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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.

Hightech Gründerfonds and  Neuhaus Partners have invested in Hannover-based antispameurope, a company which provides spam protection as managed service for private customers and businesses. This is their second round of funding.

If you understand german you can read the official press release.

Earlybird has alongside existing investor including DuMont Venture and Klaus Wecken invested EUR 3.3 millions into Music Networx.

The Cologne-based company is a very promising startup in the digital music scene and I think they will revolutionize the classic concert experience.
They offer an easy-to-use solution that goes from recording and production to on-and off-line marketing and distribution of live performances. Being live acts the main source of income for artists, the german company tries to make it even easier to profit from concerts and performances.
Artists will be able to sell USB sticks after their concert with the high-quality recording on it as well as create a website with the web based Concert Online platform.

“We have significantly increased our degree of popularity with bands, labels and concert goers over the recent months. International top-acts such as Simply Red, Franz Ferdinand and music festivals such as Rock im Park and Rock am Ring have already successfully partnered with us“, comments Gerrit Schumann, CEO and co-founder of Music Networx. “It is our aim to team up with many further high quality live acts and events in the near future. We will also be working hard on further developing our “Concert Online” platform, to enable music fans even better access to information and music from their favourite artists. We are delighted to have Earlybird as a further strong investor in our growth.”

Earlybird Partner Dr. Hendrik Brandis is convinced of Music Networx’ significant growth potential: “Live shows are again the key source of value creation for music artists. Music Networx offers distribution of and access to a very broad range of high quality live music and is therefore ideally positioned to benefit from this trend. We were also encouraged by the fact that Gerrit Schumann is a successful repeat entrepreneur and we already knew him well from our investment in element5, which was sold to Digital River.”

Seems that every new disruptive music innovation comes from Germany, with SoundCloud leading the way.

Today was an unusually generous day for the VCs in Europe, after the Innogest’s funding of Bee.tv, we have other 3 deals to announce.

• Sweden, Finland: Nexit Ventures, €3M into Aava Mobile


Nexit Ventures, a mobile venture capital firm focused on wireless technologies and services, today announced the investment of 3 million Euros in Aava Mobile, a developer of smartphone platform designs. The funding will leverage Aava Mobile’s growth and help it become a market leader.

Aava Mobile develops smartphone platform designs based on open technologies such as Linux and Android. The open platform technology will provide more flexibility for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and mobile operators to incorporate their own brand, user interface, content, and services into the devices.

“Our open platform concept has been well received by the global mobile operators, who see this as a new revenue opportunity from new and existing subscribers. The open platform lets operators and OEMs customise their devices easily and differentiate from their competitors,” explained Markus Appel, CEO from Aava Mobile.

The new platform has been designed with operators in mind. As the platform includes both hardware and core software components, it accelerates the development of new handset models significantly. The flexibility of the open platform design also brings new business opportunities for application developers as well as mobile operators.

”The smartphone market is growing fast and steady. With their open platform, Aava Mobile is one of the leaders that will take the market to another level. Operators can have a truly white-label option to brand their handsets and offer more choice for consumers. There will also be new business opportunities for Linux developers that can expand their offerings to smartphones,” comments Pekka Salonoja, General Partner of Nexit Ventures.

Nexit Ventures invests in mobile and wireless high-growth companies, primarily in the Nordic countries and the US. Nexit’s other portfolio companies include Axel Technologies, Brightkite, Conformiq, Ecrio, Ekahau and Futuremark.

• Italy: TTVenture, €3M into Directa Plus

Directa Plus srl, early stage milan based company that operates in the nanotechnology sector, received a €3 Millions funding today in exchange for 25% of the company, by TTventure, a technology fund of Fondamenta Sgr.
The operation is focused on the industrialization process of Directa for the production of “nanoparticles”.

• Germany: High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and Dr Rolf-Christian Wentz, undisclosed sum into Maxment GmbH


High-Tech Gründerfonds invests in maxment GmbH, which supports companies in increasing the return on their investments in human resource development, and in numerically proving their benefit. maxment® is a very user-friendly online software (SaaS), which via the internet is ready to use. A security server ensures a confidential treatment of the data, in line with works council requirements. Thanks to standardisation and extensive automation, the effort for training participants and personnel development managers is really low. Companies like Dürr AG and Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG already use the maxment® software.

27 billion euro are spent every year just in Germany on the training of employees. Yet, studies show that on average, only 10-40% of classroom learnings are actually applied on the job afterwards. Thus, companies face the challenge to find ways to increase the transfer of learnings to the workplace. In addition, the benefit of the human resource development investments is to be proven numerically. maxment® offers an efficient solution for both challenges.

Dr. Christoph Mehl, human resource development manager at Dürr AG, appreciates what maxment® offers: “maxment® convinced us with a functionality that fits the requirements of sustainable human resource development processes in all regards. Hence, we obtain key indicators of transfer success, which for us constitute an important component of a human resource development focused on value creation. High return rates, positive feedback from participants, trainers and managers – we are very satisfied!“

Christoph Rappe, founder and managing director of maxment GmbH, considers an important milestone for the next growth phase reached: “With the investment of the High-Tech Gründerfonds, we can now substantially enhance our software. We are going to present the new version in autumn at the industry’s biggest fair in Europe, the “Zukunft Personal” in Cologne on September 22nd to 24th, 2009.“
Dr. Björn Momsen, investment manager at the High-Tech Gründerfonds, states: “The satisfaction of the existing customers with the maxment® software has convinced us. We see a big opportunity of maxment® setting a new standard in personnel development.“

Dr. Rolf-Christian Wentz, who as a business angel invests in maxment GmbH along with the High-Tech Gründerfonds, adds: ”From my industry experience, I know that maxment® solves a real problem of the personnel development practice. If maxment® had been available years ago, I definitely would have used it.“

Wellington Partners invested €8 Millions in München-based Experteer, the leading european career services website listing jobs with a minimun salary of €60k.

Experteer CEO Christian Göttsch explains: “Experteer is an unrivaled career service for professionals and executives throughout Europe. What we offer includes clear added value in connection with professional and executive positions, discreet contact with executive search consultants and the Experteer Career Matching technology. Thanks to the new round of financing, we will now be able to further expand our leading role in this fast-growing market.”

The company was founded in 2006, it now covers 8 countries, 4.800 companies and lists more than 50.000 job offers. The investment, part of the Wellington Partners Ventures III Fund is expected to broaden Experteer’s international expansion.

Wellington General Partner Eric Archambeau notes: “Since our first investment in March 2007, the Experteer management team has impressed us with the way it smoothly and swiftly instituted its ambitious business plan. Within the space of only a few quarters, they have succeeded in convincing more than 850,000 members as well as over 4,800 headhunters. We are highly confident that they will now take their story to next stage and expand their market leadership in Europe and beyond.”

The guys over at Intruders TV have an excellent interview with SoundCloud founder Alexander Ljung, on how he raised €2.5 Millions. We covered the story recently, and here is the explanation.