The CEO of RIM, Thorsten Heins, has been speaking to German newspaper Die Welt ahead of the launch of BlackBerry 10 devices — due in Q1. Heins told the newspaper he has not ruled out licensing the new OS to other manufacturers. Asked whether RIM might not go down the licensing route, as Microsoft has with Windows Phone, he said (translated from German by Google Translate): “Before you licensed the software, you must show that the platform has a large potential. First we have to fulfill our promises. If such proof, a licensing is conceivable.”

Heins was also asked what has taken the BlackBerry maker so long to get its next-gen OS in the market. He told Die Welt that the reason for the delay is because RIM is building a platform that’s fit for the next decade — and one which can find its way into new types of devices. “We have taken the time to build a platform that is future-proof for the next ten years. Our aim is not only to smartphones, but also to the use, for example, in cars that will be in the future increasingly networked. We see with BlackBerry 10 completely new areas of growth,” he said.

The CEO also revealed that RIM has been using up a lot of shoe leather visiting carriers to introduce them to BB10. “We have visited more than 100 network operators in person to introduce BlackBerry 10. The response has been extremely good, you want to have alternatives to Android, Apple and Co.,” he told the newspaper. In December all the U.K.’s major carriers confirmed they planned to range BlackBerry 10 devices this year.

Payleven, the Rocket Internet-incubated mobile-payment service that uses a dongle attached to a mobile device to make and process card transactions — yes, like Square — is today announcing that it has picked up another round of funding, as well as a new investor. As has been the case with many past investments in Samwer-incubated startups, neither the exact funding figure, nor the investor, have been disclosed — except to note that the value is in the “high single-digit millions” of dollars, and that it is “largely” from the new backer.

Payleven would not comment on whether this is a strategic investment (eg, from a payments company) or a VC. But, in the process of announcing this news, it did confirm reports of its existing backers — specifically New Enterprise Associates, Holtzbrinck Ventures, ru-Net and the Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet, which together invested “double digit millions” in a round last year.

As a point of comparison, European competitors iZettle and SumUp have respectively raised $46.7 million and $20 million. Still nowhere near the $341 million scooped up by Square sine 2009.

ChoreMonster launched an update to their app a few days ago that includes a parents section, a redesign of the kids section, a new Monster Carnival and yes…even a new character named TeeCee exclusively for all the TechCrunch readers out there. We never asked for this, but I have to say… “Damn it feels good to be a Monster.”

The website/mobile app ecosystem designed to get kids to do their chores officially launched at the turn of the year, is decently documented,  and recently raised $775,000 in funding. Indeed, “after eight months in private beta and with over 300,000 chores completed” ChoreMonster is available to the masses for $4.99 a month and believe me, this spells HAPPY NEW YEAR to a bunch of parents out there.

In short, the website/app is a calculator that lets kids collect points for completing their chores. These points can be  exchanged for real-world rewards designed and granted by their parents (basically for doing the kind of tasks my parents just sorta made me do). But this is a much more civil age, and any kind of motivational force to get kids to clean up after themselves should be lauded.

We’ve learned today that mobile news delivery company Circa has raised another $750K on top of the $900K raised previously. The company launched its app of the same name, which allows you to follow an often-changing story in bite-sized chunked, only three months ago.

A few more big names have joined in this up-round, including: Lerer Ventures, Advancit Capital, Menlo Talent Fund, Alex Bard and Eamon Leonard. Those investors join individual contributors from its previous 900K raised like Dave Morin, David Karp and Josh Spear and firms such as Quotidian Ventures and SK Ventures.

When I spoke to Circa’s co-founder and CEO Matt Galligan today, he told me that he’s extremely happy about the growth of its userbase as well as how the app itself is coming along. The team announced version 1.1, which included some design and usability tweaks that Galligan is specifically proud of. Circa currently employs seven non-editorial staffers and twelve others who manage the current news categories within the app.

Line, a messaging app made by South Korea’s Naver Corp. that took off in Japan, just crossed 100 million users globally 19 months after it originally launched.

The app is one of the leading contenders in smartphone messaging in Asia and faces off against Tencent’s WeChat and KakaoTalk. As I’ve written before, when rumors emerged that Facebook was in acquisition talks with WhatsApp, global messaging is very fragmented with many players that do well in specific territories in Asia and Europe.

Opera unveiled a major new mobile browser initiative called Opera Ice today via Pocket-lint, coming in February and based on the same WebKit rendering engine used by Apple’s Safari and Google Chrome, rather than Presto, which has powered Opera since 2003 (including server-side compression on the iOS side of things). The browser engine change signals Opera’s intent to remain relevant in a changing browser market, as does Opera Ice’s unique control scheme and user interface.

Opera’s CEO Lars Boilesen describes the new browser in an internal video published by Pocket-lint, which eschews buttons in favor of an all-touch gesture-based control system. Tabs are also gone, supplanted by a home screen with page icons, and a single combined search and URL bar handles all new page opening duties. The browser looks to take the web application model of browsing to its natural conclusion, and Boilesen even describes pages as “apps” repeatedly in the video. Navigation back and forth between full-screen apps is handled via gestures, and also through a home screen-like software button at the bottom of every page.

“No buttons, no menus, just a pure visual experience, that’s what we’re building here,” Boilesen says at one point during the video. The idea is to hide as much of the chrome and tech as possible, including when it comes to security. He demos venturing onto a malware site, which brings up a very visual, very easy-to-grasp warning featuring a caution tape animation.

New research from Google suggests what we all likely know to be true – your pet’s name followed by a few numbers just isn’t cutting it as a password these days. The company will be publishing a new research paper in the IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine this month, but Wired got a sneak peak, and it details a number of alternatives based on requiring physical devices, in combination with some other form of screen unlock to not only simplify the password process but also make it more secure.

Some of the possible systems they describe included embedded chips in smartphones, which is a pretty convenient method given that everyone will be carrying one anyway, and a slightly more unusual means of delivery via ring worn on the finger. I think I had a pinkie ring once when I was sixteen (it was a mistake), so personally I’d prefer something a little less flashy, but the idea is sound.

As a first step, however, they’re working with a YubiKey cryptographic card, programming it so that it can automatically log a user into their Google account on the web when inserted into a computer’s USB drive. It doesn’t require a software download or any install, just a slightly modified version of Chrome. Combined with Google’s authentication and authorization services, you can see how this would eliminate the need for complicated passwords and even potentially elaborate, “prove you’re a human” CAPTCHA processes that make logging into apps and websites a pain.