Editor’s note: This article by Liam Boogar originally appeared on Rude Baguette, which covers the Internet and technology sector in France, combining breaking news with in-depth analysis.

Female-friendly social network Pinterest already announced earlier this month that after their big push in the UK, France was up next – according to this job post that appeared this week, “next” is now.

The standard Country Manager position, Pinterest is looking for someone with a strong social media background and the ability to research the market, localize the product, and build a team from the ground up.

However, what they don’t tell you on the job listing, is that the Pinterest team is coming to Paris this month.

Speaking with Sara Martineau, French community coordinator based out of San Francisco, she tells me that, after having launched the “Pin it Forward” campaign in the UK, “We plan to do the same for France in just about a month.”

In order to get a better feel for the market, “The team going to Paris to meet bloggers will include [Sara], and four other members of the Community Team.”

It seems that Pinterest is quick to roll out its expansion in Paris, so this job may not stay open for a long time – the team will be out in Paris from late may through early June, so if you’re looking to get an interview in, now may be the time.

Meanwhile, it seems that fellow social network Twitter has been delayed in its presence in France.

While some say there are already up to four team members working at the Twitter France office, an official country manager of France has yet to be announced – perhaps they’re waiting for some of the French tech drama to subside.

Hopefully Pinterest’s entrance into the market will be more welcome – they have yet to be pursued by the French government for tax evasion, but all things in due time.

Image credit: Thinkstock

In the week that Tumblr has been acquired by Yahoo, it’s interesting to see that Urturn, a service with a similar focus on user-generated content being shared by a youthful audience, has announced a $13.4 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Balderton Capital and coincides with the launch of Urturn’s mobile app for iOS.

Until January this year, Urturn went by the name of Webdoc and it initially developed an audience by allowing users to share multimedia collages encompassing images, videos, text and audio. The rebranding as Urturn saw the Switzerland-based startup focus on templates that added some direction to users as to what they could create. The templates also make sense when it comes to marketing partnerships, allowing users to create, say, their own personalised version of a musician’s album cover as a form of viral, meme-based promotion.

Indeed, music is one area that Urturn, and Webdoc before it has done well in. Acts such as One Direction, 50 Cent, Ellie Goulding and Alicia Keys have run campaigns in the past and recent sign-ups have included Snoop Lion and Will.i.am.

The iOS app, to be complemented by an Android version soon, is essentially a compact, portable version of the Urturn web app, complete with the tools needed to create and share template-based creations on the go. Quite why I decided to create an image called ‘I believe in the power of Rupert the Bear’, I don’t know but a few people ‘liked’ it, so I’m happy enough.

The Tumblr-esque nature of Urturn is particularly apparent when you start following people. Instantly, your feed screen fills with user-generated, meme-style creations that you can ‘like’ and ‘reshare’.

Interestingly, Urturn says that it isn’t charging for the marketing campaigns run on its platform at the moment. “We’re not charging for the promotional campaigns just as Twitter and Facebook are not charging for tweets or posts,” says co-founder and CEO, Stelio Tzonis. “Today, musicians don’t get promoted or do any monetzation on Urturn. But it has been really encouraging to get such a positive response from the music industry and we’re excited to see how other industries such as fashion will use it to engage with the user community.”

The funding will be used to continue to grow the business and develop the product. Balderton contributed 10.7 million, while the remaining $2.7 million comes from the private equity arm of Debiopharm Group.

➤ Urturn

CanvasDropr, a Danish collaboration software company that we profiled a year ago almost to the day, has a few things to announce today.

First of all, the company has decided to rename its visual collaboration tool, which was named CanvasDropr like the company but will henceforth be known as Kollaborate.io.

In addition, the startup will bring its collaboration software products (including its real-time presentation tool Presentation.io, which we covered earlier this year) together under a new brand name, Assemblage, which will be the overall company name from this point forward.

Aside from Kollaborate.io and Presentation.io, the third product under the Assemblage umbrella brand is Reaktify, a realtime feedback analytics tool that helps website owners get to know their users.

The company has more to announce than just the rebranding, though.

CanvasDropr, I guess now Assemblage, has also signed a deal to partner with Tibco on the latter’s Tibbr platform to pitch its realtime visual collaboration tools to their 1.5 million paying users.

The company says more details about the partnership will be revealed mid-June 2013, which is weird.

Assemblage also has a new CEO, having appointed long-time entrepreneur and angel investor Jeff Coe to take over the role.

Top image credit: Thinkstock

It’s been over three years since I first got to know Yoni Bloch, a musician and something of a celebrity in Israel, and got acquainted with his interactive video technology startup Interlude.

Interlude’s technology basically enables video creators and publishers to let viewers experience a multi-branch tree-structured video.

Think of it as ‘choose your own adventure’ technology for online videos, where users can – to a degree, at least – determine what happens next in music videos, commercials, branded webisodes and other sorts of clips.

Here’s an example, to give you an idea of the possibilities:

In early 2011, Interlude was funded by Sequoia Capital and a number of angel investors. Yesterday, Israeli business daily Calcalist reported that the startup had secured another round of funding, to the tune of $15 million.

The publication offered a detailed breakdown of which investor put in how much for the round (you can find it in English here), but we’ve been in touch with Bloch following the reports and can confirm that not all of the details are accurate.

Bloch said that Interlude had indeed closed another round of funding, but the amount raised was in fact $16 million. The investors were Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital, the Eric Schmidt-backed Innovation Endeavors fund and Marker Capital.

On a sidenote, Intel banked on Interlude’s technology for the commercials used in its international Ultrabook campaign last year.

The musician / entrepreneur declined to comment on the specific breakdown for the financing round, but said the details as reported by Calcalist were not entirely correct.

Interlude has now raised just south of $20 million in total.

Image credit: Thinkstock

Private business information service Duedil (short for ‘due diligence’) today announced that it is making data on companies in 20 new countries available to businesses and developers through the Duedil API.

In addition, the London, UK-based company is releasing a brand new developer portal to cater to third-party developers and partners.

The moves come after Duedil raised $5 million in a Series A funding round led by Notion Capital and Oak Investment Partners, with participation from early Spotify backer Shakil Khan and prior investors such as Passion Capital.

In short, the new API enables businesses and developers to integrate 20 years of private data on companies and directors across the UK and Europe directly into their applications.

Information available through the Duedil API includes financial accounts, industry profile, location details, employee numbers, credit ratings, directorships, corporate group structures and more.

A company spokesperson tells us that Duedil can now dig up more than 80 million live company and director records, which it claims enables it to rival the oldest business information company in the world, Dunn and Bradstreet, at least in terms of access to international company data.

Newly supported countries include France, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, Iceland, Lithuania, Malta, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Hungary, Finland, Luxembourg, Portugal and Slovakia.

These new regions are in addition to those already available: England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

Duedil was launched in April 2011 by founder Damian Kimmelman in order to increase trust and transparency in business.

Prior to launching Duedil, Damian set up two other businesses: a p2p Chinese gaming platform and a London-based digital agency whose clients included the BBC, Virgin and General Motors.

Image credit: Thinkstock

Editor’s note: This article by Greg Anderson originally appeared on ArcticStartup, an independent tech blog that reports on digital startups and growth entrepreneurship from the Nordic and Baltic countries.

Pan-European startup accelerator Startupbootcamp has announced that each participating team in their new Copenhagen MobilityXL program will be offered a loan of up to $1 million at the end of the program.

As you probably guessed, MobilityXL will focus on mobile startups, and will be a 3-month program. Participating teams will still be given €15,000 for 8 percent equity at the beginning of the program, as in the past.

“Several accelerators have added e.g. convertible bonds on top of the normal offering, but founders will still end up bleeding equity so we decided to introduce a much more founder friendly solution,” says Lars Buch, who runs the new Startupbootcamp MobilityXL program and was formerly Head of Smartphones Copenhagen at Nokia.

One of Buch’s focuses with Startupbootcamp it to be sure they offer support to teams after the demo day finishes, by allowing teams to take advantage of office space, six months of additional mentoring, and now arranging this funding option. Their financial partner, Accelerace, will pay out the loan over two years, with an additional five years to return it.

A million-dollar loan will give teams in the mobile space a lot to work with, so it will be interesting to see how teams take advantage of the funding. While VC funding isn’t the only measure of success, Startupbootcamp points out that 70-90 percent of their teams have received funding for the past couple of programs.

Entrepreneurs will get a chance to meet Startupbootcamp in Helsinki, Oslo, and Stockholm as part of their Open Pitch – which is attached to the Term Sheet Battle events we’re helping throw.

Tickets for entrepreneurs run €30, but it’s free to attend Open Pitch, which generally takes place before the Battles.

Top image credit: Thinkstock

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on East-West Digital News, a leading English-language resource on Russian digital industries and related venture activity.

Russian iPhone users can now experiment with social banking – an entirely new concept in the country – thanks to an app launched last month by Instabank, a Moscow-based startup. The iPhone app allows clients to transfer money to Facebook friends who also use Instabank, get notifications of new account activity, and add geotags and photos to their transactions.

At present Instabank is limiting the number of new users through an invitation-based system. Yet the company has to date received far more invitation requests than expected, marketing and communications manager Yelisey Zakharov told East-West Digital News.

“We are already working on issuing bank cards for the first users and expanding the functionality,” he said.

There is still a long way to go on the Instabank roadmap. The list of features to implement includes virtual credit/debit cards, individual Instagram-based card design, a personal home banking system and more. Zakharov also emphasized that the still-to-be-introduced function of transferring money to Facebook friends who are not using Instabank is the startup’s know-how and a potential killer feature.

Mobile first

Before creating Instabank, the co-founders — Dmitry Feofanov, Roman Potemkin and Valentin Kravtsov — had been involved in mobile software development for several major banks, including Home Credit, Unicredit, and Tinkoff. The idea of creating Instabank came as a result of frustration with what they saw as the sluggishness of large financial organizations.

“At a certain point the founders realized that over the past few years the whole world had changed,” said Zakharov. “It became obvious to them that behind the nice mobile applications then in use there still stood huge, clumsy banks – a situation not in line with the current evolution of society.”

Zakharov reckons that a “bank in a mobile phone will revolutionize the banking sector the same as Instagram has revolutionized the photography world.”

Yet the team does not stray too far from conventional banking institutions. While Instabank offers users a slick mobile banking interface and customer support, the actual bank infrastructure is provided by a partner, Russian bank VPB. Another partner of Instabank is Masterbank, from whose ATMs the social banking service’s users can withdraw funds without charge.

In October 2012 Instabank received $4 million in funding from Life.SREDA. Established last year with an initial capital of $10 million, this venture fund is part of the Russian financial group Life, which comprises eight sizable Russian banks.

An untapped market

Even though several similar projects have been launched over the past few years, including Simple and GoBank in the US and Fidor Bank in Germany, mobile and social banking is new in Russia. Rocketbank, a Russian startup that intended to disrupt the banking field, was announced in June of last year but is still working on an invite-only basis.

Instabank presents its focus on mobile and social functions, relating in particular to Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare, as a distinct advantage in Russia’s social banking market – which, according to Zakharov, is “very ample and almost untapped.”

Another source agreed. “Nowadays smartphones are becoming one of the most important channels for financial services and the main interface for social networks. Sooner or later these two segments had to be combined, and it is very promising,” noted Viktor Dostov of the Russian Electronic Money Association in an exchange with EWDN. “On the other hand, customers tend to be very conservative when it comes to bank services; this is why such projects, in my opinion, should be considered marketing instruments rather than core bank services.”

Although Instabank’s Russian service is not fully launched yet, the startup already envisions expansion to the US.

Among other plans are apps for Android and Windows Phone, though focus will be kept on iOS in the short term, Zakharov said.

Image credit: Thinkstock

Cukier is the Data Editor at The Economist and co-author of the book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. At The Next Web Conference Europe 2013, he gave a keynote talk detailing just how much impact ever-growing big data sets will have on the world. Grab a coffee, sit back and watch…

Catch up with all our coverage of The Next Web Conference 2013.

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Argus Labs, the Belgian company behind soon-to-launch mobile virtual assistant Jini, has closed a €500,000 ($640,000) seed funding round from a number of angel investors, including Samsung President and Chief Strategy Officer Young Sohn.

The company — which has offices in Antwerp, Belgium, and Palo Alto, US — says that the money will be used to “intensify” the development and distribution of the Jini service ahead of a planned launch in the summer of 2013. The capital will also go towards increasing its operations in Silicon Valley.

Sohn, who leads Samsung’s innovation efforts in the US, is obviously the big name investor, but other angels that participated in the round include: Marco De Ruiter, formerly COO of Viacom Northern-Europe, Hummingbird Ventures Partner Frank Maene, tech advisor Guy Vancollie and Nova Participations investment manager Jan Wierenga.

Jini is currently in private beta testing, and it is one of a number of services that provides contextual data and information to users via their smartphone, of which Apple’s Siri is perhaps the most famous. More than a reactive assistant, Argus Labs says Jini monitors a range of data to learn a user’s behaviour and consumption patterns to create a more personal and “useful” experience.

The company sketches the following scenario to explain what Jini can do:

Jini can recommend an individual user to get out of bed because it knows he’s slept long enough (based on his average sleeping patterns), nudge him to head to work early because the roads on the way to his office are more congested than usual. And because it knows he likes listening to heavy metal music while driving, Jini can also suggest to play a Motörhead album en route.

Argus Labs says it is currently testing Jini with an undisclosed number of partners across a range of verticles, including mobile advertising, dating, health, and the music industry. That suggests, it says, that these industries will be its target partners once Jini is made public.

With Jini slated for launch this summer, we’ll soon get a chance to see why Samsung’s Mr Innovation has put his hands in his pockets to make this personal investment.

Argus Labs previously raised a €200,000 (near-$250,000) seed funding round in 2011.

Full disclosure: TNW’s Robin Wauters is an advisor to Argus Labs (not that I’ve ever been influenced by him on anything, aside from Belgian beer selection and corrections to my faulty French vocab.)

Headline image via vinz89 / Shutterstock

As you’ll see in the interview, it appears Topiary is exactly the person the public thought he was: a kid who got addicted to the notoriety Lulzsec gave him.

Here’s an excerpt from BBC’s interview:

Head here to watch the second clip (hint, it’s located at the foot of the story).

Davis, now 20 years old, was given a two-year sentence today in London; he will, however, only have to serve half of this time. As you may already know, the group had been responsible for a number of incidents, including hacks and DDOS attacks involving Sony Pictures, PBS, Sun, Nintendo and the CIA, among others.