If you want to see what your friends or contacts are up to, you can check out Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram for a realtime feed. But what if you want to read news about your friends? That’s a little bit trickier, which is why Newsle was born. Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon created the site in early 2011 as a way to find out more about what their friends and people they met at school were up to during the summer, and beyond. At the time, Hansen and Varon were sophomores at Harvard, but they’ve since taken leave and have moved to San Francisco to focus on Newsle full-time. (Sounds like a familiar story, doesn’t it?)

At conception, Newsle mostly focused its efforts on becoming an archive for interesting (older) news about friends and people you care about. (You can read Erick’s early coverage here.) But, in testing the idea with its some 10K beta users, the founders discovered that it turns out most people have friends who are in the news every single week. And this doesn’t just apply to those in the tech industry, nearly everyone has an acquaintance or five that appear in local papers, blogs, and beyond.

The startup’s beta users wanted a better way to keep track of their friends, loved ones, and contacts popping up in the news in realtime. So, Newsle has been heads-down in stealth mode for the past nine months building technology to enable this kind of news-based friend-tracking, and the new version officially launches today.

In its new garb, Newsle has basically built a massive RSS feed crawler that processes more than 100K news sources every day, culling together over 1 million articles from major media outlets, blogs, as well as local publications. The startup allows you to then pull your Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts into its engine so that it can serve you a stream of news content that focuses on the people you want to stay in touch with. Users can then Facebook message or tweet the people they’re following directly from Newsle’s web interface. Or they can drill down, set more specific alerts that get sent to their inbox daily, weekly, and so on.

Users can not only follow their Facebook and LinkedIn friends, but also choose from a list of celebrities, comedians, actors, and business people, staying on top all news related to Lady Gaga. It sounds a little stalker-ish, but it’s a great tool for, say, startups looking to keep tabs on VCs, or for my many fans to keep track of my posts. (You’re welcome!) The founders tell us that they really wanted to pick up where Google Alerts leave off, focusing on friends and people we care about.

As Erick pointed out, if Newsle sounds familiar, it’s because the idea has been tried before in various incarnations, most notably Rohit Khare and Samil Ismail’s now-defunct Angstro, which eventually morphed into Knx.to to be later acq-hired by Google. Previous attempts haven’t been successful, but Newsle has a great UI to recommend it, works well, and looks snappy.

Obviously, tackling the enormous amount of news content out there on the Interwebs is no easy feat. The service will really live or die based on how relevant the content is that it serves to its users. Right now, since quite a few other TechCrunch writers are my friends on Facebook, Newsle is serving me their posts on TechCrunch, but if you’re looking for news about those people, and not written by those people, that could be a strike against. It’s no easy thing to separate the equivocating metadata or profile information that comes with bloggers’ news posts.

The founders have been hard at work creating and fine-tuning these disambiguation algorithms that allows Newsle to, among other things, distinguish between commonly occurring names in the news and those who are actually your friends. With so much content coming into its silo, that can be tricky.

But that’s where funding can come in handy. Newsle is officially announcing today that it raised $600K in seed financing from Lerer Ventures and SV Angel. The startup is using its new capital to hire engineers to help in tweaking its algorithms, and to launch mobile apps (which should be going live in the near future).

Newsle is still early in the process and hasn’t yet solidified its monetization strategy, but one can imagine that a service like this would be appealing to businesses, especially to marketers and sales people. The founders also said that they will add further local news sources as more users come on board, and they get a better sense of which particular outlets are most in demand.

While the goal has really been just to build an open-ended resource that allows people to track news about their friends, it also wouldn’t be surprising to see the startup eventually offer more targeted, subject-specific content and tracking.

For more, check out the new, new Newsle at home here, and let us know what you think.

Well, you have to hand it to the strategy team over at Zipcar. Arguably the largest on-demand car-sharing network, Zipcar went public last year and not long after saw its market cap cross $1 billion. It’s since fallen back, and with collaborative consumption and the market for car-sharing heating up, the big players have to make moves. Zipcar has since forged a partnership with Ford, making it the largest provider of cars for Zipcar’s University program, and, in December, the company took a controlling stake in Spain’s largest car-sharing network, Avancar.

Today finds Zipcar making another strategic move to get its mitts in fellow car-sharing companies, again with a focus on universities, whose students are among the most eager adopters of car-sharing models. What do I mean? The company today announced that it is a lead investor in the $13.7 million series A financing of Wheelz, a junior, university-focused version of itself.

The Detroit-based Fontinalis Partners, a transportation technology investment firm, also participated in the round. As a result, Mark Schulz, the former President of International Operations at Ford and a founding Partner at Fontinalis, will join Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith on the startup’s Board of Directors. (Former Vice-chairman of Ernst & Young Jim Freer also joins the board.)

This adds to the $2 million in seed funding Wheelz raised pre-launch last summer, which was led by former Facebook VP and creator of the Social+Capital Partnership venture fund Chamath Palihaptiya, and included contributions from Felicis Ventures, Red Swan Ventures, and an impressive list of angel investors, including Freer and Sebastien De Halleax, the founder of Playfish. Wheelz’s total funding now sits just under $16 million.

For those unfamiliar with Wheelz, you can check out our coverage of their launch back in September. But, essentially, Wheelz aims to bring P2P car-sharing to campuses with a platform that enables students to connect safely and swiftly through Facebook integration, mobile apps, and its proprietary in-car hardware system called DriveBox. The startup initially launched at Stanford and has since popped up at UC Berkeley, USC, and UCLA.

Among other things recommending it, Wheelz offers a wide selection of cars (sedans, hybrids, luxury cars, convertibles, vans, SUVs, and trucks), free, 24/7 customer support and roadside assistance, and users are protected by Wheelz’s million-dollar insurance policy, without affecting the individual’s own auto insurance.

As to how it works, once a student installs DriveBox in their car (for free), and has listed their car on Wheelz, other users can rent it, unlocking the car using the company’s iPhone app or Wheelz card. What’s cool is that the owner doesn’t have to be there to hand off the keys once they’ve agreed to sharing their car, as the company provides a “Key Box,” in which owners can leave their keys. The key box also comes with a gas card, so that when gas falls below a quarter of a tank, renters fill ‘er up using the card. The owner of the car decides how much the renter pays, setting hourly, daily, and weekly prices.

It’s a cool model, and one that looks to capitalize on the fact that campus, P2P car sharing is on the rise. In a statement today, Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith said that he thinks P2P will have a big effect on the car-sharing market going forward: “We chose to make this investment because we believe that Wheelz has the right leadership, technology and business model to succeed in the emerging P2P space,” he said in a statement.

Wheelz does indeed have an experienced leadership team, as CEO Jeff Miller is a veteran of building sustainable transportation solutions, having worked for electric vehicle network provider Better Place. And Co-founder and CTO Akhtar Jameel (also the architect of Wheelz’s technology platform) was formerly the CEO of Mercedes-Benz R&D and has held senior product and technology positions at Daimler, Better Place and Xerox PARC. (He was also awarded a Smithsonian Computer World Innovations gold medal for developing the world’s first Internet connected car back in 1997.)

But what the Zipcar CEO didn’t mention was that there’s a lot of interest in the space, and competition is heating up. General Motors funded RelayRides in a very similar move and is offering its cars to the Google Ventures-backed startup to help it expand its reach, and, of course, there’s TechCrunch Disrupt winner GetAround, which has been getting a lot of buzz and has raised $5 million from a number of high-profile investors.

Again, it’s no surprise that Zipcar wants to tap into startups focusing on colleges and universities, something it’s done itself through its universities program. Campuses are early adopters and since a lot of students don’t own (or can’t afford) cars, they get used a lot more than they do in other places. Wheelz has a good-looking platform, some great technology, so the move makes a lot of sense. It will be interesting to see how the car-sharing tug-of-war plays out in 2012.

For more on Wheelz, check ‘em out at home here.

You may not know this, but Turkey has a fever. And the only prescription is more games. That’s right. Sifting through some of Pando Networks’ recent numbers on international gaming, we found that Turkey owns an increasing share of the global downloads of free-to-play games. Over the last year, the number of gamers in Turkey downloading free games climbed to over 5 million, a 534 percent increase since 2010 — and more than 14 percent of the country’s total population.

Not only that, but Turkey has a growing appetite for social games, which is precisely the reason Peak Games has parked its headquarters in Istanbul. In case you’re not familiar, Peak Games is a social gaming company that produces titles specifically for emerging markets — specifically in Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa, and South America.

In conversation with the gaming company’s Chief of Strategy, Rina Onur, she made it abundantly clear that the company is aware of the huge lead Zynga has built in social games in the U.S. (its titles have over 55 million daily active users, compared with Microsoft in second at 22 million), and that there is stiff competition among Zynga, EA, wooga, and others for the Western markets. But Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa (MENA) have increasingly connected populations, their young people are coming online in droves, and they love to play games.

So, while Zynga, EA, and wooga focus their efforts in Europe and North America, largely lacking a presence in MENA, Peak Games has been busy acquiring studios or creating their own games like Okey, Umaykut Online, Akvaryum, Erlikhan Günlük Falınız, which Onur says now have over 7 million daily active users. (Although AppData puts that closer to 4 million.) These games are all built around popular Turkish and Arabic card/board games that are native to the region, so the titles are tailored towards their specific local markets, in their native tongue.

Peak Games’ MENA focus has caught the attention of top tier VCs in Europe, as the company closed a $11.5 million series B funding round in September from Earlybird Venture Capital and Hummingbird Ventures, among others, bringing the startup’s total investment to just under $20 million. At the time, Turkey was the fourth largest Facebook market, with some 30 million+ using the social network, and those numbers continue to grow across the Middle East and North Africa.

With this high rate of adoption, the startup has been eager to acquire studios with strong development talent and established titles and help bring those to the Facebook platform, make them more social, and expose them to its multi-million-strong existing user base. Last summer, it acquired two hardcore strategy game studios, Umaykut and Erlikhan, (both of which are Turkish) in an effort to continue bringing these emerging markets to social gaming.

And today, Peak Games is announcing the acquisition of Saudi Arabian social games giant, Kammelna Games, as it looks to further expand its reach into underserved markets with localized, culturally-specific games. The startup already has a popular Arabic-language title with Happy Farm (at some 2.2 million daily active users), which it will now complement with Kammelna’s “Baloot,” a popular Saudi trick card game.

Onur tells us that Kammelna founder Essam Alzamel will now run Peak Games’ new studio in Damman, Saudi Arabia, keeping the company’s 15-odd employees in their home country, and successfully adding another location to Peak Games’ already existing offices in Istanbul, Ankara, Amman, Barcelona and Berlin.

The Chief of Strategy says that more than two-thirds of Internet users in Saudi Arabia play games online, and the country has one of the highest average revenue per user (ARPU) rates in social gaming. Capitalizing on what they see as a massive regional opportunity (that is only going to get bigger), Peak will now set about launching Baloot across platforms, including Facebook and mobile, as well as using Kammelna to develop (and launch) more Arabic card, board, and table-top games.

Peak Games now claims to have over 20 million active players worldwide, with 150 employees (40 of whom are in MENA), and you can be sure that this is not even close to the end of the startup’s near-term M&A strategy, as we hear that Peak is in the process of acquiring yet another studio. It’s not clear which studio yet (and the company would not divulge the price of its Kammelna acquisition), but you can be sure that the acquisition will be another stepping stone in its mission for MENA dominance. More to come as we learn more.

Check out Peak Games at home here.

Australian-based travel marketplace Jayride.com has lined up $400,000 AUD in seed funding for its ride-sharing service, which also aggregates transportation data. The angel funding was led by Andrey Shirben, one of the first investors in Kenshoo, a digital marketing software company. In addition to helping in the financing, Shirben will also bring his digital marketing expertise to assist the company, as well as connect Jayride with other players in the global travel sector.

Compared with other current ride-sharing and carpooling startups, Jayride’s unique angle is to provide a single interface for finding all your transportation options, including commercial transport, and combining that data with the available ride-sharing options. This way, travelers will never be in a situation where they research a route and end up without options. Instead, when there are no ride-shares found on your planned route, Jayride will show you bus schedules, shuttles, relocation cars and other transportation options.

Shirben tells us that the angel round was supposed to be for $350,000 AUD, but after he put his money in, it became overbooked by 30-40%. Within a year, Jayride plans to raise another round led by a U.S. VC firm, as it prepares to expand its geographical transport data coverage.

“Jayride is the only land-transport marketplace attacking ride-sharing this way,” says Shirben of the startup’s transport data aggregation play. “There are many ride-sharing startups around the world, but almost every one fails this simple UX test: if you search from point A to point B outside a main thoroughfare, you find no search results. This is the main limitation of ride-sharing today.”

Shirben says that after meeting the Jayride founding team, and following up over the course of a few months, the decision to invest was an easy one. “Great team, disruptive idea, lots of business potential in a huge market,” he remarks.

Founded in 2008 by Rod Bishop and Ross Lin as a carpooling site, Jayride made the move to aggregate all travel data last fall. The service currently supports Australia, New Zealand, and is coming soon to the U.K. and Ireland.

Entrepreneurs and small businesses are integral to the engine of job creation. According to the White House, companies less than five years old created 44 million jobs over the last three decades in the U.S. and what’s more, accounted for all net new jobs created over that time. In a struggling economy, the incubators and accelerators that help grow startups and SMBs, giving them access to the network and capital they need to grow, are essential to job creation and building a healthy economy.

Accelerators have been popping up around the U.S. (and the world) in the past year, and the big incubation houses (like TechStars, Y Combinator, 500 Startups, etc.) continue to grow. Yet, these generators can (and should) have the most influence not in big cities/markets like New York, San Francisco, and Boston, but in places where unemployment is high and economies are stagnating.

Cities like Detroit are depressed, but they are doing everything they can to encourage innovation and fuel business development. Another is St. Louis. St. Louis has a rich big-company history, and has at various times been home to the headquarters of a slew of Fortune 500 companies. Anheuser-Busch still makes its home there. Yet, while headquarters may live there, the production likely happens elsewhere.

The city wants to fight stalling unemployment by building an innovation-focused ecosystem, which is why Arch Grants was born and launched last month. Arch Grants is a non-profit organization led and supported by a band of lawyers, investors, real estate managers, entrepreneurs, civic leaders, and more, that wants to create a more robust startup culture and infrastructure in St. Louis. The company wants to turn the city into a place where entrepreneurs want to go to grow their businesses.

Arch is starting with a business plan competition that selects the most promising startups, giving them $50K in grants to turn their ideas into reality. Typically, accelerators offering venture capital take equity stakes in the startups they choose, but Arch Grants offers non-dilutive capital — they are, as one would expect, grants and therefore don’t require founders to cough up any equity in exchange for the capital.

After receiving the initial $50K grant, startups then go on to compete for a second round of up to $100K in funding, along with access to angel investors. Arch Grants President Jerry Schlichter, a trial lawyer, says that the program will be selecting at least 12 companies per year, and plans to run the program for at least three years.

Generally speaking, it’s tough for non-profit organizations that dish out growth capital to for-profit companies to receive approval from the government, but the IRS makes exceptions in areas of high unemployment, and Schlichter says that they were surprised by how quickly Arch Grants was able to be approved.

To that point, Arch Grants isn’t a business accelerator, but they want to, for all intents and purposes, operate like one — or at least create the same opportunities for their startups. The organization has tapped more five local universities, business mentoring organizations, mentors, experts, investors, and a host of other support organizations to offer resources and assistance to its founders.

Its affiliates can also hook up startups with affordable apartments and office space, business networking and mentoring, free legal and accounting services, and collaboration with local universities, etc.

While Arch Grants has a model that may be slightly unusual for startups and entrepreneurs used to the Y Combinator approach, Schlichter and others believe that the real hook for entrepreneurs can be that they would be part of something broader than their own goals, helping to put a city back to work. “These startups are going to get a deep level of support here, because this is something that is really important to the entire city,” he says, “because it has greater implications and importance than it does for Silicon Valley.”

To assist it in its endeavors, Arch Grants today announced that it has secured a $150K donation from Peabody Energy (the largest private-sector coal company in the world). This donation brings the organization’s total funding to $2.5 million, which has been contributed by a mix of individual and corporate donors.

Another feather in the cap for Arch Grants? It’s also officially announcing today that Square Co-founder Jim McKelvey (who along with co-founder Jack Dorsey is a St. Louis native) will head the organization’s advisory board. This means that, among other things, McKelvey will help lead strategy for the business plan competition and selection of grant recipients as well as advising the selected startups and founders.

Again, while tech companies will be the program’s focus, all entrepreneurs are encouraged to apply. Arch Grants is currently accepting applications through its proposed deadline of March 9th. Those interested in applying can do so here.

And young entrepreneurs looking for another cool pitch competition and resource/hub for entrepreneurs, should check out Intel Innovators. More here.

How would you like to crunch your way through big data on your iPad? That’s one of the many promises of Lucky Sort, the stealthy new Portland, Oregon-based startup building a visualization and navigation engine called TopicWatch meant for discovering patterns in live data streams.

The company just raised a half-million seed round from Neu Venture Capital, Invite Investments (founders of Invite Media) and several angel investors, including Adam Riggs (Shutterstock.com), BankSimple co-founder Alex Payne, and, oh, geek out on this one: chaos theory physicist, quantitative trading pioneer, and roulette wheel hacker Norman Packard, Ph.D., who is also now the Chief Science Officer at the firm.

According to Lucky Sort CEO and founder Noah Pepper, “everyone complains about information overload, but until now, there have been few technologies or solutions that can really help a user control and even take advantage of the data deluge in flexible and creative ways.”

That where TopicWatch comes in. With the new service, Lucky Sort’s first product, the company wants to enable users to sift through social media, government filings, news and commentary in real time, in order to find, summarize and analyze any text-based content. To be clear, TopicWatch is not yet another “sentiment analysis” or “social listening” platform – those are just subsets of what can be done on top of its platform.

In addition, TopicWatch isn’t just for public data, like Twitter updates or RSS feeds. While those are supported, users are also able to import their own text content into the platform, and then analyze that alongside other data from Lucky Sort and its (yet to be announced) partners.

The big idea here is that the startup is trying to build the next generation interface for discovering information from huge, unstructured data sets. The system uses NLP (natural language processing) that favors statistics and user input over ontologies.

“Moving away from ontologies and dictionaries is pretty radical,” explains Pepper. “NLP relies on using known properties about language data. If you don’t have a database of nouns, verbs, etc., it’s hard to know what the linguistic structure is and therefore how to do more traditional NLP that leverages knowledge from the field of linguistics.”

For the company, Lucky Sort represents a philosophical shift away from trying derive structure from unstructured data, and a move towards embracing unstructured data mining through statistics. OK, that is pretty radical.

And if that’s all too complex an explanation, perhaps this will help. The end result are visualizations that look like this:

This visual interface for data manipulation just happens to work via touch, too. Yes, on the iPad. Of course, if you’re old school, you can do it all on the desktop, and there’s an API available for other developers to use. But that iPad app looks pretty hot, if you ask me.

The product has the potential to turn anyone into a data journalist and/or analyst, as it’s focused on ease of use, despite the complexities on the backend. With TopicView, users can embed and share restricted web views that provide interactive explorations of events or topics directly onto their website.

Forget infographics, these are living, breathing graphics.

Before Lucky Sort, Pepper was the Director of R&D for Qmedtrix, where he oversaw machine learning and visualization platforms to detect fraud and abuse in medical reimbursements. He also serves as a Collaborative Researcher for the Advanced Computation Group at Apple. However, Pepper says the concept for the new startup grew from his earlier work at Reed College’s Artificial Life Lab in the Center for Advanced Computation. He’s joined by CTO and co-founder Homer Strong and Chief Information Architect Devin Chalmers, who both have extensive development backgrounds as well.

The TopicWatch applications for iOS and the Web will launch in May 2012, as will the API. An enterprise private cloud solution will also be available in the future.

You may have heard the buzz by now about a young startup that’s being fueled by some pretty impressive star power, including the likes of the one and only Lady Gaga. The project, called Backplane, was co-founded by Lady Gaga’s manager, Troy Carter, and raised an early (then hush hush) seed round from an impressive set of investors, including Google Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, i/o Ventures, and Tomorrow Ventures.

The startup is also being led by a group of former Facebook and Google employees, as well as other tech-heavy companies, including co-founders Joey Primiani, an ex-Googler and creator of Cortex, Alex Moore, former Director of Operations (and the first employee) at Palantir Technologies, along with Panantir cofounder, Joe Lonsdale, who has become the Chairman of Backplane’s Board of Directors.

The startup is using its star power and tech cache to, among other things, hold a music hackathon at SXSW, which will be judged by music industry veterans, like Scooter Braun, the guy who brought you The Bieber, in an effort to continue to attract top-flight engineers to its platform.

The intent being to create buzz for its platform which aims to change the way traditional intermediaries connect with fans. It’s a community platform that combines features from Pinterest, Tumblr, Canvas, and Ning to bring together the most effective parts of social and visual design in the name of seriously upping the engagement level on community-centered platforms.

Backplane started with LittleMonsters.com, the first portal to be powered by Backplane, and the new online community for Lady Gaga and her army of fans. Of course, that’s just the beginning, the startup wants to create a bullpen of community sites not only for brands and celebrities, but for virtually any interest group.

But what does “community” mean in the Backplane context? In the case of LittleMonsters, Backplane provides site-wide “like” icons, social commenting, photo capturing and editing, along with integration with Google Calendar and Gmail, and more.

But the real key to Backplane’s community play, says Head of Marketing Sarah Ross (and early TechCruncher), is an i/o Ventures incubated sharing platform and browser extension called Cortex. Cortex was developed by developers, Eric Wolf and Joey Primiani, to be a simple way to integrate social functionality into how we surf the Web. As MG wrote at the time, instead of reworking the UI elements of Chrome, for example, Cortex adds a sharing overlay to any site. All you do is click you mouse and hold it down.

Up pops a prompt to share to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and more. It automatically finds the right image and title, allows you to add a message, and blast it out over social networks. The key is simplicity and speed. When Primiani hooked up with future Backplane co-founders Moore and now CEO Matt Michelsen, they were blown away by the technology and immediately set about acquiring it and bringing Primiani on as CTO of Backplane. Backplane officially announced the completion of its Cortex acquisition today, as well as the fact that the technology is powering all social syndication across Backplane.

Not only that, but on top of the $1.8 million the startup raised in seed funding (mentioned previously), Backplane has today closed a series A round of financing that adds to its already impressive array of Silicon Valley investors, including Sequoia Capital, Greylock Discovery Fund, Battery Ventures, Formation 8, and Advanced Publications Inc. While the startup is not sharing exact numbers, we have confirmed that the round is between $4 and $5 million, as the Wall Street Journal initially reported. That brings the startup’s total funding to over $6 million in just over a year.

The round came in a convertible note to give the startup more flexibility when raising its series B, as the WSJ reported. The LittleMonsters community is in controlled public beta, and by controlled, we mean that there were hundreds of thousands of signups for early testing. TechCrunch got an early look at Gaga’s Backplane community, which you can check out here.

Among other things, the community offers some nifty chat features, as users can instant message each other in any language and have it translated in realtime into the recipient’s language of choice. The CEO told us that about half of the site’s early testers hail from Brazil, with interest from China, and others. No doubt this will help make Backplane sites into international hubs of conversation about Lady Gaga, and soon many more groups and brands. In these bits of tech genius alone, one starts to see why there’s been so much early interest from Silicon Valley executives. Though it certainly doesn’t hurt to have the backing of Gaga Nation.

LittleMonsters.com is slated to go live this spring, with further communities going live over the course of the year.

For more, check out Backplane at home here.

On Tuesday, we covered the launch of Nimble 2.0, a simple, affordable social relationship manager designed to give SMBs the same mileage out of social that enterprise has been able to create with its CRM strategies. For most companies, managing customer relations on social media is difficult, time-consuming, and less-than-precise, and they outsource different parts of the social media management, marketing, and sales to disparate solutions.

Thus, B2B startups are increasingly looking to throw a wrench into the gears of legacy CRM models, providing SMBs with lightweight solutions that make it easier for them to interact with customers on social networks, track those conversations and manage relationships across platforms.

Today, the space greets another unified management player, as New York City-based Tracx is officially launching its social media management platform into the wild after several years of building, tweaking their infrastructure and beta testing. Simply put, the startup is offering a modular and scalable platform that enables professional users to build, manage, and monetize their social presence. Using its proprietary tech, the startup allows brands and agencies to define their “ultimate audience profile,” manage, and to monetize that profile to drive engagement, conversion, and good old ROI.

To support its launch, tracx is also announcing that it has closed a $4.4 million round in series B funding. The round was led by Flybridge Capital Partners and Revel Partners. As part of the round, Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge and Charlie Kemper of Revel will be joining the startup’s board of directors. The team says that it will be using its new capital to push its service in international markets, ramp up hiring, and continue touching up its UI.

With a growing number of options out there for social CRM, tracx’s SaaS solution looks to go beyond simply managing Twitter and Facebook feeds to providing brands with a more granular view into the entire lifecycle of social media campaigns. From planning, testing, and strategizing how to most effectively distribute content to better understanding and communication with your brand’s social media influencers, tracx wants to offer an end-to-end service that allows brands to get more bang for their increasing spend on social campaigns.

But the real key to the startup’s value proposition is its data engine. Tracx says that it is currently collecting and analyzing “over a terabyte of social data every second” — which is mind boggling if you think about those big data implications — to give its customers a more accurate, realtime view of audience segmentation across marketing, sales, and customer relations.

Like Nimble, tracx wants to go beyond “listening and monitoring” platforms by offering big picture analysis of the competitive landscape and giving them more realtime data than the next service to enable them to quickly strategize, research, and measure conversations that matter most to their business. And access detailed reporting.

Bringing big data to social CRM can have a big effect on how deep marketers are able to go in planning the best ways to reach and engage their customers. Companies don’t want to bring a knife to a gun fight, and building a SaaS solution on top of a massive data silo — as long as that realtime engine doesn’t encumber the user experience — allows brands to arm themselves with more effective ammo in an increasingly data-driven world.

Tracx launches with 180 brands and agencies in tow, including Coca Cola, Interpublic Group, and Porter Novelli, to name a few.

For more, check out tracx at home here.

Lab42, a startup that helps agencies and other businesses conduct market research, says it has raised “just under” $1 million in funding.

President Gauri Sharma pitches Lab42′s services (which involve targeted surveys conducted over social networks) as new way to conduct research. One big difference: It’s faster and cheaper than hiring most market research firms, while also being more reliable than just throwing a survey online. Advertising and marketing agencies make up the company’s primary customer base, and clients include Redbox, David & Goliath, Y&R, and Ogilvy.

Lab42 recently added a social login feature, which asks respondents to log in through Facebook Connect before filling out the survey. That makes it easier to verify that users are part of the target audience. A Facebook profile is no guarantee that someone really is the age or gender they say they are, or that they’re from the hometown that they claim, but it makes those things more likely.

The company also makes uses its data to create infographics, include some that have supposedly been featured on NPR and Mashable (which is a pretty impressive spread). This year, Lab42 plans to expand beyond social networks.

Lab42 was incubated at Chicago-based Sandbox Industries and raised its funding from the incubator’s venture arm, Sandbox Venture Fund.

Here’s a roundup of recent stories on TechCrunch Europe:

— Mobile sports and fitness app Runtastic is moving beyond software, announcing a hardware line as well as its expansion to the United States.

— In the UK, private sales club SecretSales has raised £6.3 million in funding to double down on its expansion in the country.

— TCEU Editor Mike Butcher traveled to Latvia for the first TechCrunch Baltics meetup, learned more about the tech scene in the country as well as that in Lithuania and Estonia, and saw some interesting startups.

— Soup.me, which helps creative people aggregate and display their digital lives, has raised $530,000 in funding from Vienna, Austria-based SpeedInvest. I’m still kind of confused about what the (invite-only) service is supposed to do.

— Founded in Juy 2011, on-demand car ordering service provider Cabify – which I likened to the ‘Uber of Europe’ – is starting to gain momentum in its hometown (Madrid, Spain), but plans to expand to 15 more European cities in 2012.