But, as more and more consumer commerce is carried out online through etailers that operate independently, how can customers gauge sellers’ trustworthiness?

That is a problem Denmark-based Trustpilot has been trying to crack in Europe since it was founded in 2007. And now it is taking on a further €10 million ($13 million) to fund entry to the United States (announcement).

The money comes from Index Ventures, which is joining previous  backers SEED Capital Denmark and Northzone, which gave €4.5 million a year ago and which think Trustpilot’s method of letting buyers rate and review merchants will be big. CEO Peter Mühlmann writes that he wants to double staff from over 100 in the next year.

Trustpilot says: “The benefit for businesses using Trustpilot is that they can backtrack each customer review to the transaction on which the review is based. This helps businesses pinpoint where and how to improve customer satisfaction.”

But, as it tries to unlock the large US market, the outfit may nevertheless still face challenges at home. Despite operating in the UK, France, Germany, Netherlands and Italy, I have never heard of it; it simply would not have occurred to me to use it to find trustworthy sellers.

That means it is starting from a lower base in the States. But Trustpilot also supplies reviews to Google product search pages — a place where people are more likely to see them.

But Trustpilot claims merchants who display its reviews on their site can increase purchase conversions by 20 percent. Its focus on providing value to businesses through highlighting positive reviews seems to take second place to providing a service to consumers.

The service claims to have garnered over six million reviews of over 100,000 merchants.

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.

The outfit is taking $25 million from Mistui Global Investments and Orix Ventures, saying it is ”setting its sights on the Asia-Pacific region”.

Kaltura’s online video platform is supposedly used by over 300,000 clients, including in the enterprise and at media companies, who can either buy in Kaltura’s own commercial service or host its open-source software themselves.

The outfit already expanded in to Europe earlier this summer. VentureBeat has called Kaltura a ”next billion-dollar enterprise tech company”. It has previously raised a $2.1 million first round, a big $21 million second round in 2008 and a $20 million raise from Intel Capital and others in 2011.

Vietnam and Hong Kong are Asia-Pacific’s top online video-viewing countries, according to comScore (and via Digital Strategy Consulting)…

Peter Chernin, who left News Corp in 2009, has invested $10 million in Base 79, an agency which exploits video rights for content owners in online video channels including YouTube. There, it operates 550 channels, from which it claims 550 million monthly views. Release.

The investment is fresh from a $100 million financing Qatar Holdings is putting in to  The Chernin Group, according to AllThingsD, joining Providence Equity Partners and others. The group also has investments in Flipboard, Tumblr and Scopely.

Base 79 was formed in 2007 in London by former The Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie’s son Ashley as MyVideoRights. It changed its name in 2011 and opened up in New York to exploit the booming U.S. video opportunity.

At that time, it took an extra £2.75 million funding from previous backers Patrick Walker (YouTube’s EMEA partnerships director), ex Endemol creative chief Peter Bazelgette and MMC Ventures to finance development of mobile and TV apps, deciding to build video in to own-brand containers rather than just go through platforms like YouTube.

Base 79 is, however, a recipient of YouTube’s first European original-productions financing last month, a grant for four such productions.

MMC has returned to join Chernin in this latest funding.

Base 79 leverages content from producers including BBC Worldwide, Endemol’s Tiger Aspect, IMG Media and Simon Cowell’s SyCo.

What we are seeing is the emergence of hotly-tipped companies that depend on existing mass video platforms and which either syndicate video to them, produce it for them or both.

Scandinavian’s Schibsted is following its spring acquisition of the Aspiro music service by purchasing 10 percent of Danish ebooks service Riidr, ArcticStartup reports.

Kobo-like platform Riidr is a service for reading .epub and watermarked ebooks through a simple web interface or through iOS and Android apps. So far, its titles are only Danish and Swedish. Riidr also lets readers move those titles over to Kindles, thereby growing the Scandinavian repertoire on Amazon’s device.

Aftenposten newspaper publisher Schibsted is one of the largest news and magazine publishers in Europe and Scandinavia and is diversifying from newspapers with this investment.

Schibsted CEO Rolv Erik Ryssdal wrote last month that the company has gathered its news content, classified and other payment efforts, started at its Fædrelandsvennen title, up together with others from its digital portfolio into a groupwide program it’s calling Schibsted Payment:

“[The aim is] to facilitate simple payment solutions for all of our companies’ customers, for buying everything from second-hand bikes on FINN.no to quality content in our newspapers.”

“We must lead the way in finding new quality content and new sources of revenue. We must derive most of our revenues from digital courses.”

Riidr and Aspiro are two ways Schibsted may get to build competency in this area.

Riidr tells ArcticStartup newspapers may get to offer its ebooks through their web pages.

Salerno-based 4W Marketplace, which powers the Premium Publisher Network, is taking the money from VC house Principia SGR.

In an announcement, the firm says:

“The investment will be directed towards the strengthening of the technological department for research and development in the computational advertising area and the development of new cutting-edge internet advertising models.”

That work will be carried out together with 4W Marketplace’s local university.

The Premium Publisher Network was formed by newspaper groups RCS and L’Espresso three years ago and now numbers dozens of members including broadcaster Rai and paper La Gazzetta della Sport and La Repubblica.

4W Marketplace is the network’s exclusive ad provider, having been started by the Digital Magics incubator, and currently offers contextual, mobile and social ads.

TV and telco operators are busy considering the range of innovative options for mobile live and on-demand viewing, social sharing, remote controlling and other scenarios.

Tel Aviv-based Tvinci recently unveiled a new version of its “OTT” (over-the-top) white-label platform, which is used by clients like LibertyGlobal’s Cello and Finland’s Elisa.

Co-founder Ido Wiesenberg tells paidContent the firm signed seven clients in the last year, tripled its revenue and is due to announce a big Asian client win. Now it is taking money led by existing investors Kaedan Capital and Zohar Gilon plus newcomer investor Trellas Enterprises.

“One of the goals in raising this round was to open up new markets. So far, our main target was Europe,” Wiesenberg said. “We need to grow. In the countries we are targeting, the population is huge.”

“OTT 2.0“, as Tvinci’s new platform is called, lets broadcasters show live and on-demand video to users through apps but also includes social sharing functions, personalisation and discovery. Viewers can also sling video from apps to full-size TV and set top boxes.

The suite has come a long way since Tvinci began in 2007 and raised $1.6 million two years later. The company claims to have doubled revenue each year since 2008 and to double its staff by year’s end.

Several notable online video companies have come out of Israel. To Wiesenberg, that’s a welcome anomaly.

“We don’t have services like Hulu or Netflix so far,” he says. “It’s not like the US where everything is online. However, TV is very popular and there is a passion to innovate.

“The Israeli market is not as advanced as the UK or Europe, but you have very innovative companies like Boxee coming from Israel.”

Despite the rush amongst operators to be on new mobile and tablet devices, Tvinci does not yet have business in the States – another of the reasons it has raised money.

“This is the goal of the new funding, to explore new markets,” Wiesenberg said. “We are experimenting to partner with companies and have a local representatives. I expect to have some news within a year.”

The French unlimited-access service has confirmed a €100 million ($130 million) new investment round from Access Industries to fund an accelerated global rollout.

“It will change our world,” Dauchez told me. But he added: “We believe we should go everywhere outside of the US. We will be in the US when the market is mature, and when we have an edge not to be a me-too service.”

Last December, Dauchez signalled Deezer’s intention to launch in over 200 countries by this June. So far, it is live in around 100, however, and is due to announce further rollouts in a press conference at Abbey Road on Wednesday.

“It was necessary to speed up,” Dauchez says. “Up to now, the total amount of money invested in Deezer was just €15 million.” The company expects to have 200 staff by year’s end, around 150 of which are in France.

Deezer’s choice of new backer may raise an eyebrow since, in a world where major labels own collective equity in rival Spotify, Access Industries – operated by industrialist Len Blavatnik – is the owner of just one label, Warner Music Group.

But Dauchez denies the shared ownership could disrupt renegotiation with Warner’s peers: “There is a huge Chinese wall between the two investments. There is no intention in Warner being too close to us,” he said.

“When Access decided to acquire Warner, it was proof they believe in the turnaround of the music business — this is the next step for them. We saw all the top private equity firms and late-stage investors in the world — no one had the spirit of Access Industries.”

As so-called “celestial jukebox” services like Deezer grow to rival a la carte download stores like iTunes, Dauchez believes it is “just a question of timing” when they will overtake the latter.

To seize a growth opportunity in which Dauchez is targeting $1 billion in revenue, he will need not just to be available in many countries but to be relevant in them, too. The CEO says acquiring local music catalog is critical.

“What we learned in the past year is that not only is taste different — so is the marketing context. In homes in parts of Asia like Indonesia, mobile is the main screen for entertainment in the home; you have a very strong market if you come through mobile. By contrast, Russia is a big PC market.”

Today, Deezer has carriage deals with telcos Orange, T-Mobile, Everything Everywhere, Belgacom, Telenor and Millicom for France, the U.K., Poland, Ivory Coast, Mauritius, Romania, Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Hungary, Montenegro, Thailand and Honduras. But those different market conditions may require distinct deals elsewhere.

What’s more, it must be said that the majority of Deezer’s subscribers are the result of its favorable domestic carriage through its earlier investor Orange, which remains aboard. Now it is present pretty much everywhere Orange is, Deezer will have to strike out without its compatriot’s assistance.

In the US, Spotify – and, to a lesser extent, Rhapsody and Rdio – already have significant gravitational pull on new subscription consumers. Deezer claims two million subscribers out of 26 million users (7.6 percent conversion), versus Spotify’s four million subscribers out of 15 million active users (26.6 percent conversion).

Dauchez explains: “We are not so much a competitor of Spotify. We obviously have a different geographical strategy, a different product strategy. When we get a new subscriber, we don’t take it from Spotify, and they don’t take it from us – we both take it from piracy.

“We are each facing virgin markets – expect Sweden and France, all the markets are virgin markets.”

Half-year mobile ads revenue boomed by 132 percent year-on-year to £181.5 million ($290 million), comprising seven percent of all digital advertising outlay, according to new figures from PwC for Internet Advertising Bureau.

Sales from display, video, SMS and MMS advertising on mobiles grew by 91% to almost £50 million, whilst those from mobile search grew by 152 percent to £131.6 million.

That means, just like on the desktop web, search ads, make up the majority of ad spending (72 percent).

Underlining the growth, more investment was announced in mobile advertising firms over the last couple of days…

• Location-aware click-to-call advertising facilitator Freespee is taking €3.3 million ($4.2 million) from Sunstone Capital, Inventure and others to expand its London HQ and Uppsala, Sweden, development centre.
• Just yesterday, Samba Mobile, which gives users free mobile SIM or dongle credit on the 3 network in exchange for watching video ads, raised a second angel investment round, bringing its total to almost £1 million ($1.6 million).

Taken together, the rise in mobile advertising may suggest a slightly more free future for consumer mobile content.

Mobile is growing up in several facets of business. A fifth of UK and US  human resources managers plan to create mobile-specific roles in the next year, according to a new poll of 600 HR managers by Lightspeed Research. A third of companies polled currently have mobile specialists.

Methodology: The PwC/IAB figures were collected from over 100 media or advertising companies which reported their advertising figures.

Then Spotify convinced it and other labels that freemium subscription services could reduce their iTunes dependence. How times change. Now WMG’s owner is so enamoured with the new model that it is ploughing a €100 million ($130 million) investment in to Deezer, Le Figaro reports.

The financing, which had been rumoured earlier last week, gives Deezer welcome financial muscle as it vies with rivals like Spotify, Rhapsody, Rdio, Mog and a host of services cropping up around the world.

But note also how two of the key players are now part-owned by the very content companies with a vested interest in making them work. Labels are believed to own 18 percent of Spotify, and now one of their owners is taking a chunk of Deezer. In theory, Access Industries’ new interest in Deezer could make Warner’s renegotiations with Spotify and others potentially interesting.

This new music consumption model could be huge. But its gravitational pull has begun to centre on Spotify as a leader. Each of the services is rapidly moving in to new countries around the world, but Deezer’s globalisation strategy has been particularly potent, aiming to quickly roll out to over 200 countries – a cash-intensive slog.

Hoping to avoid head-on competition with the aforementioned services, the US  is not on that roll-out list. This is smart, since it is arguably in high-piracy emerging markets where the biggest subscription music opportunity lays…

Japan, for example, saw the launch of only its first unlimited-music service, from Sony, recently this year. While western music downloads have boomed but growth has slowed, China still has precious little music downloads industry to speak of – if piracy there can be overcome, as it has begun to be elsewhere, unlimited-access like that offered by Deezer could be the first digital music model to take hold.

What pot of gold might these protagonists find at the other end of this rainbow?

Right now, subscription music’s economics are highly challenged and low-margin. The services are paying sizeable royalties to labels and most must offer much music for free to snag paying mobile customers.

Spotify revenue more than doubled last year, but so did its costs, meaning losses grew again. Deezer is fortunate to have found more money to finance its global expansion – but all such services may need to be global to achieve the scale necessary to make their margins worthwhile.

In other words, large sums of money are required to propel these companies toward a business opportunity, in multiple continents, that could be large but which no-one yet knows for sure.

Deezer rocketed at home in the peculiar French market thanks to bundled carriage via mobile contracts with shareholder Orange. Although it has since repeated this deal in other markets in which Orange is present, its quoted subscriber count has not moved from 1.5 million in months.

Orange told me in June it held 11 percent of Deezer. Le Figaro reports €25 million of Deezer’s €100 million new funding is to buy out some other existing shareholders. The money from Access Industries would seem to rule out, at least for now, a deal in which Orange could buy the whole of Deezer.

Indeed, now that Deezer is prevalent in most countries in which Orange operates, what greater use could Orange want from it? Orange has also been retrenching from its content ambitions – a strategy shift that could also dead-end its option on fully buying out Dailymotion.