Worth reading: PayLeven, CogniCor, Beintoo, Barcelona, Twago

There are so many interesting stories out there and unfortunately we don’t have the time to cover all of them. With our section “Worth reading” we provide you every now and then with a few links to interesting articles of other publications:

The Samwer brothers (Rocket Internet) have just pulled together “double digit funding” for their Square clone. PayLeven is a straight-up copy of Square: a matchbox-sized dongle that fits into the top of an iPhone or iPad and can let people make payments by reading the magnetic stripe on cards. Continue reading and visit GigaOm.

The European Commission’s 2nd annual Digital Agenda Assembly is currently underway in Brussels, and Spanish startup CogniCor has been announced as the winning startup in the EU-wide Tech All Stars competition. CogniCor is adding a dose of artificial intelligence to customer service conflict resolution. Read more about it on TNW.

The Milan based startup Beintoo, which has a loyalty rewards and monetization platform for mobile games, apps, and sites, has secured $5 million in Series A funding led by Italian VC firm Innogest Capital. Beintoo has managed to get itself onto 10m direct users spanning 100m devices in less than a year. Visit TechCrunch to find out more.

Celine Schmahl, the CEO and co-founder of Qipoqo lived and studied and sowed the seeds of her startup in Barcelona before moving back to Berlin. Check out her article on VentureVillage to find out what she thinks of the two cities’ startup scenes.

The Berlin-based service broker Twago is back from the brink of bankruptcy with the closure of a financing round of about €2.25 million, backed by new investors Euro Serve Media (publishers of Germany’s Yellow Pages) and media-for-equity fund German Media Pool. Read more about it on VentureVillage.