AMEE, backed by O’Reilly and Union Square Ventures among others, set out in 2008 to map, measure and track all the carbon and energy data on Earth. That’s a big job, and competes with others like Brighter Planet to do it. It’s since won contracts with the likes of the UK Government, CNN, Google, the list goes on. But what it hasn’t cracked is a consumer-facing app which gets the issue of ‘carbon footprints’ into the mind of the ordinary member of the public.

That’s changed with the launch of AskAMEE which effectively combines a search engine and calculation tool (a bit like Google + WolframAlpha). It’s pretty intuitive and is thus able to make climate change science and calculations quite a bit more accessible to the average Joe or Jane, assuming they can get the hang of using it.

This is a guest post by Phil Wilkinson a former CEO of a daily deal site and now CEO of kopi.co.uk

I’ve been wanting to write this article for a while but it has never been the right time. Ideally I’d like to do a series of articles on the daily deal / group buying space as it is still a fascinating model and still an early market sector. I must be one of very few people, perhaps the only one in Europe, who has been involved in co-founding and running a daily deal site on one hand and then flipped to run a company that sells a product and service on the other. I believe this gives me a real unique perspective on things (which hopefully you agree with after reading this).

This is a guest post by Rodolfo Rosini, Founder/CEO at Storybricks, a new MMORPG out of San Francisco.

You see people raising millions for stupid shit. But if you dig deeper you find out that they sold a company to Cisco for ½ billion (and their cheese sandwich restaurant got funded) or built several huge companies (and their photosharing app with no users or purpose got $41m) or pretty much built Facebook (and investors pile up on their social network who can only have 150 friends like it cures cancer) or had multiple rounds of funding already and a completely finished product with tons of users and healthy revenues.

The three Samwer brothers (Oliver, Marc and Alexander) founders of the Rocket Internet incubator in Berlin, are the most successful Internet entrepreneurs in Germany and possibly Europe. After launching and exiting multiple businesses, many of them clones/copycats of US startups, they are multi-millionaires. Indeed, their Groupon clone CityDeal sold to to Groupon for an estimated €750m in cash and shares. But much of that success looks threatened by the departure of at least 20 of its key staff in the last two weeks – including CTO- level people – and possibly as much as 40, according to multiple sources spoken to by TechCrunch Europe.

While Rocket Internet has around 200 people on staff, losing key heads could be a severe blow to the renowned incubator. The timing could not be worse for the Samwers, who are understood to be in the middle of raising at least a billion dollar financing round designed to clone every successful US startup, to launch them outside the US much faster and become a larger global player than many of the Silicon Valley businesses they plan to copy.

We’ll we’ve run a lot of TechCrunch meetups all over Europe since 2007, getting to most of the major European cities. But there’s one place we haven’t got a chance to hit and that’s the tiger economies of the Baltic states: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The latter is of course where, famously, Skype was largely developed. So we’re putting that right with an event in January, TechCrunch Baltics. It will be on February 9th, 2012, in the lovely city of Riga, Latvia.

Aren’t Christmas eCards lame? It’s not just me, right? The annual holiday greeting efforts from those in my family who think they have figured out the digital world by renouncing handwritten letters are not just cheesy, they usually get lost in my spam folder, too.

Turns out ThingLink has a nice little alternative to that. The image tagging startup introduced its Interactive Holiday Cards and Wish Lists Maker today. It’s a free service you can use to create personal christmas cards.

Besides uploading a festive picture and scribbling ‘Merry Christmas’ on it, you’re free to record a greeting or song and embed it in the card, through a record feature by Soundcloud that ThingLink has added for the festive purpose.
If the kids aren’t too keen on singing Jingle Bells into their parents’ laptop, you can also embed a youtube video. Or any content from around the web by, by adding the relevant link. Show some creativity!

Duedil, which is building out free database around company financials in the UK and Ireland, has today announced a second round investment from Jonty Hurwitz, the founding CTO of Wonga. Terms were undisclosed. The startup previously raised seed financing from Passion Capital and prominent angel investor Federico Pirzio-Biroli. Duedil is unusual since until now most company information has been paid-for in those territories.

Car sharing network operator Zipcar this morning announced the exercise of its option to purchase a majority ownership interest in Barcelona-based Catalunya Carsharing, better known as Avancar, after investing in the company almost exactly two years ago.

In fact, the option had been extended for an extra year after Zipcar decided last year it wouldn’t yet exercise it, opting instead to give Avancar a loan that could be converted into equity.

Ecwid, a Russian startup that enables people to set up an online store on their website or on a social network in mere minutes, has raised its first round of institutional funding, securing $1.5 million from Runa Capital.

The e-commerce software company says it currently has over 100,000 customers in 174 countries, but given that about 40 percent of its customers are located in the United States, Ecwid will part of the capital to open its first office in Mountain View, California in early 2012.