Zillow, the popular online real estate search engine, just announced that it has closed its previously announced $40 million acquisition of RentJuice. With RentJuice, Zillow now owns a rental relationship management service for landlords, property managers and rental brokers that helps them market their inventory and client relationships. RentJuice is currently being used to manage one million rental units and their rental listings.

Ticket search engine SeatGeek is best known as the place to find good deals on sports tickets, but it's working to dominate ticketing for any live events, including concerts. It just announced its first partnership deals on the music side, with AOL Music (which is, yes, owned by the same parent company as TechCrunch), Pollstar, and Emusic. Now, if you go to AOL Music, for example, and you're looking at Justin Bieber's tour dates, clicking on any of the "Get Tickets" buttons will take you to the relevant SeatGeek page. (For the record: Using Justin Bieber as the example was SeatGeek's idea, not mine.) The page includes a list of tickets available from a range of other sites including StubHub, eBay, and TicketsNow, and a map showing where all those tickets would actually seat you.

The online mapping space is quickly heating up. What used to be a relatively straightforward competition between Google and Microsoft (with Openstreetmap and a few other smaller players standing on the sidelines) will likely become a far more complex scenario now that Apple is likely to reveal its own solution at its WWDC later this month. Google, it seems, is trying to steal some thunder from Apple and is holding an invite-only press event in San Francisco where the company promises to unveil "the next dimension of Google Maps."

Earlier this month, Bing, the other white meat search engine, revealed its big redesign, which put a heavy emphasis on social search. Today, Microsoft announced the new version of Bing.com is now available to all U.S. users. Nothing has changed between then and now, but if you regularly visit Bing.com to perform searches (ha, right?) then you'll definitely notice a big difference. The new search interface opts for cleaner search results, a three-column design, and deeper Facebook integration.

In an excellent piece by David Sanger, the NY Times has confirmed what we all suspected: that the US deployed the Stuxnet worm, a powerful worm that targets very specific machines within Iran's nuclear enrichment program.

Max Schrems, the Austrian founder of Europe Vs. Facebook, has forced Facebook to put proposed policy changes up for a vote by all its users. By mobilizing his privacy group to flood Facebook's Site Governance page with pasted messages, many more than 7,000 comments were received on the proposal -- the threshold for triggering a vote. Europe Vs. Facebook is demanding sweeping changes to Facebook's product rather than the small policy changes found in the proposal Today the one-week voting period opens on a set of a relatively benign changes and Facebook will notify users by web and mobile. If over 30% of Facebook's active users, or 230 million people, vote for the changes they'll go into effect, and if they vote against they'll be scrapped. Otherwise Facebook will take the changes "under advisory". Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer for Policy Erin Egan told me yesterday the company will consider changing its site governance voting system to discourage votes being triggered by low-quality comments and adapt to the growing size of Facebook's user base.

While in the US the visibility of women in technology startups is pretty well established, in Europe it's suffered a little from the more general problem of the fragmented nature of the European tech scene. Things have improved slightly in recent years (at least that's my impression, although who knows about the stats on the ground?), but it remains the case that there are far more men than women. So lifting the visibility of women in technology is no bad thing, especially if it encourages other women to pursue careers in tech startups, which are typically more about meritocratic, flat management that the traditional "IT" roles. So it's a welcome moment that the newly established Girls in Tech London group (@girlsintech_uk) has announced their pick of the Top 100 women in tech in Europe.

Waxing for two at Take-It-Offs in Scranton? $100 worth of Polka lessons for 40 cents? An avant garde grilled cheese sandwich meal with metal shavings in it at Chez Naif for $60? You don't want any of those daily deals, right? But they're still coming. Two people (lovers, really), Edwin Hermawan and Lea Pische, wanted to fight back. And they did. With UnsubscribeDeals.com. "We stopped buying daily deals a long time ago, but the emails kept coming. We had to find a way to stop them," said Hermawan.

Happy Friday, here's some more patent trolling nonsense for you today: Google said on Thursday it had filed a complaint with the European Commission which claims cell phone maker Nokia is colluding with Microsoft to make money off their patents. The complaint states that the two companies are using proxy companies (read: patent trolls) to fight against Google Android. Nokia has since called the complaint both "frivolous" and "wrong," while Microsoft said it was a "desperate tactic."

Cricket Communications made waves yesterday morning when they announced that they would be the first prepaid carrier in the country to offer Apple's iPhone, and now it seems that other contract-averse carriers may soon do the same. TechnoBuffalo purports that Sprint-owned Boost Mobile will soon enter the fray by selling Apple's little mobile juggernaut come "early September." Like Cricket, the Sprint subsidiary is said to sell the iPhone 4 and 4S, though there's currently no word on what kinds of plans will be available for it should this launch come to pass.

Another entry in the mobile-first, private social networking for families space (yes, apparently this is a thing now): 23snaps, a new iOS application that works like a mini-Facebook for posting status updates, photos and videos of your kids. The app isn't anywhere near as dazzling as current private social network darling Path, but it's a functional and easy-to-use alternative to the typical private sharing paradigm: the group SMS.

Watch out, Best Buy and Samsung. Ikea is seemingly doing to home entertainment systems what Apple did to portable electronics. The company previously revealed its upcoming entrance into the home theater market. As the video above clearly shows, Ikea is injecting a full dose of their Swedish magic into the Uppleva line. Never mind about the thought that Apple might disrupt the TV market. Ikea is already doing it.

Much of the time when you talk about browser market share, it's in the context of IE vs. Chrome vs. all the rest. But new data released from e-commerce technology company Monetate today has thrown the mobile version of Safari into the mix. The result? The firm found Mobile Safari to be the most rapidly growing web browser over the past year on its sites, going from 5.84% in Q1 2011 to 11.12% in Q1 2012. That's not to say it's the top browser - Internet Explorer still holds that crown - but its impact is being felt.

Ever want to re-watch one of those awesome and inspirational five-minute Nike ads, but didn't know where to look? Video ad distributor Sharethrough has rolled out a new video portal that is designed to bring together all the most innovative branded ads all in one place. With the launch of Sharethrough.tv, the startup hopes to aggregate the largest repository of branded videos on the web. By doing so, brands and agencies will be able to search through the most popular and most talked about ads produced over the last several years, all in one place. Users can search through the database to find specific ads, or they can browse through ads arranged by agency, brand, video type, or industry vertical.

The powers at the ETSI just released the specifications for a new SIM format. This card, the fourth form factor or the 4FF, is 40% smaller than the current micro-SIM card. It looks very similar to traditional SIM cards with a rectangle design and a notched corner. It's just smaller at 12.3mm by 8.mm with the same thickness as the current cards. Even with the smaller size, these cards will be packaged in a way that will make them compatible with existing SIM hardware.

Property startup Zoopla and the A&N Media (DMGT)-owned Digital Property Group (Findaproperty / Primelocation) have formally completed their merger following approval by the UK's Office of Fair Trading (OFT). The transaction, which was agreed last October, had been pending subject to clearance from the OFT which was granted in April. The deal creates a property giant which now takes on Rightmove, currently the market leader in the UK.

MoneySupermarket, a UK-based price comparison site for financial services, is acquiring advice site MoneySavingExpert from founder Martin Lewis, for £87 million ($133 million). Lewis, a personal finance journalist, launched MoneySavingExpert in 2003. According to the site's Google Analytics metrics it gets 39 million unique visitors and about 277 million page impressions a month. That makes it a powerful player and Lewis has parlayed this into books and TV shows in the UK.

Today comes news of a small but indicative acquisition in the area of daily deals: the UK-based deals aggregator Coupobox has been bought by rival site DealCollector for a song: the price was in the "lower six figures," according to Stavros Prodromou, the founder and former CEO of the company. The acquisition is a sign of how consolidation in the sector is hitting aggregators, too. Counting flash sales and private buying clubs with daily deals, there are an estimated 105 sites in the UK alone, with 1,400 across all of Europe, and there will likely be more companies bought or cast by the wayside going forward. "From the consumer point of view we are currently too overloaded with daily deals," says Prodromou.

The end is in sight for Churn Labs, the startup generator created by AdMob founder Omar Hamoui and AdMob's first engineer Mike Rowehl. Two new companies will be spinning out in mid-July, Hamoui tells me, and they'll be taking the Churn team with them.

To improve academic outcomes and keep students in school, teachers, learners and administrators need access to insight in realtime. Big data, predictive analytics, machine learning and recommendation engines are transforming the way we buy products, play games and watch movies, and Civitas Learning believes that the same should be true for education. Historically, higher education has been anything but data driven, so this week the Austin-based startup came out of stealth to launch a service that combines student demographic, behavioral and academic info with next-gen analysis, recommendation and data modeling tech to let institutions build and make sense of their big data.