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After we at GoalEurope have been praised by our colleagues from RudeBaguette as having “the best eye on anything going on east of Germany”, and described as “moonlighting as a consulting service”, I have realized that the past few days have been spent mainly moonlighting. Apologies to the readers for a few quiet days and a couple of missed news. Here are some important updates.

First of all, more capital will be available for startups in Eastern Europe as Sunstone Capital has recently raised Euro 85 million for its new fund focusing on early stage technology companies in Scandinavia and Central and Eastern Europe. It plans to back 25 startups in software web services, mobile, gaming and ecommerce space. It targets a final closing of Euro 100 million in 2012.

In the meantime, Accel Partners lead a new $14 million round investment in Prezi, Hungary-based and internationally loved cloud-based presentation tool. Prezi has over 7 million users now, and there are even companies which specialize in creating Prezis as a service (for example, a Barcelona-based Prezintations).

There were also a number of events that took place this and last week which are relevant for Eastern European region. Startup Sauna has graduated its current batch of companies, with Maxygen from Russia (DNA-based infectious deceases tests), Qminder from Estonia (mobile app for queuing tickets) and Finnish Zonear (automatic testing of HTML5 apps) winning its demo day presentation competition.

Startup Highway in Lithuania held its demo day last week, presenting its startups to the investors. Graduating companies included Relead.me (web analytics tool which provides detailed information about the visitors such as employer and contact details), Llamas Valley (epublishing), Utilimon (smaller energy bills for large buildings), and Sellfy (a marketplace for digital products).

In Ukraine Max Ischenko and his team from DOU.ua organized a hackathon called Startup Mixer, an event similar in format to Startup Weekend. In May 2012 it plans to organize Garage48 event in Kiev.

In Serbia Nordeus is getting ready to conduct a hackathon of its own on the 23^rd of December bringing together pre-selected teams of college students to Nordeus to help them learn about game development, team work, and creative process under time pressure. Increasing Nordeus brand awareness is also on the agenda.

And in conclusion (drum roll), convinced by the number and quality of the Baltic startups TechCrunch event comes to Riga, Latvia. It will take place on the 9^th of February. Visit event’s official website TechCrunch Baltics and get in touch with Ernests Štāls if you want to be a speaker.

I feel that I have now caught up with the news and will start on the new batch.