IVP and Index Ventures co-led the round with equal investments and were joined by Atomico.

Perhaps even more impressive than the valuation and the size of the check is the company’s accelerating revenues. Supercell earned $179 million last quarter, including $104 million in pure profit. It earned $100 million last year, and is on track to earn at least $800 million this year, and perhaps even a billion dollars. The company earns $2.4 million per day.

It’s a far cry from Zynga, a once golden jewel of the gaming industry that currently trades for a third of its opening day IPO price due to declining revenues. The company had approached a billion dollars in revenue four years after its 2007 founding, but saw earnings continually plummet since mid-2012 as public interest in its games wanes.

As Supercell’s CEO Ilkka Paananen explains to Forbes, Supercell focuses more on the fun of the game than the revenue it will earn. “It really is that simple–just design something great, something that users love,” Paananen told the publication. It is known for celebrating failure, or more exactly, “the learning that comes from failure,” Paananen told Forbes. Whenever a game fails to make it to market, the entire company celebrates with a champagne toast, discusses what went wrong and what they can do better.

Another unique approach the company takes is the cellular game design model. Each game is built by a cellular team that reportedly has no autocratic leader by design.

Though the Finnish company currently has only two titles, Clash of Clans and Hay Day, they’re immensely popular at 8.5 million daily players who each play an average of 10 minutes every day. Supercell’s usage numbers are actually lower than Zynga’s, proving the company has more effective monetization of its base.

With the kind of profitable revenue Supercell has been raking in, it doesn’t really need the cash. It took the money and ran in order to pay off early investors, reward its employees, and avoid going public, at least for a while.

All shareholders, including Accel Partners who invested $12 million at a $52.3 million valuation, as well as employees sold 16.7 percent of their holdings to the new investors. Everyone walked away with some cash in their pockets, not just the executives and early investors.

Supercell plans to live up to its $770 million valuation. It strives to become the Pixar of mobile games, and plans to expand into Asia in the next three years to give billion-dollar Japanese companies GREE and DeNA a run for their money.

Supercell’s investors are certainly confident they can do it.

“…Staggering customer traction, revenue growth and profitability were not the main reasons we invested in Supercell,” explained Index Ventures Neil Rimer on his blog. “We have seen impressive numbers before– granted none quite as impressive as these — but what we found uniquely compelling was the way in which Ilkka Paananen and his team had managed to deliver two incredibly popular games which were showing no telltale signs of declining engagement, with such limited resources. … From our point of view, the Supercell rocket still has a long way to go. We believe it will be one of the companies that will leave a lasting mark on its industry….”

Supercell is proving that the Finnish market still has some impressive startups to deliver, despite the tumble of Nokia that has created a vacuum in the region. Rovio, another Finnish company, was a popular gaming entity with its popular title Angry Birds, and continues to offer a great degree of relevance in the market. Supercell is just another example of the region’s vitality. VCs are betting that its fast growth trajectory is only the beginning of a long journey to come.

The company will expand into eight new countries, bringing its total markets to 28. The new locations include Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mexico, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Iceland.

“Today we’re thrilled to announce that we’re bringing a new world of music to eight new markets

across the globe,” Spotify announced on its blog. “We’re taking our first steps in Latin America with Mexico, and Asia with Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. Plus we’re thrilled to make new friends in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Iceland. This fantastic step now brings us to 28 markets and closer to our dream of making all the world’s music available instantly to everyone, wherever and whenever they want it.”

Based in Stockholm, the company already serves users in the US, most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

Founded in 2008, Spotify offers on-demand music content. The company offers a free service that enables users to listen to an unlimited amount of music on desktops for free with advertising sponsorship. That aspect of the service currently has over 24 million active users, which are defined by anyone who has used it in the last 30 days. Spotify Unlimited lets users listen to advertising free music on desktops for $5 per month. The company also offers a premium edition that is advertising free, enables users to download an unlimited amount of music, and listen to the service on any device, including mobile. The paid service downloads can also be listened to without an Internet connection. It has six million paid subscribers.

The company pays about 70 percent of its revenue back to copyright owners, sharing royalty revenue with record labels and artists. It claims to be the solution to Internet piracy by offering users cheap access to music that circumvents the need for illegal downloads and file sharing.

Spotify is rivaled by Pandora, another streaming service that acts as a curated Internet radio based on the tastes of the user. Pandora vastly outsizes Spotify in its free service with 69 million users, but has struggled to earn a profit due to the hefty fees it pays in royalties.

The Spotify Unlimited Service will not be offered in Asia, the Next Web pointed out, as that service requires a desktop and the vast number of Asians using the service will likely do so through mobile. Users can choose a free option, which acts as a curated radio station similar to Pandora, or choose a Premium service for SG$9.90/HK$48.00/MYR 14.90 per month.

The expansion is certainly significant, especially considering the size of the Asian market. Facebook’s biggest market is Asia with more than 250 million registered users, so the region offers plenty of room for growth as the company strives to increase its paid user base.

Global Founders Capital will include three partners, including Siegel, Oliver and Marc Samwer, with a €150 million ($194 million) fund provided by unnamed tech entrepreneurs. It will operate separate from Rocket Internet, and will be location agnostic, but given the Samwer brothers name and its European base, it can be assumed that some regions will be given more focus, especially those where funding is scarce. With deals at €100,000 to €10 million, the new fund will focus on anything from seed to late stage that has the potential to lead one or several markets. It is said the fund will be similar to the European Founders Fund, previously launched by the Samwer brothers.

“I was fortunate throughout the last 15 years building Internet businesses. I believe the Internet is providing a once in a lifetime opportunity to entrepreneurs around the world,” Oliver Samwer said in a statement. “With Global Founders Capital we want to support these entrepreneurs with operational know-how, our network and the required funding to scale their businesses.”

Rather than providing follow-up funding or growth capital for Rocket Internet startups, this fund will focus on projects Rocket can’t do.

Though the fund has yet to announce any investments, the partners have already whittled down 800 leads to 130, with the expectation to do about 30 deals, the Wall St. Journal reported. The first investments will be announced later this year.

Much of the selection will have a data focus.

“A lot of VCs don’t appear to have a system. I am going to do 30 deals, but what happens to the 770 deals I am not doing? I want to track them, I want to look at the data. What can we learn from that?” Siegel told the Wall St. Journal. “Maybe we can build something that is more like a machine, that we can understand what works and what doesn’t. Or maybe we will find that it is all gut feeling after all.”

Harnessing the power of ammonia, Ductor hopes to revolutionize both garden farming and gas tanks by the end of this summer.

The company is developing what it claims to be the world’s first industrial scale ammonia and phosphate production technology based on a 100 percent biological process that actually reduces rather than contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. This allows it to create a low cost fertilizer that doesn’t pollute, as well as a commercially viable way to produce a crude oil alternative made from algae.

On the fertilizer side, Ductor’s technology replaces current industrial production of ammonia from natural gas and mining-based phosphates production. Ammonia and phosphate production are the basic components of fertilizer manufacturing that are also big contributors to pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. Under precise conditions as well as a specially patented brand population of bacteria, the company utilizes organic waste streams like slaughterhouse and food waste as feedstock materials to create ammonia through a natural process. Ammonia and phosphates are separated from the feedstock to make fertilizers, and the remaining biomass can be sold as black soil to optimize each resource. One hundred percent biologically produced, the fertilizers are equal in strength to chemically manufactured fertilizers, according to the company.

The company is also working on creating crude oil from algae in what it claims to be “the first commercially viable solution,” CEO Ari Ketola wrote in an email interview with Red Herring. Most R&D spent on creating crude oil from algae has focused on genetic manipulation of the algae, Ketola explained. Current approaches to crude oil also require intense energy to create it as well as an abundant supply of algae. Ductor’s bioprocess actually produces all the energy required, plus excess energy that it can then sell elsewhere. The company takes existing algae and optimizes growing conditions, using nutrients gathered through the Ductor bioprocess, as well as other undisclosed innovations. The resulting product has the needed mass to reach profitable production, according to Ketola.

The company is currently fine tuning its technology in a small scale bioprocess testing factory. Ketola estimates it is 1.5 years ahead of its original schedule. As a technology company, Ductor will license the technology to customers that will then manufacture the product.  Its technology will be ready for licensing by the end of the summer.

“Ductor’s innovation is a truly unique solution that will not only solve several key issues for our planet, but also creates a new, highly profitable business,” Ketola said. “The Ductor bioprocess is extremely economical as it produces its own energy for the process. Cost efficiency has been one of our leading bioprocess design principles, and we are absolutely confident that the overall business case is viable, also for developing countries.”

At the close of January, the company landed €1.1 million ($1.4 million) from TEKES (the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Research), which it will use to complete technology development and start commercialization. This brings Ductor funding to total €3.85 million ($5 million) for the past year as the company previously in 2012 raised another round of  €2.75 million ($3.58 million).  Naturally, the company targets the energy industry, but recycling industries like vendor rendering and food waste will also benefit from its technology as well as organic fertilizer manufacturers.

“This new Ductor technology will change several matters for our planet, secure food production, reduce CO2 emissions, reduce fertilizer-based pollution, free farming land from energy crops to food production,” Ketola said.

If all goes well, Ductor’s technology should be contributing to gas stations and gardens by the next harvest.

Last week, just a day before the death of the judge whose congressional nomination inspired the legislation, the Senate voted to relax the Video Privacy Protection Act passed in 1988 that had prohibited video service providers from sharing the viewing history of customers without consent.

Netflix spent $1 million lobbying the legislation in 2012, and about half that the year before. Though that’s an enormous pile of cash, it may very well have been worth every penny. The change clears the way for Netflix to cooperate with Facebook to offer social viewing feeds, creating a social sharing experience that would work similar to Spotify.

Netflix customers now have the ability to connect their Netflix account to Facebook to create a social experience where they can view what their friends have watched, liked and commented about on Netflix. The Netflix Facebook Friends feature includes two main views: favorite content as well as recently watched material. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg contributed to the design.

“You’ll see what titles your friends have watched in a new ‘Watched by your friends’ row and what they have rated four or five stars in a new ‘Friends’ Favorites’ row,”  Cameron Johnson, Director of Product Innovation at Netflix, explained in the company’s blog. “Your friends will also be able to see what you watch and rate highly.”

Those that opt into Facebook Friends can specify which content doesn’t get shared, so nobody knows you watched “Naked Nuns with Guns” or think you’re a fan of SpongeBob when it’s really your three year old.

Netflix customers voluntarily connect the service through their Facebook accounts, providing consent, so Netflix technically did not need Congress to amend the VPPA to introduce this feature, but likely waited until the political soup cleared as a precaution. If an error had led to one customer’s viewing history being shared without consent, the company would be in fairly hot water in a legal environment that has taken a staunch position on privacy issues in the wake of the tech revolution.

As Slate points out, the VPPA was passed in the wake of Senate Confirmation hearings of Judge Robert Bork. A reporter had interviewed a video store clerk and obtained Bork’s rental history. Though the story did not reveal anything inflammatory beyond the judge’s preference for British whodunit movies, the instance scared enough legislators who likely had rented behind the red curtain and had something to hide.

Whether people want to automatically share everything they watch remains to be seen. The service has been available to about 6 million customers in Canada, Latin America and the U.K., but only about 20 percent of subscribers signed up, Bloomberg reported. That service, however, didn’t let users choose what not to post. Likely the updated version that allows self-censorship will see greater adoption, thanks in part to a paranoid Congress in the late ’80s who didn’t want their constituents to know they rented “Revenge of the Nerds II” more than once.

“Social is going to be everything,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told Bloomberg in a January interview. “Our kids are way more social than us; their kids will be way more social than them. You tell your friends about what you watch and they’ll watch much more of what we offer.”

Prior to the roll out of Endorsements, LinkedIn users gathered longer testimonial recommendations to reflect their skills. Written recommendations are still a part of the site, but Endorsements turns the process into a streamlined service activated with one click. A prompt appears at the top of the company’s profile pages to promote the service.

Endorsements help LinkedIn keep users on the site longer, as well as increase engagement. They provide users a way to highlight skills and enhance their profiles, key as one of the biggest features of LinkedIn’s Premium Service is its advantages for job hunters. Endorsements increase LinkedIn’s abilities as a networking tool. Most importantly, Endorsements causes profiles to appear higher up in searches, making them four times more likely to be seen, the company claimed.

“We know how important it is for you to showcase your professional best on LinkedIn and we’ve made it easy for you manage what endorsements show up on your profile,” Peter Rusev, LinkedIn’s Associate Product Manager, wrote on the company’s blog. “This can be handy when someone visits your profile (think recruiter, business partner, or customer), so they can quickly see your top strengths and the diverse skills you bring to the table. With more eyeballs on your profile, you may even want to use the opportunity to spruce up your profile, such as adding a particular project or work experience to go alongside the endorsements you’ve gathered from your peers.”

And that engagement is steadily increasing, doubling weekly since the launch of Endorsements.
Still, Endorsements have become so easy to make that they’ve started to lose their meaning.
“While I initially viewed Endorsements with interest, now I consider them a nuisance,” Mashable writer Todd Wasserman noted in an op ed piece criticizing the validation of the function. “I find people I barely know endorsing me and the flurry of Endorsements in my inbox.”

In one of the most detailed and comprehensive reports ever detailed on cyber crime stemming from China, the 60 page report investigated attacks on more than 140 U.S. and other foreign corporations and entities over seven years that stole hundreds of terabytes of data. The report linked individual members of such sophisticated Chinese hacking groups as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” to the doorsteps of headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398, a Chinese military post on the outskirts of Shanghai. The company could not prove the activities took place inside the 12 story building, but argued that no other plausible reason existed for why such a large number of attacks originated from such a small area. More than 90 percent of the attacks came from the vicinity of that location.

“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398,” said Kevin Mandia, the founder and chief executive of Mandiant, told the New York Times, “or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.”

To back up the allegations, Mandiant published a video of screenshots detailing the Chinese attacks.

Most of the companies were US based, though some were smaller U.S. local, state and federal government agencies and international governmental organizations overseas. More than stealing corporate secrets, the attacks are increasingly targeting critical infrastructure. Alarmingly, one North American target was a company that provided remote access to more than 60 percent of oil and gas pipelines in North America.

Chinese government officials denied the allegations, contending their country has been the target of a number of cyber-attacks stemming from the US.

‘‘Making unfounded accusations based on preliminary results is both irresponsible and unprofessional, and is not helpful for the resolution of the relevant problem,’’ said Hong Lei, a ministry spokesman. ‘‘China resolutely opposes hacking actions and has established relevant laws and regulations and taken strict law enforcement measures to defend against online hacking activities.’’

Following the report, the White House announced a broad effort using diplomatic approaches to deter cybercrime, though it fell short on specifying fines or other trade actions. The report calls for diplomatic pressure to foreign leaders to discourage theft and enhancing US legal operations to investigate and prosecute hackers.

“Trade secret theft threatens American businesses, undermines national security and places the security of the U.S. economy in jeopardy,” the White House report stated.  ”These acts also diminish U.S. export prospects around the globe and put American jobs at risk.”

“Square Register has always made it easy for businesses to begin accepting payments and run their business beautifully. Business in a Box is an initiative to replace hardware on the counter-top,” Jesse Dorogusker, Square’s Vice President of Register, told the Wall St. Journal. “What most businesses already have is a strange collection of dinosaurs and calculators, and this is an easy replacement for all those things.”

The package includes two Square readers, a swiveling iPad holder that’s secure and counter friendly, and a cash drawer. A Star Micronics TSP143L Receipt Printer is available for an additional $300, but as PC World points out, the same printer is available through Newegg for $260. Aside from the Square reader, the components are sold by third party merchants but are wirelessly connected and compatible with Square Register.

An iPad app that complements the Square Reader, Square Register is a photo-powered registry that inventories products for easier checkout. The app also enables merchants to track customer loyalty, which items sell the best, and which hours the store is the busiest.

The package makes it easy for merchants to establish a point of sale system quickly and easily. Previously, merchants using Square had to figure out how to prop up their iPad as well as secure it, and had to provide their own cash drawer.

And businesses save money over traditional commerce systems. Square charges one fee of 2.75 percent per transaction, or a flat $275 monthly fee for large vendors. Unlike a traditional cash register, a merchant using Square just needs to take the iPad home to tally sales metrics in the comforts of their own living room. Plus, most cash register systems are also not compatible with Evernote, Documents To Go, or TableTop Translator, which makes Square’s approach all the more tempting.

Processing payments over a $10 billion annual run rate, Square serves over 3 million businesses and people.

So far, the Business in a Box package only works with the iPad, though it may be open to Android platforms in the future.

“We’re huge Android fans, we have a killer Android team, it’s a first-class citizen with awesome technology,” Dorogusker told the Wall St. Journal. “But there isn’t a single Android tablet you can name like the iPad, and that says something about distribution. But we have no religion when it comes to that.”

Merchants can sign up for the point of sale package here.

Last December, the Unabhaengiges Landeszentrum fuer Datenschutz maintained that as German law protects “the fundamental right to freedom of expression on the Internet,” German citizens should be able to utilize the social network “largely unnoticed and without fear of unpleasant consequences” by using a pseudonym. That’s a direct contradiction of Facebook’s real names policy, which requires users to use their real names “so you always know who you’re connecting with,” as the policy states. Facebook said the rule is designed to “keep communities safe,” though it does little to actively enforce the policy when user’s opt for alternative names.

“It is unacceptable that a U.S. portal like Facebook violates German data protection law unopposed and with no prospect of an end,” Thilo Weichert, Privacy Commissioner and head of ULD, said in a statement at the time. “The aim of the orders of ULD is to finally bring about a legal clarification of who is responsible for Facebook and to what this company is bound to.”

The court effectively ruled that German data protection laws did not apply to Facebook as the company’s European division was headquartered in Ireland and outside of German jurisdiction.
In response, the ULD pointed out that the ruling effectively creates “a one-stop-shop system such as in a European privacy basic regulation,” according to a translated statement from the German data protection agency. It vowed to appeal on the grounds that the agency should have jurisdiction over the use of the network by German citizens.

Thilo Weichert ,head of the ULD, described the court’s decision  as “more than amazing” and “contradictory.”

Naturally, Facebook celebrated the decision.

“We are pleased with the decision, [which] we believe … is a step into the right direction,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. “We hope that our critics will understand that it is the role of individual services to determine their own policies about anonymity within the governing law – for Facebook Ireland European data protection and Irish law. We therefore feel affirmed that the orders are without merit.”

Before anybody gets too excited, it’s worth noting that the bill’s predecessors, Startup Acts 1.0 and 2.0, never made it past the Senate floor.

The bill would give an entrepreneurial visa to up to 75,000 foreign born entrepreneurs who have a H-1B or F-1 visa who invest or raise investments of at least $100,000 and start a business that employs at least two full-time employees not related to them. The entrepreneurs would then have three years to grow that staff to at least five, when they could then apply to remove a conditional status on their visa.

“Entrepreneurs who have an idea, who are wiling to invest money here, ought to be welcome here,” Moran told the Hill. “Other countries are moving rapidly to attract and recruit the kind of individuals we need in this country and their entrepreneurial abilities.”

The act also includes a provision that would create visas to allow up to 50,000 foreign students with a master’s or P.hD. in math, science, engineering, math or tech disciplines (STEM) to stay in the U.S. on a “conditional status” if they remain engaged in a technical field for five years, after which they could become permanent legal residents with the option to become naturalized citizens.

While the bill’s first two efforts, including one spurred by Senator John Kerry, failed to see the light of day, the renewed push for immigration reform on the part of both parties following last November’s election gives the bill promise.

Venture capitalist and AOL founder Steve Case testified before Congress in support of the bill this week.

“Numerous bipartisan, high-skilled immigration proposals have been teed up in recent months that contain smart reforms aimed at righting this policy,” said Case. “A combination of these reforms should make up a core component of a comprehensive immigration package. The Startup Act permits entrepreneurs and STEM graduates to stay and set up businesses.”