Prolific European venture capital firm Index Ventures has finalized raising a €500 million growth fund (roughly $700 million), its second such fund meant for later-stage investments.

The firm will tap the new fund to invest anything from €10 million to €50 million in ventures with proven business and revenue models located around the globe, but primarily companies based in Europe or U.S. companies with international ambitions, partners Saul Klein and Bernard Dallé tell me.

A 48-hour Hackathon this weekend will bring web and app based games to life in aid for Children in Need – and if you’re an iOS and Android developer or graphic designer, you can lend a hand.

The project is due to take place at Birmingham Science Park Aston (BSPA) and hopefully result in lots of creative games to be submitted for sale in the Apple Store and Android Market Place. Ideas for the games were submitted by primary school kids across the West Midlands who were asked to sketch plots and characters they’d like to see come to life.

It’s counterintuitive to the electric-obsessed world we live in today. But dammit, it just might work. On my recent trip to Dublin Web Simmit and Founders, I was struck by the amazing entrepreneurship behind Buzzing Bicycles, a Dublin startup created by student of Trinity College Dublin, Colm Moore.

He’s been working with small engines and bicycle engines for the last 10 years and now he’s started selling and installing bicycle engine kits over the last few months and is hoping to expand across Ireland and beyond.

Advertising and content network operator Adconion this morning announced that it has acquired smartclip, a European digital video advertising startup.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but sources tell us this was an all-stock deal and no cash is changing hands in the transaction.

The 600 participants at last weekend’s Mozilla Festival were a crowd of filmmakers, educators, coders, tech-savvy media professionals, media-sceptical hackers, hacking-ignorant journalists, gamers, government advisors – I could go on, but I think you get the idea. It was diverse. All of them however were thinkers and makers ready to explore the frontiers of the open web.

Under the tagline ‘Media, Freedom and the Web’ non-profit organisation Mozilla designed this round of their yearly festival around the challenge of using the web for a more creative and collaborative media landscape. Plenty of ideas were spread, challenges were conquered, solutions were crowdsourced, a fair share of awesome new stuff presented and TechCrunch picked out the highlights for you.

In recent years the fashion of incubating companies in physical spaces (desk, Wifi, funding combinations) has faded in favour of The Accelerator. These are typically a programme of a few weeks combined with teaching, networking and funding. In the UK we’ve seen Seedcamp, then SpringBoard then The Oxygen Accelerator appear, among others. Today another joins the pack, The Accelerator Academy, out of London. This time, however, it’s attempting to up the accelerator ‘arms race’ with only post-exit mentors, although it’s charging model is unconventional for something that bills itself as an accelerator (see update below).

BagThat, a new online store that leverages social networks to benefit consumers and suppliers alike through the power and economics of collective buying, this morning announced funding of £2 million from a private EIS fund.

BagThat debuts today on a limited basis and will officially launch in January 2012. Already, the fledgling company has signed up Halfords, Thomas Cook, Neilsons and Champneys; the first high street brands to join the venture.

Netflix and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM) this morning announced a multi-year licensing agreement that will make Netflix the exclusive subscription streaming service in the UK and Ireland for most first-run feature films from the movie studio.

Starting in early 2012, when Netflix is set to make its debut in the UK and Ireland, registered members will be able to watch available content instantly on their television sets, tablets, game consoles, computers and mobile phones.

In August last year Zalando, the shoe-retailing Zappos clone started by the Samwer brothers through their investment vehicle Rocket Internet, closed an undisclosed funding round thought to be in the realm of €100 million. This is very ‘Samwer’. Supercharge a clone site in order that it can scale as fast as possible before a competitor – such as the US site they are cloning – can enter the market. By the time the US startups has realised it needs to scale in Europe, Rocket Internet has the market sown up. Kerching!

Thus Zalando took that funding round and invested massively in the execution of scaling in other markets. It’s something to behold the Samwers in operation, and if you are a fan of a sort of MBA-oriented innovation in execution – as opposed to Silicon Valley’s ‘conceptual innovation’ – then it’s pretty impressive.

So a year later Zalando is today claiming it is now the market leader in France. In September, Zalando.fr’s monthly sales revenues in France surpassed the EUR 12 million mark and the company expects a total turnover of EUR 120 million for the year. That makes France the online merchant’s 3rd largest market, after Germany and the Netherlands. Competitors include Spartoo, Sarenza, Otto, Asos and a couple of smaller German etailers (Mirapodo, Frontlineshop).

UK electronics retailer Carphone Warehouse is pulling the plug on its 11 Best Buy stores in the UK to concentrate on its own stores. The Best Buy UK joint venture with the US-based retail giant has a few “big box” (e.g. TVs, washing machines etc) stores across the south east and Midlands, aimed at hitting the electronics market with cheaper prices. It made a loss of £62m in its first year in the UK and analysts expect it to report a loss of £35m in the first half of 2011.