Mike Butcher is the European Editor for TechCrunch. A former grunge rock drummer, he became a long time journalist, and has since written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. Mike is also a co-founder and shareholder of TechHub, a co-working space/service/community with several locations in Europe.
He is also the founder and on the steering committee of Coadec, the Coalition for a Digital Economy, which works to lobby for legislation that fosters a sustainable and innovative digital economy for the UK. Mike also serve on the Mayor of London’s Smart London Board, advising on Smart Cities and Entrepreneurship.
He is a former editor of New Media Age magazine, the leading new media weekly in the UK, and the European edition of The Industry Standard magazine. Since 1996 he has launched or re-launched numerous media web sites and in 2000 he was nominated as NetMedia’s European Internet Journalist of the Year.
In 2004 he was voted ‘One of the 100 Innovators of the UK Internet Decade’ by GfK NOP, the fourth-largest custom research business in the world. In July 2008 he named as one of the Top 100 people in London’s creative industry by The Independent newspaper. In August 2008 TechCrunch’s European coverage was honoured in the the best “Web 2.0 and business blog” category by Computer Weekly magazine. In 2009 it was named as one of the Top 10 blogs out of the UK. In 2009 Mike was named one of the Top 10 bloggers on Twitter in the UK. In October 2009 he was named one of the Top 50 most influential Britons in technology by The Daily Telegraph. In April 2010 he was named as one of Britain’s Top 100 “digital power-brokers” by Wired UK magazine. In April 2010 TechCrunch Europe was shortlisted in the Specialist Digital Publisher category of the prestigious UK-based Association of Online Publishers’ Digital Publishing Awards. In November 2010 Mike was named as one of London’s most influential people in New Media and “king of dotcom commentators ” by The Evening Standard Newspaper, and again in 2011.
He has spoken at the prestigious Monaco Media Forum and Le Web, among many other conferences, and is a Davos / World Economic Forum “Media Leader”. Mike is a regular commentator on the technology business, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, Channel 4 and Bloomberg. Personal blog: mbites.com. Twitter: @mikebutcher. Facebook.com/mikebutcher. Google+: Gplus.to/mikebutcher
Mike supports and works with:
Apps For Good: A non-profit which aims to ignite a passion for technology and social enterprise in young people in the UK.
TeenTech: Which runs events to help young teenagers see career possibilities in Science, Engineering and Technology.
Coderdojo: Free not-for-profit coding clubs and regular sessions for young people in the UK, Ireland and US.
Young Rewired State: The philanthropic arm of Rewired State – which aims to foster the young children and teenagers who will become tomorrow’s technology stars.
Disclosures (reviewed, approved and signed off by TechCrunch/AOL): I’m a Co-founder and 50% owner of a co-working space in London, TechHub, established because it solved a problem for startups back in 2009, and today (I’m a strategic adviser only – not operational or ‘commercial’). I’m an adviser on content to the “London Web Summit” annual conference. I’m the founder and chair of “The Europas” annual tech startups awards. I’m on the advisory board of The Coalition For A Digital Economy, a UK non-profit which argues for a ‘digital first’ approach to business legislation. I’m an advisor to Seedrs.com, a crowd funding platform, but I maintain journalistically independent views on crowd-funding. I hold 11 shares in BT which makes about $10 a year in dividends and I can’t be bothered to cancel.
A new report commissioned by research giant GfK claims that the growth of the high density cluster of technology companies in East London (dubbed Tech City by the UK government) is being “stunted” by a talent shortage and lack of access to capital. The ‘Tech Futures Report’ – commissioned by publishing company TechCityInsider and sponsored by accountant Grant Thornton, recruitment firm Vitamin… → Read More
While the world goes gaga for Google Glass, a small startup has come up with an intriguing new take on a device which can display information before your eyes. Instabeat is head-up display unit which attaches to swimming goggles and monitors your heart rate, calories, laps and turns during your swim. It’s been live on crowd funding platform Indiegogo for a few days and is already poised to reach… → Read More
ShapeUp Club is a startup out of Stockholm which has been making waves recently with a lot of under-the-radar growth. Originally built back in 2008 as a side project, it’s morphed into an interactive calorie counter on iPhone, Android, and web. You get a personal weight loss plan, can track nutrition, exercise and weight. Ok, so it might not sound original set against the likes of bigger players… → Read More
Last week we reported that Facebook is in advanced talks to buy Israel-born social traffic and mapping app Waze for up to $1 billion, but that there were still some questions over whether Waze’s R&D efforts would remain in their home country, or move over with the rest of the team, which is in California, to Facebook’s HQ. → Read More
Today in interesting moves comes the news that serial entrepreneur-turned-investor Russell Buckley – who was first employee at AdMob (which sold to Google) is joining the UK government to accelerate its policies around startups, mainly funding. Specifically, he’s joining the UK Government’s Venture Capital Unit. The Unit, launched last year, is designed to help UK companies attract funding from… → Read More
There’s something about soccer (and as a Brit, by that I mean football, puh-lease…) that seems to have captured investors’ imaginations of late. Case in point: FTBpro, a large fan-generated content platform, has now secured $5.8 million from Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel Ventures to fund global expansion.
The site currently has 20 million monthly page views, over 1,000 contributing fan… → Read More
This October we’re looking forward to bringing you a full-blown, all-hands-on-deck, TechCrunch Disrupt Europe in Berlin, the only Disrupt conference outside North America. This will feature the biggest stars of Silicon Valley meeting with the biggest stars of the European and emerging markets tech scenes. Meanwhile, we’ve begun working with local partners to bring you country-based events. These… → Read More
Facebook’s social graph went missing from yesterday’s update to Path’s smartphone app, and Facebook now confirms it has restricted Path’s API access. Path can no longer look up your Facebook friends, which prevents it from sending them invitations or suggesting you follow them. The damaging blow to Path’s growth may be in response to Path spamming user’s contacts with invites last week. → Read More
Last October, Datahug, a ‘business networking automation’ startup, which is also being used by VCs, secured a €2.5 million Series A financing led by European VC DFJ Esprit. But it’s now adding to that pot. We’ve confirmed Salesforce has decided to join that round in an “expansion” of its Series A, which includes original investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson (in the US), DFJ Esprit (UK), Oyster… → Read More
Last month Skimlinks, the platform that allows publishers full control over affiliate links and content monetization, completed a growth financing round led by Greycroft Partners and others, while expanding into Asia. This month it has new products to roll out, launching two major initiatives. The question is, how does it stand up to the competition? → Read More
Five years after being started as a back-bedroom project by Michael Acton Smith, Mind Candy, the company that came up with the hugely successful Moshi Monsters kids game, has achieved a lot. Unusually for most UK consumer startups, it’s reached across the globe to become a global brand attracting 80 million registered users, up from 50 million in 2011. → Read More
Photo and video apps have rocketed up the app store charts driven by apps like Instagram and Vine, becoming the third largest category in iOS downloads. Most contain casual photo filters and simple editing tools. In contrast with this trend, others are feeding the desire for photo editing with more sophisticated apps. The latest entrant to this market is MasterFX which launches today for iPad and… → Read More
If, say, a company uses both Sharepoint and Salesforce inside a mobile app, to get that data into one app they need multiple levels of API integration. Because of the enormous boom in mobile and tablet apps, so-called ‘back-end as a service’ (BaaS) platforms like FeedHenry – which solve these problems – are hugely expanding. Thus, today FeedHenry has secured $9M (€7M) in a funding round led by… → Read More
Startups in the UK are upbeat about the future and usually more profitable (comparatively) than their US counterparts (which tend to focus on growth over revenues). But they find raising Series A money difficult, with 90% of entrepreneurs saying the UK fundraising environment is “challenging”. Those are the findings of a survey commissioned by Silicon Valley Bank (its first such) which has set up… → Read More
Recently we’ve seen a lot of news articles about the potential for chat apps to take over the role of SMS. Analysts Informa recently came out with the research that suggested that 2012 was the tipping point, with nearly 19 billion messages sent over chat apps daily globally, versus 17.6 billion SMS messages. In 2014 some 21 billion SMS messages are predicated as against 50 billion app-based… → Read More
In March last year Yahoo’s SVP of the Europe, the Middle East and Africa region abruptly quit his role in the rejuvenation of Yahoo, supposedly to be closer to family in Sunnyvale. However, after an orderly departure he’s now joined Shazam, the mobile music discovery app as CEO. Longtime CEO Andrew Fisher (since 2005) will become executive chairman. The London-based Shazam says it now has 300… → Read More
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has said he finds having to talk to Google Glass out loud to control the interface “the weirdest thing” and that there are going to be “places where Google Glass are inappropriate.” My own experience of trying out the device, even briefly, confirmed to me that this product simply will not become a mass-market device any time soon. Indeed, if it has any future at all it… → Read More
Back in June last year BancBox, a payment services platform similar to Stripe, went further with a platform allowing developers to build a lot of different payment services. As cofounder Sanj Goyle claimed at the time: “PayPal could be built on top of our platform.” Now it has launched BancBox Crowd, which – as far as we can tell – is the first independent escrow service aimed at crowd funding… → Read More
You’re familiar with the scenario of not being able to keeping up with some of your best contacts because there are probably now plenty of them? Small businesses have that same problem, and they aren’t about to employ heavy lifting CRM to solve that simple problem. Contactually, which has previously raised money form Point Nine Capital, Boston Seed and 500 Startups, is going to try to address this… → Read More
We’ve been saying for a few months now that Barcelona is shaping up to be an emerging new technology hub in Europe. The ingredients are there: great universities, a young population, affordable living costs and literally a great location and climate. With seed funding on the doorstep in nearby hubs like Madrid and London, you can see a few things starting to happen. It’s why we held a meetup there… → Read More
For the last few years Europe has been emerging as a powerful source of new global startups. Hell, why else would we be doing TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin this year? And we’ve seen efforts to recognise the heroes of the scene, with a proliferation of startup conferences, as well as awards, such as The Europas (which I chair). Now the venerable European Commission has started to wake up to the… → Read More
Socialising the travel experience – in the way that Airbnb ‘socialised’ apartment rentals – has proved harder than expected. “Hot” Berlin-based startup Gidsy has spent almost two years touting its peer-to-peer booking platform for discovering local experiences and things to do. It attracted $1.2 million in a seed round in January 2012, with Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher participating. But recently… → Read More
Last month Oliver and Marc Samwer — founders of the Rocket Internet startup incubator — launched Global Founders Capital, a new €150 million ($194 million) fund aimed at any and all startups worldwide. This month one of the first startups to benefit from that will be credit scoring startup Kreditech which has raised an undisclosed amount said to be “low to mid 7 digits”. We’ve heard USD$3.5… → Read More
Skimlinks, the platform which effectively gives publishers control over affiliate links and content monetization, has completed a growth financing round led by Greycroft Partners. Joining the round are Japan-based angel investors, Hiro Maeda and Ryota Matsuzaki, as well as Forum Foundry, a Texas-based network of blog and forum communities. The amount raised was undisclosed. Existing investors also… → Read More
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs, said today that Apple’s share price, which hit a 16-month low two days ago, is “disappointing” but that he was confident the tech giant would come out with products which would “surprise and shock us all.” → Read More
Globally-known London-based product and design consultancy Berg has become best known for its work with major tech companies such as Apple and Twitter, as well as it’s now famous “Little Printer” design which captured the collective imagination of the tech world last year. The tiny device that could print out any kind of information you wanted from the web became a physical manifestation of how… → Read More
When Siri arrived on the iPhone 4S it seemed like a magic piece of software. The future had arrived. But it wasn’t alone. True Knowledge, a British startup with a natural language search engine developed in university labs had been working out what to do next. Siri was the ‘boom’ moment. They licensed Nuance’s voice recognition technology and created an app based on the True Knowledge engine… → Read More
Medium, the content creation platform started by Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone, has acquired Matter, the science and technology journalism startup cofounded by former long-time Guardian technology correspondent and GigaOm writer Bobbie Johnson last year, for an undisclosed sum. This is Medium’s first acquisition. → Read More
Tonight in the UK there came a moment which you might call the end of an era in the UK tech startup scene. One of the first of the ‘new wave’ of startups from the mid-2000s lost its last founder, as Andy Young (pictured left), co-founder of the group management startup GroupSpaces, announced he was leaving to join the payments starts Stripe, and will be a core part of its “expansion into the UK… → Read More
We’ve seen a lot lately of car companies sidling up the technology world and vice versa. Consider Ford’s Open Developer Program for instance. But today, three big companies get involved in startups, one of them being the huge Mercedes-Benz. It, along with industrial giant Bosch and insurance company HDI, are partnering with tech accelerator Startupbootcamp in Berlin to create a new kind of… → Read More
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