While startups like Uber, Lyft, Hailo and Sidecar are upending traditional taxi markets across North America and Europe, Helsinki’s Cabforce is aiming to change corporate bookings for taxis across the European continent and soon the U.S.

The twelve-person company has built an API and hub that lets third-party corporate booking services pull in flat rates for between 10,000 and 20,000 taxis in cities across Europe.

Their product isn’t for on-demand taxi requests in an app like with Uber. It is for bookings that people might make a couple days in advance before they make a business trip to a different city.

When digital marketers do competitive analysis today, they’re still cobbling together data from a variety of sources then tucking it into a PowerPoint presentation where, by the time it’s actually read, is already out of date. TrackMaven, a new, largely real-time competitive intelligence platform for marketers is changing that, now with $1.25 million in funding from Aol Ventures and other angels, and paying customers like Martha Stewart Living and the NBA.

Disclosure: Aol is TechCrunch’s corporate parent.

The annual Wharton Business Plan Competition is a crowd pleaser offering brainy ideas from entrepreneurial students, more than $100,000 in prizes to jumpstart new businesses and a layer of suspense.

This year, about 300 students, faculty, business executives and potential investors attended the 15th annual competition that marks the culmination of seven months of work for the eight contenders.

The finalists, or "great eight," were winnowed down from 140 teams that entered the competition initially. At the starting gate in the fall, 350 students from 10 schools within the University of Pennsylvania community participated.

Australian startup Tapestry, which makes an app for Android tablets to help seniors stay connected to family members, has raised $400,000 in new funding in the form of a grant from Commercialisation Australia — capital it will use to extend its wares to iOS (and beyond tablets), add additional community features, and gear up for a U.S. launch.

It follows $600,000 raised last November from Sydney Angels, with a list of investors that included David Greatorex (founding investor ResMed, SecureNet), Su-Ming Wong (CHAMP Private Equity), Brand Hoff (Tower Software, Director NICTA).

Researchers at IBM, using movement data collected from millions of cell-phone users in Ivory Coast in West Africa, have developed a new model for optimizing an urban transportation system.

The IBM model prescribed changes in bus routes around the around Abidjan, the nation’s largest city. These changes—based on people’s movements as discerned from cell-phone records—could, in theory, slash travel times 10 percent.