BonitaSoft, a provider of an open source business process management (BPM) solution, has raised a $13 million Series C round led by the FSN PME Fund, a French government initiative to invest in technology companies to help them scale globally. Also joining the round are previous investors Ventech, Auriga Partners, and Serena Capital. The new funding round brings the total raised by the company to just over $28 million since being founded in 2009, and follows an $11m Series B in late 2011.

BonitaSoft is headquartered in Grenoble, France — hence the French government’s backing — although it also has a U.S. office in San Francisco where I’m told CEO Miguel Valdes Faura spends half his time, as well an another office in Paris. It operates in the BPM space, competing with the likes of Pegasystems, Appian, LongJump, and a number of other open source players.

Companies use BPM software to automate their processes, particularly where these operate at the intersection of machines and people. For example, insurance companies might employ a BPM suite to design software to automate the claims process when a customer is involved in a car accident. Or to streamline and make accountable any business process where without systems in place things would otherwise fall through the cracks, especially at scale.

To that end, BonitaSoft’s solution includes a design studio to model business processes, a BPM engine that adapts to various information systems architectures, and an end-user interface for managing and interacting with processes. It also has support for a range of internal and external systems via a library of hundreds of ‘Connectors’ and a strong developer community (due to its open source nature) who contribute connectors, business processes and other extensions.

BonitaSoft says that it serves more than 600 companies and governments worldwide, claiming customers such as Accenture, DirectTV, Old Dominion University, Trane, Teach For America and Michelin. Its software has seen more than 2 million downloads, while the open source community is said to be 60,000 member-strong.

Like other open source business models, BonitaSoft makes money by charging for additional add-ons and support. It plans to use the new capital to “fuel its global expansion plans in the USA, Europe, and Latin America”, specifically increasing its marketshare of mid and large-sized businesses who currently rely on proprietary and aging BPM solutions. It also plans to plough some of that cash into developing next-generation BPM technologies.

VERSUS IO, the natural language-styled comparison engine backed by Dave McClure (amongst others), has closed a $2.8 million Series A round led by Earlybird Venture Capital. McClure’s 500 Startups also participated, as did Hightech-Gruenderfonds, Lars Dittrich, and Dario Suter.

This brings the Berlin-based startup’s total funding to $3.8 million, having already received seed backing from Hightech-Gruenderfonds and JMES Investments, followed by 500 Startups putting in $100k last December — McClure’s first investment in the Berlin startup scene.

Launched in July as a way to compare smartphones, VERSUS IO has since expanded to let consumers also compare tablets, cameras, and mobile apps, in addition to city comparisons, its first non-product vertical.

In fact, the startup claims its engine is able to compare just about anything using natural language processing, frequently talking its plans to expand to 640 verticals and the potential to even add people to that list, which is an ever so slightly creepy (but fun) thought.

VERSUS IO says there are now 25 million comparisons available via its site, which for a European startup gunning to be global has rather smartly been localised in 18 languages. Furthermore, it’s seeing 2 million unique visitors each month, claiming to have grown 35% month-on-month on average since launch in July 2011.

As online advertising transitions from desktop to mobile — research firm Gartner predicts that the global mobile ad market will grow 400% by 2016 to be worth $24.5 billion — it stands that startups operating in the wider mobile ad ecosystem are well-placed to benefit. To that end, click-to-call startup Freespee is announcing a neat tie-in today with NASDAQ OMX, Stockholm-listed Tradedoubler that will see the performance marketing network offer advertisers clickable phone numbers and, crucially, call tracking analytics in their mobile (and desktop) display ads.

It builds on Freespee’s proposition that if an ad can offer a painless way to initiate a phone call, those that take up that offer are likely to convert, and that for many types of businesses, especially local ones, a sale invariably takes place via a phone call no matter from where or how the lead is generated. Therefore it makes sense to not only build technology that makes that user-journey — online ad to phone call — as frictionless as possible, but also trackable. Otherwise it’s very difficult to know where to put your ad dollars. Furthermore, mobile ads are the perfect candidate for click-to-call, lest we forget that smartphones make calls, too.

Freespee says that Tradedoubler, which claims 140,000 website publishers and 2,000 advertisers use its performance marketing network, is utilising its platform and API to offer click-to-call and analytics. “The beauty of Freespee is we don’t have to reinvent the wheel – we can add clickable, trackable phone numbers to our desktop and mobile ad formats with just a couple of lines of code,” says Rob Wilson, CEO of Tradedoubler.

Canned statements aside, it looks like a decent client win for Freespee, and builds on the startup’s recent momentum that saw it raise €3.3 million (approx. $4.3m) last October in a new round of funding led by pan-European early-stage investor Sunstone Capital. This brought the total raised by the company to €5.2 million.

At the same time Freespee announced the launch of its own ad network, dubbed Freespee Ads, to compliment its Freespee Analytics product, which focuses on providing analytics to measure and track the success of mobile click-to-call ad campaigns. The latter comprises “management functions, real-time number provisioning, call tracking and conversion attribution” to enable advertisers to optimise campaigns based on which destinations generate the most calls and actually convert to sales.

Rushmore.fm, a new London-based startup founded by Fictive Kin and Betaworks, is de-cloaking somewhat today with what sounds like the rather lofty but noble mission to fix the music industry. Described as a “music ecosystem”, the (currently) invite-only site initially consists of a Wikipedia-like music resource where you’re encouraged to contribute and follow content, although the site’s broader aim is to connect music fans “directly and effortlessly with the artists and labels they love”, and in doing so make it easier to make a living from music.

In fact, it’s what Rushmore sees as a disconnect between fans and artists that it’s trying to solve. Bring these two groups closer together and the company thinks there’s money to be made, which in turn can be reinvested in music. Of course, if it’s successful, that’s also how the startup plans to generate revenue via related services. “We need to get these folks connected with the fans that love them, and subsequently enable some sweet, sweet commerce,” reads the site’s mission statement.

With that in mind, along with its public (partial) unveiling, Rushmore is announcing the appointment of Alex Hunter, the former Global Head of Online for Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, as its CEO. While it may seem odd to hire an “outside” CEO so early, it’s a reflection of the incubation model that New York-based Betaworks, Rushmore’s backer, is employing. It’s teamed up with neighbouring design collective Fictive Kin who are charged with researching and coming up with a startup’s concept, before handing it over to take forward and scale — a methodology we’ve compared to the studio model employed by Hollywood.

Once Rushmore.fm was green-lighted at the end of 2012, Hunter was approached and after agreeing to come onboard it was decided the company should operate out of London, which has a decent track record for music-oriented startups. Last.fm, for example, famously exited to CBS, while more recently the likes of Songkick are making decent headway.

(As aside, for those familiar with the London tech scene, Alex Hunter is the brother of Andrew Hunter, co-founder and CEO of jobs search engine Adzuna.)

As Rushmore stands today, the site uses a “follow” model to provide a way for music fans to stay up to date with news, live events, and new releases from their favourite artists. The clincher is that, collectively, they’re also the ones doing most of the work in the sense that content is at least partially based on user contributions (pages have a Wiki-esque “edit” button, though I’m told that contributors will always be invite-only), while Rushmore is rewarding fans who add content via virtual and unspecified real world rewards. There’s a sprinkling of gamification, too. Each week fans compete for the top spots on “The 300″, described as a “highly competitive chart of Rushmore’s top users”.

To that end, Rushmore says that its private beta users have made 200,000 music news, live event, and discography contributions already, which isn’t bad going, though we won’t declare the music industry fixed just yet.

Here’s some encouraging news for the European startup scene, and London in particular. TransferWise, the online currency exchange that uses the crowd to undercut traditional money transfer services, has announced that it’s closed a $6 million series A round led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures — the first investment in Europe by the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor’s international fund.

We also understand that Ron Conway’s SV Angel has joined this round, along with a small number of angels, and TransferWise’s existing backers IA Ventures, Index, Seedcamp, and TAG. This brings the total raised by the company to $7.35 million since its launch just two years ago.

Originally billing itself as the “Skype of money transfer,” TransferWise enables individuals and businesses to send money between countries for a fraction of the price that banks and others charge, using a peer-to-peer, “crowdsourced” model — where money destined for transfer doesn’t unnecessarily actually leave each country. It passes on these saving by charging a small flat fee per transfer.

(It’s the P2P element that playfully draws the Skype comparison, as well as the fact that TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus was the Internet calling giant’s first employee, while other members of his team also worked at the company.)

The company also pitches itself as the preferred method of money transfer for European startups, recently garnering some decent PR with an offer to waive the fees for a total of $100 million worth of international money transfers for qualifying startups using the TransferWise platform. Interestingly, Thiel was one of a host of names publicly endorsing the campaign, so we probably should have known something was going down.

Hinrikus tell me that the new funding will enable TransferWise to continue expanding, both in terms of the number of currencies it plans to support, and in raw head-count. It started out offering British Pound and Euro transfers, and has since added support for the U.S. Dollar, Swiss Franc, Polish Zloty, and Danish, Swedish and Norwegian Krone. In total, the company claims to have transferred over £125m worth of customers’ money, saving £5 million-plus in banking fees (though it isn’t without competition). Meanwhile, the team has grown to 33 members of staff.

“There’s another dozen currencies to be launched this year and 20 more people needed in the team,” says Hinrikus. “Also we need to launch locally in key European markets – Germany, France and Spain.” Hinrikus says TransferWise continues to grow between 20-30 percent a month, which to date equals roughly 10x year-on-year growth. “Doing what’s in the pipeline puts us on track to do another 5-10x this year,” he says.

Staying on message, London-based TransferWise (with an office also in Tallinn, Estonia) is now calling itself a Tech City startup. Tech City, headed up by Joanna Shields, ex-Google, AOL/Bebo, and most recently Facebook’s head of EMEA operations, is the UK government’s re-branding of the London tech scene and, specifically, East London’s “Silicon Roundabout” area.

Cue the now prerequisite statement from Shields: “Transferwise is a shining example of the successful businesses that make Tech City a thriving ecosystem. London has a real strength in financial services and technology, with many companies like Transferwise transforming financial services for consumers, for the better.”

That said, TransferWise’s HQ is on Shoreditch High Street, which doesn’t get any more Silicon Roundabout than that. And certainly, a $6 million series A is no mean feat for a European startup, and nor is attracting a top tier Silicon Valley investor like Peter Thiel.

The idea of using Augmented Reality to bring dead-tree media to life is arguably very 2010, and back then it often hugged the line of gimmickry. But with the hype being generated by Google Glass, AR technology seems destined to be brought back into focus. Meanwhile, companies like Layer and Metaio have built platforms to help brands create experiences that bring real-world objects to life, not least print campaigns, by overlaying digital content via the view finder of a smartphone.

Today UK startup VirtualMob is officially launching its own Augmented Reality self-service — Point-at-Me (PAM) — which mixes drag ‘n’ drop content creation, e-commerce, and analytics in a bid to make it even easier for companies to get in on the AR action.

Running in private Beta over the last month, PAM aims to lower the barriers for brands who want to build Augmented Reality-enabled mobile apps and campaigns. It combines a CMS platform to let them create AR experiences without the need to code, which can then be accessed by consumers through the accompanying PAM smartphone app or by being integrated into the brand’s own app. In that sense, one way to think of VirtualMob’s proposition might be a WordPress for AR — and certainly this is about democratising access to the technology for content creators through ease-of-use and reduced cost.

The PAM platform itself — which while in Beta has already been used by over 100 customers including The Trump Ocean Club Panama, Cartier, Victoria’s Secret, Time Inc., The Waldorf Astoria, Cartier, Hyundai, and Unilever — is designed to be self-service, requiring little to no technical knowledge by employing a drag ‘n’ drop UI. It’s particularly suited to bringing a print campaign (or other real-world static content) to life by augmenting it with digital content, such as images, video, links and, crucially, e-commerce functionality.

So, for example, you might see an advert for a watch in a dead-tree magazine prompting you to fire up the PAM app (or the brand’s own app with PAM integrated) and point your phone at the image. From here you’d see additional information like where to buy, features, cost etc., along with any relevant call to actions.

But what makes this especially useful for brands employing the technology is that all of these interactions are measurable, and indeed PAM comes with analytics. This includes things like click through rate, location/time, and source media, thus bringing a degree of accountability to print campaigns that isn’t normally possible, helping brands prioritise their marketing budgets.

“Brands love the analytics part, as they spend millions on printed media, but have difficulties turning that into something they can measure or convert into hits via print,” says VirtualMob co-founder Chaya Jadhav.

Founded in 2011, the company is self-funded to the tune of $500,000 and is in the process of raising an external round of funding. To that end, I’m also told that the PAM platform will be compatible with Google Glass.

Well, there’s a surprise.

After reading about WeatherSignal, a new project from London startup OpenSignal which makes use of the latest sensors in smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy S4 to crowdsource weather information, I was reminded that I recently caught wind of Shaka, an Estonian startup that has built a wind meter accessory for iOS.

Due to start shipping next month, the battery-free Shaka Wind Meter plugs into an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad’s headphone socket, and combined with the existing onboard sensors of Apple’s hardware and the startup’s own app/service, measures, records and displays wind-specific weather data such as current and average wind speed, maximum wind gust, ambient temperature, and wind direction — all mapped to a location via GPS.

The device’s inspiration and intended use-case was to enable people who take part in wind-related sports, such as windsurfers and kitesurfers, to find good wind conditions. “Forecasts are often inaccurate and the coverage with stationary and connected stations is not good enough,” says Shaka co-founder Raigo Raamat. “We wanted to simplify the process of sharing good wind conditions inside the community.”

But when he and his two other co-founders — Jens Kasemets and Mihkel Güsson — embarked on the project as far back as 2011 they soon realised “many more communities” could benefit from a device that enabled a smartphone or tablet to be transformed into a “connected weather station” for either private use or for contributing to and accessing real-time crowdsourced weather data. These range from academia, agriculture, emergency services, to golfers and motor sports. “The problem for all these use cases differ, but all need local weather measurements as input,” says Raamat.

To that end, Shaka has gustier ambitions beyond just a wind meter. Longer term, the startup and graduate of the harware-focused accelerator HAXLR8R (which also provided seed funding), plans to build what Raamat’s calling a platform for the world’s smallest weather station. “We’ll add barometric pressure and humidity sensors to achieve that and also support Android devices,” he says. The startup’s ultimate target is expensive and non-connected legacy handheld weather stations.

Today the company is monetizing on the hardware only — the accompanying app is free — but in the future it will offer additional paid-for services, along with opening up the platform to partners who want to develop apps on top of Shaka that target various weather-related communities.

Since launching in 2010, HealthTap has been on a mission to bring the proverbial “house call” back to healthcare — virtually speaking, of course. With more than 80 percent of people turning to online resources (and to Dr. Google) for health-related information — from insurance to basic diagnostics — HealthTap set out to give people a better alternative to using Google or WebMD for their health queries.

Capitalizing the increasing ubiquity of mobile devices, HealthTap created an interactive mobile health network and Q&A platform to allow everyday people to connect with one of its 38K licensed physicians in realtime, via their smartphone or the Web. Over the last year, the startup has proven that there’s ample demand for a “Quora for doctors”-type service, with the founder telling us last month that the site is now serving over 7.5 million unique visitors every month, and more than 10 million questions have been answered on its platform to date.

In turn, HealthTap has served over 581 million answers to those seeking health device and, as of March, Gutman said, over 3K people had sent thank-you notes to HealthTap, saying that these doctor answers had saved their lives. While this may sound a little too saccharine to be true, doctors and hypochondriacs aren’t the only ones drinking the Kool-Aid.

Based on its recent traction, along with the growing potential of virtual health information networks, the startup announced this morning that it has secured $24 million in series B financing. The majority of the capital, the founder told us this week, came from its new lead investor, Khosla Ventures and, specifically, was led by its newest partner: Keith Rabois, the former COO of Square and early exec at Slide, LinkedIn and PayPal, among others.

The round marks Rabois’ first investment since joining Khosla Ventures in February and sees the new partner taking a seat on HealthTap’s board of directors. As further testament to the firm’s interest in its latest investment, Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla, who has become an active HealthTech investor over the past few years, will be officially joining HealthTap as a member of its advisory board.

With contributions from HealthTap’s existing investors, like The Mayfield Fund and Mohr Davidow Ventures, the new round brings the company’s total funding to $37.9 million, which Gutman says the company will use to hire “top talent”, expand its web and mobile offerings, and accelerate growth.

The new capital will also allow HealthTap to begin taking steps to open the significant amount of health data the platform has collected over the past two years to third-parties — be they startups looking to build new tools and applications around healthcare, or healthcare players themselves. The startup has also yet to begin monetizing in any significant way, and Gutman sees these potential partnerships and integrations as the best way to begin generating revenue.

“The real question we want to answer going forward,” the founder says, “is how do we best tackle healthcare and health data in a post-Obamacare world?” With healthcare, insurance, brokers and all manners of health information moving online, the system is going to be hard pressed to handle the increase in demand. The goal is to put HealthTap in a position to be the de facto triaging system once Obamacare really kicks in, Gutman continued.

Over the last few months, the startup has been steadily moving in that direction. HealthTap’s platform provides health information primarily through its Q&A functionality which now connects users to a network of more than 38,000 registered doctors, offering a potentially more efficient and cheaper alternative to seeing a doctor face-to-face.

For doctors who join HealthTap, the platform provides tools to build an online and real-world reputation — the usual draw for those contributing to a Q&A site — and the potential to attract new patients while also improving the quality of health information online, which is noble in itself.

HealthTap claims that the new financing represents “one of the most substantial series B investments to date in the digital health industry”, and that the company has grown “rapidly over the past year, nearly quadrupling the number of doctors in its network, and serving tens of millions of people worldwide via its web and mobile apps.”

Testimony to this, the founder told us in March that doctors are now spending an average of over one hour per session (61.2 minutes to be precise) each time they log in — not only to answer questions, but to engage in peer reviews of other doctors’ answers, to build referral networks and vote on one another’s expertise.

Of course, HealthTap is far from being the first to go after these concepts — something that Doximity, QuantiaMD and a growing number of health startups will be quick to remind you. For the moment, HealthTap seems to have taken the lead, at least as far as investors are concerned; however, there’s a long way to go and much flux to come with Obamacare looming on the horizon.

More VC money sloshing around Europe. Creandum, the Stockholm-based VC best known for its early investments in the likes of Spotify and Videoplaza, has closed its third fund at €135 million (~$177m), laying claim to being the biggest technology venture capital fund in the Nordics.

The new fund, which was a year in the making and has already made around six investments, will target 25-30 early stage companies in the Nordics and wider European region, with a mixture of seed (€100k – 1m) and A-rounds (€1m – 10m). The majority of those will be in consumer and other software companies, with the rest being hardware and high-tech investments.

Maybe Europe’s Series A crunch — if there is such a thing — just got a little softer.

Creandum says the new fund was raised with “strong support from existing and new investors from the Nordics, rest of Europe and the US”, and that the number of Limited Partners doubled versus the previous €80m Creandum fund raised in 2007.

Interestingly, Unquote reports that only one investor from Fund II “did not re-up into Creandum III”, and that the new fund comprises 11 investors, with “approximately 50% of the capital coming from Sweden and the rest from elsewhere in Europe”. One of those investors is the Finnish government investment vehicle Finnish Industry Investment, which put in €7.5m. More generally, they are made up of family offices, and institutional investors such as pension funds and insurance companies.

Already active for a year, Creandum’s early investments from the new fund include the computer vision startup 13th Lab, mobile wine app Vivino, the price comparison service for sea freight Xeneta, last-minute hotel booking app JustBook and Singapore-based gaming company Non Stop Games – with a 6th Swedish investment yet unannounced.

I’m told that this accounts for no more than 10% of the new fund, with up to 24 more investments to go. Meanwhile, the VC says that 5 out of its first 6 deals have been seed investments.

Australian startup Tapestry, which makes an app for Android tablets to help seniors stay connected to family members, has raised $400,000 in new funding in the form of a grant from Commercialisation Australia — capital it will use to extend its wares to iOS (and beyond tablets), add additional community features, and gear up for a U.S. launch.

It follows $600,000 raised last November from Sydney Angels, with a list of investors that included David Greatorex (founding investor ResMed, SecureNet), Su-Ming Wong (CHAMP Private Equity), Brand Hoff (Tower Software, Director NICTA).

Targeting the ageing population and their family members, Tapestry’s service — currently an Android tablet app — is an attempt to simplify the social web and make it more accessible to less tech-savvy seniors in order to help them stay connected to family. It does this through a user interface that relies on two different account types — one for “sharing”, aimed at the more tech-savvy family members, and another, dubbed “simplicity”, for the senior(s) in the family who wish to mostly consume content and require the tailored Tapestry experience.

In addition to an Android app, the startup was offering its own (optional) hardware — a rebadged Toshiba tablet — though this appears to have been quietly dropped, a sensible move as Android hardware is fast becoming a commodity business.

Instead, the product roadmap looks to be in its software and service only, with expansion to the iPad and iOS in general, along with Android smartphones not just tablets. Tapestry also says it plans to extend its proposition beyond helping families stay connected, to include community-based features, which founder Andrew Dowling describes as “retirement and other group-based group packages”.

Meanwhile, further growth is also said to come from a planned U.S. launch, which the startup has been putting in place via a recent trip to the Valley to meet potential investors, partners and customers, backed by the Australian Federal Government-funded Advance Innovation Program.

Inventure-backed Froont has launched in public beta today with a web-based tool that aims to make it easy for designers to create, prototype and share responsive website designs, without the need to code. Using a visual, largely drag ‘n’ drop interface that creates responsive CSS/HTML on the fly, it aims to replace the somewhat arcane process where a designer hands off a Photoshop mockup for a developer to interpret. In fact, Froont offers the potential to leave developers out of the design (and even prototyping) process altogether, which in some cases may be a very good thing.

Responsive web design — where a single version of a site is designed to adapt in size and layout depending on the device that it’s being viewed on — is particularly in vogue right now. And with the proliferation of various types of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets etc.), alongside the traditional desktop, it’s easy to see why. A responsive approach to web design offers an attractive solution to reaching as wide an audience as possible without necessarily degrading their experience, even if it does make some compromises.

But the old way of designing websites, and the traditional division of labour, doesn’t necessarily scale well if you’re jumping on the responsive bandwagon. Trying to represent a responsive design in a series of static Photoshop mockups to show how a site will adapt when viewed on various screen sizes involves quite a lot of compromise. One solution is to have the non-coding designer work hand in hand with a front-end developer to prototype their Photoshop designs in HTML/CSS, thus making them viewable as is and to get a feel for how the responsive design will work in practice. This approach, however, can involve a lot of unnecessary back and forth as the design gets lost in translation.

Instead, Froont wants to hand control back to designers by letting them visually create working responsive designs that, because they are built using HTML/CSS and hosted in the cloud, can be viewed and shared instantly in a web browser, on any device being targeted. And when it’s time to hand off the design to a developer, instead of a static PNG file or something similar, in theory they’re given “nice, clean HTML/CSS or the ‘face’ of the website already made,” says the company.

The tool itself, though only in Beta, appears to be quite easy to get to grips with without being overly restrictive. It’s primarily WYSIWYG, employing a palette of tools and lots of drag ‘n’ drop, making it easy to add text, import graphics and tinker with typography and layout. Obviously, the aim here is to create a responsive design and in this respect Froont has some nice touches, such as a sliding ruler at the top of the page that adjusts the targeted screen size on the fly, instantly updating how your design changes as it responds. You’re also able to set “break points” to denote when the layout of your content shouldn’t simply reflow as the target device’s screen size differs but should change altogether.

Although there are lots of visual web design tools that target different stages of the process or a finished site entirely, in terms of tackling responsive design at the initial HTML/CSS stage, Adobe’s Reflow probably comes closest. The main difference, says Froont, is that its tool runs in the browser, which means that its output can be shared instantly with team members, clients or developers for feedback and testing. Also, however subtle a difference, Froont isn’t so much aiming at simplifying coding but providing better tools for design.

Froont’s team of six is spread across San Francisco, Finland and Latvia. The company is founded by Sandijs Ruluks (designer/CEO), Andris Silis (CTO), Anna Andersone (operations and marketing) and Eli Altman (PR), and originally graduated from the Finnish accelerator Startup Sauna, giving it an avenue to raise €100,000 from Finnish VC fund Inventure. Froont also appears to at least be a partial pivot. The same team is behind the content management system Berta, which although described as a side-project, is still operational and I’m told is profitable.

Well, what do we have here? Somewhat under the radar, Google has hired the computer games veteran Noah Falstein to the position of Chief Game Designer. Yes, that’s right, the search giant, not normally known for its games development, appears to have a major gaming project in circulation, at least something that requires someone as experienced as Falstein at its helm. What that might be we can only speculate. A Google Glass-related augmented-reality game seems a possibility, though there could be something even more serious going on, given Falstein’s areas of interest.

For those who aren’t familiar with his work, according to his bio Falstein’s been in the computer games industry since 1980, spanning companies such as LucasArts, 3DO, and Dreamworks Interactive, and is the designer behind a number of hit titles. He most recently ran his own consultancy, The Inspiracy, which offered companies help on game design, development and business, as well as being a regular on the lecture and speaking circuit. Ever influential, so perhaps not so surprising that he’s wound up at Google.

On his LinkedIn profile, his new title is “Chief Game Designer” at Google, joining sometime in April 2013. No further details are provided. Intriguingly, however, an earlier cached version has the position down as “Chief Game Designer at Android Play Studio.”

That, of course, points to something Android-related, even if — as one industry insider noted when I asked around — Google’s mobile OS seems to be doing just fine games-wise without the need for a dedicated Android Chief Game Designer within the company.

Were Google to be working on a new game (or games) led by Falstein, it wouldn’t be an entirely new avenue. It already has the mysterious Niantic Labs, maker of Ingress, a real-time augmented reality MMO for Android, so perhaps there’s a connection there. Or maybe a similar concept but for Google Glass.

Finally, if we zoom out further and think a bit more laterally, a major interest of Falstein is the field of “Serious Games,” which he defines as “Using Games, Game Technology, or Game Industry Techniques for a purpose other than pure entertainment.” The list of Serious Games projects Falstein has been involved in spans anything from using game techniques to improve health and education, to financial projections. In other words, weighty stuff.

Or, dare I say, very Google.

I’m pretty much out of superlatives when writing about Dylan Collins’ latest venture.

Box of Awesome, which we previously described as a “free Birchbox for kids“, has acquired Swapit, the site that lets kids and teens trade unwanted items for stuff they do want and operates an accompanying ad network with a reach of 7.3 million. And with it comes a change of name. The newly formed company, which Collins says is now the leading kids and teens discovery platform in the UK, is to be called SuperAwesome.

That’s right, just when you think it can’t get any more ____________ [INSERT SUPERLATIVE].

The terms of the deal remains undisclosed, though I understand it was for stock not cash and that Swapit’s 9 person team will be joining the newly-formed company, including Tom Impallomeni as COO and Lee Veitch as VP Sales.

Box of Awesome launched back in February as a way to solve the discovery problem faced by physical and digital products targeting the 8-14 year-old kids market. It consists of a bi-monthly box delivered in the post to subscribers, stuffed full of games, music, books and other kid-friendly stuff. The draw for brands who pay for space in each Box of Awesome is the opportunity to be discovered by influencers in that hard to reach demographic — and to get valuable feedback from the mandatory surveys the kids take if they want to receive the next box.

The following month, the UK startup launched a version targeting girls, cleverly named OMG!, and there’s also a digital-only version to keep kids happy while they sit it out on the waiting list.

Meanwhile, Swapit has been around for a lot longer. Founded in 2001, it has three legs to its business. First is the online swapping and trading community for kids and teenagers. On the site, members earn virtual currency called “swapits” for every item they trade in, which they then use to bid on items they do want. But here’s the clincher: They can also earn “swapits” from leading brands and organisations for various activities. This includes mini-games, competitions and taking surveys. Swapits can also be used to bid on brand-promoted items. All of which makes sense from a SuperAwesome point of view.

In addition, Swapit operates an extensive ad network targeting kids, and has a research arm, too. Both also of value to the “kids discovery” proposition offered by the new company.

“Our vision is to create the next generation discovery platform for the kids and teens market,” says Collins in an email. “This generation of kids is enormously disruptive: they exist on multiple platforms and locations. And this maps exactly to how we’re building our company. As well as being experts in understanding kids and teens, Swapit has always shared this hybrid view which is why we realised there was a genuine match here.”

Collins also reckons that by combining forces, SuperAwesome has a reach of about 65% of the UK kids/teens market.

In a statement, Tom Impallomeni, CEO of Swapit, adds: “With SuperAwesome we’ve created the biggest kids and teens discovery platform in the UK which is safe, compliant and effective. I think our awesome customers, who include the likes of Warner Bros, Topps, Activision and Random House (amongst many others) are testament to this. For many brands, we are already a required part of their marketing mix.”

23snaps, one of a number of mobile apps that target parents who want to share photos, videos and updates of their children within a private social network, has flicked the monetization switch today. It’s launched an on-demand printing feature within the app to let users turn their uploaded photos into a physical printed product — both photo books and individual prints.

Available for both iOS and Android, as well as a web-based version, we’ve previously described 23snaps as like a Facebook for families, even down to its look and feel.

You begin by setting up profiles of your children in the app and optionally adding your partner, who can also have posting privileges, as well as any other friends or family members you want to privately share content with. You can then upload photos, enter height and weight measurements at various stage of your child’s development, and add status updates to record those special moments, which will be enjoyed by close family and friends but might otherwise be considered as over sharing within an uber-social network like Facebook.

This content then shows up in your news feed and the news feed of those who you have chosen to share with. In addition, those friends and family members receive real time mobile or email notifications when you add a new update. To that end, 23snaps says that photo and video uploads have an engagement rate of 90% (meaning that on average, 90% of a user’s connections will in some way engage with every piece of content they post), which it claims compares to Facebook’s 10% engagement on an individual’s posts. In addition, the average open rate of 23snaps email updates is said to be 70%, while the startup has passed 1 million items shared since launch.

More details on how the new printing feature works: Users tap the print button and choose to print individual pictures or a photo book comprised of selected pictures, specific collections or favourites. They then choose to have their photos and albums sent to themselves or directly to friends and family. The “high quality” photo book (worldwide) starts at a minimum of 24 photos for £15 and prints (U.S. and UK-only) start at £6 for 20 photos.

Based in London, 23snaps was founded in January 2012 by Ivailo Jordanov and Yury Tereschenko. Jordanov was previously Head of Product at Espotting, a search service acquired by Findwhat in 2004. He also co-founded Zoomf.com, later acquired by UK newspaper Trinity Mirror. In 2009, he joined financial company Avans.bg in Bulgaria, where he still serves as advisor and board member. Tereschenko and Jordanov also both later co-founded the UK shopping company Styloko.

23snaps competitors include the likes of Notabli, Kidfolio and Everyme.

Finnish startup M-Files, a provider of a metadata-powered content management solution targeting the enterprise, has closed a €6 million (~$7.8m) series A round led by DFJ Esprit, with participation from Finnish Industry Investment. It says it will use the fresh injection of capital to fuel its growth plans in the U.S., and bolster sales and marketing via partner channels globally.

Described as shunning the outdated folder structure traditionally used by enterprise-wide document management systems, which is said to date back to the ’80s, M-Files’ solution is based on a metadata approach that cares less about where documents/content is stored — on-premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid of the two — and instead manages information based on what it is. One way to think of its approach, says the company, is the way a user’s iPhone doesn’t surface the device’s file structure but only the content and related metadata, where you’d expect to find it, such as music and the iTunes app (tracks, artists, genre etc.).

Or, as M-Files CEO Miika Mäkitalo says in a statement, “Think Enterprise Document Management 2.0, or the combined power of Dropbox AND Documentum but for enterprise-scale businesses.”

Okay then.

To the end user, files show up on their desktop just like any shared drive. Navigation is via the Windows Explorer UI, while Windows applications are supported using standard “File Open” or “Save” commands. M-Files also integrates with other enterprise systems such as CRM, ERP and Accounting systems, including Salesforce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM (online and on-premise), Dynamics GP, AX and NAV, and NetSuite.

Having expanded out of its home base of Tampere, Finland, M-Files already claims a number of enterprise customers in the U.S. such as AstraZeneca, SAS, Pandora, the United Nations, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Charles Schwab, Hecla Mining, and Hill+Knowlton.

Alongside today’s funding, the company is announcing that Jim Geary and Bob Suh, described as “proven technology leaders” (Accenture, Perot Systems, and Pedestal Software), and DFJ Esprit’s Mikko Suonenlahti, have joined M-Files’ Board of Directors.

There are an abundance of startups trying to solve the problem of how to “try on” clothes online, with a range of different approaches and technology — a competition we’ve previously likened to a space race where nobody has yet landed on the moon. Today, Virtusize launches its virtual fitting solution in the UK via a partnership with ASOS. After a successful six month trial, the “Fit Vitualiser” button is initially being rolled out on the product pages of over 2,000 of the online fashion retailer’s own brand clothes.

Shunning Fits.me’s 3D modeled approach which uses robots or something like Metail that enables a shopper to upload and see a 3D visualisation of themselves in order to virtually dress up in potential purchases, Virtusize lets customers to compare specific measurements of an item they are looking to buy with a similar item they already own. By displaying and overlaying 2D silhouettes of both garments, the startup says that customers can more accurately compare sizes and, ultimately, choose the item that would fit them best. It’s a compelling pitch and has obvious cost savings over the up front work involved in 3D visualisation of a retailer’s entire catalog.

That said, it also means that Virtusize’s solution focuses more on how a garment will fit a customer, not so much what it will look like on them. The latter is quite subjective but could also contribute to high return rates, which is what all virtual fitting solutions are trying to reduce.

In addition, Virtusize’s solution requires that a customer already owns a supported garment in order to compare sizes or that they measure a favourite (and similar) item of clothing at home and enter the data manually. Presumably that’s why ATOS has chosen to start with its own brand clothing as returning customers will be more likely to own a comparable garment, and the company has the size and fit data more readily at hand to apply to Virtusize’s technology.

In terms of how it approaches the virtual fitting problem, Virtusize’s closest competitors are the likes of Clothes Horse and Truefit which recommend size based on what the consumer wears in other brands. However, these solutions lack a visual presentation and only produce a number/letter to denote size. Therefore, says Virtusize, they don’t capture how a specific style will fit as garments vary in terms of style etc. regardless of if they are technically the same size and have historically worked out well for the customer.

Founded in Spring 2011, Virtusize launched with Nelly.com (the largest online retailer in Scandinavia) as a pilot customer during the autumn the same year. It makes money by charging web shops a monthly subscription fee for using its solution. The fee is determined by monthly page views on the product pages where Virtusize is available. With the addition of ASOS as a partner, the startup now claims to be the leading online fitting solution in terms of availability with over 30,000 garments at 23 web shops and approximately 50,000 users per month.

Virtusize has raised £1 million in seed funding. Among the startup’s backers are Swedish listed investment company Öresund and a number of angel investors including Fredrik Åhlberg, former Head of Growth at eBay Europe. As a reference point, earlier this month Fits.me closed a $7.2m series A round. Meanwhile, Metail has raised £2.7m in total.

Sherpa, the virtual personal assistant for Android (and indirect competitor to Apple’s Siri), has launched in the UK, albeit in requisite Beta. It follows the original Spanish version released in October 2012, which has since seen it claim 400,000 downloads to become the No. 1 virtual assistant on Android in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries. Meanwhile, Sherpa made its U.S. debut earlier this month.

Operating in a similar space to Cupertino’s talk-happy virtual assistant, or Samsung Ventures-backed Maluuba, which like Sherpa is also available on Android, the app uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to let users interact with their smartphones to perform various tasks and to retrieve information online and via the services it plugs into. This can be via typing, touch and, of course voice.

There’s also a machine-learning element so it gets smarter the more you use it, to the point that it can be proactive, pitching itself alongside something like Google Now.

A potential key differentiator is the ability to complete voice-enabled online transactions through a partnership with PayPal. Furthermore, the company is talking up the level at which Sherpa can understand user queries. Ten years in the making, based on founder Xabier Uribe-Etxebarria’s NLP research, it understands more than 250,000 concepts and relies on “five levels of linguistic analysis, including morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and functional.” If that went over your head, you’re not alone.

The UK version has been localised and includes regional variations for Scotland and Ireland to enable users to take advantage of the app’s features, such as searching for information, completing transactions, managing schedules and operating the device itself.

The company has raised $1.6 million in funding.

TechStars London, the UK outpost of Boulder, U.S.-based uber-accelerator TechStars after it merged with Jon Bradford’s Springboard, has announced that its found a permanent home at newly-established Warner Yard, a co-working space owned by early-stage fund Playfair Capital.

Why is this news, you may ask. Well, not only does it means that teams will now get up to 6 months free office space in the UK’s capital city, rather than just the 3 months they are on the program, but it follows the recent news that TechStars London has been approved as a Recognised Seed Competition, smoothing the way for participants to qualify for a UK Entrepreneur Visa. This means, I hasten to add, that TechStars London startups are far more likely to stay located in London long after they graduate.

Zooming out a bit more, it also adds further weight to London’s claim as a leading tech hub, espoused by the British government’s Tech City project (now led by Joanna Shields, ex-Google, AOL/Bebo, and most recently Facebook’s head of EMEA operations), alongside the network effects that have grown out of the organic “Silicon Roundabout” tech cluster in East London, which has seen the likes of Google and Amazon invest in the area.

The official announcement says TechStars London’s new base is located in “the heart of Tech City”, though in a later statement Jon Bradford, Managing Director of TechStars London, describes Warner Yard as “close” to Tech City, proving that nobody knows for sure where the UK government’s branding for the London tech scene starts and ends. For those who are familiar with London, Warner Yard is actually in Clerkenwell. Due to open on the 29th of May, it will feature 154 desks over 4 floors including 5 quiet booths, 4 meeting rooms, 3 kitchens and space for presentations and pitching. It will be open 24 hours a day and will house both PlayFair Capital’s portfolio companies, and external companies — including TechStars London, of course, who will also use the space to host events for the wider community and provide hot-desking facilities for TechStars alumni.

In a further boost to the local ecosystem, the new co-working space, which is modelled on Passion Capital’s nearby White Bear Yard, is being targeted at early-stage investors and angels as an alternative to hot-desking at various coffee shops in London. At launch, it’s signed up EC1 Capital, #1Seed, Hotspur Capital Partners, Ballpark Ventures, Doug Scott and Richard Fearn — a sign of more cozying up by London’s investment community.

Here’s Bradford’s statement in full: “Finding the right environment for TechStars London has been a priority since our launch. Warner Yard provides both TechStars London teams a great central location being close to both TechCity and also the West End with an awesome environment alongside other seed funded companies for the duration of the programme and also immediate run out period.”

Meanwhile, applications for TechStars London close on 5th of May 2013. Startups interested in applying can come from anywhere, not just Europe, but must physically come to London for the three-month program. In total, €85k of funding is up for grabs per team, though the majority of this is a convertible note.

However, funding mechanics aside, the fact that the accelerator’s investment in each startup crosses the £50k mark, combined with TechStars London’s newly acquired Recognised Seed Competition status, means that its entrepreneurs have sufficient “points” to qualify for a UK Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) Visa.

Here’s how TechStars describes the win:

The approval will allow TechStars London teams from outside of the EU, to work in the UK for up to 3 years and towards the end of this period, can apply to extend their stay by a further 2 years if they want to continue living here. Furthermore teams, after 3 years have the right to apply for permission to settle in the UK if their business has created at least 10 new full-time jobs in the UK. Partners and children of the teams can also apply for settlement.

There’s no shortage of apps to help you get healthier. Most push the idea of the Quantified Self. Better data, makes for better decisions — a claim that is difficult to argue against.

Today, Nutrino sees its official launch with a virtual nutritionist app for iOS that provides personalised meal recommendations based on a user’s profile, goals, habits and taste. It also includes a grocery list component, which at launch ties into major UK supermarket chains, in addition to support for Withings wireless scales to save on manual data entry.

Nutrino starts from the premise that, rather than taking a “one-size-fits-all” approach, nutrition should be personal to each individual. And while there are lots of apps and gadgets on the market to help users track their diet or fitness, Nutrino’s pitch places more emphasis on its recommendation algorithms — two years in the making, apparently — which it claims enable it to truly personalise its nutritional/meal planning features.

Users began by taking a survey within the app, with a largely toggle-driven UI, which forms the basis of their Nutrino profile. This includes obvious things like gender, age, height, weight, and something as subject as their exercise-related lifestyle e.g. couch potato. They also define their goals, such as lose or maintain weight, as well as their culinary tastes and eating habits, and so on. The app then provides a daily meal plan for each user. Naturally, there’s a tracking element, too, hence the ability to sync weight data with the Withings wireless scale/app.

Finally, each meal can be added to the app’s “Grocery List” feature, for easy purchase at one of the supported grocery stores — Tesco and ASDA in the UK with “more chains worldwide to come soon”. Nutrino also ties in with the likes of Pret, pod, eat, Costa Coffee and Café Nero, for users who are eating on-the-go.

In terms of business model, in the future Nutrino will target communities with special nutritional requirements, such as people with diabetes, hypertension, or athletes etc., who would be willing to pay a subscription for more tailored features. There’s also tie-ins with grocery shopping, and take-out food ordering. To that end, I can see something along the lines of weight loss coaching app Noom’s recent partnership with recipe kit subscription service HelloFresh.

The startup is funded to the tune of $400,000 from family and private investors. It’s founded by Jonathan Lipnik, Yaron Hadad, Jose Luis Martin de Bustamente, Eduard Ros Bajona, and Ido Cohn, and is spread across the UK, Spain and Israel.

We’d been hearing for a while that Storybricks, the AI gaming startup co-founded by serial entrepreneur Rodolfo Rosini, had picked up a major client win since pivoting to license its technology to games studios. We just didn’t say who, in case it hadn’t closed, except to describe the potential partnership as of “jaw-dropping magnitude”.

Today, the cat is out of the bag. In its latest newsletter, Storybricks confirms that it is collaborating with Sony Online for EverQuest Next, the latest sequel to the highly successful EverQuest franchise. Jaw-dropping indeed for a six-person company.

Late last year we reported that, after a failed Kickstarter campaign, Storybricks was pivoting. Gone was the company’s super-ambitious mission to create a new browser-based MMO that would let users turn stories into games. Instead, harnessing much of its core tech, the startup was aiming to build the best artificial intelligence (AI) engine for online games by giving characters emotions — and licensing this engine to third-parties. And now it seems that Sony Online — specifically EverQuest Next — will be the first title to benefit from Storybricks’ AI boosting technology.

The announcement, via the company’s newsletter, is very short on details. Instead it teases: “After several months of working together with Sony Online, we can finally reveal that we are collaborating on EverQuest Next. EQN is ‘the biggest sandbox ever designed’ and we are extremely happy to be working on the most innovative MMORPG under development.”

It goes on to state that the company “can’t give any specifics about what we are doing on EQN yet”, except to say that it is “doing remarkable things”.

Curiosity never killed this cat, so I tracked down Rosini over email to push for more information about the startup’s partnership with Sony Online. “Sorry we can’t talk about it yet,” he wrote with uncharacteristic reserve. When pressed, however, he did reveal that the collaboration is generating significant revenue for Storybricks and isn’t royalty-based.

It wasn’t the only deal on the table, either. Rosini says that lots of games studios were interested in working with the startup, but they could only embark on one project of this size. “EQN could be the most important game of the next 10 years,” he said. “We could not let this opportunity pass.”

Finally, returning to form, Rosini signed off with the following: “Also there are [a] few VCs who are hardcore Warcraft players and certainly I enjoy being able to have access to the new new MMO before them.”

Well, they do say that money can’t buy you everything.