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ClickandBuy is to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG. Via its venture capital company, T-Venture, Deutsche Telekom has held shares in ClickandBuy since 2006 and currently owns 20.2 per cent of its shares.

Other investors included Intel Capital and 3i. Deutsche Telekom has now acquired all remaining shares in the internet payment service provider ClickandBuy. The agreement was finalized yesterday. The supervisory bodies of the companies concerned and the UK’s Finacial Services  Authority (FSA) have already approved the process.

Klaus Konrad, Investment Director of Intel Capital: “ClickandBuy has become one of the top three online payment providers in the world and is a European investment success story.This shows that even in challenging economic periods, it is possible to grow top performing organizations through great management and the right investment strategy.”

ClickandBuy’s CEO, Charles Fraenkl, welcomed the deal: “Our minority shareholders T-Venture and Intel Capital with their dedication and commitment have contributed a lot to the success and growth of ClickandBuy.With the support of our new shareholder, ClickandBuy, already one of today’s leading providers of online payments solutions, will continue to strengthen and expand its market position in the future. ClickandBuy is in an exceptionally good position and is very happy about the huge advantages this synergy contains regarding the realisation of its global strategic goals which will be made possible through the involvement of Deutsche Telekom.”

ClickandBuy is one of the leading payment services in the internet.Certified by McAfee and tested by Germany’s Technical Inspection and Testing Association (TUV), this online payment system is used for internet purchases by over 13 million people. Having doubled its turnover generated by traders and end customers to EUR 922 million (TTV) in 2008, the ClickandBuy Group first crossed the billion euro threshold in 2009.

Over 16.000 online traders use ClickandBuy’s e-payment system for their e-commerce, retail, online entertainment, and paid content & services billing, including Deutsche Telekom, Scout24 Group, Apple iTunes, Napster, Orange, msn, AOL, Meetic, Parship, Electronic Arts (EA), Codemasters, McAfee, Panda, RTL, Playboy, Financial Times Deutschland, Foto.com, Deutsche Boerse Group, KPMG, Yamaha, Digital River, Redcoon, bonprix (Otto Group).

Founded in 1999, ClickandBuy represents over 10 years of experience and expertise in the e-payment market. The online payment system is operated by ClickandBuy International Ltd. in London. As an e-money institution licensed by the UK’s Financial Services Authority (FSA), ClickandBuy’s complete service includes 120 currencies and offers 50 national and international modes of payment throughout 31 countries.

Giant mobile phone producer Nokia announced today its plan of acquiring “certain assets” of social address book startup Cellity.

The Hamburg-based company was founded on october 2006 and develops an addressbook 2.0 that allows users to continuously update all their contacts from their phonebook, Outlook and social networks in order to always have them synchronized.

“Cellity has a very talented and innovative team, which we are very happy to have on board at Nokia. With this acquisition, we can accelerate our service development in some of our core areas,” said Christof Hellmis, Vice President, Services, Nokia.

Nokia essentially just bought the founding team, since the Cellity product offering will be discontinued soon.

“We are excited that Nokia has chosen our team and technology. With our experience from building social networking solutions, we can help Nokia further develop their services offering,” said Nils Weitemeyer, CEO of Cellity.

Looks like a really focused acquisition for Nokia, it is fair to assume that the team will work on their symbian platform (another nice aquisition by Nokia) on some new social features. The amount of the deal has not been disclosed.

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.