company plans to use the new financing to expand its user base and develop new services.

AlterGeo, a Foursquare-like location-based service with more than 700,000 users, currently has Windows and Mac OSX desktop applications, along with apps for all of the major smartphone platforms. Its features include the ability to “check-in” along with reviews and user ratings based on activity. Additionally, AlterGeo provides augmented reality functionality that shows both places and users, visually displaying the distance between them.

Beyond its consumer offering, AlterGeo licenses its location technology to third parties. This includes the ability to aggregate GSM Cell-ID, Wi-Fi and WiMax data to retrieve a user’s location.

On the content side, the platform is able to turn any RSS feed (which can be kelp private) into a mobile-friendly website, a potentially cheaper option than building a native app. In turn, that content can then be charged for – and to a reader’s mobile phone bill or pre-pay credit – through ImpulsePay’s support for Payforit, the mobile payments service backed by all the UK’s mobile operators. This provides a fairly frictionless alternative to Premium SMS or credit card payments — see our previous coverage.

Interestingly (or opportunistically), ImpulsePay is pitching the news off the back of the FT’s new HTML5 iPad-optimized version, which as we noted, by being browser-based conveniently bypasses Apple’s in-app purchasing mechanism and in turn the company’s 30% cut. To that end, ImpulsePay says there are no set up or monthly fees and publishers keep 75% of the transaction fee.

In terms of the type of paywall that can be erected, content can be charged per-article or per-day, while the service also allows for subscription payments to be taken, potentially creating a recurring revenue stream.

So, for example, if you’re pitching something technology-based (or perhaps coffee), I’m probably worth a shot (no pun intended) but go too far off the beaten track and my potential influence will soon drop off. That’s because UK-based PeerIndex, which competes most directly with Klout, identifies influential individuals online according to specific topics.

It’s this topic-based approach, says the company, which means its technology can be applied to marketing applications so that they can effectively leverage the kind of “influence data” that PeerIndex is touting. By integrating this data, MarketMeSuite is able to add an additional layer of insight and targeting to their client’s campaigns. And the better the targeting, the more efficient and cost-effective a social media-based marketing campaign can be.

Back in January, we covered MarketMeSuite’s growth after the Gorelston, UK-based company had been flying somewhat under the radar. The paid-for subscription-only service, which shuns the freemium model to head straight for a pay day, enables businesses to manage their marketing campaigns on Twitter and Facebook via a desktop application, which competes to varying degrees with something like TweetDeck or more directly Hootsuite and CoTweet.