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Flash News: Investor Growth Capital along with two new owners, Via Venture Partners and InnovationsKapital have bought 90% of  Stockholm-based ProjectPlace.

Read the Press Release.

Flash News: Amsterdam-based RES Software raises $12.5 million from leading US-based growth equity firm – Updata Partners to lead “workspace management” market, critical to the next wave of enterprise desktops (virtual desktops, thin clients and traditional desktops).

Read the Press Release.

From today we will be experimenting with this new format. For venture capital news we think you may be interested in, but don’t really fit in the “startup” world, we will provide you with flash updates about all the deals around Europe, without doing a whole post each time. Let us know what you think.

The Pirate Bay, the famous and controversial swedish torrent tracker has announced that it has been acquired by an unknown (to us and the general public anyways) software house called Global Gaming Factory X for SEK60 Millions, approximately €5.5 Millions.

That is bad news for p2p fans, and it really reminds me of Napster and its story.

As you know, the founders of the pirate bay have been recently sentenced to one year in jail and a millionaire fine for running the site. Is this their attempt to get off the radar? I really didn’t expect it from them, seeing how they reacted every time someone tried to attack them.

Now the question is: what will the new owner of the site do with it?

TechCrunch Torrent Freak, who first broke the story, doesn’t seem to be much worried about this, but from the few lines they gathered from the managers of the company, we all better be: “We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.”

That pretty much translates to pay-site for me. In their announcement, however, they invite their users “not to worry”.

Certainly to be continued.

Update: Shares of the company are up 166%. Read the TorrentFreak post to get latest news.

Update2: The Pirate Bay will stop hosting torrents and decentralize everything: TorrentFreak post.

You may have noticed the banner on our sidebar, that’s because we are official media partners for Future Of Web Applications London 2009.

FOWA is one of the major conferences in the european tech scene, and each years features inspiring talks from the most influential people in the industry. This year looks promising as always.

If you’d like to get the feeling, you can watch video recordings of previous editions. Inspiring stuff.

To celebrate summer finally hitting the UK, Carsonified are having an absolute scorcher of a sale!

10 seats at 50% off (save £167.50)
20 seats at 25% off (save £83.75)
30 seats at 10% off (save £33.50)

If youre not quick enough to grab one of the first 10 there is still a chance to save some pennies as the sale will continue with the further 50 discounted passes.

This special offer applies to 2 day conference passes to FOWA London 09 only.

Keep your ears to the ground to find out where and when to get your Summer Sale pass!

Update: The FOWA Summer Sale - http://thinkvitamin.com/ will launch on 9th July at http://www.carsonified.com/

Italy has today witnessed the announcement of GoJajah, a new service offered by Mountain View, CA-based Jajah in partnership with italo-american Funambol.

The service, that will be tested in Italy as a “world premiere” as they like to call it, promises to make your international calls 98% cheaper. The process is really simple.
You login or signup on GoJajah and insert your mobile phone information and carrier. You will then receive and SMS and your phone will be configured to use the service, basically it will create a duplice JAJAH contact with a local number for every international number it finds in your phone.
This means that every call you will make to any foreign country will be billed by your mobile operator as a local call (it will also count into your minutes if you have such a plan), on top of that you will need to pay the standard Jajah rates that are ridiculously cheap.

The service will benefit and appeal to many diverse and new type of clients, from the immigrant wanting to call home, to the budget focused executive.

“We are using Italy as a test market because of its mobile penetration, always ahead when it comes to mobile phones”, says Fabrizio Capobianco, italian expat in silicon valley and now Funambol CEO. His company is the most advanced provider of email and mobile data synchronization, based on open source software and web applications. The software, that has been developed in Italy, in their R&D labs near Pavia, synchronizes data over-the-air (Ota), provides the platform for the online registration in addition to security, monitoring, diagnose and reporting services.

Capobianco ironically says “this could also be a stimulus for italian mobile operators that never really considered international calls”.

“Italy is one of the leading countries in wireless technologies. We are happy to launch GoJajah here, especially in partnership with Funambol” said Trevor Healy, Jajah CEO. “Jajah’s services are very popular in Italy, which is one of our most important markets. We are happy to work with Funambol, their mobile open source platform integrates perfectly with us”.

World class chats.

You can watch Fabrizio’s announcement on YouTube (in Italian).

Hope you have more time than me to do your weekend reading Here are my suggestions.

• The New New Economy: More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity

on Wired

• Entrepreneurship 101: Financing the launch of your company

on Local Tech Wire

• Watch 33 Sessions from 140conf

on the Jeff Pulver Blog

• How to Run a Startup Board Meeting

on Payne.org

• Why Business Plans Don’t Deliver

on MITSloan Review

• The Five Most Promising Nordic Startups

on Tiburon Tv