Semiconductor chip maker Quantenna Communications has a new strategic investor on board, and her name is Telefónica.

Through its investment arm Telefónica Ventures, a division of Telefónica Digital, the Spanish broadband and telecom company has made an equity investment to gain access to the latest Quantenna technology for the deployment of video services to the home.

Confirming rumors earlier reported by Bloomberg, mobile carrier France Télécom-Orange and advertising juggernaut Publicis Groupe have teamed up to launch a venture capital fund.

The companies have committed to jointly put in 150 million euros (presumably split 50/50), and are seeking outside investors to double the size of the fund, which will focus on backing budding entrepreneurs building digital companies in France and the rest of Europe.

Bloomberg pegged the size of the fund at ‘more than 100 million euros’. If enough investors line up to back the new fund, it will reach its actual target size of 300 million euros.

Back in June image tagging startup ThingLink launched launched Rich Media Tags for publishers, allowing anyone to interact with an image tag which might be embedded music, video, words, pictures and tags for people. But this is still a product aimed at publishers. The real power to come from image tagging is going to be setting it free. Thus today it’s launching a rich media tag creator enabling app developers to build custom ThingLink-powered applications.

MADS, a provider of mobile display and messaging ad serving solutions, has raised €1 million – or roughly $1.4 million – in funding in a Series B round led by OTM Investments (both the company and the investor are based in The Netherlands).

MADS says it will use the fresh capital to take its business beyond mobile ad serving and set up sales offices in the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain to support clients in their local languages.

Masabi, which develops mobile ticketing technology for the transport sector, has secured $4 million from London-based m8 Capital, the majority-owned affiliate of AGC Equity Partners that targets mobile startups and technology. This is a B-round, following the $2m A-round of last year.

In June last year, m8 invested $800k in the location-based startup Rummble, the startup which pre-dated Foursquare but which is now focusing on the B2B market.

The launch of the iPhone 4 and its arial problems suddenly created a massive interest in the quality and reach of mobile phone and WiFi networks across the planet. The issue has only increased as smartphones have proliferated. So being able to work out which mobile carrier was best for you based on where you are, in real time would be a dream come true for many. OpenSignalMaps launched at the start of this year to do just that, and now they have hit a million downloads on the Android app store.

The data is also producing some interesting results. Lately they’ve been picking up some unreleased devices being used with the application. For example, it appears AT&T is testing some phones on their new 4G network (which was only released recently and currently has no released 4G phones that work). Their data shows that the network is – at least right now – blazing fast (but this could slow down once more people are using it of course).

Coull, the video advertising network, has closed of a $2m equity round led by Peter Hargreaves (co-founder of Hargreaves Lansdown). That is a sizeable chuck of cash for one guy, but Hargreaves is famously known as an investor who does not follow the pack, instead going with businesses with proven traction.

Coull has avoided VC route because, as CEO and founder Irfon Watkins says, “it’s too long winded and you get conservative valuations within UK. I chose angel investment as opposed to VC because they had cash and experience with friendly legal terms.” Alas, it’s a view often espoused by UK startups, although the VCs argue back that they are often restricted by their funds from taking on risk. The debate continues…

Last year I attended a brand new event in Dublin called Founders (or F.ounders if you prefer the branding). I duly wrote it up here as an “overnight must-attend” and a welcome addition to the European tech events scene.

As one of the few writers to attend the first one, it was indeed a pretty damn good event, and an amazing achievement for 27 year old entrepreneur Paddy Cosgrave. And I see various others coming out with a bunch of superlatives to describe the events, which was run alongside the Dublin Web Summit.

First I’ll say what happened, then I’ll have something to say about what I think is going on here.

Trustpilot, a site which rates the trustworthiness of shopping sites via a toolbar, has raised €3.3 million from two Nordic venture funds, SEED Capital and Northzone Ventures. The money will be used to scale internationally. Right now it’s available in 10 European countries but plans further rollouts.

Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine, has joined Google, Bing and Yahoo! to collaborate on Schema.org. The initiative was set up in June 2011 to help web developers tag their websites to improve the display of the search results, which should make it easier for people to find the right web pages.

Schema.org aims to achieve that by adding specific HTML code into the webpage, which helps differentiate between things, persons, events, places, businesses and creative works amongst others. The full list of tags can be found here.