Netherlands-based Cleeng, which we have previously reported on and which facilitates payments through blog CMSes and other suites for outlets including La Tribune, Dailymotion and VentureBeat, is raising a €400,000 ($511,000) investment to try targeting U.S. business.

Amongst the backers is Pascal Cagni — until his resignation this May, Apple’s VP for Europe, Middle East, India and Asia — who says (via release):

“Through my 12 years leading Apple in Europe, I was uniquely positioned to monitor how the digital revolution can be disruptive and make monetization challenging. In the meantime, the proliferation of mobiles devices is on par with the acceleration of content digitalization and has broadened market reach in an unforeseen fashion. The opportunity to offer a simple, straightforward, robust solution to monetize content, being TV programs, videos, or live events is simply huge.”

Meanwhile, central European buffet payment facilitator Piano Media is trying a limited addition of paid video to its system that already charges users to access sections of several newspaper and magazine websites.

The video is from Zuzana Piussi, a Slovak filmmaker who could face two years in prison if convicted for her controversial film about the Slovak judiciary. Her latest film, about Slovak politics, is being distributed only via the Piano-powered paid part of weekly news magazine Týždeň’s website.

“The multiplex cinemas were against distributing the film after the controversy surrounding my last film,” Piussi says (via release). “Therefore, distributing the movie online, for me as the creator, is now the only way forward.”

Piano Media is better resourced than Cleeng for geographical expansion, having raised a €2 million second round in April. But Piano’s three launched countries so far — Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland — are all in Europe while Cleeng already appears to have ambitions of breaking in to the States.

Other Cleeng backers are unnamed private investors.

Now the Amsterdam pair want to help other would-be publishers feel the same glow — by giving away dedicated new web-based software they recently wrote themselves to redesign their own publication.

Called PRSS and launched on Thursday, the template-driven production suite lets people drag and drop web objects to design pages, is free for anyone to use and saves on distribution costs by storing magazines on Amazon’s cloud hosts.

TRVL claims to have clocked 700,000 installs, around 450,000 regular readers and has impressed by introducing a model in which individual destination articles, rather than an entire magazine, can be downloaded in its app.

But, still, Elings and Wijnands had an itch. And its name was Woodwing, the 12-year-old company that makes one of the most popular packages for producing iPad magazines.

“I had to learn Adobe InDesign to use Woodwing and it wasn’t really intuitive,” Elings said. “We were happy using it for a while but, in our app, it took seven steps just to tweet an article link — 30 percent of users go away when you build in an extra step.

“Distribution costs for Woodwing, InDesign and all the others are so expensive. People were downloading terabytes of data from our magazines, this wasn’t cheap to us. We also had to pay Apple a 30 percent cut and Adobe takes a 30 percent – you have only 40 percent left!” Elings says he didn’t mind paying Apple 30 percent but had to pay Adobe 30 percent on top of Apple’s commission.

The pair had enough when Woodwing last year agreed to a closer Adobe tie-up in which it became an InDesign reseller. “It was a blessing in disguise,” Elings says. “We thought, ‘Let’s do it ourselves.’ I wanted to make the magazine design software that Apple forgot, where everything just works.”

Re-making the maker

So, just like Wijnands, who has photographed for the likes of National Geographic for 15 years, and Elings, whose former consulting firm advised Apple among others, had done with their earlier tablet-only magazine incursion itself, they set about trying to reinvent the very software used to make such magazines.

The result is PRSS, the web-based suite the TRVL team now uses to make its own magazine. The benefits are smaller file sizes and cheaper distribution costs, Elings says.

“InDesign made a picture of every page, even when it was just text. Our photos became four times larger. A magazine was nearly 200Mb. In our software, the magazine is now 35Mb. We just cut 80 percent of the file size and the photos are even better.” The reduction means magazines can be downloaded and read quicker.

And, rather than rely on Woodwing and Adobe to host those hefty uploaded titles for distributing to iPad Newsstand customers, PRSS keeps them in low-cost Amazon storage. ”Today, I uninstalled InDesign. We can do everything in the cloud,” Elings says.

I’ve been waiting so long to uninstall InDesign. Tears of happiness ;) http://t.co/uYGy9CjV

—
Michel Elings (@michelelings) November 02, 2012

Give it away now

TRVL is not the only publisher to write its own tablet magazine production software. U.K. magazine house Future has also created its own suite, Folio, on which it is now building several selected titles — weening itself off the large industrial packages and offering Folio to other publishers as a service.

Although Elings and Wijnands conceived PRSS for themselves, making it widely available is also a strategy they want to follow. The service is now live to interested enquirers, and TRVL hopes to profit from a commission.

“PRSS will be totally free to use,” Elings tells me. “But, if you start distributing a magazine, you will have to pay a small fee to us.

“You don’t have to pay us a license fee, commission or share revenue with us — but you have to pay for distribution costs from Amazon. We want to take a little percentage of the download costs, we are going to make that fair and transparent. We will make a very small amount of money.”

Do it yourself

The proceeds may support TRVL’s independent travel photojournalism efforts, but Elings also appears to hope such actions can help kickstart an independent tablet magazine market.

The prospect is tantalizing. In the 1980s and 90s, desktop publishing (DTP) software and cheap printers helped amateur bedroom designers make their own newsletters, fanzines and posters. The web has unleashed that creativity still further. But, in tablet-specific publishing, production remains the preserve of a few established publishing houses with the resources to rent the kind of software packages Elings has come to detest.

“iPad magazines aren’t taking off yet because the apps are badly designed,” he told me. “They are all going for multiplatform instead of doing individual platforms right.

“We want to help the market. If this works, a lot of new publishers will start up — you can start your own magazine. We want to make an iPad editing app as well, where you can make an iPad magazine on your iPad — that would be cool.”

Such a thing could amplify the democratization of publishing from which TRVL’s Wijnands and Elings have themselves benefitted.

“We met each other by coincidence,” Elings said. “A day after, we started our own magazine. I was one of the few in the Netherlands with an iPad. I said, ‘Why don’t we start a magazine? We can charge less than National Geographic and become very rich. Well, that didn’t quite work out — it was early days.”

TRVL has scored points if not yet riches, gaining 100,000 downloads in its first year — and doubling that figure when Apple introduced in-app download and, later, Newsstand. All articles are free to download — only “coffee-table”-style photo “books” cost $2 — and the title is trying to sell interactive ads like those it runs currently for Canon.

Dutch publishers’ trade association  NDP Nieuwsmedia confirmed members are exploring possibilities for a “common platform to meet demand for their content”, involving a shared database.

Holland’s number-three paper de Volkskrant reports that its Flemish owner Persgroep, NRC Handelsblad and the business title Het Financieele Dagblad (FD), which already charges, want to create (wait for it) “a Spotify for newspapers”.

Deloitte consultant Marieke van der Donk tells de Volkskrant that research she recently carried out for NPD New Media showed: “There is absolutely a market for the pay wall. The idea is that people own a newspaper can compile from the range of all the newspapers.”

Holland’s local media groups have already agreed a common news payment system, de Volkskrant reports.

And Flemish publishers in neighbouring Belgium are also talking with each other about a common news payment platform, according to De Standaard.

Some publishers that have considered charging have concluded it risky whilst their peers remain free. And many have concerns that retail collaboration would draw anti-trust heat.

Now some publishers in the low countries appear to be gaining confidence in a related option rolled out in Slovakia and Slovenia, where many publishers have put a minority of their content in to country-wide payment systems operated by Piano Media at arm’s length.

Publishers in countries where English is not the primary language may have a greater chance at selling their unique content.

Thanks to University of Sheffield journalism student Jeroen Kraan for the tip.

The move will require Samsung to make a software change, and that will translate as a cost to the company — although not nearly as severe as the situation in Australia, which could see Samsung missing a chance to promote its new tablet during the critical holiday buying season.

The three Android-powered devices, the Galaxy S, the SII and Ace (pictured left, from left to right), have already been the subject of legal dispute in the country. In August, the court ordered a ban on their sales, only to halt that when Samsung promised a workaround for the issue. This newest development is that workaround.

According to Reuters (NYSE: TRI), the patent at issue concerns a method of scrolling through photos, which is used in those three Samsung smartphone models. In August the Dutch court dismissed the other claims that Apple had made to both software and hardware patents and design.

The new devices could go on sale as soon as next week.

Meanwhile, a development on the case in Australia, where Samsung has now had a temporary injunction on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet as the court continues to asses Apple’s claims.

Patent blogger Florian Mueller points out that the patent in question that was exercised in the case is one registered to the late Steve Jobs (among others) and concerns “heuristic touchscreen” technology.

The generality of the patent, he speculates, could be applied to a number of other tablets, not just Samsung’s, and the fact that the Australian court has chosen to support it means that Apple may now have the legal ammunition to go after other competitors looking to launch products in Australia.

That could have implications outside of Oz, too: “Apple owns those two patents in most major jurisdictions. If other courts also conclude that the patents are valid, they will almost certainly find them infringed by Android. Invalidation is Google’s only realistic chance to fend off this threat,” he told me in an email. “It’s just that Australia is the first jurisdiction to have taken a decision on this.”

That turns out to be very timely, because today is another big day in court for the two sides in the U.S., in which Apple is seeking nationwide injunctions on four different Samsung devices — the Infuse 4G, Galaxy S 4G, Droid Charge, and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 — so we could see yet more developments on this case.

For Samsung’s part, the company has been making patent infringement claims of its own on Apple based on the UMTS technology inside the device. It is seeking injunctions in multiple markets on iPhone and iPad models, including the newest iPhone 4S device, on sale this week.

The legal fight between the two handset makers has been accelerating in the past several months and now threatens to disrupt device sales in nine countries, including several key markets for both companies.

Tablet wizards in Oz…
In Australia today, the judge presiding over the case there — Annabelle Bennett — said that she needed more time to evaluate the case being made by Apple against Samsung, over design and patent infringements. As a result she may grant a “brief” injunction on sales of Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet.

This would be the first injunction granted in Australia against Samsung’s tablet. Up to now, Samsung has agreed to delay starting its sales until the dispute got resolved. It has already been delaying for nearly two months.

An injunction on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 would be a significant setback for Samsung, which has been working hard to paint a picture of Apple as waging a war on Samsung’s device mainly as a competitive tactic to give its iPad a cleaner run at the tablet market.

As David Catterns, Samsung’s lawyer in Australia, pointed out today, Apple didn’t seem to have any problems when Samsung had been selling only one tablet, the seven-inch version of the Galaxy Tab. Apple, he noted, only raised its voice when the bigger Tab, which competes more directly with the iPad, emerged.

“They didn’t sue before but now they’re worried,” he said (via Bloomberg). “It’s the thinness of our product that worries them.”

Samsung has already presented an “altered” version of the Tab 10.1 in Australia, which it says no longer violates the 10 patents that Apple claimed were at issue. Apple says it is still violating three of those patents.

Meanwhile, in Holland….
But if one can accuse Apple of playing a legal game to delay competition, Samsung may be no more innocent in that respect. The company is currently suing Apple in several markets claiming that Apple is violating technology patents concerning areas like 3G technology, and is also requesting injunctions on the products in question, which include the iPad and iPhone.

One of those cases had a day in court today, in The Hague in Holland, where the two sides met to argue their cases for how much Apple is and should be paying Samsung to license patents for technology, under the so-called FRAND (Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory) terms.

Some revealing gems came out of the meeting today, which underscore a real sense of acrimony between the two sides. These come courtesy of the Dutch journalist Andreas Udo de Haes, editor of Webwereld, who was tweeting live from the courtroom:

– Samsung claims that Apple has been selling iPhones since 2008 in Holland (when it launched the iPhone in that market) without paying certain 3G patent licenses, which Samsung says it offers under FRAND terms.

– Apple says it does pay, not to Samsung — but to Intel/Infineon (which presumably incorporates some of Samsung’s technology).

– Samsung claims that Apple has caused problems by obscuring who its component suppliers are. Apple claims that Samsung only started to talk about licenses in 2010.

– Samsung says Apple has delayed FRAND negotiations because it refuses to sign NDAs. Apple claims that it has already entered into a FRAND negotiation, which is as good as an agreement to pay once the terms have been decided: “Not an invitation, but an obligation,”as described by the lawyers. (Hence no right to sue Apple based on this not yet being decided; and injunctions are premature.)

– Apple accuses Samsung of “Patent Ambush” by withholding its patent rights until its technology becomes part of a standard (which then means mass payments). Samsung denies this, and says that Samsung is claiming different patents in different markets.

– Apple, in the words of De Haes, describes Samsung’s injunction attempts as a “blackmail scheme to extort Apple.” Samsung’s royalty requests on patents are “outrageous”: “We have made a clear and complete offer.”

– Samsung, according to Apple, is demanding 2.4 percent of the price of each chip to be paid in royalties. Considering that Samsung supplied Apple with $5.7 billion in components last year alone (although that figure would include more than just chips) that could mean a hefty royalty payment.

The case in Holland is significant not only for the ramifications for injunctions in Europe, but also, because, as De Haes points out, FRAND is also one of the issues in the case between Samsung and Apple in the U.S.

The news comes after allegations were raised the other week that Apple had distorted the images of the Galaxy device to advance its claims of copying. It had altered the size of a Galaxy device to be the same as that of an iPhone.

The ruling today (in Dutch; embedded below the story) is potentially much bigger than the one made in Germany regarding Samsung’s latest tablet, in that the injunction covers some of the company’s most popular smartphones: the Galaxy S, Galaxy S II and Ace devices.

It is due to take effect in six weeks’ time, or the middle of October, if Samsung does not find a way of halting it first, as it did last week with the German ruling.

Update: Looks like Samsung is responding fast. The Dutch site Tweakers.net quotes Bas Berghuis, a lawyer from the firm of Woortman representing Samsung, as saying that the company would work around the ruling, which concerns patent EP 2059868 and how it relates to photo scrolling in Samsung’s Gallery application in the current edition of Android (2.3). If that is changed — say, with a software update — there is no reason to maintain the ban, he said.

What the site also points out is that the scrolling in question appears in Android rather than Samsung’s specific use of it — meaning it might serve as the basis of further litigation by Apple.

Update 2: Samsung’s spokesperson Kim Titus sent us the following response to the litigation as well — shows confidence in how it will handle the situation:

“Today’s ruling is an affirmation that the GALAXY range of products is innovative and distinctive. With regard to the single infringement cited in the ruling, we will take all possible measures including legal action to ensure that there is no disruption in the availability of our GALAXY smartphones to Dutch consumers. This ruling is not expected to affect sales in other European markets.

“Samsung has a proud history of innovation in the mobile industry. We will continue our plans to introduce new products and technologies that meet and exceed consumer expectations. And we will defend our intellectual property rights through the ongoing legal proceedings around the world.”

The news comes on the same day that Samsung had a little victory of its own in the UK, at the expense of Motorola (NYSE: MMI). The Advertising Standards Agency ruled that Motorola could no longer call its Atrix the “world’s most powerful smartphone” in advertisements in the UK: that honor, it said, goes to Samsung for the Galaxy S II i9100. Ironically, if the Dutch ruling holds up, Samsung won’t be able to sell the world’s fastest device on these shores.

As Florian Mueller notes, the injunction might apply differently across Europe: the injunction concerns one patent, EP 2059868, the status of which varies in individual countries. Specifically, “Apple didn’t successfully pursue and complete a local registration” in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Spain. It did, however, in Germany, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the Netherlands

He also points out that while Samsung has subsidiaries registered in different countries (and therefore might argue that this ruling would only apply in the Netherlands, as it did the other week with the German ruling), it actually routes its smartphone distribution logistics through the Netherlands, so getting around the injunction might mean reorganizing that.

On a positive note, the judge appeared to be less likely to endorse two other patents as they related to hardware design.

Coincidentally, today Samsung also unveiled four new devices and a new, five-tier naming scheme for its Galaxy range of smartphones, spanning from the entry-level “Y” range up through to its flagship “S” range.

KG 11-0730 en 11-731 Apple – Samsung

In the case of online ad firm Specific Media, its purchase of Amsterdam-based AdCombination comes a little more than a month after it bought video ad network BBE, while Aegis market research unit Synovate’s acquisition of a majority stake in Russia’s Comcon are likely to be first of many such deals this month.

M&A activity in the marketing, information and digital media/commerce areas were 27 percent in Q3,said media investment bank Petsky Prunier, which tracked 200 deals for its September survey. In its overview of the M&A landscape, the Jordan, Edmiston Group, Inc. said the value of deals increased 42- and 95 percent, respectively, over 2009 levels in the first three quarters of 2010. The expectation by both bankers was that Q4 would see a lot more deals, especially in the marketing services and analytics space.

European expansion: For Irvine, CA-based Specific Media, the purchase of AdCombination follows its expansion into the Nordic region with office openings in Norway and Denmark in 2009 and Sweden in 2010. It’s been a much better year for online ad companies like Specific Media, so the move into the Benelux region also bets on the focus on European growth despite the continued economic uncertainty. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but it was likely smaller than the $65 million Specific Media paid to acquire BBE. Release

Rocket to Russia: For the past two years, the common view of ad holding companies like Aegis is that now is the time to build up a presence in Russia. As our headlines have shown in just the past few weeks, there’s a lot going on, including investments from relatively new Russian VC Runa Capital, which just injected $2 million into OnAir3G, a mobile-based social network there. Furthermore, there’s a lot of speculation about the IPO market there, especially for tech firms.

In the case of Aegis’ Synovate unit, aligning itself with Comcon is a chance to solidify its position in the Russian market. It’s still testing the waters though and did not pursue a complete acquisition of the company, which claimed to have generated $18.9 million in revenue last year. The deal does allow for a 100 percent acquisition of Comcon by 2015, if Synovate feels the partnership — and its Russian business — is going well. Release

There are other – and increasingly more – startups in A/R applications for mobile, as the networks and devices improve, and a critical mass of people use those devices for more services.

Layar (of course) claims that it is the biggest of them all, with more than one million active users, and thousands of developers that have created some 1,500 layers for its platform. These range from information-based services – such as real estate prices that come up when a person points his handset’s camera on a property – to apps that are a little lighter, like the game Woomba Mania (pictured).

Layar has so far come only partly good on its expansion strategy. It may have reached its 2009 goal to have “thousands” of apps on its platform. But an app for Symbian phones, which appeared imminent last year, is still “in development” according to the company’s site, possibly because Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is interested in creating its own A/R application, as this report suggests. Today, Layar is available for the iPhone 3GS, and Bada- and Android-based devices.

Layar says it will use this newest round of funding for “further development of the product and platform to drive meaningful content and usage of augmented reality. Specifically, the team will be focusing on working with developers and brands to make it easier to discover Layar content as well as further investing in the capabilities of the platform.”

Layar also raised a round of $1 million in October 2009.

We could tell you about Moon, but Smartclip has already redirected its website to its own.

It’s creating its own Smartclip Benelux division out of the acquisition, led by Annemiek de Geus Verhagen. It was already operating in Germany, France, Spain, the UK and U.S.

A Dutch play is obvious – founders of the Dutch TV group Endemol invested in Smartclip in 2008 through their Van den Ende & Deitmers VC house.

Smartclip calls itself an ad network, with a claimed network of over 400 video publishers, but it also offers video ad formats – pre- and mid-rolls plus interactive overlays.

As ever, no acquisition terms released.

NYT’s flagship app lit the blue touch paper for iPad, Wired also got in on the act early, both Denmark’s Information paper and Penguin Books have imagined themselves on the tablet, even The Economist is getting excited.

Now Holland’s De Telegraaf newspaper has published a concept video, showing how it’s thinking of approaching the gadget…

Another Dutch publisher, Sanoma Magazines, says publishers have been having “secretive” talks with Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) about supporting iPad’s roll-out.

But, for all the iPad concepts we’ve seen lately, many are still only that. De Telegraaf’s video is a corporate montage designed to depict a forward-thinking multi-platform publisher, but it doesn’t exist.

In fact, it only renders Telegraaf.nl’s existing website on the gadget – and, as Apple watchers will know, Telegraaf’s Flash news videos seen in the clip won’t even work on the iPad.

Via Emerce.nl.