Credit crunch? What credit crunch?

SMSGupShup, India’s equivalent of Twitter, has just taken $11m from Helion Ventures and Charles River Ventures, to help grow and develop the business (reports Silicon India).

This good news for the SMSGupShup team and for the mobile industry as a whole. The growth of mobile in the emerging markets is simply staggering. The intent with GupShup is to capitalise on contextual mobile advertising demand.

We’ll keep an eye on them. Meanwhile, congratulations to the company’s co-founders Rakesh Mathur and Beerud Sheth.

Co-founder of the social network creator site Ning.com, Marc Andreessen, who just joined the Facebook Board Members has teamed up with Ben Horowitz, the VP and GM at Hewlett-Packard, to provide “significant investment” in the California based company. The Duo will also join the company as members of the board of advisors.

Qik is becoming immensely popular among the masses with its easy to install app and ability to start streaming within minutes. The site’s ability to integrate with popular social networks such as Twitter, MySpace and Orkut and even integrates with YouTube and Justin.tv

We, here, are great fans of Qik ourselves, having put it to use many a times. Citizen journalism is great fun in itself. Dan had covered the iPhone 3G launch in UK, while I was at the phone’s launch in India.

So, has Qik won now?

Funambol said it will use the proceeds for continued growth in the push email market, to advance product R&D and to accelerate global expansion, particularly in Europe and Asia, as well as adding geographic support in new markets where they believe push email could take off

Funanmbol’s model is an interesting one – push email capabilities are ad funded rather than pay-up-front, with open source software – and looks like it has massive potential. After all, who doesn’t like free services? An ad funded service could be one way to break mobile email out of its corporate niche. We’ll be watching this one with interest.

InvenSense, whose applications include image stabilisation and navigation, will put the funding towards “company growth and evolv[ing] both the company business and product strategy”. The company reckons motion sensing will take off in mobile gaming and in smart user interfaces.

Motion sensing is a fascinating area, but applications are still in niche and more gimmicky than useful. Still, it’s a chicken and egg problem: phones need to have the appropriate tech inside them to make use of motion-sensitive applications, and without the apps, why put the necessary tech into the handsets? Hopefully, with some funding and some R&D, the motion-sensing people out there can come up with some must-have apps.

The company is mainly a North American-based venture – it lists Verizon Wireless and Helio among its partners – and its mobile money transfer system works with US bank accounts using a widget, through a browser or SMS. While the company hasn’t given away what it plans to do with the latest round of investments, international expansion shouldn’t be ruled out – Obopay has a presence in India and a number of big names are falling over themselves to bring mobile money transfer to developing economies.

Gizmoz said it will use the cash to will invest into Asian expansion, starting with work in Japan, and also announced today that its service will be compatible with AOL instant messaging service for the first time. However, with DoCoMo Capital as a backer, I’m guessing we’ll be seeing Gizmoz moving more towards mobile offerings. Gizmoz itself is strongly hinting at the same direction highlighting of its Japanese move it’s “a market that leads the world in mobile internet adoption” and stresses its interests in cross-platform services.