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… but not in the Northern Germany, where we are adopting English attitude to the weather conditions, “… they called it a disaster, we call it summer”, as one Facebook shareable suggested.

Deal flow

3D Property visualization startup Real5D created by the Hungarian Farago brothers has received $1.2 million dollars in Series-A funding. Actually, they closed the funding in 10 days, which is faster than getting the funding announcement published on TechCrunch.

Russian RealSpeaker Lab received a grant of about $150,000 from government-owned innovation center Skolkovo. The company claims to be able to improve quality of speech recognition by 40 percent by focusing not only on audio recognition, but also on the video of the speaker, not very frequent occurence, however. For those of us who record interviews on an audio recorder, let’s not get too excited, it will still take regular hours to process.

Launches and announcements

Slovak aggregated online paywall Piano Media launched in Poland. Seven Polish media companies which own 27 national and regional newspapers, 14 magazines and Poland’s national public radio will share Piano paywall.

Polish investment fund Xevin Investments launched ShoeDazzle of Eastern Europe called Modo.pl, as I reported earlier this week.

We’ve been told about a California-based accelerator with Bulgarian roots called VoiVoda Labs, which is run by Val Babajov (the background in software and mobile development outsourcing). The company focuses on B2B businesses, and helps syndicate investments between $250,000 and $1 million. We shall watch with interest, if freshly launched Bulgarian startup ecosystem will cooperate with its Bulgarian expats to take their ventures westwards.

Estonian gaming startup accelerator GameFounders reports receiving 122 applications from 41 countries.

Founder Institute is looking to set up an accelerator location in Croatia, which is one of the few Eastern European countries lacking its own accelerator program, and which is expecting Geeks on a Plane to attend. Croatians have been enthusiastically sharing the news in social networks. I do however want to remind them, that Founder Institute functions as  an MBA program, where founders have to pay to get in.

More on startup accelerators: Czech Startup Yard invites the investors to attend its demo day on the 7^th of August.

Polish online payment processor PayLane opened up its documentation for the developers.

An “under the table” thumbs up for Ukrainian startups, as I have just received information that a new seed-stage UK-based venture fund focusing on Ukraine is about to be launched. Stay tuned.

News Reviews

Slovenian Toshl, a mobile financial assistant startup has just graduated from 500 Startups Accelerator.

Hungarian mobile democratic jukebox Mixgar got a pat on a back by Hyperbot blog.

That’s all for this week. Admittedly, my email box is coming back to life, as my hopes for a good summer are being flushed down the rainwater pipe.

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