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That was one hot week to go through. TGI Friday!

So, to close it off, here are some news from startups in Eastern Europe.

Deal flow

It is funny how a startup without a working web page gets $749,000 in seed investment. Soceaniq is founded by a Romania-born Adrian Amariei, and keeps its product development team in Romania. The company aims to help companies personalize messages to their customers based on the up to date information about searches and social media posts. If a company started indicating through such messages that they know more about me than I would like them too I would think it was creepy: think Girlsaround.me for B2C marketing. But interestingly, according to this story in Mass High Tech, the customer engagement is at around 8 to 10 percent, up from 2-3 percent using traditional emailing methods.

Ukrainian TA Venture backed German online textile retailer Urbanara. They didn’t tell me, but Mike Butcher got the figure: 3.5 million Euros invested together with B-to-V Partners, and Blumberg Capital.

Fast Lane Ventures launched Eventbrite competitor in Russia called Eventmag.ru with a participation from a prominent Russian venture capital firm ru-Net.

HackFwd announced its investment in Cobook, contact management tool (currently client app for MACs).

Product launches

Latvian Inforg.am launched its web app for infographics, made a tour to Silicon Valley with Startup Sauna and Uldis Leiterts was interviewed by Robert Scoble.

Jelastic launched commercially in Germany this week, a breakthrough for a Platform-as-a-Service business, typically based in the US and subject to Patriot Act regulations. The company has recently raised $2 million from Russian Almaz Capital Partners and Foresight Ventures.

Press coverage

Russian Tagbrand has been covered by TechCrunch as a result of participation at TC Disrupt. Tagbrand app allows people upload their photos and tag brands of clothes they are wearing. This is quite relevant for Russian brand-conscious fashion junkies, and an apps is available in English too. So far it raised $100,000 from Russian accelerator Glavstart.

Hungarian startups were reviewed in the New York Times.

Also Slovak Piano Media got coverage by the New York Times which is not surprising, as NYT is one of the few online media that have successfully rolled out its paywall, and Piano advocates other media to embrace it as well.

Russian government-owned investment fund Rusnano has apparently suffered a failure in producing Russian product line of e-readers for schools, as its partner Plastic Logic has announced closing down this line of business, according to Radio Free Europe.

Estonian Erply, provider of retail inventory and ecommerce for physical and online shops, launched a partnership with PayPal.

Something I missed last week, but I think it may be of interest, is an interview with the co-founder and CTO of Hungarian tech success story LogMeIn Marton Lonka, published by Marton Osze of the Hungarian accelerator European Entrepreneurship Foundation.

Russian RBC Daily reported that social game developers are now taking over 70 percent of $200-million social network games market. Payment providers and well as social networks themselves retain smaller portion of the pie. Read here in Russian or with Google Translate.

And finally, Ukrainian Startup Rating statistics has been released. In total 35 experts voted for 173 startups, 33 percent of which offered SaaS, 30 percent offered Internet services, and the remaining categories including ecommerce, digital media, online video, emoney, games and internet advertisement. SaaS companies leading the global startup rating offered SaaS  and Internet services (75 percent). Amongst the judges 35 percent had investment background and focus. Investors valued online media product significantly less (2 to 3 times) than other experts. Further information in Russian can be found here.

That’s all for this week. Enjoy the sunshine.

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