The Online Backup Company has secured €6.47 million in a funding round led by VC Northzone Ventures to expand into to Sweden, Germany, and the rest of Europe. The company provides online backup and disaster recovery solutions, and is the biggest in Norway with 4,000 customers, 35 employees and a turnover close to NKr 50 million.

New year, new aspirations. If running a marathon is a part of your New Year resolution, Sportlyzer is a tool which may help. It is specifically developed for the endurance sport enthusiasts such as runners or cyclists, but aims to support also the less ambitious racers, to help improve fitness level or complete a race.

The Estonian startup and a Seedcamp company, Sportlyzer analyzes workout goals, develops a personalized plan and records workout data. The co-founder and CEO of Sportlyzer Tonis Saag told me: “Every plan in this world gets knocked out by the reality in a couple of weeks. That’s why the essence of Sportlyzer is not just generating training programs, but also adjusting these on the fly. This way the generated plans work even if the user deviated from the training instructions in the past”.

Blippar, the UK startup behind an eponymous mobile image recognition and augmented reality platform, has landed seed funding – the size of the investment was not disclosed – from Qualcomm Ventures.

The startup, which is based in London, says the seed funding serves as a springboard for a bigger Series A funding round it expects to close in early 2012.

SoundCloud has raised a new fundraising round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The amount was not released but TechCrunch understands it to be $50 million. This would give the company a $200 million pre-money valuation. GGV Capital also participated in this round. The social sound platform which has seen high growth in the past year will use the funding to expand more rapidly, especially in the US. Mary Meeker, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, will take a board observer seat at the company. She already serves on the board of Square.

Honours and medals from Queens and Kings may be an alien concept in Silicon Valley, but they are a delightfully steam-punk tradition, still continued in a Britain which long ago said goodbye to its Empire, yet still has Knights and ‘Commander’ orders to hand out. Thus, Apple’s chief designer, Jonathan Ive, has been knighted in the Queen’s New Year’s honours list, principally for his work in industrial design and championing British talent abroad. Ive was already made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2006. Being a Knight means he is now Sir Jonathan Ive – a moniker which should, at the very least, bump him to the front of the average restaurant queue when he’s in London.

This is a guest post by Richard Holdsworth, Wapple CEO.

Flash is on the endangered species list, already extinct on mobile, and Silverlight has been all but aborted. HTML5 is being heralded as both the cause and the solution but what is it and are we getting caught up in a game of buzzword bingo that has spiralled out of control?

Point Nine Capital has made a seed investment into Cibando, an Italian startup which operates a popular iPhone application that makes it easy to find the best restaurants in Rome, Milan, Florence and other cities in Italy. Fabio Pezzotti, one of Italy’s more successful Internet entrepreneurs and angel investors, also participated in the round. Terms of the investment were not disclosed. The deal is significant since it’s the first investment by Point Nine in a startup in Italy, a market traditional vastly under-served by risk capital. Outside of traditional e-commerce style businesses, there remains very few Italian startups compared to the rest of Europe’s major countries.

We’re all familiar with the pain of having to share photos with people. I’m not talking about the staff party album on Facebook, I’m talking about moments that matter – the family holidays, the weddings, big days like those. And this remains an ongoing issue. We can share Dropbox folders all we like. Everything still has to be downloaded and the interface does not suit viewing, especially on tablets. We can ask friends and family to sign up to a private Flickr group, but that’s still another hurdle. Lots of photo and file sharing services are rubbish and many people remain afraid of Facebook’s now quite public nature. Now, a new startup out of Berlin has come up with something it calls the ‘Dropbox for photos’ where you can privately exchange photos in a group: 7moments.

According to some press reports today the British Prime Minister, David Cameron is to get “his own personalised iPad app” to stay on top of Government business.

Cameron is known to use an iPad to read newspapers and catch up on media generally, as evidenced by this photo taken at a party conference last year. But this report sounds just a little like a slow news week combined with some idle chatter over the Christmas party season amongst the Whitehall press gang and the ‘spads’ – insider shorthand for Special Advisers.

On December 5th, 2011 TechCrunch Europe came to Moscow again. Co-organized by TechCrunch Europe, Digital October and Kite Ventures, the second TechCrunch Moscow showcased several early stage startups and hosted panels on emerging technology trends in Russia and abroad.

The event, held in English, proved to be a smashing success, bringing together over 700 participants and attracting several thousand viewers online. Videos of the event can be found below including the amazing interview between Andrew Keen and Anton Nossik (media director of LiveJournal) on a pivotal day for Russian politics following the Russian Duma elections of the previous day. It’s a must watch.