Online cash trivia gamester Amuso has closed its latest round of funding with a $1.5 million investment from Mangrove Capital Partners, the principal investor at its launch in 2007, alongside a series of angel investors. It will use the cash to expand in the UK and US. It’s also hired Ned Walley and Rabin Yaghoubi, both former Directors of Strategic Partnerships at Google. Bill Houghton, former Director of Products at AOL Entertainment, is Amuso’s new Head of Products. Amuso’s development lab is in Barcelona.

Cash trivia games are worth more than $3 billion globally, and Amuso’s speciality is launching them on social networks via flash widgets. On TriviaStar competitors can play the free version or make small cash deposits, payable via SMA or PayPal, from which partners take a transactional commission. The remainder is used to fund cash prizes for winners. Amuso says conversion rates from play for free to play for cash represent one in ten for an average $1.50 entry fee.

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[Lebanon] Back in March, 2008 we first wrote about Woopra the realtime web analytics startup that originated from Lebanon which, unlike Google Analytics, offered a desktop application to track websites visits as they happen. Since then Woopra has been in beta, upgrading its desktop app and offering a web version .

Today Woopra has come out of beta and introduced paid accounts, thus monetising its service. Previously it relied only on banner Advertising displayed at the home screen of its desktop app. This now means paying users do not need an invitation to the beta. It also means the removal of the 10,000 page view per day limit. Woopra is planning to add new features in about a month that will include a new Desktop version.

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[France] On stage at last year’s Le Web an argument broke out between co-founder Loic Le Meur and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington over whether Europe was capable of producing a ‘big win’ Web company or whether Skype was, perhaps, just a one-hit wonder. Like heavyweight fighters, both of them traded some heavy blows in subsequent blog posts. But during the live on-stage Gilmour Gang, one company was mentioned by Le Meur which left the rest of the assembled staring blankly: Vente-Privee.

Probably the reason it prompted such sideways looks however is that this is not a classic web app startup, but an ecommerce hub. Vente-Privee began in France in 2001, but has only recently become a powerhouse of a new wave in Europe: online private sales clubs involving designer fashion brands, otherwise known in the fashion retail industry as the “overstock market”. Its success has lead to a bunch of clone sites, while Vente-Privee itself is on target to €650m in turnover globally this year. In other words Europe is not out to lunch – as Arrington put it – it is out to shop.

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[Turkey]Markafoni, the first Turkish player in the wave of private shopping clubs in Europe, is planning to start operations in seven other countries by the end of 2010. Markafoni is planning to operate in Ukraine and Greece first, and looking at other markets.

Markafoni was founded in June 2008, and also now operates in Australia under the name BrandsExclusive.

Tolga Tatari, one of the cofounders, told us the company, which has 600,000 members in Turkey, has seen a seven-digit turnover in September and since then has been cash flow positive. Tatari says that 85 percent of its members sign in to the site every month. Markafoni has 60,000 visitors per day and a 30-person team in Turkey.

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[UK] If you employ celebrity PR Max Clifford to help advertise your business you might end up with neat quotes stating that your niche of the industry is going to grow with 500 percent by 2012. Online storage might be the next big thing, but 500 percent sounds a tad excessive. Livedrive doesn’t seem to think so and is pushing forward with new partnerships. This time with ISP BeBroadband.

The company is the brainchild of entrepreneur Andrew Michael, who started his first business Fasthosts when he was 17 and later sold it for about £60 million. He’s since gained notoriety for throwing lavish Christmas parties and getting into legal disputes with posh casinos.

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[UK] Presumably missing the obvious opportunity to launch “SkyTunes” to compete with the slightly better known iTunes (I guess because of the legalities) the UK broadcaster Sky is launching SkySongs some 15 months after it said it would.

Kicking off next week on October 19, the service will have all the major labels and 100 independents – but its four million catalogue compares badly with 7digital’s, for example. But then again, we are not really talking about Sky service here. We are talking about a re-skinned MusicStation /Omnifone. Omnifone is an independent provider of music services, with MusicStation being its main product. It’s won lots of industry awards, apparently.

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In one of those wonderful ironies of scheduling that make columnists weep with joy, Larry Dignan spent yesterday at a Yahoo! hack day in New York.

This is the same Larry Dignan who is editor in chief of ZDNet, which is the same ZDNet that yesterday published a blog post accusing Yahoo of passing the names and email addresses of thousands – sorry, hundreds of thousands – of bloggers to the Iranian authorities during the country’s recent election.

Poor old Larry. One can only imagine the warmth with which he was greeted when he arrived at Yahoo’s event. “Hey Larry!” his hosts may perhaps have said “go fuck yourself.” And their suggestion wouldn’t be entirely unfair, given that the story – written by ‘lawyer and technology writer’ Richard Koman, was a steaming pile of horseshit.

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Facebook finally gets its own ‘face’ for Germany: The sleuths of media newswire Kress Report got wind that Facebook could hire the advertising expert Scott Woods, who previously headed the Last.fm office in Hamburg. His new job is to build up contacts with brands and advertisers in Germany, as he already did for the music site. It was only last year that Woods got appointed as senior vice president and managing director for Germany at Last.fm. His Xing profile says that he stopped working there in February of this year.

Since March 2008 German Facebook members have used the website in their own language. But the social network never showed ambitions to open a local office. Woods’ assignment as an advertisers’ contact is seen as a first step in this direction. He built up the Hamburg office for Last.fm from where he oversaw marketing, advertising and business development in Germany and Northern Europe. Before that he had worked as head of strategic partnership and business development Northern & Central Europe at Google.

At the very same time Twitter has announced its roll out in German, as well as in French, Italian and Spanish. Like Facebook they are looking for free ride from users translate. “We are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at first”, says the blog post. The company will distribute the translations to Twitter platform developers making it easier for them to offer multiple language support as well.

GooSync, the synchronisation service that lets you sync a mobile with Google Calendar, tasks and contacts using SyncML, has been going since 2007. But though it’s been running a premium and free version, it’s now dumping the latter entirely. Not an unsurprising move given the growth especially in mobile data use of apps like this, especially with the iPhone.

The company said “Given the exponential demand for GooSync over the last 12 months, it has become increasingly more difficult to continue this high level of service to both Premium and Free users. It is therefore, with regret, that we are now discontinuing our Free service.”

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