New York-based Shapeways sells 3D printing services to designers and makers and also has an Etsy-like marketplace for creators. The startup, a transplant from the Netherlands, was printing more than 100,000 products a month and had over 150,000 users inside its community last year, so has no doubt grown that audience and volume since then.

Last month Shapeways debuted their new API which enables developers to create consumer facing applications that can tap into the Shapeways printing network and marketplace. That’s important because, as GigaOM Pro analyst Mike Wolf explained it, the API gives Shapeways greater access to the bigger, non-maker audience who want access to 3D printed objects but don’t want to learn how to use sophisticated 3D design software.

Shapeways has been planning to expand through its new New York factory, which is supposed to occupy up to 30,000 feet in Long Island City. Previously, much of the printing work was being done in Europe at its Eindhoven factory in the Netherlands or through partners.

Check out our Field Guide to 3D Printing on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), which defines 3D printing as:

[A] process that produces physical 3D objects by adding layer upon layer of material. Direct from a computer model, objects are “grown.” These objects can be almost anything: engineering prototypes of automotive components, tooling for manufacturing, medical implants, architectural models and sellable goods for end users.

We’ll be digging into 3D printing more at our RoadMap conference on connected design in November in San Francisco. To be the first to register for this event sign up here.

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In other words, it is very mainstream and very big. And that is why Moleskine went public today on the Milan Stock Exchange. Its shares were priced at 2.30 euros a share. The company raised 245 million euros, or roughly $314 million. It is valued at roughly $626 million. Moleskin had revenues of 78.1 million euros and a profit of about 18.1 million euros in 2012. The stock jumped 3.9 percent today before falling slightly.

Here is a little background on the company from its prospectus:

The company grew out of the experience of Modo&Modo, a small Milanese publisher that in 1997 created the Moleskine trademark, rediscovering and renewing an extraordinary tradition. In the fall of 2006, Modo&Modo was purchased by SGCapital Europe, now Syntegra Capital, with the objective of fully developing the potential of the Moleskine brand. Since 1 January 2007, Moleskine has also become the name of the company that owns the worldwide trademark rights for the brand.  In the fall of 2006, Modo&Modo was purchased by SGCapital Europe, now Syntegra Capital, with the objective of fully developing the potential of the Moleskine brand.

The IPO is a windfall for Index Ventures, one of the investors in Moleskine. The company is making efforts to cash in on its tech connections. It recently partnered with Evernote for a smart notebook and also has started a community for Moleskine customers. By the way, all the cool kids are now using Field Notes, which is, well, cooler.

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Path CEO Dave Morin. Photo by Om Malik

Path, the San Francisco-based startup that offers private social networking services, has reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (pending judicial approval) on alleged violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protections Act (COPPA). As part of the settlement, the company will pay a fine of $800,000 and has purged about 3,000 accounts from the network. The settlement requires Path to establish a comprehensive privacy program and to obtain independent privacy assessments every other year for the next 20 years, the FTC said in a statement.

The discovery of the underage members came as a byproduct of the FTC investigation into the privacy fiasco over the uploading of iPhone address books to Path’s servers without the permission of the individuals. That privacy breach became a major headache for the company, including stoking  the ire of a very irate Apple. The company later changed its policies.

In a statement, the FTC said:

“Over the years the FTC has been vigilant in responding to a long list of threats to consumer privacy, whether it’s mortgage applications thrown into open trash dumpsters, kids information culled by music fan websites, or unencrypted credit card information left vulnerable to hackers,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz.  “This settlement with Path shows that no matter what new technologies emerge, the agency will continue to safeguard the privacy of Americans.”

In addition to the $800,000 civil penalty, Path is prohibited from making any misrepresentations about the extent to which it maintains the privacy and confidentiality of consumers’ personal information.  The proposed settlement also requires Path to delete information collected from children under age 13 and bars future violations of COPPA.  Path has already deleted the address book information that it collected during the time period its deceptive practices were in place.

Dave Morin, Path’s founder and chief executive officer, said that the company had identified the accounts in February 2012 and by May 2012 had implemented changes to its sign-up process that automatically caught the underage sign-ups. Path discovered the issue on its own and addressed it (that is, they removed and blocked minors under the age of 13 from the service) before the FTC approached the company, Morin said. Path is currently compliant with COPPA rules. Morin said that the typical Path user is about 25 years old. The company, which has about 6 million registered users, is targeting families for using Path to share personal moments, so this particular settlement offers up a new and unique set of challenges to the company.

Morin said that the big reason the underage children were able to get into the network is because the company didn’t have requisite checks and balances in the system. In a blog post that the company shared with us, Morin explained:

Today the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it reached a settlement pending court approval with Path regarding alleged violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protections Act (COPPA). The gist of the FTC’s complaint is this: early in Path’s history, children under the age of 13 were able to sign up for accounts. A very small number of affected accounts have since been closed by Path.

As you may know, we ask users’ their birthdays during the process of creating an account. However, there was a period of time where our system was not automatically rejecting people who indicated that they were under 13. Before the FTC reached out to us, we discovered and fixed this sign-up process qualification, and took further action by suspending any under age accounts that had mistakenly been allowed to be created.

We want to share our experience and learnings in the hope that others in our industry are reminded of the importance of making sure services are in full compliance with rules like COPPA. From a developer’s perspective, we understand the tendency to focus all attention on the process of building amazing new things. It wasn’t until we gave our account verification system a second look that we realized there was a problem. We hope our experience can help others as a reminder to be cautious and diligent.

Throughout this experience and now, we stand by our number one commitment to serve our users first.

Path has raised a total of $41.2 million from investors such as Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Redpoint Ventures. It was rumored that Google offered a couple hundred million dollars for the company.

Updated at 2.22 Pm: Jeffrey Paul, a researcher discovered another privacy bug in Path’s software. The company says it has fixed the problem and the update has been sent to Apple.

Path’s iOS app (yes, that same Path that was caught stealing users’ entire address books last February) will use the embedded EXIF tag location information from photos in the iOS Camera Roll to geotag your posts, even when you’ve explicitly disabledLocation Services for the Path application. (The app knows, of course, that it’s not getting location data via normal means from Location Services, yet behaves this wayeven in that case.)

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The company and idea were created by David Friedberg — also the founder and CEO of The Climate Corporation — and Steve Pretre, who will lead the startup as its CEO. Friedberg brought in Climate Corp’s investors (as well as Climate Corp itself) to back MetroMile, and the company has already raised $4 million from NEA, Index Ventures, First Round Capital, and SV Angel, in addition to Climate Corp.

Customers using MetroMile’s new service — which is only available in Oregon because it needs state approval — place a device called the Metronome into their car’s onboard diagnostic car port, called the OBD-II. You might have never noticed it, but the OBD-II is standard port on all cars built after 1996, and has to be accessible in the front dashboard within three feet of the driver. The port is one of the ways that car data is being unlocked for third party developers (see my GigaOM Pro report, subscription required).

After the Metronome is plugged in, it accesses all the car computer’s data, and specifically collects (for this initial product) information about how much the customer is driving. The cellular connection in the Metronome enables MetroMile to process the data in the cloud, and the Metronome also has GPS to track distance. I was wondering if a cell phone app would have the brains to do this just as easily (and clearly more cheaply), and Friedberg told me in an interview that they need the data to be collected by a device to avoid fraud and ensure accountability.

Once MetroMile has the driving data, it can charge its customer only for how much — or how little — they’ve driven per month. Drivers who only occasionally use their car — say for weekend trips — would pay much lower rates than a person who commutes in their car an hour every day, each way.

While the idea sounds boringly simple, it’s meant to target a specific set of drivers that doesn’t drive all that much and who for years have been subsidizing those drivers that do drive a lot through traditional car insurance programs. Most of the accidents are done by drivers that drive a lot, says Friedberg. This new type of low mileage demographic tends to be young, urban, environmentally conscious, and maybe even a member of car sharing groups like Zipcar.

That target demographic is alive and well in MetroMile’s initial city, Portland, where the dream of the 90′s are also alive, and everything has a bird on it. MetroMile said it can offer this type of driver insurance for 20 to 50 percent less cost than traditional insurance, with equal or even superior coverage. Friedberg told me that MetroMile has discussed its insurance products with car sharing companies, but that the company is really targeting car owners, as car sharing drivers are still a small slice of the population.

MetroMile also shows the customer their driving data through an online dashboard. Down the road, MetroMile could offer other types of services using car data. I could envision a service that gives recommendations for how to cut down on driving (to save fuel costs), in the same way that Opower provides recommendations for lowering energy consumption.

In that way, MetroMile, like the Climate Corporation, could have a planet-friendly slant. Once car drivers know more data about their own driving habits, their likely inclined to drive their car more efficiently.

The traditional insurance companies are also looking at using devices and data to create new products, and the New York Times had an interesting article on this trend this weekend. Friedberg says that standard insurance companies won’t readily accept pay-per-mile insurance rates because then they would be forced to raise rates on the drivers that drive a lot more, to cover the lower mileage drivers; drivers that face higher rates then would just defect to competitors, said Friedberg. Car drivers are also wary of what types of data the car insurance companies are collecting with these new devices, and also how the insurance companies would use such data.

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And yet the ambition is there — and company he runs, online vacation rental company HouseTrip, is doing well right now. It just raised $40 million and is even pushing the much-vaunted Airbnb into second place in parts of Europe.

The businesses are not exact rivals — HouseTrip focuses on helping people rent entire homes for their breaks, rather than rooms — but they are both taking the continent seriously. There are a number of different ways you can compare the two companies, and in many cases Airbnb comes out on top: it’s certainly the biggest beast in some of the popular urban destinations around Europe, even when you strip out the room-only listings.

But at a national level, Housetrip is ahead in many countries across the continent — with far better coverage of rural locations and out-of-the-way hotspots that appeal to families on vacation, rather than urban travelers on short breaks. In its home market of France, for example, Housetrip emerges narrowly ahead in volume, while in other popular destinations (Spain, Croatia and others) it boasts a greater lead in its number of listings.

In a highly competitive market that includes rivals like Wimdu, OneFineStay and many, many more, that’s no mean feat.

And the fact that Bertrand cuts against the grain is, perhaps, part of the reason for that success.

The Insider

After all, unlike most of the people fighting for this market, he didn’t end up in the business by accident: he started out in the world of hotels. The idea for HouseTrip came to him and his wife, Junjun Chen, while they were studying at Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne, the oldest and most famous hospitality school in the world.

“When I studied hospitality over five years I guess what you really understand is service — how to make people feel welcome,” he says.

“If you ask the team I’m very, very detail-oriented, and the product is all in the detail. What gave me that focus on the details, certainly, was studying hospitality. In Paris hotels, if one pillow is not perfect, or one knife is not exactly two centimeters from the edge of the table, it’s a big, big deal.”

Hidden underneath his crop of curly red hair, it seems, is a mind focused on getting it right and almost nothing else.

The company, which started in Switzerland but now has its HQ in London, became unique when it took on its latest funding. The round was led by Accel, making HouseTrip the only company that all three of Europe’s leading venture firms — Accel, Balderton and Index — have backed. They’re all on board because they see a massive opportunity, and (perhaps) a chance for Europe to exert its power over foreign competition.

This, says Bertrand, plays to the continent’s natural strengths.

“When you look at most of the big travel companies, they’re European-based,” he explains. “By far the biggest is Booking.com, which is a Dutch startup. Travel is different maybe because that’s our DNA in Europe: Most of the market is European; Most of the schemes for decades have been European; We invented the hospitality industry, and so on.”

He may be overstating the case a little (Booking.com is a powerhouse, but it was acquired by the Connecticut-based Priceline back in 2005) but Europe is definitely HouseTrip’s stronghold right now. Its biggest cities include Paris, Barcelona, London and Berlin, where demand is high and the company is working hard to keep its supply of listings closely matched.

But while Bertrand says those large locations are profitable — Paris, he claims, hit breakeven nearly two years ago — the company is taking on a lot of funding: near $60 million at last count. He is using venture money, he says, to try and achieve scale. This means opening up new destinations and bringing on fresh listings, which can be an expensive, arduous task.

“Destinations that are big and have reached critical mass are profitable, but we’re expanding to lots of new places at any one time and that’s what really costs the money — but that’s what gives us so much growth,” he says.

“We could decide tomorrow that we’re happy with the existing destinations we have and become much more profitable, but we still think there is huge room for growth, so we want to capture the opportunities.”

Focus, focus, focus

For now, however, that need to grow is tempered by the desire to keep quality up — his obsession with quality. That means that although cities outside Europe, like New York, are growing fast, the company is primarily sticking to what it knows best.

“I think Europe will still be our focus in the medium term. This market is a European market, and if you conquer Europe you can conquer the world.”

For all the drama and talk of competition between HouseTrip and Airbnb and the rest of them, though, it’s only a small part of a very large story. Holiday rental is a big industry — big enough to support a public company like Homeaway, which is currently valued at around $2 billion — but it’s dwarfed by the much larger hotel sector.

And long-term success may require a change in strategy for many of the players in the game. Like others in the collaborative consumption sector, I have spoken to, Bertrand believes that Airbnb is soon going to have to move sideways into some unexpected markets to maintain the growth its investors seek.

After all, there’s a certain kind of pressure that comes from the $220 million that Airbnb has now had pumped into it — maybe more soon, if rumors that Peter Thiel is interested in investing another $150 million pan out. Building a company that can match those expectations may mean expansion into areas like, say, car rental, or a deal with the hotel industry to offload empty rooms.

Bertrand doesn’t think the same sort of pressure will come to bear on HouseTrip, even with the bundles of cash it has taken. For a start, he says with a smile, his wife and co-founder Junjun is the CFO. But more importantly, his business fundamentals are more sound: renting entire homes means that the average booking on the site is higher than many of its rivals. And that, in turn, gives it a stronger position to attack new destinations, new places.

But more than that, it’s a philosophy.

“My whole vision from the beginning is that holiday rental is much better than hotels, more authentic, and a much better way to travel,” he says. “I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror.”

Still room at the inn

It’s clear that this game still has a long way to go, and the market in two or three years may look very different from today. The vast number of names currently in the mix are likely to consolidate, and perhaps one or two of them will get snapped up by the bigger travel giants.

Still, though, Bertrand says there’s a lot of headroom — even at the most basic levels.

“We’re still focusing on what we call internally the low hanging fruit — on the rental side, that’s people who have been renting out holiday rentals for a long time and are simply looking for a more efficient way of doing it. When you look at that market in Europe it’s 3 million properties, it’s massive and there’s a lot of room to grow in there.”

And how many of those 3 million properties would HouseTrip need to make Bertrand feel comfortable?

“Three million is the answer,” he says, without blinking.

Oh yeah. There’s that ambition again.

Update: This post has been edited and updated to clarify how Housetrip is “beating” Airbnb in Europe. More detail in the comments.

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The new round, led by Redpoint Ventures, boasts some big names: Goldman Sachs, Silicon Valley Bank, Index Ventures and GGV Capital, with existing investors Benchmark Capital, Matrix Partners and Charles River Ventures all taking part as well. It’s by far the biggest injection Zendesk has received, taking the firm’s total funding to date up to $86m.

As for the UI revamp, Zendesk EMEA chief Matt Price told me it was very much a reflection of the consumerization trend – it’s around 18 months since the company rolled out its iPad app, and the positive feedback from that apparently stimulated the browser interface refresh.

“For us that meant we really had to make it beautifully simple,” Price said. “We needed to make sure that when an agent logs in, they see everything they need in one place, and when an enquiry comes in from a customer, everything related to that is in one place.”

That related data can come from a variety of sources, from social media to live chat sessions. Zendesk has had these features for a while, as customers these days tend to have their own communications channel preferences, but older versions required the agent to keep switching tools.

And there’s more on the unification front too: another key feature of the new product is the Zendesk Apps application framework, which provides 75 prebuilt integration points for the likes of Salesforce.com and JIRA.

“We found many people integrate Zendesk into other systems to gather information,” Price said. “They might want to get information out of a CRM system, or on a particular technical issue from an internal system.”

Apart from all the talk of big bucks and sleek UIs, one of the quieter parts of Zendesk’s announcement was the expansion of the platform’s number of supported languages to 12.

That’s very much geared towards a revitalised push into the European market, Price suggested. And to back that up, he added that Zendesk will shortly be opening a Berlin office.

It’s not like Zendesk was lacking a European base before – it was after all founded in Denmark and also has a London office – but it’s clearly targeting an expansion of its existing user base on the continent.

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Much of the public debate pushing for London’s resurgence has been steered by Index Ventures, probably Europe’s leading venture firm. Neil Rimer, one of the firm’s founding partners, argued back in May that the circular argument is the result of a defeatist mindset; a couple of months later his colleague Robin Klein suggested that London’s huge, dominant financial community needed to step up its game.

Now a report from Bloomberg looks at the issue and suggests that the British government could relax some of its rules on IPOs. Right now, for examples, companies listing on the London Stock Exchange are required to sell at least 25 percent of their shares, compared to just 10 percent on the Nasdaq. Lowering that number may be on the cards.

To attract more technology firms […] Britain is considering new rules that would make the London Stock Exchange (LSE) more attractive to startups. Taking a page from the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act approved by the U.S. Congress this year, the government may cut the minimum stake IPO candidates are required to sell, from 25 percent to 10 percent.

“The U.K is looking into adopting elements of the U.S. JOBS Act, relaxing rules including equity listings,” Rohan Silva, a technology adviser to Cameron, said.

The result, perhaps, may be to claw back some of the ground lost. According to the report, tech IPOs in the U.S. accounted for $18.7 billion raised in the past 12 months, while the entire IPO market in Western Europe — technology or otherwise, across a number of exchanges — accounted for just $5.6 billion. In fact it seems only Russian companies are interested in floating in London — and even then, not very often.

So will it work? There are reasons to be hopeful, but it’s going to be difficult.

For those championing London as a place to go public, the arguments are deep, philosophical, heartfelt. It’s about what Europe should do if it wants to build a better startup culture and turn towards a technology-based economy.

But the counter-argument is simple and practical: why bother? The New York exchanges have greater access to capital and better liquidity; companies going public want to maximize their returns; from a corporate perspective, anyone choosing to go elsewhere is putting a fuzzy principle above the interests of their business. That’s tough to beat.

Bull photograph courtesy of Shutterstock/SeanPavlonePhoto

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It’s fair to say that the site, which provides game-like online courses to teach people how to code, has had a blockbuster year so far. It’s spent 2012 seeing enormous growth, adding new marketplace features, and gaining a legion of fans, including New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.

But even though the site has seen a breathless rise to prominence, the money isn’t just being used to keep the servers spinning while demand grows: it’s got ambitions too.

Ahead of an on-stage interview with me at LeWeb London on Tuesday, co-founder Zach Sims told me that the new funds “give us the ability to go international” — something useful given that 50 percent of the company’s user base already comes from outside the U.S.

And in a post on the company’s blog, he explains his belief that the latest investors are well-placed to help it achieve that expansion.

“A few weeks after we launched Code Year, we met Neil Rimer and Saul Klein of Index Ventures.  Saul told us, about the world he wanted for his kids – one where code was a foreign language as important as Chinese and English for people to learn.  Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins visited our office around the same time and painted a picture of a few industries that needed to be shaken up – education chief among them.”

“It became clear that we needed partners who both understood the importance of a global company… and the process of scaling a company far beyond the nine people we have grown to now.”

It’s actually the first investment from Index’s new €350 million early stage fund, but still, it’s only eight months since the business announced its last round of funding, a $2.5 million round from investors including Union Square Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Michael Arrington’s Crunchfund.

This time round Union Square is following up, with Index’s Saul Klein leading the round and KPCB’s Mary Meeker joining in too.

So what do they see in it?

Index’s Klein told me that he was excited by Codecademy for many reasons, but not least because “it’s not a content-needy educational publisher” but “a marketplace for students and teachers.”

He also pointed out that with a global depression, it made sense to back a company that gives people the chance to learn new skills and potentially find jobs that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to access.

That seems a proposition that is not just popular with VCs but also a magnet for billionaire tycoons: not only did Bloomberg express his support for the site, but investors include Russian Yuri Milner (who adds to his previous investment) and Virgin founder Richard Branson.

Here’s my chat with Zach Simms at LeWeb:

Photograph of Codecademy founders Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Hack NY

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Volpi is quoted as saying:

“We looked at a lot of deals but didn’t think that many had the same potential as tech deals, because they relied too much on subsidies. We did a couple, including a tire recycling company, but I wouldn’t say that it’s still a focus.”

Index is just the latest venture firm to decide that cleantech investing isn’t so compatible with the venture capital model. Draper Fisher Jurvetson also has shied away from cleantech investing in recent month. Both DFJ partners Raj Atluru and Josh Raffaelli left DFJ months ago to join Silver Lake Kraftwerk and it doesn’t seem like they were ever replaced.

Both Kleiner’s Ray Lane and Bill Joy, who were greentech champions, weren’t named as general partners on Kleiner Perkins’ next fund. So basically they will continue to take care of their current investments, but they won’t go out looking for new ones for the next fund. While Kleiner says it’s not changing its strategy away from greentech, its actions seem to suggest otherwise.

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The company — which now has major presence in Geneva, London and San Francisco — is best known for investing in European internet businesses like Skype, MySQL and Lovefilm. But over the past few years it has expanded its presence elsewhere too, with significant moves in San Francisco, New York and Tel Aviv.

It’s three years since Index last raised an early stage fund, which was around the same size.

Partner Neil Rimer told me that the new money would be invested in around 35 companies over the next three years — linking up with entrepreneurs at the very beginnings of their business, and (where possible) following them all the way to an exit.

“In terms of where the rubber meets the road in our business, it’s really early stage,” he said. “It’s meeting two guys with an idea and an early version of the site and deciding to help them. This is our core, this is really what we do.”

Europe remains a focus for the company, not least because Rimer recently railed against ‘defeatist’ European companies who shied away IPOs in London in favor of New York. His argument centered around the idea that this created a vicious spiral in which the fact that few successful tech IPOs happen in Europe causes to discount going public in Europe.

So will he be making sure that Index’s European investments stick by their guns?

“It definitely struck a chord,” he said. “When I called people defeatist, they thought I was calling them wimps — but I’m calling myself a wimp too: unless we fix this thing, we’re being defeatist. We can’t just assume that all of our great companies, all of this work will go into enriching American investors, and all of our great companies will move to the U.S.”

Index’s focus will remain on areas where it is already active: things like fashion, marketplaces, big data and knowledge. And the money is already starting to be distributed, so keep your eyes out for new funding announcements coming soon.

And what about long term vision? Venture capitalists have investors of their own to worry about — and getting returns on €350 million is no small feat in an industry that many say is broken. So what’s Index looking for this time?

“The best funds return between three and 10 times the fund, and sometimes more than that,” he said. “We’re shooting for 10x.”

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