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This week two Eastern European tech companies were backed: Estonian international money transfer startup Transferwise received 1 million Euro from Paypal Max Levshin, Index Ventures and others  and an aggregated paywall Piano Media from Slovakia raised 2 million Euro from 3TS.

Mini Seedcamp took place in Estonia and received ample coverage on TechCrunch, Arctic Startup and Eastist, you can find the list of the participating companies here.

Data visualization startup Inforg.am launched its beta this week.

Startup Monthly conference took place in Vilnus and announced a winner offline mobile maps app Mapswithme. One of the finalists who is also going to Silicon Valley is GigBasket, a Pinterest for jobs which means the only Lithuanian tech blogger I follow Eddy Balcikonis is likely to stop his coverage of the local startup scene, at least temporarily.

Startup Sauna announced the list of the startups which will go through its Helsinki-based accelerator program,TropicMind, which won a trip to Silicon Valley at Startup Monthly, is predictably not on the list.

My recent find, video social network Runfaces with origins in Ukraine made its appearance on TechCrunch yesterday, after making it to the top ten global startups of the Ukrainian startup rating. In the meantime in Ukraine tax authorities have been obstructing business of Rozetka.ua and partner organizations. Ain.ua follows the story (in Russian).

Further on the subject of Ukraine, Ukrainian Unshared.tv was covered by VentureBeat, whose blogger Jolie O’Dell referred to its interviewees as “Unshared founders” and “Unshared team”, in an unspectacular display of mediocre journalistic skills.  Jolie O’Dell should note that the founder of Unshared.tv is called  Dmitri Lisitski, who has also co-founded ThickButtons (the app predicts the button users need, and enlarges them on the keyboard). Besides, Unshared.tv is supposedly paid $18,500 to appear at the Demo (run by IDG in conjunction with VentureBeat), so at least the people deserved their names mentioned.

Russia was the radar of the major tech blogs as well, featuring on  GigaOm (Bobbie Johnson pondered why Russian companies go public in London), while Robin Wauters of The Next Web has plunged into the tech scene in Russia and reported some stats on the Russian ecommerce market. Ingrid Lunden of TechCrunch interviewed Alexander Turkot, the head of IT cluster at the government-backed incubator Skolkovo and wrote about potential for Facebook and Google in Russia. The Next Web has also run a story on Turkot and Skolkovo. And since we are on the subject of Russia, I have come across the list of top 30 online shops in Russia which is a month old (use Google Translate).

Romania Business Insider published an interview with Romanian business angel Peter Barta, director of Post-Privatization Foundation, who said that some of the challenges of the local entrepreneurs is know-it-all attitude and inability to learn from their mistakes.

And finally in Poland, personal finance management app Moneyzoom raised seed round from IQ Partners, and Placenow (a social network for individuals and organizations to share photos of their hometowns) was reviewed in Tnooz.

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