Mike Butcher is a journalist, broadcaster and commentator. He is firstly editor of TechCrunch Europe, but has also co-founded TechHub.com and Coadec.com in Europe as ventures to support the tech startup eco-system.
A long time journalist, Mike has written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. 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.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Mike co-founded TechHub, a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club environment (@TechHub), in London initially.
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 was put at No. 47 out of the Top 100 people in London’s creative industry by The Independent newspaper and The Hospital Club. In August 2008 TechCrunch Europe was awarded the best “Web 2.0 and business blog†in the UK, by the readers of Computer Weekly magazine. In 2009 it was named as one of the Top 10 blogs out of the UK. Also in 2009 he 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 he 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 November 2011. In February he was listed as one of the Top 100 most influential people on Twitter in the UK.
He has spoken at the prestigious Monaco Media Forum and Le Web, among many other conferences. Mike is a regular commentator on the technology business, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, Channel 4 and Bloomberg. Mike’s personal blog is mbites.com, while he Twitters as @mikebutcher.
While startups across the world are doing their best to disrupt mobile networks with clever voice call apps, like Viber, there remains the basic issues of actual voice and data access which still requires some chipping away at. It’s a particular issue in places like Europe where you can drive for only a couple of hours and cross two or even three borders and see your mobile roaming bill spin up or down like a yo-yo. For the past few years we’ve seen players like Truphone and Maxroam attempt to gnaw away at the telcos, but now Maxroam is going one further, launching a virtual network operator of its own. → Read More
European accelerator HackFwd just announced that Infogr.am from Riga in Latvia as its latest investment. Infogr.am’s product is gunning to be a kind of Adobe Illustrator for online, allowing anyone to create cool info-graphics. The web-based application needs no programming or design skills, and works in the same way that you can snap a photo and share it on your social networks. Users make a statement or an argument graphically and then share it. An infographic can be embedded on a page or shared as a link or an image directly.
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BaltCap, a leading venture investor in startups in the Baltics region, has signed a €1 million investment in Clusterpoint, an enterprise software startup created by Latvian programmers and backed by seed investors in the UK and Baltics. Clusterpoint has built a database platform designed for cloud computing infrastructure which they claim is highly scalable. They are competing against open source solutions such as MongoDB. → Read More
We’re running the first ever TechCrunch Baltics meetup today with a mini-conference and pitch contest in the lovely city of Riga, Latvia. The Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are tiny countries, but punch above their weight in terms of their technical prowess. Estonia in particular was made famous as being the base from which Skype was developed, and now the rest of the region is coming alive with startups and accelerators. You can find the agenda here. Up to 8 selected Baltic startups will pitch to a jury and audience that includes many key investors in the region and beyond. We also have a dedicated twitter account @TCBaltics and the hashtag is #TCBaltics. Check out the live stream on this post: → Read More
It’s been a long and winding road since Tariq Krim created and eventually left Netvibes, but today Netvibes has been acquired by huge French engineering giant Dassault Systèmes for an undisclosed amount. Krim continues to pursue his original dream of organising the social web on Jolicloud. → Read More
I love it when a startup I’ve been covering for literally years suddenly finds itself in the spotlight, and for the right reasons. In this case, Skimlinks, originally from London but now with a growing US base, has been revealed as powering the affiliate links behind Pinterest, one of the hottest startups on the map right now. For some that appears to be a little bit of scandal, at least for Pinterest, though not for Skimlinks.
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Early last year we pointed out that implementing the proposed EU cookie law would profoundly affect European technology companies and anyone running a business online out of Europe. Let’s review why.
First of all, it could mean that a staggering 90% of a site’s visitors would run a mile rather than saying yes to accepting a simple Google Analytics cookie. This is what happened when the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) implemented the EU advise on their own web site.
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Bringing US business models to Europe might seem an obvious move for some – but it’s frequently far harder than it might appear. US incumbents can indeed try to expand, but some fall at the first hurdle. Exactly this happened on January 20 when Shoedazzle announced its closure in the UK. UK head Nigel Whiteoak has since admitted to me that the company was looking to make more of the continued opportunity in the US, versus trying to expand in the UK. Shades of the Romans over-reaching their borders? Maybe. Whatever the case, the news has been a boon to Stylistpick, the local UK player which is making hay in the UK and now heading to other markets with a war chest.
StylistPick has now raised an $11million B round led by Fidelity Growth Partners Europe. The subscription-based fast fashion brand, kept existing investors Accel Partners and Index Ventures on board, who invested $8 million in a Series A in April 2011. The board of directors is now Davor Hebel (Fidelity), Sonali de Rycker (Accel), Robin Klein (Index) and Eileen Burbidge (Passion Capital).
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We covered the launch of Summly an application that summarises text last year, but I recently caught up with Nick D’Aloisio, the16 year year-old programmer who came up with the application for a video interview.
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Berlin-based startup 6Wunderkinder has just launched their private beta for their productivity suite Wunderkit. This is an extension to their simple, yet well designed task list manager Wunderlist, which was acclaimed both by early adopters and users.
With Wunderkit the startup is now taking a next step. They’ve stuck to the user experience that, while beautifully crafted on the one hand is surely tricky to get used to, and have taken their core task manager several steps further by wrapping a fully fledged social network around it. Whereas RememberTheMilk had been their primary competitor until now, the company is now directly competing with full virtual workspace apps such as Podio or Asana, all of them trying to re-invent peoples’ work and organize their private and professional lives. → Read More
With the huge rise in the consumption of online video it follows that services to monetize that video are becoming hot properties. To that end, today Videoplaza, a ‘sell side’ ad management platform for video, has secured a Series B round of $12million led by Qualcomm Ventures and Innovacom. The company previously received rounds from VCs Creandum and Northzone, which also participated, which means VideoPlaza has received $18 million to date.
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Accelerators, Accelerator, Accelerators! There’s a rash of them appearing everywhere, and the latest is the Rockstart Accelerator, a new startup program aimed at Europe’s most promising startups that want to hit a global scale (but then don’t they all?). However, this one has some credible partners in the shape of Google, Microsoft BizSpark, Mozilla WebFWD and StartupHouse in San Francisco.
Oscar Kneppers, founder of Rockstart says the program is for startups from the whole of Europe. Based in Amsterdam, it’s looking for 10 teams of founders and will subject them to 99 mentors for 100 days, and combine that with an additional three-month summer program that culminates with a 25-day Silicon Valley road trip. That last point is probably not a bad idea, for obvious reasons, though Seedcamp has done this for the last few years.
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Way back in 2009 there was no large event dedicated to technology startups in the UK. TechCrunch, under Mike Arrington, was busy trying to get its TechCrunch50/Disrupt programme going in the US, and outside of local meetups, the TC event juggernaut still had yet to arrive in Europe. My friend and colleague Robin Wauters was doing Plugg in Brussels, but there wasn’t a startup event in London. So I launched a personal project, an event I called GeeknRolla, the name for which I literally dreamt up in a London pub. Despite those amateurish beginnings, about 400 people turned up that year, and I ran it again for the next couple of years as a fun side project. But times move on and after running it single-handedly for three years in a row, I’m going to bring the GeeknRolla “mojo” to a new event (while we wait for the TC event machine to spin up in Europe, and more on that later so stay tuned).
Thus, GeeknRolla and the Dublin Web Summit, are merging to create the London Web Summit. It’ll be on March 19th in The Brewery Venue, in London’s “Tech City” area.
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Chicago-based but Israeli-founded Future Simple, a startup that creates products aimed at small businesses, has released an Android app which hooks into their small business CRM. It’s the first Small Business CRM with a true full native Android app and appears to be the first CRM in the Android Market. They already had an iPhone app.
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We first reviewed online workspace startup Podio on its launch in March last year, and it looked pretty promising. A little like Box.net or 37Signals, Podio is closer to a more sophisticated Yammer, with lots of customising possible via its own internal ‘app’ store. Today it launches in two new language, Brazilian Portuguese and Italian, adding to its existing English, German, French, Danish and Spanish translations. Spilt between San Francisco and Copenhagen offices, Podio is now in use in 170 countries so, as CEO Tommy Ahlers says, the translations now make a lot of sense. Though you would think Chinese might also be a good addition?
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Some 15 companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, PayPal plan to jointly work on a standard for blocking phishing e-mails by verifying that they come from legitimate companies. It seems obvious that trusted, legitimate companies could come together to do this, but it’s only started happening in the last 18 months.
DMARC.org – or the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance – is a new white-list system will be available for use across the Internet.
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BraveNewTalent is a social recruitment platform operating in the UK and moving into the US. I caught up with CEO and founder Lucia Tarnowski at Davos.
The startup is built around the idea that people want to follow companies they might want to work for in the future, and companies in turn want to educate potential hires about how they work.
They recently introduced a few new features, which Tarnowski outlines, notably the new feature enabling a user to follow the key employees of a company. → Read More
At Davos I managed to catch Juliana Rotich, Co-Founder of Ushahidi, the incredible crowd sourcing platform which came out of Kenya. Starting with just a handful of countries in 2009, it’s main product, Crowdmap, is now used in hundreds of countries for crisis mapping and even crowd sourcing information about nuclear weapons in Iran.
I got an update from her about their latest moves. These include news that the Omidyar Network, which put $1.4m towards Ushahidi, and which late last year put in another $1.9m.
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Clearly controversy is swirling around web lockers and online storage companies in the wake of the Federal swoop on Megaupload, but if it all goes wrong rest assured that DropBox founder and CEO Drew Houston has a second career to fall back on.
The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (or just “Davos” to those in the know) is a great place for the world’s millionaires and billionaires to loosely affiliate with each-other (as Paul Simon might have put it) and part of that looseness extends to the Piano Bar of the Hotel Europe in the tiny – but 5-star-hotel-packed – village.
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Here at the World Economic Forum in Davos, among the banking, shipping, steel and transport magnates of the global economy, there are a number of technology entrepreneurs floating around. As they rub shoulders with the likes of Eric Schmidt, Sean Parker, Loic Le Meur and Robert Scoble, it’s possible to peel them off from the crowd. I managed to catch Jose Ferreira, CEO and Founder of Knewton a startup which is aiming a silver bullet at the education problem with something that one might even call an audacious platform.
Ferreira has raised $54M to achieve this, which is quite a sum. Despite that, he is openly critical of VCs who do not think in such word changing arenas as education. → Read More
