Uber, the breakthrough car service app with big ambitions to do much more, is now making its way to international markets: today the car service company kicked off its London operation with a soft launch, just in time to start prepping for the summer tourist rush and the visitor onslaught also known as the Summer Olympics.

The launch is still at a very early stage — with “secret Ubers” prowling the roads, and the company still in research mode to figure out the best way of tackling the city according a blog post on Uber’s site. London, like many other European cities, is a tangle of streets — Black cab drivers have to pass a special test called “the knowledge” to be able to drive here, although this isn’t required to operate a non-Black cab.

As it has done with other city launches, the Uber crew has laid on a few VIPs to be the first passengers. Rider number one was a Dragon’s Den judge, Richard Farleigh.

Rider two was David Clark, director of astronaut relations (yes, that is a real job title) at Virgin Galactic.

Navigating small London streets in quite possibly large luxury cars is not the only challenge that might face Uber as it builds out its London service.

There is also the basic issue of competition: London has Black cabs, but it also has two other classes of cars for hire: small, independent local minicab firms and more established car service companies (like Addison Lee). It’s the latter that perhaps most closely matches Uber for the “luxury” experience it offers.

There are also two other companies offering car hire apps in London, Hailo and GetTaxi. At least two of them will get to duke it out over their relative merits before a live audience: both Uber and Hailo will be squaring off against each other next week at the LeWeb conference in London.

Uber’s international director Sam Gellman tells me that a full rollout won’t be coming for a couple of weeks. The operation will be led by UK country manager Chelsea Cooper.

Despite the rapid growth of the smartphone market (41 percent YOY, to be exact), Samsung and Apple are the only smartphone makers really enjoying this growth. Combined, they took home 55 percent of global smartphone shipments in the first quarter of 2012. More importantly, they’re walking away with 90 percent of the market’s profits.

Surprisingly, however, Samsung and Sony were the only OEMs to see any sequential growth in shipments. Even more surprising, RIM (of all companies) is set to surpass Nokia, despite the fact that both companies saw a decrease in shipments, 20 percent and 40 percent respectively.

According to senior ABI analyst Michael Morgan, "at this point in the year, Nokia will have to grow its Windows Phone business 5000% in 2012 just to offset its declines in Symbian shipments."

In the first quarter, Samsung came out on top with 43 million global shipments, followed by Apple with 35 million shipments. Trailing far behind, Nokia and Rim shipped 11.9 million and 11.1 million units respectively, followed closely by Sony and Huawei, with 7 million and 6.8 million shipments respectively.

Nokia is seriously struggling of late, as proven by yesterday’s headlines, after ditching Symbian and transitioning to Microsoft’s mobile operating system. RIM has been floundering for about the same amount of time, trying desperately to revive itself with BB10.

On the other hand, Samsung and Apple’s success is only expected to grow with the looming launches of the Samsung Galaxy S III and iPhone 5.

Sulake, the developers behind the children’s virtual world Habbo Hotel, is preparing to reopen its chatrooms once again after a week in which it was exposed for hosting inappropriate sexual content on the site, prompting the company to close down all conversations — “mute” them in Habbo terminology — while it sorted out the mess.

The news of what Habbo is calling “The Great Unmute” will also be used as a chance to get user feedback on the state of the site and how it should develop, according to a blog post published today by Sulake’s CEO, Paul LaFontaine. He also took the opportunity to claim that some journalists have been using the opportunity to start reaching out to Habbo users, offering them money for stories of their Habbo misadventures.

“They may well be vulnerable and certainly will not benefit from self-interested approaches and offers of cash for case studies,” he writes. “We want to create a comprehensive and constructive response to our current challenges and send out a call to action for improved safety standards across the online gaming community. Petty attempts to generate more bad news are distracting us from the job at hand.”

LaFontaine says that the decision to “mute” all conversations on the site, which it took after the UK’s Channel Four broadcast its exposé on Tuesday, had a “massive business impact” on the site — financial amount not specified, but the company makes money off the sale of virtual goods. That would have been largely halted in the process of the part-closure, resulting in a revenue loss that would have been compounded by some users leaving the site altogether in the wake of the scandal.

Despite that, he writes, “the safety of our users is non-negotiable.”

He writes that since the scandal broke — which resulted in key investor Balderton dropping its 13 percent stake in the company — senior management and “world leading technologists” have been working in its Helsinki HQ to sort out the situation and put in place a new “comprehensive safety program.” Other sites aimed at children have taken a mixed approach to firming up their controls, however.

The details of that have not yet been made public but interestingly it looks like it will involve more parental involvement in the use of the site — something that was not required before. There may be (and should be) more algorithmic improvements made for non-human monitoring, too, however.

Habbo’s "Great Unmute", in the words of LaFontaine, sounds slightly cultish, but if you go beyond cynicism it might be a worthwhile exercise: “It's going to provide a chance for our users to create a conversational tidal wave, telling us what they want and showing the world that our global community contains millions of responsible and proud users who have a positive experience on our site,” he writes. He says that more details will come in the days ahead.

The cost of entry into the world of film is constantly dropping. A new Kickstarter project from Nice Industries called The Aviator is attempting to bring it even lower. The product is a portable, low-cost camera jib that, as the Kickstarter page explains, when mounted, allows for cinematic, sweeping camera scenes. The compact kit is designed for cameras weighing up to 6 lbs. That should cover most DLSRs even with a hefty lens.

The project already hit its Kickstarter funding goal of $20,000, but it’s still worth a look. This project, like so many others on the site, shows how a product can bypass the typical nonsense and hit the market by simply getting enough pre-orders.

The Aviator is currently available through several Kickstarter funding levels. Pledge $299 and net just the travel jib and not all the extras — there are only four of these remaining as of this post’s writing. For $399 supporters will get the Aviator travel jib along with a bunch of pertinent accoutrements. Feeling frisky? Spend $799 and get a carbon fiber edition that weighs even less.

So now with The Aviator, film makers just need to add a camera, a bit of talent, and plenty of vision to take a quality shot.

Next Tuesday we’re invading Philly for an evening of networking, fun, and bacchanalian pleasure. Are you coming?

Josh Zelman, Jordan Crook, Chris Velazco, and myself will be rolling into Philadelphia on Tuesday morning and we’re ready to talk start-ups, tech, and all things in between. We’re excited to head out to the city of brotherly love and we’re also excited to announce a new sponsor, Uber, who is offering a special gift to our Philly readers.

The Philly Meetup will begin promptly at 6pm and go until 10pm, and will be held in The Fieldhouse on June 19. If you’d like to RSVP, head on over to our Plancast page. Specific questions can be directed to john@techcrunch.com. Oh, and if you want to tweet us, it’s @johnbiggs and @jordanrcrook.

We’re also holding Office Hours earlier on in the day, around high noon, although the official reservations are already closed. Still, it wouldn’t be the first time we met up with some eager, yet unannounced startups at an Office Hours session, so feel free to stop on by the Caribou Cafe around then and we’ll try to squeeze everyone in.

Special thanks to our excellent sponsors who helped get this thing off the ground as well as Anthony Coombs who was our ears on the ground. We’ll also be hunting for Disrupt Battlefield companies, so get your pitch down cold.

If you would like to volunteer to help at the event, please email jordan @ techcrunch.com with the subject line “VOLUNTEER PHILLY.” We need people to hang out at the door and help with signage, etc.

Uber would like to help you get too and from the event so if you enter the coupon code TechCrunchPhilly before requesting a ride you’ll get 20% off of 2 trips.

Sponsors

appRenaissance

Interact

Monetate

Novotorium

OneTwoSee

Seed Philly

Uber

News that Apple’s brand-spankin’ new Maps app wouldn’t have full functionality across all of their iOS 6-capable devices struck many as a major blow this week. Apple’s known to keep flagship features on flagship devices, so relegating turn-by-turn navigation and the 3D “Flyover” mode to the iPhone 4S and new iPad only fits with that strategy.

But it turns out that a Russian website called iGuides has cracked the case, at least where Flyover mode is concerned. Without even using Cydia, the hackers have found a way to get Maps up and running on an iPhone 4, including Flyover. Unfortunately, turn-by-turn navigation is still a trouble spot.

Before we go any further, I must instill a sense of caution within your little hacker heart. Not only is the app a bit rough around the edges on the iPhone 4, but the instructions on how to port the software over to your older-generation device are translated from Russian. So please, be careful.

As you can see in the video, the phone he’s using to demo doesn’t have the iPhone 4S’s second antenna band on the side. You can check out the functional Flyover mode below, and directions can be found here.

[via Ubergizmo]

One pint of milk, one loaf of bread, and a music streaming service. That will be £10.8 million.

Yesterday's news that We7, which aimed to be the Pandora of Europe, has sold to the supermarket giant Tesco probably raised a few eyebrows. What's a grocery store to do with a music streaming service? Selling to Tesco is unlikely to have been in We7's original deck under the section titled “exit strategy.”

The official line is that the purchase of We7 will “complement Tesco's current music offer in store and online” as its customers abandon CDs in favour of accessing music “instantly on any device, whenever and wherever they want.” It's reminiscent of Amazon's digital strategy, of which Tesco is now surely a competitor, and ties in nicely with the retailer's purchase last year of another UK startup, Blinkbox, which lets users stream Hollywood movies on-demand on the same day as their DVD release. Like We7, the service also aims to be device agnostic and is available on PC, games consoles, tablets and Internet-connected TVs.

Tesco, of course, has been diversifying beyond groceries since as far back as 1997 as it's aggressively entered markets such as financial services, non-food items and telecoms. The latter via the retailer's MNVO Tesco Mobile fits in nicely with offering music and video streaming services to smartphones and tablets.

For We7, whose original backers include Peter Gabriel and CEO Steve Purdham in early 2007, followed by a number of rounds from the likes of Eden Ventures, Spark Ventures, Pentech Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures, the exit is a modest one after years of tenacity.

The company is thought to have raised a Series A of $6M and a subsequent undisclosed round, while sustaining almost as many pivots as Loic Le Meur's Seesmic (OK, I'm being unkind). We7 began life as an innovative free and ad-supported music download service before transitioning to an on-demand browser-based offering. This was followed by a premium paid-for play with desktop and mobile versions sans-advertising before repositioning itself once again as a personalised Internet radio service more along the lines of Pandora in the U.S.

In a canned statement Purdham talks about Tesco being the "perfect partner to bring We7's music services to a wider audience", and certainly the company has reach. Not only is Tesco the UK’s largest retailer, it has around 5,000 stores worldwide, and operates in 14 countries, with a decent online presence too.

In other news, Tesco isn't the only UK supermarket to be jumping on the digital goods bandwagon. Competitor Sainsbury's recently gobbled up the ebook retailer Anobii from HMV (for just £1), also pitting itself against Amazon.

So startups take note: on that slide named 'exit strategy', it might be worth adding a supermarket giant or two alongside the usual suspects. I'm sure VCs will love you for it.

Less than a year after the debut of gaming on Google’s social platform, Google+, two game developers are pulling their titles. Bejeweled Blitz, a popular game owned by Electronic Arts‘ Pop Cap divsion, and several titles from Wooga, the maker of games for children, will no longer be available on the Google+ social network.

You can visit Wooga’s Monster World here on Google+ and discover that it has already gone offline. Although the page still exists, if you try to load the game, you’re instead directed to a message reading “Monster World Says Goodbye.” According to the message, the game was officially shut down on May 1st, although it appears many are just spotting it today in light of the other major pullout – that of EA’s Bejeweled Blitz.

In addition to Monster World, SocialGamesObserver is reporting that Wooga’s Bubble Island and Diamond Dash will also be removed from the network on July 1st. We’ve now confirmed this with Wooga directly. A spokesperson provided the following statement, but declined to say more on the matter: ”In the coming weeks Wooga games Diamond Dash and Bubble Island will follow Monster World in leaving the Google+ platform.”

Google+ is not the first network to see Wooga leave, the company also pulled out of Berline-based StudiVZ last year, another situation where declining user engagement made it less worthwhile to dedicate resources there. Wooga continues to have a sizable Facebook audience, however, with over 40.1 million monthly active users across its total catalog.

The bigger name in terms of Google+ gaming exits is EA, which owns PopCap. The company is removing its only Google+ title, Bejeweled Blitz, according to Popcap’s customer support page. Here, the page informs players that Blitz will be taken offline by June 18th, and customers are encouraged to use up their remaining in-game coins by that time, as they cannot be transferred to another game or other versions of Bejeweled Blitz. Blitz, too, is a popular title on Facebook. It’s currently in the number 11 spot of top Facebook games with 2.9 million daily active users (source: AppData).

According to a PopCap spokesperson:

PopCap has decided to suspend Bejeweled Blitz on Google+ to redeploy our resources to other adaptations of Bejeweled. Certainly, Google is a valuable gaming partner for PopCap and EA, and we'll continue to develop for Google platforms.

Bejeweled Franchise Director at PopCap, Giordano Contestabile, provided more color to the decision, telling InsideSocialGames, that “the Bejeweled team (not the greater PopCap, and certainly not EA) chose to scale back the Google+ offerings because, like most game teams, we want to spend our resources improving games to have the biggest impact on the most customers. Shifting some of our resources from Google+ onto higher-impact efforts was a pretty straightforward decision."

The decision by these game makers to withdraw from the Google+ platform is clearly related to their ability to generate revenue. It’s notable that even though Google is under-cutting Facebook’s 30% fee for virtual goods by charging just 5%, that price cut alone was still not enough to make the resources the companies were dedicating to the platform worth the investment.

Updated 11 AM ET with most recent PopCap statement. 

The Cisco Networking Academy is the largest education program in the world you’ve probably never heard of. The Academy, which is Cisco System’s largest and longest-running corporate responsibility program, partners with over 10,000 universities, community colleges, and high schools to teach students networking and ICT skills, preparing them for jobs and higher ed programs in engineering, computer science, and related fields.

More than one million students currently participate in Cisco’s Academies, which operate in colleges and universities across 165 countries and 17 languages. Today, Cisco is announcing that it has awarded Instructure with a multi-year contract to use the startup’s flagship open-source LMS product, Canvas as its learning platform.

For Cisco, Instructure will help it move its global classroom and online IT courses to the cloud, with the additional benefit of Canvas’ open platform that integrates easily with other technologies and web services and provides simplified tools for grading and assessment.

For Instructure, a startup that’s not yet 18 months old, this is a big win, as its Neworking Academy represents one of the biggest education platforms in the world and will help scale Canvas as a platform significantly, allowing it to reach students across the globe.

As a little background for those unfamiliar with the startup: Back in January of 2011, Mozy founder Josh Coates launched Instructure with the goal of disrupting the Learning Management System (LMS) market. Even if the “LMS market” sounds foreign, you’re likely familiar with the market’s ubiquitous and unpopular giants, Blackboard and Moodle, which have long been the bane of disorganized college students everywhere.

When we last checked in with the startup in April of last year, it had just closed an $8 million series B round from a host of notable investors, including OpenView Venture Partners, Epic Ventures, TomorrowVentures, and Tim Draper of Draper, Fisher Jurveston (bringing its total investment to $9M).

Meanwhile, over these last 14 months, Instructure has been growing like a weed. At the end of 2010, Instructure had 4 customers, but since launching Canvas, the startup has been adopted by 189 institutions (including names like Brown University, Auburn University, University of Austin, Texas, and Wharton School of Business) and about 2.7 million users. What’s more, in 14 months, Instructure has gone from 20 employees to over 130.

And now it will be built into Cisco’s Academy, adding the network’s one million students to its growing user base, while delivering a 21st-century education to students who might not otherwise have the resources or cash to enroll in IT and computer science courses.

Although Coates wouldn’t reveal Instructure’s revenues, he did say that, while there’s been a lot of interest in contributing to the startup’s Series C round, the board has chosen not to pursue any further funding for the time being. Apparently, it’s got plenty of reserves in the tank, and having secured this multiyear contract with Cisco, it wouldn’t be surprising to see its expansion continue.

For more, find Instructure at home here.

Another former executive from Apple’s iAd business has made a move to another mobile ad venture: Mike Owen, who had been a senior manager overseeing iAd’s New York office, is joining mobile video ad network AdColony as its chief revenue officer. The news comes amid two other executive appointments for AdColony  – Ty Heath as CTO, and Abe Pralle as VP of technology, both joining from gaming company Plasmaworks.

The most high profile departures at iAd have been ex-head Andy Miller, who left last year to join Highland Capital; and Lars Albright, who helped had helped found Quattro Wireless and then establish iAd after Apple bought Quattro.

In March, Albright launched a startup called SessionM that offers a mobile ad platform that looks to improve engagement in mobile ads by incorporating gamification elements. It raised $20 million in May.

(Apple’s iAd has Apple has also made some key hires as well: it picked up Todd Teresi, formerly of Adobe, to replace Miller at the top. A former Yahoo, Jessica Jensen, has also gone to iAd.)

In his role at Apple, Owen had overseen the company’s New York office — arguably the most important, given many of the main players in the ad industry are so heavily concentrated there. His new job as CRO at AdColony is based in Los Angeles, where he will be responsible for overall company revenue.

Mobile advertising is still a relatively small portions of the overall market for advertising: ZenithOptimedia forecasts this year will see $486 billion in ad revenues in the U.S., but eMarketer forecasts only $2.6 billion for mobile ads. At the same time, though, the rise of smartphone usage has had a knock-on effect in growing these areas, and so those in the space are seeing rapid growth.

AdColony says that its business has grown by ten times over the last two quarters compared to 2010 and 2011 — although it is not sharing revenue figures.

The company’s business is two-fold: it’s built around the idea of serving video into ads running across different sites, and it also has developed some innovative technologies around certain video ad formats, such one it calls HD Mobile Video. Prior to AdColony, its founders were app developers themselves, making some 200 apps for brands like ESPN, Sony Music, 20th Century Fox, Universal Music and CBS Mobile.

This is not too far from the high-impact, rich-media aspect of iAd, so it should be a product that Owen can sell well if the packaging is right for the audience — one issue with iAd, especially in its early days, were the high fees and control that Apple had been wanting to exert on the process of creating and distributing the ads.

“AdColony is delivering rich, fast mobile video experiences to consumers in a mobile video ecosystem that is riddled with speed and quality issues,” Owen said in a statement. “Video is incredibly powerful for consumers and brands and AdColony's technology is allowing premium publishers to deliver the highest quality video experience to their consumers, which is translating into unprecedented results for advertisers.  The post-PC era has just begun and we have a clear opportunity to change the way consumers think about, and experience advertising on their mobile devices.”

AdColony has recently opened a San Francisco office and is preparing also to expand to New York.

Dropbox can be a nifty service to have in your digital arsenal, but a new change to the service may make sharing files a little less straightforward. According to an email sent to developers who use the Dropbox API, the cloud storage company will no longer be creating Public folders for new users starting on July 31.

Fret not, you current Dropbox users — a Dropbox representative left a note on the company's support forums stating that the functionality won't disappear for current users, but those who create new accounts after the cutoff date won't be able to their dump files in a public folder to simplify sharing.

The Dropbox team has been busy though, and last month they added a new feature to the mix that in most cases mitigates the need for a Public folder in the first place. Back in April, the company launched the ability to quickly create links to any file stored in a Dropbox account, something that my colleagues were rather enamored with because of its simplicity.

As straightforward as the new feature is, it’s arguably less useful at times. Instead of being able to link directly to a file stored in a Public folder, a link created with the Get Link feature routes people to a download page where they can snag the file. It’s painless enough when you want to keep the file in question, but more than a few people on the Dropbox forums express concerns over sharing certain kinds of files, and photos in particular. After all, it’s far better to just view an image rather than go through the additional step of clicking through a splash page to download it.

But the question remains — why did Dropbox feel the need to do this in the first place? The official reason is a decidedly pragmatic one. According to their email, the new link-oriented sharing model is a more scalable way to handle the sorts of use-cases that people use the Public folder for, which is sure to help as the service continues to grow (they tiptoed over the 50 million registered user mark a few months back). There could still be more behind the change in policy, and I’ve reached out to Dropbox for some further insight.

The change is certainly a bummer (and I’m looking forward to seeing more of how the community reacts to it), but in the end it seems like a small price to pay to keep the service as cheap and responsive as it is.

Despite the fact that almost nothing happens but running, turning, jumping and sliding, Temple Run is one of the most popular games on mobile. In fact, in just a month on the platform the Android version of the game saw 10 million downloads. But there’s gotta be more to life than jumping over overgrown tree roots and sliding under bridges, which is why a new version of the game has been brought to life within the App Store and Google Play.

It’s a collaborative project between Imangi Studios, makers of the original Temple Run, and Disney/Pixar, which has a big new movie coming out soon titled Brave.

The game is pretty much the same in terms of features, save for a new feature called Archery which will net you points should you hit the target. Graphics have also been much improved to offer a more three-dimensional experience.

The Brave new world also happens to be much greener than in the original, gold and brown Temple Run, with our fearless runner being replaced by the little girl from the movie, complete with blue dress.

It was only a year or so ago that Rovio teamed up with Twentieth Century Fox and Blue Skies Studio to build an Angry Birds Rio version of their ever-popular game to coincide with the launch of Rio, the movie. That turned out to be quite the success, as Angry Birds Rio saw 10 million downloads in its first ten days on the market.

Perhaps the same growth spurt will occur with Temple Run: Brave. In the meantime, check out the Temple Run: Brave trailer:

Amazon is prepping a 7-inch $199 tablet for a third quarter release, reports Max Wang for Digitimes. Reportedly, this tablet will have better specs than the Fire with a higher quality screen and more than likely a more competent computing platform. The original Fire will then get cut to $150. Then, later in the year or maybe in early 2013, Amazon will release a 10.1-inch model. This comes by way of an “upstream supply chain” source. Digitimes is as sketchy as trade publications get, but logic dictates that there is some truth here.

Amazon will release a new Fire model this year. That’s a given as Amazon will likely try to replicate last year’s stellar holiday season lead by the first Fire. A larger model is likely in the cards, too, although I wouldn’t say it’s a lock for this year.

Amazon has long found success by releasing new Kindle hardware at a lower price point. The original Kindle started out at $399. A Kindle is nothing more than a hardware portal to Amazon’s massive marketplace. Unlike competitors in the tablet space, Amazon can afford to sell hardware at a loss as long as the loss revenue is compensated by Amazon purchases. Amazon’s end game doesn’t involve besting Apple, Samsung or Motorola in the tablet game, but rather selling more wares.

Hearsay Social, a startup backed by New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia Capital, has tried to solve many of the challenges facing large brands that need to manage the social media presence of local branches or franchises. Its latest step: Launching a “Content Exchange” where brands can find and share articles.

“Content is the currency of social media,” says VP of Marketing Amy Miller. She adds that the brands who understand this, and who don’t just treat their Facebook Pages as a place to post ads and marketing content, tend to see the best results. However, these brands may not be able to hire an army of people to write new content from scratch for their social media accounts — and they don’t need to, since there’s plenty of content online already.

To make that process easier, Hearsay Social customers can now go to the Content Exchange and browse articles, photos, and videos, based on location, date, or content. If they find something that will be relevant to their customers or fans, they can add their own comments, then share it on all of their social media accounts. (The exact workflow for making this happen, and the extent to which the sharing is a suggestion versus a requirement for local branches, will differ from company to company.)

For the initial launch, Hearsay has partnered with Demand Media, Tribune Media Services, and Thomson Reuters to provide the content. (In the case of Thomson Reuters, brands will need be subscribers in order to read the articles, but if they find something they like, the full text can be shared on social media without restrictions.) Miller says these first partnerships are focused on financial, local, and lifestyle content, but Hearsay is also talking to potential media partners in other categories.

In addition to announcing the Content Exchange, Hearsay is also releasing research conducted by Mainstay Salire showing the return on investment for Hearsay customers. The key takeaway is that customers have seen a 50 percent to 500 percent increase in revenue performance measures, as well as a 2x to 5x increase in local fans. The whitepaper includes plenty of individual examples — though to keep things anonymous, companies are identified by industry but not name.

Dmitry Grishin, founder of Grishin Robotics, believes that robots – personal robots, not boring ones like the Mars Rover – are the future.

“It has been very difficult to do something really big in robotics for the last 20 years. So much technology innovation has been web-based and with computers. It’s been very expensive and hard to do to build a prototype, never mind bringing it to market.”

“We can advance robots quickly and in a big way,” he said.

Girshin is the CEO of Mail.ru but studied robotics in college. His goal is to fund new research and products in the personal robotics space meaning home helper bots, cleaning systems, and drones. He believes the industrial robotics space is already saturated. What’s needed is for some of that technology to roll into the home.

“We’re hoping to invest in 10-20 projects,” he said. “Investment could be anywhere from $1 million to $5 million per project; it all depends.”

The company, Grishin Robotics, will be headquartered in New York because he’s excited about the central location and international community. The level of investment in this sort of venture is low, a fact that Grishin chalks up to VC nervousness. “Someone needs to take the risk. Without money there are no companies, but without companies there is no money. The technology is there, we just need to figure out how we can use it, put it all together,” he said.

“The goal is to increase awareness of robotics industry, build robots cheaper and easier than before, and to make robotics more affordable for the mass consumer market.”

You can apply at the Grishin Robotics website and the company is currently taking funding applications for the next Rosie, Robbie, or HAL 2000.

RebelMouse, the social media aggregator founded by former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry, launched a little more than a week ago. We missed out on covering it (apparently because Berry’s email got lost in a vacationing reporter‘s inbox), but there was still a bunch of articles — and more importantly, plenty of user sign-ups.

Specifically, Berry tells me that 12,000 people have signed up for RebelMouse’s invite-only beta. His team has been working hard to get people off the wait list, so there are now 8,000 active sites. (If you’re too lazy to do the subtraction, that means there are still 4,000 people on the wait list.) Actually, Berry gave me those numbers on Thursday, so I suppose they might actually be a little out-of-date by now, but the point is — more than 10,000 sign-ups, and thousands of live pages. He also says the service is parsing 20 posts per second, creating two stories per second, and that nearly 1 million stories have been posted.

What is it that those users are signing up for? RebelMouse describes itself as your “social front page,” which sounds about right to me. Basically users connect their Facebook and Twitter accounts, and then some of the latest updates are posted in a Pinterest-style collage that represents your social media presence. (To see a couple of examples, you can check out my RebelMouse page, plus RebelMouse’s.) The page creation process is automated, but you can tweak the results, say by deleting updates that you don’t like or sticking important ones to the top of the page. Berry says it’s similar to “seeing yourself in the mirror for the first time” — you probably want to spend a few seconds fixing your hair. There’s also a bookmarklet for sharing content that you find on the Web directly to your RebelMouse page.

In part, Berry says he founded RebelMouse with the needs of publishers in mind, because they’d been asking for an easy way to “deal with social.” So he sounds particularly pleased to see that publications like Mother Jones (where, coincidentally, I interned nearly a decade ago) create RebelMouse pages. On the brand side, Oakley has a page too.

Berry says there are going to be plenty of improvements in the coming weeks and months. First up is deeper integration with Facebook Pages for companies — it’s currently difficult to connect many different Facebook Pages to multiple RebelMouse sites that you can immediately launch and connect to Twitter accounts and contributors. Berry says users will be able to add Pages where they’re an administrator, and then to invite all the other administrators to join RebelMouse too.

Another big goal is to turn the “drafts” area, which currently shows additional content that you could publish to your page, into a full-blown stream of updates from other RebelMouse users have published, which you can browse and republish. The idea, Berry says, is to turn RebelMouse into a site where managing your identity and consuming social content are “super-tightly linked.” He adds that he even considered holding off on the launch until after this feature went live, but ultimately went with launching earlier to get the product into the hands of users.

Hot on the heels of completing its acquisition of Findaproperty last week, Zoopla is increasing its online real estate inventory once again: it will operate the property portals for the UK daily newspapers the Independent, the Evening Standard, and the Evening Standard’s popular standalone property site (itself an offshoot of a printed supplement) Homes And Property, on an exclusive basis. All three publications are owned by the Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev. The partnership went live today.

The move is interesting on two levels. First of all, it’s a sign of how Zoopla is continuing to move aggressively in its bid to outpace its biggest rival, RightMove, and potentially Google, in the UK online property market, one of the biggest in Europe (and therefore a key target for, say, U.S. players who may have their eye on international expansion). Second of all, it’s yet another sign of how newspapers are continuing to downsize, cut expenses and outsource operations in a bid to save money to offset their declines in readership and ad revenues, and their costly print operations, but they’re doing so in a way that is eating into areas that once used to give them very healthy margins and actually drive revenues.

For its part, Zoopla will be using the deal to actually invest more into the operation — something that the papers may not have had the resources to do to keep up with competitors’ offerings. This will include getting involved in more of the advertising and promotional marketing that happens for the property pages in the printed editions as well as the online portals.

For Zoopla, this is an important deal because in its competition against RightMove, one important selling point to real estate agents and brokers is how much their home listings will get seen. The Standard says that it currently has 2.6 million unique users (according to ABCe figures from April 2012). The Independent has 15 million unique users (UK and elsewhere) with 60-70 million page impressions per month, along with 125,000 users of its mobile apps for iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices.

This is something underscored by Zoopla’s founder and CEO Alex Chesterman, too. “We are delighted to be working so closely with the Evening Standard and Independent. Both these newspapers and their websites have a very loyal and property-interested audience and Homes & Property has one of the highest circulations of any property supplement in the country. This partnership will drive significant value for our members,” he said in a statement.

A spokesperson for Zoopla would not disclose the financial terms of this deal, or details of how long the exclusivity of this deal would last. Presumably, the papers could potentially feed other real estate listings into their portals over time.

This is not something that the publisher would comment on at the moment however. “Our cross-media partnership with Zoopla combines leading property search technology with the Homes & Property, Evening Standard and Independent brands' combined reach in print and online – an unrivaled solution for advertisers and home buyers and sellers,” group MD of The London Evening Standard, The Independent and i (the Independent’s smaller-format, less expensive edition) Andrew Mullins said in a statement.

For companies like Zoopla, it’s important to sell their services both as a direct product, but also as a platform reseller, and this deal with Lebedev’s papers follows on from similar deals Zoopla has signed with others. They include agreements in 2011 to power property search for AOL, parent of TechCrunch, as well as local newspaper publisher Archant.

Zoopla has been making other moves to grow its business inorganically: in May it also bought the local listings site UpMyStreet, once an early mover in the local listings space but more recently losing its way as companies like Google and smaller startups have come to dominate that space.

Just days after releasing an API to integrate its payment platform into third-party apps, iZettle, known as the “Square of Europe” for its dongle-based iOS mobile payment system, has even more news: it has just completed a  €25 million ($31.4 million) Series B round of funding as part of its bid to become the biggest mobile payments platform in the region. The round was led by new investors Greylock Partners and Northzone, with participation from others — including the eye-catching news that payment giant MasterCard is now an investor — along with other new backer SEB Private Equity, and previous investors Index Ventures and Creandum.

The funding takes the total investment in the company to $46.7 million, and Jacob de Geer, iZettle’s co-founder and CEO, says it will be used for product development, and to continue to build out its mobile payments service in Europe — currently available in Scandinavia and trialling in the UK. “Our priority is to get the UK fully launched, and then look at other major markets like Spain, Italy, France and Germany to continue building up our transaction volume,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. “We’re not interested in the U.S. They’re doing really well with Square and others.”

Since starting its first services in its home market of Sweden in August 2011, iZettle has picked up 50,000 merchants using its system — a far smaller number than the 2 million milestone revealed yesterday by Square. But iZettle says that potentially there are 20 million merchants in Europe — that’s the number who currently do not take card payments for their services, putting to one side targeting those who already can — who could be using its service to accept card-based payments.

In its focus on Europe, iZettle is going after a market that has yet to be tackled by PayPal’s Here (although it is looking at other payment routes), or Square (which is reportedly looking to enter Europe itself); but that does have others also looking to do more dongle-based mobile payments: they include mPowa, and a Square clone from the Samwer brothers that may be called PayLeven (that would be its third re-branding and the Samwers’ investment vehicle Rocket Internet has so far declined to comment to TechCrunch about what its strategy is in the venture — we’re asking again now).

iZettle is not disclosing its valuation on the back of the funding news today. Square, by comparison, has raised $141 million to date and has a valuation of $4 billion.

Unlike other dongle-based mobile payment services like Square and PayPal’s Here which use a card’s swipe strip for processing, iZettle has focused on transactions (each charged a flat 2.75% commission on MasterCard, Visa and Diners Club; 3.75 for AmEx) using chips embedded in the cards: chips are now ubiquitous in Europe and are considered more tamper-proof than the strips. De Geer believes that will help the company bring on both more merchants and consumers to the service as it looks to take its offering mass market. “Security comes built into that,” he says.

Its unique IP — an interesting mix of software technology with hardware thrown in — is also what has attracted this latest round of investment.

"iZettle is the first and only company to develop an affordable chip-card reader and app for smartphone-based mobile commerce that meets all of the rigorous international security requirements," Laurel Bowden, Greylock's partner in London who is joining iZettle's board of directors, said in a statement. "They've proved they're ready to step up their game in this very complex and competitive industry."

The fact that iZettle is based around the chip technology, and that it has a firm commitment to becoming the name synonymous with mobile payments in Europe, makes the company also potentially interesting as either a partner, or even an outright acquisition target, for those larger U.S.-based payment companies that are looking for a way of entering a new market.

De Geer says that the company has already even engaged in those kinds of conversations on a casual basis — but he emphasizes that nothing has advanced into more serious negotiations yet. “It’s not something that we’ve been pursuing actively at this point,” he says.

Aside from building its own user footprint and partnering with other, complementary mobile players, there is another direction that iZettle is likely to explore in the future: the idea of linking up its payments services with other parts of the mobile payment ecosystem, which includes services like product discover, customer loyalty programs, and other rewards services: after all it’s a natural progression to take a consumer from one function to the other, and it makes it much more likely that the consumer will complete transactions if you make it as easy as possible for him to do so.

iZettle has an interesting arrangement that could point to its first partner in such a new venture. It actually shares a Stockholm office with Wrapp, the mobile gift card aggregator that recently entered the U.S. market and has similar ambitions to become the default service of its kind across Europe.

“We are very interested in what Wrapp does in terms of gift cards. They are really disrupting with the gift card market, and that's all they focus on so that makes them a good partner for what we could do,” says de Geer. “At the end of the day, for all of us, it’s all about adding value for our merchants.”

Goldman Sachs’ co-head of investment banking for global telecommunications, media and technology Anthony Noto said tonight that he’d be surprised if there’s another IPO for an Internet company before Labor Day.

Facebook’s controversial offering has already shelved other deals from companies like Kayak, as public investors have driven down the value of newer consumer web companies. Facebook is now is at $28.23 in after-hours trading, down from the $42.05 price it opened at last month. Zynga is now worth $3.7 billion, down from the $14 billion valuation it commanded from private investors in February of 2011.

“If you go public now, you have to have a high quality company that doesn’t have a business model in transition. If you haircut the estimates and haircut valuation, you can go public,” Noto said at the F.ounders conference in New York today.

“I think it won’t be until after Labor Day that we’ll see a public offering [from an Internet company],” he said.

He added that companies considering public offerings need to be wary of pricing based on demand from retail investors. “You have to price off institutional demand. “If there’s any uncertainty in the trading of the stock during the first couple days, retail investors are going to run.”

Even though Facebook, Groupon and Zynga shares haven’t done so well post-IPO, the older Internet companies like IAC and Amazon are ironically doing better, he said. They’ve balanced out the sluggish performance of companies like Groupon. “The weighted average for consumer web companies hasn’t actually changed,” he said.

Like other venture capitalists have said recently including Union Square’s Fred Wilson and Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker, Noto said private markets will have to cool a bit to make sure exit multiples still make sense for late-stage investors.

“Private market valuations were headier than they were in the public market,” he said. “I actually think private capital will be harder to get and much more expensive. The exit multiples have been reset.” This might prompt a wave of M&A deals as companies opt to sell instead of wait it out.

Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley, who interviewed Noto, joked: “You’re assuming rational behavior by late-stage investors?”

Benchmark Capital general partner Bill Gurley tipped an interesting price point for a potential Yammer deal.

He asked on-stage whether it was $1.4 billion to the co-head of Goldman Sachs’ global telecommunications, media and technology investment banking unit Anthony Noto tonight at the F.ounders conference in New York. Noto declined to comment. Benchmark is not an investor in Yammer, although many others including Founders Fund, Charles River Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Khosla Ventures are. Update: The Wall Street Journal is reporting a $1 billion price.

We’re hearing from other sources that the talks with Microsoft are serious. If the deal does go down as soon as tomorrow (as reported by Bloomberg), Yammer’s CEO David Sacks will have something to celebrate at his now infamous 40th birthday party. We have heard that he’s invited 1,000 people, sending them cupcakes and a copy of “Marie Antoinette” as an invite — in line with an 18th century costume party theme.

The invitation said, “Let Him Eat Cake.”

What Spanish bailout?