If you are operating an ecommerce site which has traction then it might be worth picking up the phone to these guys.

Online retailing platform The Hut Group has secured a whopping £14 million investment by institutional investors via a Pre-IPO (Initial Public Offering) placing. The cash will be used to fund further acquisitions and expansion, prior to a flotation. That could mean an interesting exit for some of the UK’s smaller retail startups.

The five year old company sells through its own sites like TheHut.com and Zavvi.com as well as powering the platform for blue-chip retail partners like ASDA, Woolworths, Argos, Tesco and WHSmith.

The startup behind Hubdub is pulling the plug on the site that gave it its name to concentrate on its more successful spinoff, FanDuel.

It turns out FanDuel, a premium sports fantasy game, has sucked all the small startups resources, and proved a bigger winner amongst HubDub’s newspaper customers. FanDuel announced it’s first distribution partner last week with the Philly.com newspaper site.

Hubdub.com’s community of volunteer editors have effectively been running the site for the past 12 months and the site’s traffic has clearly suffered from this lack of attention. Close competitor TheStandard.com has also closed.

[Austria] runtastic, a mobile app for iPhones that connects sporty people among each other, just released their PRO Version (iTunes link), complimentary to their free version which has been available for some months.

Although apps for tracking personal fitness and health are relatively new, there are already some players in that space, such as Nike and more recently Runkeeper. Runkeeper’s success in the US has surely proven, that, with smartphones becoming more ubiquitious among runners or other amateur athletes, there’s a big market for these types of Apps.

Apple says that although it has “delivered more than 500,000 iPads during its first week” the demand for the iPad in sales and pre-orders is “far higher than we predicted”. The upshot of all these US sales? The international launch – that’s including us here in Europe folks – will be postponed by one month, until the end of May.

However, make a date in your diary as Apple says it will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders on Monday, May 10.

[UK] Lovefilm co-founder and ex-CEO Adam Valkin has joined VC firm Accel in London as a partner. Most recently Valkin was head of digital and new business at Endemol Group, and prior to that he spent nine years as an investor at Arts Alliance Advisors where he invested in and managed portfolio companies in Europe and Israel.

Accel Partners is focused on investing in early stage technology companies in the areas of consumer internet, enterprise software, networking and mobile. It has offices in Palo Alto, London, Bangalore and China (via the IDG-Accel Partnership).

[UK/US] Fresh on the heels of $50m of new investment, Glam Media is forging ahead with its global expansion, opening a new International headquarters in London.

The vertical media and advertising network’s new office will be headed up by Co-Founder & EVP, Glam Global Partners, Ernie Cicogna, who has relocated to London to take the position of General Manager, International.

At the heart of Glam’s global plans is to become the number one in the women’s lifestyle vertical, a position it already holds in the US, UK, Germany and Japan, claims the company. Globally, Glam Media is seeing 160 million unique visitors per month.

Java application infrastructure and management solutions provider SpringSource, itself picked up by VMware last year, this morning announced the acquisition of Rabbit Technologies, an open source software company based in the UK.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but SpringSource says it will add the RabbitMQ open messaging system into its suite of technologies.

Livebookings, the European-based restaurant reservation service, has announced three new recruits to its executive team, including ex-Google New Business Development Principal for EMEA, Robert Swerling, who becomes Chief Commercial Officer.

The other two new recruits are Sue Ball, ex-Unibet Group, who joins as CFO; and Andris Berzins, who joins from AeroScout as Chief Marketing Officer.

Swerling will be charged with leading Livebookings’ “aggressive push into new and existing markets”, with the company already claiming revenue growth of 300% in 2009, although that’s pretty meaningless without the numbers.

[UK] West London-based mflow is pitching itself as “iTunes meets Twitter” — and as convenient as that sounds, the concept is actually quite compelling, especially as users get paid for the music sales they help generate.

Just like Twitter, users follow one another but instead of sending out tweets, they share links to tracks available in the mflow music store – called ‘flows’ – that include a one-off full streaming preview, and any comments that the user adds. Each flow also has an option to purchase an MP3 of the track and it’s here where users get paid in the form of mflow store credit – 20% of the download price.

Crucially, users don’t need to have purchased the track from mflow to share it with their followers, it just needs to be available in the mflow store, so it could be something they’ve heard on radio or bought or ‘acquired’ elsewhere.

Ok people, l know this isn’t about European tech startups, but here at TechCrunch Europe towers, we’re just a little excited that Apple has refreshed its MacBook Pro line-up. It’s been a long time coming. Yes, we’ll have to wait for iPad pre-orders, but in the meantime, at least the new Pros are out.

If the Apple Store in the UK is now correct ( it looks like it is), then these are the new configurations and prices.

13-inch: 2.4GHz – £999.00
13-inch: 2.66GHz – £1,249.00
15-inch: 2.4GHz – £1,499.00
15-inch: 2.53GHz – £1,649.00
15-inch: 2.66GHz – £1,799.00
17-inch: 2.53GHz – £1,899.00

Here’s Apple’s press statement in full.

[Spain] The music streaming service Rockola.fm has secured €1.5 million of additional funding, reports Loogic.

The new round comes from investment bank Caja Navarra (CAN), Cabiedes & Partners, which invests in early-stage companies, and Jesus Encinar, a previous investor in Rockola, among others. We understand that this now takes the startup’s total funding to just over €2m.

Of note, it’s only the second investment in an Internet startup by CAN after its involvement with cloud computing startup Abiquo.

[Germany] Fear not, the German iPad competitor, the WePad, really does exist. Over 100 journalists could prove it on Monday night in a small reception room at the Adina Apartment Hotel in Berlin. International press and major TV stations were present to see the latest tablet computer by Neofonie from Berlin.

However, the venue was so overcrowded that no cellphone worked and in one moment I feared the photographers would just crush CEO Helmut Hoffer von Ankershoffen with his WePad. (Death by WePad – great headline). But that’s ok. The WePad is going to be the saviour of the German print publishing industry.

We’re just over a week away from GeeknRolla the annual conference from TechCrunch Europe which brings together Europe’s technology startups and investors. We have an amazing line-up of speakers, panels and startup judges on April 20. We’ll be launching around 15 startups in front of a panel of around 18 judges. There will also be a DemoPit for startups not selected to appear on the main stage.

Plus, we just released only 100 tickets to the now legendary Afterparty where you can join the 350+ delegates from the main day – I’d grab one of those before they all go very shortly.

The start-studded line-up includes: Tommy Ahlers, ex-ZYB now Vodafone; Morten Lund, Skype investor & serial entrepreneur; Stefan Glaenzer, Angel; Brent Hoberman, MyDeco & PROFounders; Reshma Sohoni, Seedcamp; Mattias Ljungman, Atomico Ventures; Lukas Gadowski, Team Europe; Anil Hansjee, Google; Irena Goldenberg, Highland Capital Partners; Daniel Heaf, 4IP; Ari Wegter, LoveFilm Co-Founder and Alicia Navarro, Co Founder, Skimlinks.

I’d strongly advise you get a ticket. Last year we more than sold out.

We’ll be hearing from of Europe’s best entrepreneurs about how they are building their own companies and with it, the European tech ecosystem. As with GeeknRolla’s fast pace style, the speeches will be fast, furious and fulfilling.

Check out our awesome sponsors and partners after the jump.

[Finland] The ‘Internet of Things’ startup Thinglink has pulled off quite a coup, recruiting Nokia’s Janne Jalkanen as its new CTO.

Jalkanen is an 8 year veteran of Nokia where he earned the unofficial title of the Godfather of NFC because of his leading role in developing the burgeoning wireless technology. He’s also been a long-term advocate of the Internet of Things meme in more general terms.

[Germany] Since Foursquare never officially checked in to Germany, another company has decided to become the local Mayor. The clone company Friendticker came out its beta on Friday with a banging underground party in one of Berlin’s secret club locations. Officially, the business of ruling Germany’s location wars starts today.

As is generally widely known, Germany has a very environmentally sustainable economy. There are recycling bins everywhere. So it’s nice to see the recycling has extended to the layout and functionality of Friendticker. The website and the iPhone app resembles Foursquare with only minor changes and the browser bar’s favicon looks very much like Facebook’s – only in purple. Even the company name is recycled: The founders bought it from the deadpooled German Twitter clone Frazr which used it as an alternative.

This is a guest post by Inmaculada Martinez, (@inma_martinez) a principal at Stradbroke Advisors, an investment and innovation agency working with investors and entrepreneurs in digital technologies.

European startups are setting their footprint in the world markets with greater strength these days. It was great to watch Saul Klein’s presentation at Plugg recently, recalling the breath of innovation that many European entrepreneurs have regaled the world with. It was even better to see the great quality of startup presentations that took place on the day. But in my speech I went off on a slight tangent: it is time to hire more women into tech startups. The lack of them is now so obvious that is becoming a blatant sight for sore eyes in any VC portfolio.

It’s emerged that last Tuesday night, a list of the Croatian participants in the Croatian War of Independence was put online as a simple web application. The never before published list is one of the best kept secrets of the current Croatian goverment, so much so that a prominent Croatian political blogger, Marko Rakar, was arrested in connection to the list. Current laws in Croatia make it illegal for anyone to publish the list, which is a topic of huge controversy both in the media and in the public.

The website, registarbranitelja.com, which listed a couple of hundred thousand people which you can search through by name, surname and group, is a searchable simple database.

[Istanbul] What’s on your disk other than your own data and applications? Media files, right? Put.io as which we’ve covered before, is a new kind of storage service that eliminates the process of uploading media files to a server, something that usually takes hours, by proactively fetching them from their sources and putting them in your online space. It’s like a golden retriever crossbred with Dropbox.

The service was in private beta for the last 6 months and has had huge demand for invites. Now they’ve set their prices and have launched officially.

A basic account with 10GB’s of storage space and 10GB’s of bandwidth costs $4.90. A pro account with 50GB’s of the same costs $9.90 and the 100GB Premium plan costs $19.90. If you need more bandwidth you can purchase extra traffic for 10 cents per GB.

Back in January, TechCrunch Europe broke the news that Luxembourg-based digital music startup Jamendo was running out of money fast and looking for an exit.

Three months later, the company is announcing that European music broadcasting and technology company MusicMatic has purchased the entire stake investor Mangrove Capital Partners held in the startup.

It’s unclear exactly how big Mangrove’s piece of the pie was, but I gather they were a majority shareholder in the company.

Fresh from inking a deal with Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest video sites, The Filter, a startup with a white label discovery engine for digital entertainment, has a new commercial partnership with NBC.com to power the short-form video recommendations for its broadcast network website.

The Filter’s technology will bubble up relevant video from NBC’s catalog, creating easier discovery for users. So, more views for 30 Rock, and The Office then. After NBC trialled The Filter’s recommendation and relevance platform they say they found an uplift in video streams per session, hence the deal.

The Filter’s main business model is a white label personalisation engine for mass audiences and thus needs content partnerships like this to prove its technology scales into the billion-request level.