Flaregames of Karlsruhe, Germany, is taking €6 million, led by Angry Bird backer Accel, to “scale” the company, hire new talent and to to market its upcoming series of free-to-play mobile games.

“Our first focus is on getting fun, high-quality games to market, and reaching the mass-market as well as mid-core gamers with our line-up this year,” said founder Klaas Kersting (via release).

“The mobile games business will likely be larger than the social games business,” according to Accel partner Harry Nelis. The firm is planning five games by year’s end.

Separately, Tusjuegos, a Spanish portal for buying and downloading PC and Mac games, is taking €420,000 from Spain’s VentureCap and others, Loogic reports.

Spain is plagued by illegal downloading. Tusjuegos is aiming to ensure game buying, after the box era subsides, remains legal in the online downloading arena.

Jaime Ferrer has been installed as CEO of Tusjuegos parent ITnet.

eMarketer were the same analyst house that last year revised up their mobile ad forecasts to over $1 billion—the first time a company had made that proclamation. In the event, those revenues reached $1.45 billion, they said, nearly double what they were in 2010. Their 2012 figure represents a rise of 80 percent on last year.

Yesterday Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson claimed that there wasn’t yet a clear leader in mobile advertising, and that it was still an open field. That may be the case in that there is still a lot of room for growth, but there is actually a company dominating the mobile ad business at the moment: Google (NSDQ: GOOG).

In 2011 eMarketer says that Google had about 51.7 percent of all mobile ad revenues, with sales of $750 million. The second-two biggest platforms were far behind it. Apple’s iAd took in $92.4 million for a 6.4 percent share; while Millennial earned $90.9 million for a 6.3 percent stake.

Google totally dominated the mobile search category—an area where Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Millennial currently do not play—with some 95 percent of all revenues. Google was not shabby in display, either, leading in that category, too—although not as comprehensively, with only 24.8 percent of the market, with Millennial Media and Apple’s iAd very close to each other for second place.

As a sign of how fragmented mobile display advertising remains, “other” was the biggest category of all with 39.6 percent of all sales.

How different mediums will grow. eMarketer predicts that spend in mobile search will double in 2012, with $1.28 billion spent in the medium compared to $652.5 million in 2011. Higher-value display and rich-media ads will see less investment—which could either be a sign that mobile is still working to earn its stripes as a credible medium with big brands, or a tacit belief that these formats simply are not working as effectively as search at the moment.

Display will be worth $861.7 million, a rise of 93.5 percent on 2011; video will be worth $151.5 million, a very respectable rise of 122 percent.

Very usefully for those of us who take forecasts with a grain of salt, eMarketer has also published a kind of leader board for how much different research groups believe mobile ads will bring in the year ahead. eMarketer is coming out at the top end with some of the more bullish predictions.

Mobile marketing and advertising services have also attracted the attention of venture capitalists: it was one of the big draws in a record-breaking year for mobile investment, according to research from the investment bank Rutberg & Co.

The analysts say that mobile investments accounted for 42.4 percent of all technology investment in 2011—or $6.3 billion for mobile startups in a year where, overall, venture capital investment in technology totaled $14.9 billion.

That’s a record proportion for the sector, and a massive spike on 2010, when mobile represented 30.4 percent of all tech investments worldwide, or $6.1 billion of investment. (See table at end of post.)

Ironically, while mobile is representing the greatest amount of investment, $6.3 billion falls just short of the biggest-ever year for mobile investment: that honor goes to 2006, when VCs pumped $6.4 billion into mobile technology.

Drilling down: As for the single-biggest category for investment in 2011, it’s consumer applications that have won the day—a sign of how the smartphone boom is leading to a big rise in the amount of companies rushing in to service those new consumers, and a subsequent rush of money men scrambling to finance them and get a piece of the action.

While no single consumer application made it into the top-10 mobile investments of 2011, the sum total of all the investments in the category pushed the total number of consumer applications investments to $1.33 billion.

Media infrastructure was the second-largest category for investment with some $900 million put into companies working in the category (services like mobile advertising are part of this latter group). Collectively, infrastructure was the biggest sector receiving VC money.

Infrastructure covers a diverse range of mobile-related startups, from mobile advertising (InMobi’s $200 million from Softbank being the second-largest deal of 2011), to technology used in backhaul and radio towers (Tower Cloud’s $155 million, and Eaton Towers’ $150 million respectively in these categories).

While consumers apps didn’t make the top 10, plenty of them made the top 20. The biggest of them all was for a service that is disrupting more traditional telecoms business: video calling service Tango picked up $50.7 million. Swiftly behind that was note-taking application maker Evernote, news aggregation site Flipboard, and check-in darling Foursquare—each picking up $50 million. Further along, Angry Birds maker Rovio picked up $42 million and photo sharing company Color picked up $41 million.

All these companies certainly saw a lot of attention in the last year, and they all cover hugely different areas of services. But one of them, Color, has already had to make a major pivot, losing one of its key founders in the process, and it’s still unclear what will happen with it next. Similarly, while Evernote has had a huge amount of attention for its core, note-taking app, the follow-up services have made significantly less impact on the mobile public.

Mobile is certainly a volatile area, with more than a little of a tech-bubble feel to it: Which of these, do you think, will be able to sustain their momentum and become profitable businesses in the years ahead?

Worth pointing out that this is not just the case for consumer apps, though: the single-biggest VC investment in mobile this year went to LightSquared, the LTE startup that picked up $265 million from a consortium of investors. The company is still trying to build out a network for its services, hence the huge capital buy-in. However, there are still big question marks over what will happen: the most recent report is that Carl Icahn has picked up $300 million in LightSquared debt, perhaps in anticipation of the company being unable to get its services off the ground after some regulatory hurdles around spectrum interference.

Sequoia Capital was the biggest VC in 2011, making 24 investments including several in mobile apps and media services. They included Bubble Motion, Bump, Clickatell, Color, Cotendo, DailyBooth, Evernote, Flite, Inkling, Inkling, Just Dial, MeLLmo, Meraki, MobileIron, MoboTap, Onavo, Quantenna, Sencha, Sourcebits, Square, Stoke, Synapsense, Trippy and Unity.

Rutberg also notes that more than one in five of all VC investments this year were strategic investments: those buy-ins made by companies like Intel (NSDQ: INTC) and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) that might potentially acquire the companies or use their services in the years ahead.

A couple of other notable points from Rutberg’s numbers: investments in mobile advertising services increased nearly five-fold last year: to $592 million from $128 million in 2010; and mobile payments investments more than doubled to $558 million from $276 million in 2010.

How does all this stack up for 2012? Mobile will continue to figure big: “We expect mobile to continue to be significant percentage within venture overall,” says Rajeev Chand, MD and head of research for Rutberg, but the fate of upcoming IPOs will also play a role. “Right now growth of overall venture is uncertain, depending upon how tech IPOs play out and what impact that has to late stage pre-IPO financings.”

Related

• Mobile VC Investment Was A Massive $6.1B In 2010. Google, Intel Led The Way

Polar also today released some numbers that attests to the growth of the apps economy—and to its own business. It says that it currently works with some 380 media brands in 12 countries. It has served 1.6 billion page views for some 11 million users to-date across the many apps that it has produced.

The $6 million round was led by Georgian Partners and takes the total invested in the company to $9 million, with the previous $3 million coming from private investors.

Georgian, which based in Toronto like Polar, has a portfolio that includes another app developer, Kony Solutions, as well as a number of other platform-based B2B digital media startups. (Two others include Shopify and Terapeak, which are used by retail e-commerce companies.)

Meanwhile, the new product line, branded MediaEverywhere, effectively does what it says on the label: it is HTML-5 based and is aimed at letting publishers make apps that can get used on different platforms and devices—not just mobiles and tablets but also desktop computers, and not just native apps but web browsers, too.

Working across different platforms is a trend we’ve seem among other app developers—but given the client line-up that Polar already has, this is a significant sign of how that kind of strategic view is taking shape among publishers investing in apps. Research from GfK last year showed that some 11 percent of magazine views are now digital-only—a number that is on the rise, with publishers all making sure that they will be along for the ride.

It’s worth pointing out that Polar already offered a degree of cross-platform development before today: its SmartTM product lets content be formatted for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, PlayBook, Windows Phone and Nokia’s Symbian platform; however now web apps are being added into the mix.

Kunal Gupta, the CEO of Polar, tells paidContent that is has some publishers already on the platform but is not announcing any client names just yet.

Some publishers—notably the FT—are buying up/bringing in-house their third-party developers in order to have a better grip on how they develop their apps, and to make sure that they continue to have an edge on their competitors. That presents an interesting challenge for a third-party company like Polar: will it, too, eventually get swallowed up by one of its customers, or will it find it hard in the longer term to attract business from the big-name publishers who will continue to invest in having that expertise in-house?

Gupta tells paidContent that the company is more than happy to stay independent for now.

Related

• Tablets Are Prime-Time Media Devices
• Nokia's Signs Of Life: A China Deal; A Content Deal; And A Show
• Some Mileage Yet In MeeGo? Intel Adds MeeGo Tablet Apps To Its App Store
• Time Inc. Skips The CES Bins, Sort Of; Offers Free Downloads Of All Titles
• Apple's Newsstand Debuts, Grouping iOS Publications In One Folder
• 11% Of Magazine Exposures Are Digital-Only, Survey Shows

“This is 100 percent new funding,” CEO Ernesto Schmitt tells paidContent. “It’s a major deal. Sky consider social TV to be the biggest opportunity for innovation since Sky+ (PVR). Now we are launching in the U.S., Europe and Australia.”

Co-founder Anthony Rose tells paidContent: “The Sky deal is a significant new deal in addition to our previous $7 million funding, which this new deal dramatically exceeds.”

“As part of the deal, BSkyB’s advertising-sales house, Sky Media, will sell sponsorship and product placement opportunities around Zeebox’s ‘Zeetags’, accompanying text that highlights actors, characters and topics being shown on screen,” reports FT, which broke the news.

“The deal secures exclusive rights in the UK to integrate Zeebox’s technology into (BSkyB’s) own array of 20 mobile apps, while providing the London-based start-up with capital to expand internationally. Zeebox will first appear in the Sky+ app.”

Founded by former EMI executive Schmitt and former BBC online product leader Rose, Zeebox, which paidContent exclusively previewed in August and which launched in October, is a collection of technologies, currently available as iPad app, which let TV viewers watch and chat together, gives them contextual information about on-air material and, as a possible eventual business model, may let them buy products mentioned on screen.

Early in 2011, the project had been codenamed Tbone, but was renamed after raising nearly $7 million early in the summer. Albeit with a small audience, Zeebox has won admirers in a short space of time.

“Zeebox has attracted 250,000 users in eight weeks in the UK through word of mouth only,” Schmitt added. The space also includes social TV app peers like GetGlue and Miso but Zeebox eschews their “check-in” paradigm.

The company is currently pitching the technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Arguably, Zeebox technology could gain a wider audience inside Sky’s own apps.

Other major Zeebox shareholders are not clear.

Related

• Anthony Rose's Social TV Startup Zeebox Is Now Live
• Theory: Only Ultra-Competitive Americans Care About 'Check-Ins'
• Revealed: How Anthony Rose Plans To Revolutionise TV
• Forget Smart TV, Is 'Dumb TV' The Next Big Thing?

The funding underscores how, while Twitter is slowly turning its attention to generating revenue on its social-media platform through advertising and marketing services, it is also still very much picking up huge injections of cash for faster growth.

It also raises the question of whether Twitter may put off thoughts of an IPO for the time being: this latest investment values the company at $10 billion, according to Jack Neele, a fund manager at Robeco Groep NV (via Bloomberg).

The deal follows an $800 million investment taken earlier this year by the Russian group Digital Sky Technologies (DST), and take Twitter’s total investments to just under $1.5 billion.

Not a fly-by-night prince: Kingdom Holdings, in a press release, noted that the deal was the result of several months of negotiations and due diligence on the part of the company.

It could signal a change in strategy for the company, which might be eyeing up other social media brands for further investments. Up to now, it has focused on some key stakes in regional operations, as well as some of the biggest, most established international media and tech properties:

—The company has invested $600 million in shares of News Corporation. Those shares include voting rights and the prince was the subject of some media attention earlier this year when we spoke out in support of the Murdochs during the height of the phone-hacking scandal. That investment has been used as a route to growing out News Corp.‘s footprint in the Arabic world.

—Kingdom Holdings and the Prince also have a stake of Time Warner: that came by way of its initial investment of $145 million in Netscape, which subsequently got bought by AOL (NYSE: AOL). The company made further, unspecified investments in Time Warner in subsequent years, and according to its site, has a similar strategy to the one it has taken with News Corp., to partner with Time Warner on regional investments in the Middle East.

—It also, very presciently, acquired five percent of Apple back in 1997, a steal for $115 million. It’s unclear if that stake has increased or decreased but it seems more of a straight rather than strategic investment.

—Other stakes that it has held include those in Motorola (NYSE: MMI), eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) and HP (NYSE: HPQ).

—Regionally, it has a 29.9 percent stake in the publishers Saudi Research and Marketing Group (SRMG), and Rotana Group, a broadcasting JV with News Corp. The Prince also has plans to launch his own Arab news channel, Alarab.

Given Kingdom Holdings’ emphasis on building out regional operations based on strategic stakes, this could kick off an interesting chapter in the international growth of Twitter.

Twitter had already marked itself out during the “Arab spring” revolts as a key route for communicating not only among people on the ground, but also for communicating developments to the outside world.

Twitter’s platform, in its simplest form of exchanging short messages with a group of followers, is highly scalable, working not only on the web and smartphones but on the most basic of mobile handsets. That gives it a lot of potential in developing markets, as well as those that are more advanced.

Cork, Ireland-based wholesale e-book supplier ePub Direct is taking €1.3 ($1.69/£1.09) million in funding to grow its business supplying e-books to digital retailers.

ePub supplies titles to 116 stores including Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Waterstones and to over 15,000 online libraries.

It says it wants to grow in to Europe’s leading e-book supplier.

The equity funding comes from The Ulster Bank Diageo Venture Fund, a €75 ($97.64/£62.95) million targeting companies in Northern Ireland and the Republic Of Ireland, and is managed by NCB Ventures

Ulster Bank Diageo Venture Fund’s Will Prendergast is joining ePub’s board.

TouchType, makers of the popular SwiftKey Android application, plan to announce Wednesday that they have secured $2.4 million in a first round of investment as part of an internal round of financing. The money will allow the 30-person London-based company to hire additional engineers and work on expanding its revenue sources to include app developers and device makers who are willing to use its predictive typing technology to help power their text input fields, said Jon Reynolds, CEO of TouchType.

SwiftKey’s virtual keyboard is based on the premise that individuals have distinct typing styles; as in, a professional writer probably types differently as compared to a lawyer or a 15-year-old. But all of those people might be interested in saving time while entering text into a mobile device, which is why SwiftKey’s predictive typing app has consistently ranked among the more popular apps in the Android App Store and was featured as one of the special 10-cent apps promoted by Google (NSDQ: GOOG) in announcing the 10 billionth download of an Android app.

The company hopes to have its technology used on other mobile platforms such as iOS over time, Reynolds said. “Fundamentally, what we see is that the platform that we’re building is an enabler for text entry across a wide variety of factors,” he said.

Reynolds also said that TouchType has inked deals for the technology with several major handset makers, including Vizio for the release of its first Android tablet. He declined to name other licensees but said several companies had expressed interest in using the technology, and TouchType hopes to make licensing deals a greater percentage of its revenue in 2012.

Related

• Update: Nuance's Swype Buy Could See The Text Input System Go Large
• The Quest To Make A Better Virtual Keyboard

Additionally, current investors participating in this round include eyeSight’s largest investor, Professor Eli Talmor, who is founder and chairman of the Coller Institute of Private Equity at the London Business School.

Although the area of gesture-based controls for mobile devices is a relatively new area—with touchscreens being the norm in smartphones at the moment—there are signs that the technology is picking up speed: in addition to eyeSight’s news, today Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) announced that it would not only be creating a version of its Kinect platform for Windows but that it would be developing specific hardware for such services, too.

eyeSight’s touch-free interfaces, which rely on a device’s camera to read the gestures, can be made for devices running iOS, Android, Windows, Symbian and Linux among its OS platforms.

The release notes that the funds will mainly be used to extend the reach for eyeSight. It is here that eyeSights’s two new investors will come in especially handy: CEVA already counts 190 licensees, and the list includes biggies like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Samsung; meanwhile, the company’s connection to Mitsui should open a lot of doors in Japan, a target country for expansion, says the company.

Past investments for Mitsui have included stakes in a $14 million round for mobile ad company 4INFO and $20 million for the online ad company OpenX.

Related

• Mobile Ad Company 4INFO Raises $14 Million, Spins Out Its AdHaven Platform
• OpenX Raises $20 Million For 'Enterprise' Platform; AOL Among Backers
• Musical future for phones

Zuora, which was founded four years ago, focuses on services around what it calls the “subscription economy,” managing subscriptions to content and the billing behind it. Direct customers include News International, Reed Business Information, Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM), TripAdvisor, VNU Media, Ning, Ooyala, and Ustream, among others.

When Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) began to lay out the terms of its in-app subscription model for publishers on its iOS platform, Zuora’s CEO and founder, Tien Tzuo (pictured), was outspoken about Apple being potentially too powerful in dictating the terms of how the subscriptions would work, and how much publishers would get paid as a result.

Of course some of that could have been down to Zuora safeguarding its own place in the value chain, but from the looks of it, it would seem that both have been benefiting from the rise in subscription-based services.

Zuora said in a news release that it would be using the new funds to expand internationally as well as to launch new products.

Most immediately, Zuora is establishing new offices in the Netherlands, Germany, France and Ireland, and notes that it already has €2 billion ($2.7 billion) in subscription contract revenues in the EMEA region.

Leading this current Series D round was Index Ventures, along with investment from Greylock Partners, and a “personal investment” from Dave Duffield, founder and co-CEO, Workday. As part of the deal, Mike Volpi, a partner at Index and a tech industry veteran, will join the Zuora board of directors.

Existing investors include Benchmark Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Tenaya Capital and Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com also participated. Today’s funding round takes the total raised by Zuora to $82.5 million.

The company currently employs around 200 people.

Related

• Threatened Much? News-Subscription Vendor Tries To Stick It To Apple
• The 'Subscription Economy' Is Growing, And It's Bigger Than Just Media
• @ MWC: Big Media Is On The Fence Over New In-App Charges

A household name in PCs, Intel is conspicuously absent from the smartphones and tablets that make up the modern mobile computing market. Virtually all of those devices—hundreds of millions sold each year—use processors designed by ARM and manufactured by Samsung, Texas Instruments, Nvidia, and others. And that’s despite years of work on the Atom processor Intel has targeted for this space to no avail.

But mobility is about more than phones and the iPad, and the story of mobile computing is far from over. Intel has been trying to spur interest in devices such as the Ultrabook, a thin laptop geared for travelers, with a similar fund and will likely find its way into a commercially available phone or tablet running Android or Windows 8 at some point.

Hence the fund, which made its first investments Monday in Urban Airship, a startup that is building marketing and development tools for the mobile minded, and 4tiitoo, which is working on an open-source tablet operating system and hopefully received enough money to buy a new name.

“The fund is built to advance computing innovations based on Intel architecture in key areas such as digital media consumption, context-aware computing and infrastructure applications. While the investments will focus across multiple technologies and devices, key areas include cross-platform technologies such as HTML5, as well as experiences designed specifically for Ultrabooks,” Intel said in describing the mission of the fund.

Related

• Mobile Startup Funding: Strangeloop $10 Million; Urban Airship $15 Million
• Google And Intel Working On Android Phones For Early 2012 Release
• Intel Hopes $300 Million Ultrabook Fund Is Enough To Boost Mobile Presence
• Intel At Computex: 'Just Wait Until Next Year,' As Asus Unveils Padfone

The Dublin-based company has released a series of iOS book-apps based on Brothers Grimm fairy tales: Rumpelstiltskin and Red Riding Hood, along with three apps in its 3D Classic Literature series. The company uses its own PopIris 3D engine, which was built using the previous games industry experience of founders Aidan and Kevin Doolan.

As part of the funding round, Barry O’Neill, who has previously held mobile games executive roles at Namco Bandai and Upstart Games, has joined Ideal Binary as chief executive. “We are a profitable business, so this new capital is to expand the company’s production,” he says. “This is not a flaky startup situation.”

O’Neill explains that the Doolan brothers founded Ideal Binary in 2008 with the intention of making iPhone games, before realising that their 3D engine might be put to good use for book-apps instead.

The first three Grimm’s apps are a good showcase for the first version of the company’s platform: digitising the traditional pop-up books with characters and scenery that can be tapped on to trigger light interactions: thought bubbles for characters, spinning water-wheels, draggable clouds and so on.

“Rapunzel has sold more than 75,000 units, and continues to occupy top five and top ten positions in a lot of territories around the world,” says O’Neill. The app was sold for £1.49 for its first week after launching in December 2010, before rising to £2.49 and maintaining that price ever since. That means somewhere between £78k and £130k of net revenues for Ideal Binary after Apple’s 30% cut.

O’Neill says that Ideal Binary is betting on the PopIris engine enabling it to make high-quality book-apps without spending silly money, and so delivering a decent return on their investment.

“We’ve heard stories about people spending upwards of £250,000 developing very sophisticated book-apps as one-off showcases, which got great reviews but ultimately did very mediocre sales numbers,” he says.

“PopIris allows us to achieve a very high degree of interactivity at a fairly reasonable production cost, which is one of the keys to success in this market. Even the bigger publishers are not realising sustainable profitability levels. A lot of money is being spent developing book-apps which are not delivering results.”

Will the company be sticking with out-of-copyright fairy tales for its book-apps? Probably not. O’Neill says Ideal Binary has had “a number of discussions” with potential licensors, but adds that the company is keen not to end up over-paying to make book-apps based on popular brands, and thus face a new challenge to its chances of making back its development costs.

“We are looking at original IP too,” he says. “We have a pretty strong audience across all of our existing apps, so we think we can make a go of investing in our own IP. We are also looking at different demographics across the children’s sector. At the moment, we appeal mainly to parents reading with their 3-8 year-old children. We’d like to go a little bit lower and a little bit higher, so there will be different product lines coming out.”

Ideal Binary is also planning to go beyond iOS with its book-apps, with O’Neill saying Android is firmly on its agenda, partly due to the sheer number of Android devices being sold, and also due to demand from the people writing emails to the company asking for Android support.

O’Neill is particularly excited about new Android-based tablets on the way from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and Barnes & Noble: the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet respectively.

“It’s fantastically exciting. I don’t buy this line that the Fire will benefit Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) due to adding further fragmentation in the Android market,” he says. “I see it as creating an entirely new market in its own right, among people who might not be iPad aspirant, or even if they are, may not have the resources to purchase one. Or they could be existing Kindle users looking for an interesting media tablet to complement their e-reader.”

In the meantime, Ideal Binary is hoping to continue developing its engine and apps, with a version of Hansel & Gretel due for release before Christmas with noticeably more game-like interaction than the earlier Grimm titles.

O’Neill is enthusiastic about the crossover between games and books in the apps world: Ideal Binary’s founders are one example, but so are the former game developers working at publisher Nosy Crow; the social games history of several founders of kid-apps publisher Mindshapes; and the recent appointment of former Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS) executive Rex Ishibashi as chief executive of US book-apps startup Callaway Digital Arts.

“I think game-based metrics will influence everything from marketing to design to portfolio-planning for successful interactive book publishers,” says O’Neill. “Those metrics are something the traditional publisuing industry has less experience with, which is why you’re seeing people coming in from the games market. They will have a distinct edge when it comes to designing and marketing new content.”

In the meantime, Ideal Binary is hoping to build on its existing success to help future titles like Hansel & Gretel find an audience. As with many mobile games developers, the company sees the value of its network as hugely important.

“You can’t just launch a book-app and hope for the best,” says O’Neill. “The challenge for all developers is how to monetise your existing customers better, and how to encourage your existing customers to find new audiences for you.”

Press releases from Virgin and Square do not give any indication of how much money Branson has invested in the company, which was started by Twitter founder and (current) executive chairman Jack Dorsey. We have contacted Square, Dorsey and Branson to ask and will update this post as we learn more.

Square raised $100 million at the end of June in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. At the time, that valued the company at $1 billion.

Square built a business initially on an iPhone-based mobile payments service that is now avaialbe for both iOS and Android devices. It provides a square-shaped dongle to merchants, who can plug the device into a phone to make instant card transactions. Some 800,000 merchants in the U.S. are now using the dongles, and there are around $2 billion in payments processed annually through the platform. At the standard 2.75 percent commission that Square charges merchants, that works out to annuals revenues of $55 million from those transactions going to Square.

Last week, the company upgraded its payment app, Card Case, which now uses geofencing technology built into smartphones to let a user make purchases without even presenting the device. About 20,000 merchants have signed up to work with the Card Case app to date.

How will Richard Branson’s investment in Square figure in the company’s strategy? It seems unlikely that Branson has taken an interest in Square as a simple financial investment. Rather, Branson could prove to be a key figure for Square as it looks to make its payment services more ubiquitous.

Square has said it plans to launch in international markets in 2012, and Branson’s international Virgin empire could help with that.

Not only does Virgin operate national and international airlines, but it has a number of other travel interests, including train services in the UK. It also runs a number of financial services, as well as gyms, mobile operators and a pay-TV company: all opportunities to increase the number of Square transactions and give more exposure to the brand on a global basis.

Related

• The NFC Dance: One Step Closer With PayPal; One Step Further With Square
• Not So Square Anymore: Dorsey's Payment Startup Gets $100M, Valued At $1Bn

The $15-million Urban Airship deal was led by strategic investors Verizon and Salesforce, with participation also from existing investors Foundry Group and True Ventures. This is the third round of funding for the company, which has raised $21 million to date.

Urban Airship, which gives developers tools to incorporate services like push notifications and payments into their apps for iOS, Blackberry and Android devices, says in a blog post announcing the deal that it has seen explosive growth in the last year, with a 1000 percent increase in traffic to its APIs this month. Currently the company is processing some one billion notifications per month, with seven billion tallied so far this year.

The Verizon investment in Urban Airship points to how carriers continue to hold out hope that they will play a part the growth of mobile services, not just as passive networks but as active players. It’s not clear now whether Verizon already provides some of its billing and location services as a back end to Urban Airship, but something like this could well be on the cards. Salesforce, meanwhile, is seeing a lot of growth of its mobile services, and you can equally see how it would open up new doors of opportunity for a company like this to integrate Urban Airship’s offering into its wider framework enabling enterprise support systems.

Although we are still seeing a lot of money being pumped into smaller companies that are enabling different aspects of app production, there are also signs that there is some consolidation also starting to take shape. Urban Airship itself just last week acquired a competing platform, SimpleGeo.

Strangeloop. The $10 million raised by Vancouver, Canada-based Strangeloop, meawhile, is the second round of funding for the startup, which has now picked up around $22 million to date.

The actual investors have not been named, although TechCrunch reports that they are a group of “Canadian super angels.”

Strangeloop, which started life as a company focused on speeding up the load time for web pages as viewed on PCs, has more recently moved into offering its product for mobile web pages as well. Getting these, and the mobile web “apps” that are starting to appear in increasing numbers, up to speed will be essential if those promoting the mobile web over apps want to claim better performance: today, as a general rule (although not in all cases), native apps tend to show faster performance than those designed for the mobile web.

Through its literally-titled Mobile Site Optimizer product, Strangeloop offers different tools to enhance sites built on standards like HTML5 and SPDY from Google.

The company’s CEO, Jonathan Bixby, wrote in a blog post that the company has seen 200 percent growth quarter on quarter, and counts big names like eBay (NSDQ: EBAY), Visa and Travelocity among its customers.

He adds that the funding will be used to expand its business, particularly in Europe, Asia and Latin America—three regions where he says the company is seeing “huge market demand.”

Related

• Urban Airship Snaps Up SimpleGeo, Adding Location To Mobile Dev Services
• Urban Airship Raises $5.4 Million To Build App Services
• Verizon Wireless Reaffirms Commitment To Building An App Store

This round of funding was led by m8 Capital, which was also the lead VC in Masabi’s last round of $2 million back in September 2010.

The company currently lets users buy tickets via their mobile devices, and then gives them several options for using them: via QR codes that can be read with special readers at the gates; via visual checks by staff; or by using the card used to buy the ticket through the app at a ticket vending machine.

The idea now will be to extend those payment options to include NFC, something that is already used in certain UK networks—for example the Underground in London uses NFC in its card scheme—and may well become more common in the future.

More importantly, perhaps, is that a move into NFC could help the company in its ambition to target international markets like the U.S., which has shown strong interest in NFC with initiatives coming from several operators, payment providers, handset makers and even payment companies like PayPal that have up to now not given NFC much time. It can also help Masabi branch out into other areas beyond transport such as ticketing for entertainment and sporting events.

Masabi says that by the end of this year its service will be deployed with nine train operators in the UK. Named customers include thetrainline.com, Virgin Trains, Cross Country Trains, First TransPennine Express, First Hull Trains and Chiltern Railways.

That represents significant growth over the last year: when announcing its last round of funding a year ago, Masabi only had two customers.

Related

• The NFC Dance: One Step Closer With PayPal; One Step Further With Square
• Masabi Raises $2 Million To Deploy Mobile Tickets For Rail Companies
• Google Wallet Adds New Partners, Coupons, And Loyalty Cards
• @ CTIA: Credit-Card Companies See No Limit On Mobile Payments

The round announced today was led by Mayfield Fund, Red Hat and Translink Capital. Existing investors eBay (NSDQ: EBAY), Sierra Ventures and Storm Ventures—which put $9 million into the company last year—also participated. The total amount of money invested in the company to date is now $31.5 million.

As a testament to the huge popularity of apps, the company’s business model of working across both native and web platforms, and its acquisition strategy, Appcelerator has ballooned since it raised that last $9 million in October 2010.

At the time, the company’s platform was being used by 77,000 developers; today the company says that number is 1.6 million. A lot of that might mainly be down to the third of these factors: the company acquired web-app development platform Aptana in January of this year. Aptana had 1.5 million developers signed up to its services at the time.

That web-app push was further bolstered last week when Appcelerator acquired mobile gaming and HTML5 development platform, Particle Code.

To date, there have been some 30,000 apps developed on Appcelerator’s Titanium platform, according to GigaOm. That makes it one of the biggest players in this space, which is crowded with a number of other players who have also raised significant funding, such as Service2Media, which picked up $10 million in June for its cross-platform app development services.

While Appcelerator has definitely been making a push into web apps via its Aptana and Particle Code acquisitions, it has also benefited from partnering with third-parties to extend its activities in native platforms as well. Earlier this year the company inked a deal with Barnes & Nobel’s Nook to bring more app development targeted specifically at the bookseller’s tablet device.,

Related

• Appcelerator Opens A Spare-Parts Store (Sort Of) For Mobile Web Developers
• Mobile Lowdown 9-13-11: Samsung; Apple/China; Dolby/RIM; Nokia; HP Refunds
• Mobile Developers Ponder Impact Of Google+, iCloud In New Survey
• Service2Media Raises $10 Million For Multi-Platform Apps Development
• Mobile App Developers Seeing Two-Horse iOS-Android Race
• PayPal Expands Mobile Payments; Pushes Into The Sale Of Digital Goods
• eBay Invests In Appcelerator As Part Of A $9 Million Round
• Will AppMakr's Self-Serve Apps Flood The App Store?

4INFO, meanwhile, will focus on its other business area in mobile ad technology and ad sales, and plans on making further acquisitions.

The company was first established back in 2004 and initially built its business up around SMS-based advertising, such as the example pictured here. This has remained a core area for the company even as it has expanded into the newer formats that have arisen with the arrival of smartphones, apps and more usage of the mobile web. To date 4INFO has raised $52 million.

In addition to Vulcan and Mitsui, this current round included investment existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Gannett (NYSE: GCI), Mezzanine Capital and U.S. Venture Partners. Stuart Nagae, a partner at Vulcan, is joining 4INFO’s board of directors.

AdHaven, which 4INFO calls “the industry’s first” mobile audience platform, brings together several of the technical, behind-the-scenes aspects of mobile advertising that will likely grow in importance as advertisers look for more specific and assured ways of getting their campaigns seen by the right people: the services offered by AdHaven include audience targeting and analytics, and these are used in campaigns that can be delivered across a range of mobile screens and formats, including mobile web pages, apps and text messages—and covering a variety of formats, from rich-media technologies like video, to those more basic services like SMS that are still the company’s bread and butter. AdHaven works with platform partners to also deliver those campaigns across both mobile and online screens.

4INFO claims that its AdHaven platform currently reaches 90 million uniques per month. Customers include brands like Ford, Universal Pictures, and Proctor & Gamble, with publishers including Gannett, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and Aol.

This is not the first eight-figure funding for an independent mobile ad firm in this month: Madvertise raised $10 million from investors including Blumberg Capital. In September InMobi picked up funding of $200 million from Softbank.

Related

• Is Consolidation In Mobile Ads Overrated? Madvertise Raises $10 Million
• Infographic: Nokia's Ad Peformance Holding Up, On Symbian At Least
• Google's UK Q3 Revenue Seven Percent Higher Than Last Year
• U.S. Mobile Ad Spend To Pass $1 Billion For The First Time
• Mobile Ad Consolidation Continues: Fetch Media Buys Lucidity Mobile
• 4INFO: Mobile Ads Served In 2010 Grew Nearly 2,000 Percent
• 4info To Acquire Mobile Advertising Startup Butter
• Mobile Ad Network InMobi Takes Huge $200 Million Investment From Softbank

New Revenue Streams: When sites can’t compete on CPMs, where else can they find revenue? The St. Louis Beacon, a nonprofit online publication for regional news, sought to tie revenue strategies to its mission, business manager Shawn McGinness said. The site derives about 10 percent of its revenue each year from events. The Beacon also created what it calls “SpAd packages,” which give sponsors exposure on the site, at events and in printed materials and also provide them with engagement consulting to help them frame their message, design their ads and use social media. (Jeff Jarvis has previously stressed the importance of efforts like these.) And its coverage of the health/biotech industry, which makes up the bulk of the startup scene in St. Louis, has led to donations larger than those raised through typical development efforts.

For many sites, though, advertising is key. Display ads make up “95 percent, maybe 98 percent of revenue,” said Debra Galant, the co-founder of Baristanet in Montclair, N.J. Meanwhile, the site has scaled back its effort to offer daily deals. “We felt like we had to be in the deal space,” Galant said. “But it just doesn’t turn out to be a lot of money. Sometimes it makes sense for an advertiser; we have the apparatus there and can sell it, but it’s not our emphasis now.”

Success As a Standalone The key to starting a small hyperlocal site from scratch is to think about it as a business, as well as a journalistic enterprise, said LocalAmerica‘s editorial director Tom Grubisich, who moderated a panel on the topic. Baristanet’s Galant said, “We’re like the community elders. That’s how we stayed valuable.” How valuable? The site pulls in “well north of” $100,000 per year. “I’d like to see Patch sites as standalones competing against us,” Galant said, and “see how well they do without the AOL (NYSE: AOL) infusions.”

Scott Brodbeck, editor and publisher of Arlington, Va.‘s ARLNow, said the journalistic product is the key to a good business. The site grew its audience by offering a “consistent product,” he said: all content is written by fulltime or freelance reporters with backgrounds in journalism. The site links to local blogs and their reporting, but “I don’t really view them as competition,” he said.

Going Hyperlocal In Silicon Alley A panel moderated by Curbed founder Lockhart Steele focused on the startup scene in New York City, and whether hyperlocal businesses started here can scale nationwide. It depends, said Owen Davis, managing director of early-stage VC firm NYC Seed: The “car culture” in other parts of the country may hinder the expansion of a startup focused on “trying get people to interact and purchase.”

Steele asked whether, given fatigue on the part of local merchants, startups are better off demoing a product outside NYC. “San Francisco is more fatigued than New York,” said David Tisch, managing director of seed funding firm TechStars. “Here you can test 15 different kinds of neighborhoods”—tourism- and finance-focused Midtown, neighborhood-y Brooklyn—without leaving the city.

The Next Big Thing (Hint: It Is Not Daily Deals) Offline retail is still an open space, said Tisch. “When was the last time your in-store experience was changed?” Steele pointed out that NYC is a great place to test a retail-based startup. Tisch mentioned Prism SkyLabs, which used footage from stores’ surveillance cameras to build heat maps of how people walked around the store and finding which aisles and shelves got the most attention. “That’s innovative,” he said, “taking existing technology and finding a data layer on top of it.” As for daily deals, Davis said it’s an oversaturated space with little new innovation.

Related

• Where The Daily Deal Business Is Headed
• Brooklyn's Latest Local News Site Aims For Gritty, Not Trendy
• FCC Report Cites Lack Of Local News, But Has No Ideas To Fill The Gap
• Main Street Connect's Most Ambitious Launch Yet
• The Guardian Cans Its 'Unsustainable' Local Websites
• AOL's Patch Will Add Blog Posts From Community Members
• Post Huffington Post Deal, AOL's Patch Will Become More 'Social'
• MSNBC.com Relaunches EveryBlock As A Social Network For The Neighborhood
• AOL Buying Hyperlocal News Aggregator Outside.in; Will Align With Patch
• Yahoo Forms AdLabs To Better Pitch Hyperlocal Ad Sales
• Gannett's Dubow: Doubling Down On Local And Mobile
• Foursquare To Add Examiner News Alongside Check-Ins
• Yahoo Overhauls Its Local Pages; Downplays Business Reviews
• PBS.org Revamp Aims To Make Local Content More 'National'

They’re facing competition from a new breed of free navigation apps with an emphasis on social features and crowdsourced data. One of them, Waze, has just raised $30m (£19.1m) to launch its popular app in China and develop new features for its seven million users. Another, Skobbler, has seen its GPS Navigation 2 app downloaded more than one million times in its first week of release.

Waze is an interesting company, headquartered in Israel but with a key office in the US too. The $30m funding round came from Hong Kong investor Li Ka Shing and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, whose partner (and technology maven) Mary Meeker will be joining as a strategic advisor and board observer as part of the funding.

Waze draws data on roads and traffic by analysing collective data from its users, while also enabling them to actively submit reports on accidents, police traps and other blockages. The company has shown off its crowdsourced data with YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) videos like this one for Los Angeles:

It says that it’s big in the US, France, Italy and Israel, but has also seen strong growth in Spain, Malaysia, Mexico and Brazil in recent months. The company now has seven million users across its iOS and Android apps.

Skobbler isn’t quite at that level yet, but GPS Navigation 2 has roared up App Store charts around the world since its release in early October, with the one million downloads building on the company’s 1.5 million-strong user base for its first satnav app.

The app draws on the OpenStreetMap project for regular updates to its maps, as does another of the most popular free satnav apps: Navfree. Navfree’s parent company Navmii announced in mid-September that it had more than 3.2 million users, with 1.5 million of those using the Navfree UK application alone.

Both stress the fact that as they attract more users, so the quality of the data for their maps improves, to the point where it’s good enough to make people think twice about buying one of the more expensive competitors.

The rise of these apps has certainly posed questions for the traditional satellite navigation companies, who have themselves been making the transition from in-car devices to smartphone apps. The business model for the crowdsourced and/or social apps remains fluid, though: potentially ads, potentially in-app purchases of premium features, but… well, it’s mainly still potential.

The big threat for these companies, though, is if navigation evolves into a standard feature in smartphones provided by the handset maker and/or software provider.

Google Maps Navigation already offers formidable competition on Android, and few people would bet against Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) bringing navigation in-house for iOS at some point – perhaps as part of a bigger revamp for its mapping features in iOS 6.

The New York-based company changed gears around April, when CEO Nihal Mehta sensed that Buzzd’s profile as an aggregator of Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla check-ins as a city guide wasn’t going to cut it. By morphing into LocalResponse, Mehta felt he could take those same check-ins and instead of guiding consumers to restaurants or events, it could be used to help guide advertising.

LocalResponse collects “explicit check-ins” and creates what it calls “implicit check-ins” based on what users are saying about their activities and the geo-tags used in updates and photos on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The idea is for marketers to respond to those “implied check-ins” with relevant ad or an offer. Secondly, LocalResponse also derives analytics based on users check-ins and that can also give marketers a clearer picture about the customers they want to reach.

Of course, this approach is not without challenges. While users certainly don’t mind relevant ads, individuals still have qualms about location-based ads or marketing that mines their social media conversations. For one thing, users who do check-in to restaurants or shops do appreciate deals and discounts, so that’s one way to warm them up. That’s essentially the message LocalResponse is bringing to the 40 marketers it has signed up so far.

“Tweet that you’re excited to watch X-Factor, and don’t be surprised to see an X-Factor ad on a digital billboard near you,” Mehta said in a statement. “Take a picture at a Yankees game and get an offer for a free beer from a nearby vendor. Check-in to a local retailer, and get an offer from them unlocking their latest promotion. It’s all on the table now.”

The company has previously raised $3.5 million, giving it $8.5 million in total funding to date. New investors Cava Capital, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) Ventures, Advancit Capital, and Progress Ventures joined existing backers Metamorphic Ventures, Extreme Venture Partners, FF Ventures, Acadia Woods Partners and Jim Pallotta, among others, for the latest round.