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This week high summer is just in the name, as it rains nearly all the time in this part of Germany. Eastern European startups appear to have better weather conditions, since the news feed continues to dry up.

However there are a few stories worth driving your attention to. Here they are.

Deal flow

First of all, the social alarm clock from Russia Budist, which we covered last year, has announced raising $2 million funding from Leta Group in exchange for nearly 30 percent of the equity to start international expansion with Wakie, according to EWDN.

Greenfield Project wrote about the Life Button (Knopka Zhizni) startup, which raised over $1 million from the IT Co Group to help individuals and corporations trigger alarm in the life-threatening situations. The company applies the technology in the healthcare sector to help elderly people call for help at the critical moments. The idea of such service is not new, e.g.  M2M industry (machine to machine) integrated wireless sensor networks and GRPS transmission into such monitoring and alarm devices. Here is one such example from Vodafone.

Fast Lane Ventures project Renthome.ru, which was launched in October 2011, raised $1 million from undisclosed angel investors to start regional expansion to 10 Russian cities and Kiev, Ukraine. Renthome is a marketplace for the short term rentals, which works with the real estate agencies. It has nearly 17’000 active properties in its database.

News coverage

Russian government innovation center Skolkovo was covered by Economist with tomorrow’s date on it (do note that this link was delivered to you one day earlier by GoalEurope!)

Robin Wauters of The Next Web reminded startups that applications for Webit Congress StartUp Challenge 2012  are still accepted until the 20th of July.

IESE Business School issued Countries Attractiveness Ranking in collaboration with E&Y. Interestingly, Estonia and Lithuania are down in the ranking compared to 2008, and Hungary and Poland are up. (Hat tip Allan Martinson). In Estonia the depth of capital market skews the results. Perhaps the interest from Creandum will change that?

That’s all for the week.

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