Beepl is a questions and answers service, which launches today. Co-founder/CEO and ex-TechCrunch blogger Steve O’Hear actually left TC to do this startup is convinced that Beepl can take on the the so-called Q&A field better than Quora. But how?

We’ve been watching online video advertising startup Brainient for a little while, given that the online video market looked poised for a lot of growth. Just how much growth was revealed at CES last week when YouTube stood up and predicted that 75 percent of all future channels will be born on the Internet and it had logged a trillion hits in 2011. That’s a lot of potential advertising inventory and someone out there is going to have to come up with some answers to make this work.

To that end Brainient has brought round a few people to the same idea, given that today it lands $1.8 million in funding from a number of strategic investors. The round was led by Prague-based Credo Ventures. The other backers include Atlas Venture and Estag Capital. Existing investors Sherry Coutu and Dave Mclure’s 500 Startups incubator also participated in the round. Atlas is already doubling down on ad plays such as AdSafe Media and Estag Capital in RevenueMax, Germany’s leading yield optimisation platform.

Various German media outlets are reporting that Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher, has invested once again in a startup in Berlin, after doing so with SoundCloud and Amen. What is it with Ashton and Berlin? Post-Demi, is he planning to move or something?

At any rate, the lucky winner of his humungous Twitter attention now will be Gidsy, which is a community marketplace for authentic travel experiences.

We’re looking forward to our very first TechCrunch Baltics event on February 9th, 2012, in the lovely city of Riga, Latvia.

We’ll be holding a min-conference and pitch contest to show off the best that the Baltic startup and technology community has to offer. Below you’ll find the agenda. Up to 8 select Baltic startups will able to pitch to a jury and audience that includes many key investors in the region and beyond (please apply here).

You can grab a ticket here and also follow @TCBaltics for information.

Appearing at the event include Aldas Kirvaitis (CEO, Cherry Media Group) who leads the Baltic daily deal operator that has grown from zero to a monthly run rate of 1.7m Euros and Baltic market dominance in less than 2 years; Jon Bradford (Managing Director, Springboard Cambridge); Carlos Eduardo Espinal (Partner, Seedcamp); , Priit Salumaa (Co-Founder and Member of the Board, Garage48); Margus Uudam (Ambient Sound Investments); Lars Hinrichs (Executive Geek & Founder, HackFwd); Kris Hiiemaa – CEO, Erply; Stephan Uhrenbacher – CEO, 9flats.com; Andres Susi – CEO, Flirtic; Vitaly Rubstein – Co-Founder and Partner, RubyLight.

Kwaga, a Paris, France-based startup that specializes in tools to make email ‘smarter’ by leveraging semantic technology, has raised $1.55 million in Series A funding. The company, which received seed funding from Seedcamp and Kima Ventures after its founding in 2008, raised the money from unnamed private investors, advised by investment consultancy firm Financière Fonds Privés.

Kwaga aims to build semantic software that will make us love email again and turn it into a productivity enhancer rather than killer. The company’s flagship service, WriteThat.Name, for instance automatically updates a user’s address book based on the information contained in the messages received.

US-based desktop virtualization software maker DeskStream has acquired Northern Irish cloud start-up WorldDesk, the companies are set to announce today at CES in Las Vegas. Terms of the acquisition, which is expected to close this quarter, were not disclosed.

Interestingly, the acquisition will see DeskStream adopt the WorldDesk name and branding.

StrikeAd, a London and New York based mobile advertising startup, has secured a £2m second round investment from VCs DFJ Esprit expand further internationally. The investment follows a first round finance from Germany-based venture capital firm eValue announced in February 2011. It recently announced a move into the Japanese market in conjunction with mediba Inc., a leading Tokyo-based advertising business.

Stop the clocks and give the dog a juicy bone. Max Niederhofer, sometime investors, entrepreneur and startup guru (if you missed his speech at GeeknRolla last year you seriously missed out), is going back into VC. He’s joined Accel in London. We’ll follow up with a little more soon enough. Suffice it to say that for now, its good news for the tech scene to have another experienced startuper at a major VC house, like Accel in this case. He will focus on investment opportunities in consumer internet, mobile and software across Europe.

Just-Eat, the online food ordering giant of Europe, is continuing its rapid expansion, working out a partnership / acquisition deal with Alloresto.fr, the online food delivery leader in France. Just-Eat CEO Klaus Nyengaard, who blogged about the deal here, tells me it took over a year to work out the arrangement.

In an initial phase, Alloresto will be run as a joint-venture between the two companies, and after ‘a few years’ Just-Eat will acquire the remaining shares. Sebastien Forrest, founder and CEO of Alloresto, will continue to head the company as part of the deal terms.

While thousands of people swarmed all over CES, I went off-beat and headed north to downtown Las Vegas. This is the old part of the city where once gamblers at slot machines listened to Sinatra wafting through the Casino doors rather than Beyonce. This area of faded glory is now the scene of the Downtown Project, an initiative by Zapos CEO Tony Hsieh to transform the area from an unloved poor relation to the famous Vegas “Strip” of huge casinos and hotels down the road, into a hive of tech startup activity. Silicon Strip, if you will.

The timing could’t be more interesting. As governments around the world look to the continuing boom in technology to revive their battered economies – from ‘Startup Chile’ to ‘Tech City’ in East London – Hsieh’s project could well become a blueprint for others to follow. After all, if you could re-create the fecund atmosphere and economic success of Silicon Valley in the middle of the American desert, surely you could do the same anywhere in the world?