Juicy rumor coming from Pocket-lint this morning: Facebook is reportedly eyeing a takeover of desktop, tablet and smartphone browser maker Opera Software.

Citing an unnamed source, Pocket-lint says the social network juggernaut is considering an outright acquisition of the Norwegian software company to accelerate a move onto the battlefields where the browser wars between Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple and since recently Yahoo are being fought.

But not so fast. First of all, we asked Opera Software for an official response on the report, and a spokesperson declined to comment.

Update: Facebook also declined to comment.

One source close to Opera, however, tells us two interesting things:

1) Opera Software management is talking to potential buyers right now.

Currently listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange, the company’s leadership is said to consider becoming part of a larger privately-held or public company rather than trying to keep growing the business independently.

2) We’re told that there’s currently a hiring freeze at Opera, which is a surefire sign that something big is about to happen – or at least that Opera wants something big to happen.

We’re trying to get more sources to corroborate these stories, but the above comes from a very solid source. Our source was unable to confirm whether Facebook was one of the potential acquirers, but said it “would make sense”.

Indeed, an acquisition of Opera could give Facebook a major boost if they decide to enter the browser wars for real (and they may eventually have to).

As the company itself admitted when it filed to go public, it has some issues monetizing mobile right now, and that’s where its users are increasingly heading to visit Facebook.

Facebook has long been rumored to be working on a full-fledged mobile operating system based on Android, and even its own (HTC-made?) ‘social’ smartphone.

Buying Opera would certainly make more sense for Facebook than to do it all from scratch, but for now this is almost all speculation. On to the facts:

About 270 million people use Opera browsers every month, the software company claims. Furthermore, more than 168 million people used the Opera Mini browser in March 2012, with a total of 117 billion pages served.

The company has deals with mobile device (and TV) OEMs and carriers worldwide.

Opera also just bought not one but two mobile advertising companies (after picking up AdMarvel back in January 2010).

Opera boasts more than 750 employees today and a strong executive team. Its chief technology officer, Håkon Wium Lie, is a pioneer in the Web field and a standards expert who is often described as the ‘father of CSS’.

Established as an independent company back in 1995, Opera expects to book roughly $50 million in revenue for the second quarter of the year. Its market cap currently hovers around $670 million.

That would make it an expensive purchase, but Facebook’s recent IPO certainly put the social networking company in a solid position to close major deals like an Opera Software acquisition. Let’s not forget it spent $1 billion to buy Instagram.

All this does not mean Opera will end up selling, and it doesn’t mean Facebook will be the buyer if they do. But for now, Opera execs are definitely talking to a number of different companies about what a deal could look like, our source asserts. Other likely suitors include search giants Yandex (Russia) and, yes, Google.

When we learn more, you’ll learn more.

Does you car need a decent scrubbing? Need someone to go pick up your groceries at the store because you’re on a tight deadline at work? Could you use someone to install that damn Ikea closet in your kid’s room before the weekend?

Not unlike TaskRabbit, Viatask and Agent Anything in the US, Milk.ly is a new marketplace that helps you get small things like that done by willing people in your neighborhood. That is, if you’re in London, which is where Milk.ly is starting out.

Co-founded by former head of Display Platform at Yahoo EMEA Sal Matteis, Milk.ly is essentially a peer-to-peer marketplace that lets people outsource errands, tasks and a wide range of small jobs to a curated network of ‘runners’ or ‘milkmen’.

The company also teams up with local businesses looking for ways to expand their reach and tap into new revenue streams for their services.

As for the business model: Milk.ly takes a 15 percent commission on each transaction that results from its marketplace.

Over time, the fledgling company also aims to introduce ‘corporate’ accounts that would allow office managers to have small errands or tasks handled by trusted and verified ‘milkmen’.

From what I can gather, they’re currently focused on laying the groundworks for a sophisticated system that would enable ‘milkmen’ to receive notifications of newly posted tasks by email, through native mobile applications and even SMS. Milk.ly is also building a solid API to let third-party developers integrate with their service.

The short-term goal is to expand to several urban areas across Europe this year. Long-term, Milk.ly wants to, oh, disrupt the entire labour market.

The startup is backed by pan-European startup accelerator Seedcamp.

Now, can someone pick up lunch for me please?

Berlin-based Internet startup incubator Team Europe is expanding to Asia with the establishment of a “market-watch” office in Seoul, South Korea.

It will be headed by German-Korean Ludolf Ebner-Chung, a former McKinsey consultant, with Team Europe partner Markus Fuhrmann overseeing the venture.

The idea is for Team Europe to use the new office as a launchpad to expand its activities across multiple Asian regions. So why Korea first?

Furhmann asserts that Korea has a huge Internet and smartphone environment, and that there are big opportunities for Team Europe to build successful Internet companies in the region. “It feels like Berlin a few years ago,” he says.

Fuhrmann already started several companies in China before joining Lukasz Gadowski, Kolja Hebenstreit and Steffen Höllinger at Team Europe as a partner in 2009. The firm’s portfolio includes companies like Delivery Hero, HitFox, Mister Spex and Madvertise.

Question is: do they need to change their name now?

It is already a well-established name on the Berlin startup cityscape – and now tape.tv has taken the next step with the €5 million Series B funding round. With the social music video platform already reporting revenue of €20 million a year, the team behind it is definitely onto something.

CEO and co-founder Conrad Fritzsch is a man inspired to make TV better, and he knows exactly how he wants to achieve that:

“Content is king, everybody knows it, but packaging is God.”

Participants in the funding round include Atlantic Capital Partners GmbH, Dario Suter, Christoph Daniel and Marc Schmidheiny (DCM), Christophe Maire and the Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB) through the VC Fonds Kreativwirtschaft Berlin.

Alongside international expansion, the investment will go towards further scaling the business, investing in technology and improving the service across all devices.

Founded in July 2008 by Conrad and COO Stephanie Renner, Berlin-based tape.tv provides users with personalised music television. It is the leading German online music video streaming platform, having negotiated its way through the country’s complex licensing process, and there are more than 3.4 million users watching a catalogue of 45,000 videos.

It counts major German media outlets such as Bild.de, Spiegel.de and ZDF.kultur – with whom it produces a regular show – as well as Facebook, Spotify and Last.fm among its strategic partners.

In announcing the investment, Conrad revealed the startup’s aim of combining Internet and TV in the form of SmartTV as it seeks a “creative solution for mobile usage of TV.” And when he sat down with Silicon Allee earlier this year, he revealed the ethos behind tape.tv.

‘MTV Was Crap’

The idea for the company arose from his love of TV and his frustration at the state of television in the late 1990s: “I would sit and watch, nothing would be interesting to me. The whole concept of TV was not working for me.” Even MTV didn’t satisfy him – “it was crap; there was hardly any music on it” – and when YouTube came along, he was left to his own devices as he tried to find interesting content.

“So I thought, why don’t we take the intelligence of the net, all the things we can do in the digital world, and combine it with the easiness of TV? I wanted to use these two things to bring music into the digital age.”

And with tape.tv, he is looking to do exactly that.

“In the future,” he added, “we can foresee a product where it never matters where I am, or who I’m with, I’ll get the perfect TV experience, and TV experience defines the digital age… Music is something which reflects our zeitgeist. With Spotify, for example, I as a user have to do all the work. Help me, please! The big answer is curation. The question is, who curates me – and this is the answer which we have found.”

Individualising and packaging the content for users – remember, content may be king but packaging is God – is the future tape.tv is planning for music TV, and now it seems the resources are in place for the team to press forward with their plans.

This story originally appeared on Silicon Allee.

Cloud-based collaboration and task management software company Huddle has raised $24 million in Series C financing on the heels of setting up an office in New York, and plans to use the proceeds to triple its team size in the next 12 months.

The round was led by Jafco Ventures with participation from DAG Ventures. Prior backers Matrix Partners and Eden Ventures also chipped in, as did super angel investors Subrah Iyar (founder of WebEx) and Herb Madan.

Huddle has now raised $40 million in funding to date.

Founded in London in 2006, Huddle has come a long way. The company says it has seen business triple in size each year since its inception, and plans to use the fresh capital to accelerate growth and enhance its enterprise content management and social software offerings.

The company says more than 100,000 organizations in 180 countries use its products to store, share and collaborate on content in the cloud across devices.

High-profile clients include Procter & Gamble, Saatchi & Saatchi, NASA and PwC.

Says Huddle co-founder and CEO Alastair Mitchell:

“Huddle is revolutionizing the ECM market by making it collaborative, social, ubiquitously accessible and – above all – intelligent.

Our intelligent collaboration platform opens up content silos across the global enterprise ecosystem, enabling people to share, discover and work on content wherever, whenever and with whomever they need to.”

(ECM stands for enterprise content management, in case you’re wondering).

We’re going to catch up with Mitchell in the coming days to take a more in-depth look of why they raised funding, and what they plan to do with it.

For now, read his blog post:

Huddle closes $24 million Series C round and here’s why …

Apple’s vice president of Europe Pascal Cagni has reportedly resigned after twelve years at the company, having originally joined in 2000 as a direct appointment by Steve Jobs.

The news comes by way of French newspaper Le Figaro, which reports that Cagni tendered his resigned yesterday, although it has yet to be confirmed either by Apple or the executive himself.

Cagni’s LinkedIn profile still states that he is employed by Apple but given the immediacy of his resignation, it is understandable that this wouldn’t have been updated.

Apple announced Cagni’s appointment in April 2000, having tempted its new vice president to part ways with NEC/Packard Bell Europe. He is also a non-executive director of retail giant Kingfisher — which counts UK DIY companies Screwfix and B&Q amongst its portfolio of businesses — and credit company Egg.

By 2010, Cagni was credited with driving revenue in Apple’s EMEA regions up from $1 billion to more than $19 billion, which at the time was the fastest growing region within Apple Worldwide.

While Jony Ive was knighted just yesterday, Cagni is also a Knight of the French Order of Merit.

We have reached out for comment on Cagni’s resignation and will update should we receive a response.

Derwent Capital Markets raised eyebrows when it launched a hedge fund that used analysis of Twitter to predict movements in the stock market. Now the London-based firm is set to open up its technology for anyone to use via what it’s calling the “world’s first social media sentiment analysis trading platform.”

The service, set to launch in late summer, promises to allow investors and stock traders to monitor the global social media sentiment around any stock, commodity or currency in real-time – hopefully giving them an edge when they trade.

Derwent’s technology is based on a 2010 academic paper that showed how information from Twitter could predict how stock would perform. Since then it has been putting the theory to the test via its Derwent Absolute Return Fund. The new platform appears to essentially be ‘Radian6 for traders’, letting anyone put do the same with their own money. It will be available as both a browser-based service and a mobile app.

While the firm isn’t giving any more precise launch details than ‘”late summer,” we’ll be watching this one closely.

After raising a whopping $155 million in funding from DST, General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital at the end of last year, Swedish online payments company Klarna has brought two heavyweights from the haute finance industry on board – literally.

The company this morning announced that Nigel Morris, co-founder of Capital One, and Anton Levy, MD of General Atlantic, have joined its board of directors.

Morris co-founded Capital One and which grew the firm to one of the largest issuers of Visa and MasterCard in the world. During his 10-year tenure, Capital One’s sales grew revenue to $11 billion annually and a market cap of $18 billion.

Levy is a managing director at General Atlantic, and sits on the boards of companies like AKQA, Gilt Groupe, Red Ventures and Web.com.

Klarna’s board already had seats for two other big names from the investment world: Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital and Klaus Hommels.

The company says 6 million shoppers already using its service for after-delivery online payments, and that it currently handles over $2.5 billion worth of transactions annually for 15,000 merchants across Europe.

Watch this one, folks.

The social calling platform KipCall is now available for Android devices in beta version, the French startup announced during TC Disrupt in New York this week.

As we reported when the company launched its free iOS app last year, KipCall lets you call your Facebook friends without knowing their number and while keeping your own number private. As you can imagine, KipCall’s approach is opt-in, and you decide who can contact you and get a notification when you are around. It also goes without saying that you can block anyone.

But it isn’t only about masking numbers; callers are clearly identified, so you still know who is calling, thanks to Facebook names. If some of your friends don’t have Facebook, the company has its own sign-up system as well, with internal KipCall IDs. As part of a recent update, the app also lists all your contacts, including those who aren’t using KipCall, which means users may now use it as a substitute for the built-in Contacts app.

One of the most interesting things about KipCall is that it’s not relying on wi-fi or 3G – only traditional calls. In other words, this isn’t a data-based solution like WhatsApp, except for the chat feature it recently added to its iPhone app. As for its beta Android app, it’s fairly similar to the iOS version, except for simplified graphics and the absence of the chat feature, which will be added later on.

You may be wondering how operators feel about such an app, since KipCall is currently ad-supported (though will soon move to a freemium model.) Yet, traditional carriers are actually interested in partnering with the startup, KipCall’s CEO Yoann Valensi tells us. The rationale is actually pretty simple: while the young generation has been increasingly leaning towards other forms of communication, KipCall hopes to put traditional phone calls back in fashion.

As a matter of fact, one of the most promising ways for KipCall to monetize its technology is white-labeling. According to Valensi, his startup has just closed a deal to power internal calls for a major Chinese dating website, and could also offer a similar service to operators. However, the startup still plans to stay in the B2C business under its own brand as well.

➤  KipCall, via the App Store and Google Play

Nokia just announced on its Conversations blog that it is moving away from organizing one major annual event to organizing more than one “smaller, more intimate events” over the course of the year.

Each of these smaller events will be ‘tailored to a specific audience’, Nokia says.

“Think less CES, more SXSW,” the company writes. Does that mean more parties?

The smaller events will still be called Nokia World, mind you, but if you’ve already made travel arrangements for a trip to the one in Helsinki at the end of September, you’re going to want to cancel them.

Nokia has moved the date of the (first smaller) Nokia World event in the Finnish capital from 25-26 September (as previously communicated) to 5-6 September.

Furthermore, the event is now decidedly invitation-only, and the specific audience in this case is apparently ‘operator and retail partners’.

In the comments to the post on the Conversations blog, Nokia’s Heidi Lemmetyinen says “other Nokia activities for the media and bloggers will be announced in the coming weeks and months”.

Arranged since 2006, Nokia World used to bring together thousands of visitors, including journalists, analysts, carriers, developers, partners and Nokia employees.

The last big Nokia World was held in London in October 2011, where the Finnish phone maker first introduced the Asha line of handsets and the Windows Phone-powered Lumia 710 and 800 smartphones with some fanfare.

We’ve contacted Nokia to ask for more details about the format and timing changes.