Peak Games, the flourishing emerging markets social gaming company, today announced a $5 million Series-A investment to foster continued growth in some of the fastest-growing markets in the world including Turkey and MENA (Middle East North Africa). The round is led by Earlybird Venture Capital, one of Europe’s most successful, early-stage technology investors. The funding will enable Peak Games to execute on aggressive growth plans as the company solidifies its position as a global player in the expanding market for social games. Part of Peak Games’ success has been driven by how the company reaches underserved markets with localized and culturally-specific games that employ strong engagement and monetization strategies.

“The success Peak Games has had to date proves that the  next big game genres on Facebook will offer culturally-relevant content and deliver a fully localized experience,” said Jason Whitmire, partner at Earlybird Venture Capital. “We believe that this investment will support the company as it taps the rapidly-growing social gaming potential in emerging markets.”

Peak Games, was launched by Sidar Sahin, one of Turkey and the Middle East’s most prolific entrepreneurs and most respected gaming experts in October 2010.

Three leading Baltic „internet daily deals“ companies Cherry.ee, Beta.lt and Grupinis.lt have signed a merger agreement, creating one of the region’s largest internet commerce companies with almost 1 million Euros in monthly gross turnover.
Each month, over 0.5 million people visit Cherry, Beta.lt and Grupinis.lt sites to discover new offers by restaurants, spas, concert organizers, travel operators and benefit from steep discounts which may be as high as 70% from the regular price. More than 1300 merchants across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have used this unique and extremely effective advertising channel to promote their goods or services so far.

All three companies were launched in spring and summer 2010 and quickly gained wide popularity among internet audience, especially among women who account for 70% of the purchases. Cherry  operates cherry.ee, the largest daily deal site in Estonia, and cherry.lv, No 2 in Latvia. Beta.lt and Grupinis.lt are the largest daily deal sites in Lithuania.

The merged company had a gross turnover of 0.94 m EUR in March and it commands over 50% market share in the Baltics among similar companies. All three companies were owned by founders and private angel investors. The merger was completed through stock swap.

„We were very quick to find common language with our Lithuanian partners as we share common background and passion to this business. This is true merger of the equals,“ said CEO of Cherry Media Priit Tomp.

„Our pan-Baltic merger creates an undisputed leader of this industry. It allows us to exchange the best practicies, carry out pan-Baltic campaigns and be very strong partner to our customers and merchants,“ said Aldas Kirvaitis, co-founder of Grupinis.lt.

The daily deals business model originates from the U.S. where it was pioneered in 2008 by Groupon, the fastest-growing company in internet’s history. Similarily, the Baltic daily deals companies achieved almost 1 million EUR in monthly gross turnover in less than one year. Never has any Baltic internet company achieved such turnovers so fast.

Over less than 12 months, the merged company has sold 424 000 vouchers for goods and services, saving over 6,3 m EUR for customers and creating steady flow of new customers to merchants who have used this sales channel. In certain cases, Cherry was able to sell 20% of the merchant’s annual business volume in one day.

„We are on course to become the largest Baltic internet company in 1-2 years time. We have already passed Delfi, if compared by turnover,“ said Andres Susi, the co-founder of Cherry Media.

Cherry was founded in April 2010 by Andres Susi, a partner in MTVP venture capital company, Priit Tomp, Cherry’s CEO, Marius Andra, lead developer and several other co-founders. They were joined by Allan Martinson, the managing partner in MTVP and co-founder of the Baltic News Service and Delfi, as well as Janis and Normunds Bergs, prominent Latvian technology investors.

Cherry opened its Latvian site cherry.lv in February and achieved No 2 position on Latvian market in less than 3 months. Cherry.lv is headed by Girts Slavins, former CEO of the largest Latvian social network draugiem.lv.

Grupinis.lt was developed by Dealcraft, a subsidiary of Blue Ant Holdings, an investment company which also owns ONE.LT, the largest local social network in Lithuania. Blue Ant Holdings has been founded by Aldas Kirvaitis, Vilius Juraitis, Romualdas Dumčius and Šarūnas Chomentauskas.

Beta.lt was founded by Alvydė Palaimaitė and MAKE Ventures, an investment firm owned by Ilja Polivanovas and Mantas Rauckis.

The companies will continue using the same brands after merger: cherry.ee, seller.ee and cherrygift.ee in Estonia, cherry.lv in Latvia, beta.lt and grupinis.lt in Lithuania.

The company’s board will consist of 5 members: Allan Martinson, Priit Tomp, Andres Susi, Aldas Kirvaitis and Ilja Polivanovas. The merged company employs 45 people across the Baltics.

I’m happy to announce that we’re gladly continuing our media partnership with Finovate, the leading conference in innovative financial services startups.

Finovate, after holding their first European conference, will return to San Francisco on May 10 and 11, with an expanded two-day showcase of dozens of the biggest and most innovative new ideas in financial and banking technology. As a subscriber of TheStartup, you are eligible for a special discount – see below for more details.

Last year’s event sold out, so the event has moved to a larger venue in 2011 to keep up with demand. FinovateSpring offers an unparalleled opportunity to watch the cutting edge of banking and financial technology unfold, along with the chance to network with hundreds of leading financial executives, venture capitalists, press, industry analysts, bloggers, and fintech entrepreneurs. With only 7 minutes afforded to each demoing company, no other event packs as much unique value into just two
days.

After completing its extensive screening process, FinovateSpring is pleased to announce the following companies who will be demoing this May in San Francisco:

Afiniate, Aptys Solutions, Arroweye Solutions, Backbase, Balance Financial, BancVue, Bill.com, Billeo, BillFloat, Bills.com, BillShrink, Braintree, Bundle, ChargeSmart, Clovr Media, Code Green, Crossroads Financial Technologies, Currensee, doxo, Dwolla, edo Interactive, Enloop, eWise, Expensify, Experian, Figlo, Fiserv, Gold Bullion International, Gratio Capital, HelloWallet, HOYOS, ID Analytics, Ideon, Intellaegis, Kabbage, Kiboo, Kony Solutions, Lend Street, Lendio, Liqpay.com, Mint.com, MyBankTracker.com, oFlows, Pageonce, PayDivvy, PayNearMe, PayPal/Discover, peerTransfer, ProfitStars, Q2ebanking, Ready Receipts, Silver Tail Systems, TILE Financial, TrustedID, Wikinvest, Wipro, and Xero.

In addition to the above companies, a handful of stealth startups and large established players will be announced closer to the conference date.

As part of theStartup’s partnership with Finovate, we’ve negotiated a special discount specifically for our members. On the registration page, simply enter the discount code TheStartupSpring to save 10% off the ticket price. Regular tickets will be available until April 29, but tickets are going fast – register now to lock in your spot!

For more information or to register for FinovateSpring, visit www.finovatespring.com.

This is a guest post by Scoop.it CEO Guillaume Decugis, explaining why he believes the curated web should be the future of the Social Web.

Social Media lets everyone speak all the time. So what happens? Noise. Not just that of course: great content gets shared, inspiring ideas get tweeted and retweeted, interesting analysis spread, etc… but who never felt overwhelmed by the amount of content we receive on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and whatever other forms of social media we use. A lot of people wrote about how this perceived information overload prevents readers from finding signal in the noise (including myself) and how we badly needed new filters.

But there’s another problem:
In that noise, how can you be a voice that gets heard? How can you be relevant? How can you find your audience?
As a teenager, I wanted to be a novel writer: I loved reading and I loved writing. And now I’m a Web Entrepreneur. So how come I never managed to start a blog?
If not having a blog seems to be tolerate, “As a Tech Entrepreneur, you have to be on Twitter”, seems to be a must you cannot discuss.

Sadly, I admit that’s how I got onto it. Not because I fell in love with it, nor because I felt I could be heard. Actually I was terrified by just the opposite: sure, tweeting was simple, but starting at 0 followers (well not exactly, my teammates were kind enough to follow me so make it 10…), how could I be heard when Robert Scoble was already broadcasting at 1,000 miliscobles to thousands of people?
Social media had brought us great engagement and resulted in great sharing activity but that one thing had been lost in the way: meaning. A lot of people were saying we needed curation. Not just in the sense of filtering : curating is not only about selecting, it’s also about highlighting and sharing content with analysis or comments that give it a specific – and most of the time subjective – meaning. Blogs had been focusing people’s energy on becoming writers or journalists. That’s good. But we felt we now needed to bring people’s energy on collectively creating this meaning out of all that produced content.

Are we social if we do not listen to each other?
After a hectic start, there’s one thing I discovered getting on Twitter: no one seemed to listen to me. Unlike on Facebook where my friends do care enough to react to my lame jokes, I’m not a celebrity so no one gives a damn that I’m in a night club having a great time. But when I started tweeting on what I knew well (eg iphone app marketing, a topic we pioneered at the time), I got re-tweeted or replied. And finding out what to tweet also became easy. Focusing on topics seems to solve both inspiration and the getting-heard problem.

The idea behind Scoop.It is simple but more and more necessary in a world of digital abundance: with lots of content available out there, you’re probably better off giving your own twist, your witty comment or your smart sarcasm to an article or a video made by someone else rather than duplicate content or write yet-another-blog-post on something already covered a dozen times. And if the platform is designed to help you find the right content, it’s much easier.
Expression through curation. To tell your story on your topic, I think it definitely matters.
If, like Valeria Maltoni (who recently gave a great speech on influence at SxSWi), ”[you] didn’t start a blog to be influential but because [you] had a voice”, you should join us and start a topic.

Nothing is more addictive than being heard.

Michael L. Smolens, Founder and Chairman of dotSUB, announced today the appointment of David Orban as Chief Executive Officer of dotSUB, the leading technology provider powering video viewing in multiple languages.

David is the chairman of Humanity+, founder and Chief Evangelist of WideTag, Inc., advisor to the prestigious Singularity University, a Scientific Advisory Board Member for the Lifeboat Foundation and founder of the Open Government Data.

His educational background includes studies in Physics at both the University of Milan and the University of Padua. Born in Budapest, Hungary, he and his family currently live in northern Italy, near Milan.

“David Orban brings a wealth of experience as CEO of international technology start-ups, software distributors and online communities, so he is the perfect person to manage dotSUB’s hyper-growth over the coming years,” says Smolens.

“David is in sync with my vision of removing language as a barrier to cross-cultural communications, as well as building dotSUB into a truly global business,” states Smolens. “I also plan to stay actively involved with our activities as Chairman.”

dotSUB powers online videos with translations in all languages across the Internet and mobile screens around the world. The company generates local connections to global businesses, educational institutions and public agencies such as Adobe, GE, TED, The Port Authority of NY / NJ, and the U.S. Army.
“I’m excited to lead a team building language bridges across cultures. Video usage is exploding, and dotSUB provides high quality, audience engagement and international reach. Seeing dotSUB’s crowd-sourcing platform empowering organizations like the TED conferences publishing more than 16,000 TED Talks with captions and subtitles in 88 languages-all with 6,000 volunteer translators-that’s inspiring” stated Orban.

This is a guest contribution by Katheryn Rivas, who regularly writes for online
universities. She welcomes your comments by email.

One thing the history of entrepreneurship shows us is that the startups that initially resist bids
to take them over often do much better in the long term. One only has to look at the paragon
of startup achievement, Mark Zuckerberg’s famous Facebook, to see that theme in action.
Zuckerberg was reportedly turning down offers of around $1 billion USD from the likes of
Yahoo. Since then, Facebook has grown to be worth around $75 billion USD.

Certainly, this hasn’t always been the case with startups that turn down takeover offers, and it
won’t be the last of that sort of problem either. Groupon’s recent resistance to Google’s rumored
offer of $6 billion USD could spell disaster for the company, especially if Google gets into the
daily deal market with its own applications. Of course, we’ll have to wait and see in that respect.

So what are some other companies that have fared well when they turned down initial takeover
offers? Well, recently, The New York Times reported that Canadian fertilizer mining group
Potash resist a bid, with the help of the Candaian government, from BHP Billiton to buy the
group for $130 a share. As of February 2011, Potash’s value had risen to $190 a share and seem
to steadily increase. Another Canadian startup company, Casey’s General Stores, is now worth
more than what Alimentation Couche-Tard offered to pay for it.

We can learn from this trend that founders of startup companies are being more responsible in
the decisions to sell a company. No longer are startup founder strictly looking for a quick sale
to make lots of money. We’ve seen more and more startups approach potential takeovers with a
longer term goal. Of course, sure, the founders wish to still make some money, but they are also
looking to make sure that the takeover will continue to benefit themselves and their employees.
They want to know how exactly the continued function of their startup will fit into the overall
vision of the takeover company, for example.

So if you’re a startup founder and you’re being offered a takeover bid, then you should know
that hesitation could be your best option. Ask the company that’s making the offer about the
nature of the takeover. Bargain for benefits on your terms. Don’t feel pressured into taking the
first thing that comes your way. If the work you do is truly great, then you’ll have plenty of other
opportunities to sell the company in the future.

Future Simple, a startup from Krakow, Poland and offices in Chicago raised a $1.1m round.

The company was founded in 2009, and builds simple software for small businesses to help them grow and thrive. The first product it launched, PipeJump, a CRM and sales tracking application for small business, has gained quite a few customers in the last year.

At the end of last year, the company released its second product, QuoteBase, a simple online quote creation tool.

We still have no information about the investors, but will try to update you soon.

Yuilop, a spanish startup, just raised €1m from Nauta Capital.

Nauta Capital, is a very active firm founded in 2004 with offices in Barcelona, Spain and Boston, USA, is a venture capital firm specializing in technology, media and telecommunications investment. It is now investing it’s third fund, Nauta Capital III, which has around €100m under management. One notable investment is Groupalia.

Yuilop is still in stealth mode, but we understood it is developing an innovative mobile application and service. The company is based in Barcelona, Spain and was founded by Jochen Doppelhammer, the founder of Simyo Espana, what looks to be Spain’s most successful MVNO and self-describes itself as the world’s largest Internet-based MVNO. Julian Moreno Beltrán, ex-ceo of Veotrip, joined him as CTO.

Update: we found what seems to be an old description of the app. “Stream live video and audio from your phone to multiple phones or the web using a 3G or Wifi connection. You can chat with your viewers and show them your position/orientation in Google Maps. Twitter integration. Visit Yuilop.com to see what’s happening right here, right now.“

So it turns out that the mind behind that awesome piece of open source called Redis, an open source, advanced key-value store, is italian, and he’s developing it from a small city in Sicily. I had a chance to interview him, and here is what I learned.

Hi Salvatore, could you please tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Salvatore Sanfilippo, I’m 33 years old, live in Sicily, Italy and I spent a great amount of my life writing programs. Currently I’m working for VMware, where I develop an open source database called Redis. In the past I worked in the field of security, embedded systems, system programming, and web applications. I wrote the hping security utility and invented the idle scan. A few years ago I wrote one of the first few web 2.0 applications that appeared in Italy, Oknotizie and Segnalo, and did a partnership with Matrix.
I’m also advisor and shareholder of a small company based in Sicily that is called Kiurma, specialized in writing iPhone and iPad applications.

Awesome, so I see you have a mix of startup experience, open-source development and large-company employment. Which one do you prefer and which one would you suggest to a young CS graduate?

I think that a lot has to do with your temper, but it is really a shame to miss the startup opportunity.
It’s hard for me to argue on the large-company employment since VMware is like the dream job, since I’m free to develop Redis full time, pretty freely, and with the support of some seriously smart guy inside of VMware if I need some hint. But I guess not every corporate job is like this.

I guess that as long as the corporate job is cool, you learn new things and do something that seems useful not just to the management but also to yourself, then it can be a good thing. Otherwise, especially if you are able to bet on yourself (that is, you can manage to live without a fixed income for some time without too much trouble since you are young enough, or with some savings in your bank account), the startup experience could be very rewarding and exciting, I mean, even if the startup will not be a success.

Your path is pretty different from the traditional italian CS graduate, why do you think most people just try to get a boring job in consulting and don’t try to just build cool stuff?

I think that in Italy for cultural traits we tend to do the boring-but-sure path. From what I understand from chatting with people, only a few of them are willing to do extra work for long term rewarding opportunities. People should probably start to shift their mindset. After all what is worse than doing something you don’t care about? Especially in Italy where your IT company is not exactly an exciting place like VMware, or Twitter or Google.

Also in our country many times programmers are payed too little for their work in a company, so it is not so hard to get more earnings even from your single-man-band business.

But there is to admit that startups need an fresh economy and a modern state, to grow up well, without bureaucracy and this is not what I see if I look at the Italian economic environment.

Do you think it’s harder to succeed while living in Italy, and Sicily in particular?

If your target is the world, being here is not a big limit for a programmer. Most of the interesting things are going on the internet anyway. I mean, here or in Paris is almost the same. What could do a difference is instead here or in the bay area.

But if you plan to do a startup that targets your region or country, Italy, and Sicily, are not the best places to stay for sure. For instance the company I advice, Kiurma, is located in Sicily but focused on customers in the north Italy, Europe, and US.

Could you tell us more about Redis? How was it born, why is it awesome, and why should we use it in our applications?

Redis was born almost two years ago, as the result of a need. At the time I was experimenting with a real time analytics service called lloogg.com (now the site is online just in a best effort way, no interest in doing business with it for me). With MySQL it was very hard to scale, since it is a very write intensive application. A pageview in any site with our javascript code would result in a DB write operation, and that’s a lot of writes per second.

The web application of lloogg was an ajax app to show the site traffic in real time. So what I needed was a DB handling fast writes, and fast ”get latest N items” operation.

If you are a programmer, you know how a linked list can solve this kind of problems, so I started wondering, why on the earth is so hard to model this with MySQL with decent performance? Why there is no database that is able to natively handle natural ordering of items, that is, I put things inside with this order, so it should be fast to get the latest N items. After this considerations I started coding a prototype of the system, and shared the first beta on Hacker News, receiving good feedbacks.

Why should you use it? For two reasons I think. One is that for the right use cases Redis is really a game changer performance wise. If your data are in size the kind of order of magnitude that can fit in memory you can scale to an incredible number of users with just one database box. This means lower costs, less problems.

Another reason for using Redis is the following. In the field of programming languages there is a motto: A programming language is worth learning if it is different enough from all you already know to change your mind, exposing you to new abstractions. Well I think Redis definitely is a really different database, and will change the way you think at your data.

And now a few questions from the Italian Startup Scene group on Facebook:
Andrea Reginato asks: How did you convince VMWare into sponsoring your work on Redis?

Actually VMware contacted me! And in a very interesting way… one of the smartest guys I know at VMware started contacting me about the design of Redis internals, with very compelling technical arguments. Our discussion simply evolved into the hiring process. At the time I had offers from a few companies, but I wanted to join VMware because in my opinion this was the best “home” for Redis: a company with high technical value inside, with a focus in cloud technologies, and I think that after a year I can say that this was the best pick.

Francesco Sullo asks: Given the awesome performance of Redis, did you ever plan a persistent mode for the future? I know that Redis was born to manage processes in-memory, but a db version, even if seriously limited, could be a great alternative in many cases.

Our main focus is in the in-memory backend, but actually we already have a disk backend that is called Virtual Memory and is something like the swap file of Redis, where values rarely used are swapped out in order to reclaim memory. This feature is present in both Redis 2.0 and the upcoming 2.2 but I’m not happy with the implementation, so the new focus is on the “diskstore” feature. Diskstore is a combination of an on disk key value store and an in-memory object cache. So in this special mode Redis takes everything on disk but loads the “working set” (the keys you use more often) on memory. When a key changes it gets asynchronously flushed on disk by another thread. All this is currently implemented in the “unstable” branch of Redis on github. The next version of Redis, 2.4, will drop support for Virtual Memory and will instead just support diskstore.

Salvatore, thanks so much for taking the time to answer this questions. I hope, and I’m sure, they’ll inspire someone to take your path.

Thanks Stefano, I had fun replying to your questions, thank you.

Index Ventures Growth announced it has invested in Moleskine, an established italian notebooks and diaries manufacturer.

Index joins Syntegra Capital as a shareholder in the company, which acquired control of the company in October 2006. Syntegra is an independent PE buyout firm focusing on Continental Europe which invests in unquoted, medium sized companies in Benelux, France, Germany and Italy.

Our sources say that Index bought a 15% stake of the company, while Syntegra now owns about 67%. The remainder of Moleskine is owned by founder Francesco Franceschi and management. Size of the investment in unknown, but we do know that they also raised some €64m in debt from GE Interbanca and Banca Popolare di Milano.

Milan-based Moleskine was launched in 1997, aiming to revive the style of notebook used by artists and thinkers over the past two centuries including Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway.

The management team, led by CEO Arrigo Berni, has allowed Moleskine to achieve significant growth over the past four years, in terms of turnover. Since Syntegra’s operation, Moleskine has increased its markets and the number of diaries and notebooks sold has tripled. This growth was achieved by bolstering its organizational structure from just under 20 employees in 2006 to 85 at year-end 2010.

Giuseppe Zocco, Partner at Index Ventures, said “Moleskine and Syntegra have created and developed a company that has built up a loyal customer base all over the world. We are very excited to participate in this next phase of growth and to contribute to the continuous expansion of the online presence.”

Is Index smelling some bubble smell in the web world, and going for more PE and traditional deals?