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 has also served on the Mayor of London’s Digital Advisory Board. 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.
We’re all now familiar with how adwords campaigns on Google work. You buy keywords commonly used in search terms, such as “plumber in X town”, and send people to a response mechanism, usually a web site. But increasingly that response mechanism is not a just a web site but a phone number as well – sometimes it’s even just a phone number. But these days it’s rarely an ordinary number – it’s usually a ‘smart number’ that performs certain kinds of actions and sends data, just like browser calls a web page and sends data from that page. These smart numbers can be made to grab an RSS feed, play a sound file, make the caller fill out a form with their voice – just about anything.
Increasingly we are seeing tech startups address what you do with that phone call and the data and analytics that can be pulled from it, just like on the Web.
While Google and Facebook look at this area with their pet own projects, startups have appeared on the market to address this, such as AdInsight, Tropo, Twilio and Iovox, among others. → Read More
A lot of people in Silicon Valley are pretty obsessed with organic this and that. One or two startups have looked at the whole connecting-fams-with-consumers-directly model, even. So it’s odd that it’s taken a startup from little old Croatia to realise that it’s the farmers themselves that could use a little help. And let’s not be parochial about this. Farming is big business. The ‘market’ of medium and corporate-size farms around the world is worth a juicy $12 billion – but as of today it’s often run on outmoded systems. Thus, Farmeron.com, a startup billing itself as one of the world’s first agricultural SaaS companies, plans to change all that. It’s closed a $1.4 million seed (one time this word is highly appropriate) round co-led by Lee Hower of NextView Ventures and Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC. Other prominent angels – Evan Nisselson of LDV Capital, Niko Hrdy, Taavet Hinrikus - also participated.
The funds will be used to hire key management team members and to staff sales and support teams both in US and Europe. → Read More
It’s easy to miss the launch of the latest movies. You get a week of marketing and by the time you’ve figured out if you want to see it or not, it’s moved off the theatre and you’re waiting for the DVD release. Most movie marketing dollars are spent in these first few days. So MoviePilot, launched out of Berlin, brings upcoming films to fans based on their taste, turning the marketing model on its head and making better use of budgets. It focuses solely on upcoming movie projects and TV shows so that fans are less likely to miss new releases. This gives them a place to gather often long before official homepages are created, finding the right film for its natural audience and the right audience for a film.
Today it’s sealed a $7 million Series B financing, led by leading venture capital firm DFJ Esprit, and continued participation from existing VC funds T-Venture, Grazia Equity and VC Fund Creative Industries Berlin. This will be used to expand in the US and develop the platform.
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ThingLink, which has a platform for tagging things inside images, has acquired Pixboom, an interactive image tagging service for the Swedish fashion industry. The terms of the deal were undisclosed but we understand it was an ‘acquhire’ in that ThingLink, in the main, wanted to bring the Pixboom team on board.
Founded in 2008 by entrepreneurs Jonas Sujkerbuik and Daniel Aspers and based in Stockholm, Pixboom already powers interactive images on hundreds of Swedish fashion blogs. You may not know this but fashion blogging is quite a big deal in Sweden. Suijkerbuijk also joins the ThingLink advisory board as the startup doubles-down on its growth into the fashion industry. → Read More
Credictive, which just went into invite-only beta, wants to solve the problem of crediting who did what online. It’s pitched as an “IMDB for creative content” where people who create videos or music or other kinds of content or just appear in that media can also be connected. Think LinkedIn for creatives. Given that the Internet is like one big giant photocopier, this is a big problem. They might also be on-trend: Jason Calacanis recently asked where is the “Kickstarter meets LinkedIn for talent“.
So say you’re watching a video online and want to know who created it without having to go to their page, then click on the username, find their original web site/blog or Twitter handle etc etc. That’s where Credictive comes in. In a similar manner to the way Pinterest will tell you where an image was re-pinned from, that’s what Credictive wants to do. By installing a bookmarklet (a browser extension is coming) Credictive tags up the content you’re looking at with who did it. → Read More
Lady Gaga has captured the imagination of the entertainment world with her team’s successful social media engagement with the fans she calls her “Little Monsters”, and many other artists and agents are scrambling to capitalise in similar ways. At the same time startups are appearing to meet this need.
To that end MobileBackstage, an interactive fan club service that develops these online relationships between artists and fans, has just today announced it closed a bridge funding round of $1.3 million (€1 million) back in April. The investment was led by Finnvera, the financing vehicle of the Finnish state, which was joined by Miston, a privately owned investment company, management team members, as well as a group of angel investors. The cash will be used for growth, developing the platform and new offices in San Francisco, going existing offices in New York, London and Helsinki.
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Wonga.com, the successful but controversial payday loans provider, is extending its credit service to small businesses in the UK. The move is a smart one given the current economic climate. Banks have been lambasted for not lending to small businesses – Wonga is simply going to try and fill in the gap – and take advantage. Needless to say this could end up being a huge business for Wonga.
Despite attracting the ire of financial journalists – including the Daily Telegraph, which prevented it from winning its Startup 100 awards – Wonga has made as many as 4 million short-term loans to consumers since its launch in 2007.
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Previously we’ve covered Dropbox Automator, a sort of IFTTT for Dropbox. (IFTTT, if you haven’t heard, automates tasks to trigger when a particular action has occurred, e.g. if a Facebook profile picture changes, then update a Twitter profile, etc). Like IFTTT, Dropbox Automator is capable of triggering a similar series of actions, based on what kind of files have been added to your Dropbox folders. Now, the startup that makes Dropbox Automator, Wappwolf, has produced Google Drive Automator. → Read More
With ‘social discovery’ all the rage with apps like Highlight, Banjo and Glancee attracting attention during this year’s SXSW it’s easy to forget there are players out there which have been doing this a tad longer. Badoo de-cloaked as a social network in London a few years ago with ‘discovery’ very much at its core, but with a twist – it encouraged people to promote themselves, sometimes with payment. Where Facebook concentrated on linking up with existing friends and friends of friends, Badoo was literally oriented towards you meeting new people all the time, and for others to push themselves out there. That gave it an obvious flirtatious feel, making it a quasi-dating site which happens to use a different method for getting people to pay. But it’s appealed to a lot of people. And I mean a lot. Currently on 149.8 million users, some time today that will tick over to hit 150 million, given it clocks around 150,000 a day. → Read More
Rdio has launched in the UK and France with a 7-day free trial of unlimited listening. Rdio hasn’t officially announced this, but it’s working. You can sign up for a free trial and stream.
The cost is £4.99 a month in the UK for web-only streaming, and £9.99 a month for unlimited streaming and mobile access. This is comparable with Spotify’s pricing.
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Although it’s a year this week since Passion Capital appeared on the tech scene in London, it feels like they have been around a lot longer. It was in July 2009 I sat on the sun-kissed roof of what became known as their White Bear Yard base in London’s Clerkenwell, having had a tour of a vast empty warehouse space which three noted tech angels planned to fill with their invested startups. Unlike one or two other tech angels I knew, these guys were something of a breed apart.
A laid-back German ex-DJ who had killed it in ecommerce, a cool-calm-collected Brit veteran of the Internet and a former Valley maven who had seen the early days of Skype. We expected interesting things from these three musketeers and we got it. Many of their early investments are now seen as Passion Capital portfolio companies, but in truth, whatever the brand they work under, the special sauce that Eileen, Robert and Stefan brings to the party is the essential ingredient.
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While Pair are popping champagne corks at their funding round today, they better not swig too much bubbly because tomorrow they may have to check out their rear-view mirrors. Co-founder Oleg Kostour seems to think the company’s closest competitor in the ‘private sharing’ space is Path. He’s basically wrong, but then he lives in the Valley echo chamber, so he’s excused…
Cupple is, frankly, at least as excellent a private sharing app for couples app which actually launched before Pair (and has an equally good name). Its had steady growth since November after being featured on the Apple in the Date Night section of the US store iTunes store (iTunes link). → Read More
Avito.ru, the biggest online classified ads site in Russia, has secured a fresh $75 million round of funding from Accel Partners’ London office. Founded in 2008, Avito has so far landed $101 million from Accel, Baring Vostok Private Equity, Kinnevik, and Northzone. The capital will be used for expansion and hiring.
Russia’s classifieds ads business has plenty of room for growth because – guess what, kids – it’s basically 1999 out there in Russia. And this large emerging market is playing through all those businesses models we know and love from back in the good ‘ol days. Expect more of this.
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Flattr, a social micro-payments platform which we’ve likened to a “Like button with cash” is to partner with the second biggest video site on the Web, Dailymotion. The distribution deal is targeted at Dailymotion’s key content creators in its Motionmakers category. A cynic might call this a mere test of the platform to see if it can be rolled out across the site more widely. But both parties insist this is a card-carrying ‘deal’. Suffice it to say Flattr has been crying out for a big distribution partner and yearned after one for the last two years. But TechCrunch remains skeptical that even this deal will lift the startup out of the early adopter crowd into the mainstream as there remain significant issues with its business model. Then again, at least they now get a real stress test.
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Loopc.am has lately become a little bit of a craze amongst some iPhone users I know. Frankly, at first it seemed like something of a gimmick. Recording and sharing short gif-based videoclips called loops seemed like a temporary blip. I mean, why not just do a video and upload it somewhere? But word on the street is that users have taken to the app in droves and that is leading to significant traction in, perhaps, the same way that people took to sharing filter-altered images on Instagram. Loopc.am is also continuing an interesting startup tradition out of Berlin right now, joining EyeEm on the ‘photography’ front, and the ‘Berlin Swedish Mafia’ of Soundcloud and Readmill. But Loopc.am Founder Tor Rauden Källstigen feels animated loops are a brand new category of shareable content, and so do his investors, Passion Capital, who today doing an undisclosed seed financing round.
Alongside them are angel investors including Zoe Adamovicz (Xyologic, Concise Software), Alexander Ljung (Soundcloud), Heilemann Ventures (Dailydeal), Christophe Maire (Txtr), Felix Petersen (Amen), Peter Read and Eric Wahlforss (Soundcloud). The new funds will be used for growing the team and accelerating product development, including expanding the Loopc.am app client to support other platforms. → Read More
Facebook has been credited with helping to power the ‘Arab Spring’ movement of democracy, and in further ‘we plan to save the world’ news, it is now unveiling a new feature: tell the world you’re an organ donor.
Starting today, you can add that you’re an organ donor to your timeline, and share your story about when, where or why you decided to become a donor, says Facebook. → Read More
MLOVE is a European mobile conference with a difference. If a mobile conference was crossed with TED and a music festival, that’s vaguely like MLove. Its big annual event is in an old East German castle 200 miles outside of Berlin. Yes, it’s as exotic as it sounds. But this week it took the plunge and brought its special atmosphere to Monterey.
Amid the excellent speeches about the future of mobile, and the future generally, organiser Harald Neidhardt throws together a diverse range of speakers, from Grammy Award winning Musician Chamillionaire to “CameraGirl”, who runs tech at Burning Man. As one delegate, Dr. Robert Daubner of billiger, put it to me, “mobile is poised to disrupt the world.” Never were truer words spoken…
Amid the high concept presentations from the likes of the Singularity University and others were a number of startup pitches from U.S.-based startups. Here’s a run-down on those: → Read More
As of yesterday Y Combinator began its marathon series of interviews to decide which startup teams will ultimately go through the – now world-renowned – program. Interviews go on for five days. Rumours that people have been seen running screaming from the building shouting “The Horror!” have not been confirmed. But I’m currently in the Valley catching up with one or two of those European hopefuls trying to get into Paul Graham’s good books – indeed I bumped into one team at San Francisco’s SFO airport. Turns out the YC pitch document I saw being worked on a laptop on the plane over was for Stackblaze. The guys behind it, James Cunningham and Colin Hayhurst, also put together a cute web app full to the brim with the kinds of typically blunt questions you get asked at a YC interview.
You can check it out here, and subject yourself to the same torture as all those YC hopefuls. → Read More
Online private sales burst onto the scene a few years ago in the shape of Vente Privee in Europe and, later, Gilt in the US. It’s a model we all know and love – and it’s rapidly proving a model with which emerging economies are, well, rather obsessed. I was just recently in Istanbul where you can almost throw a stone and be sure of hiting a private sales startup entrepreneur. And from there, and across the Middle East and North Africa (known as MENA), online businesses are growing like weeds.
And some investors know it. Thus today MarkaVIP, a runaway private sales success story in the Middle East has completed a $10 million Series B funding led by European venture firm Prime Ventures. It’s joined by participation from New York City-based Invus Financial Advisors (IFA), Antwerp-based Hummingbird Ventures, and San Francisco-based Lumia Capital.
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There is a chapter in the history of technology startups, or perhaps more a book, that will be dedicated to Berlin. As with other cities, but particularly those that, in 2012, are attracting what I like to call The International Brigade of startup entrepreneurs, Berlin is plowing its own path… its own, distinct, ecosystem. But there is something uniquely Berlin about how this history is playing out. For if this were the Middle Ages, we’d be talking that time when the villagers began demanding more rights from the feudal, Teutonic knights. Perhaps rising up to reclaim their destiny. Just as Berlin started out with a handful of entrepreneurs dominating the scene – sometimes unwilling to share the wealth with their serfs in the field – now a new wave is bringing a new, collaborative and organic approach.
To that end, this new wave has already begin to manifest itself physically. Two years ago, on a winter’s day in Berlin, I sat in a coffee shop with Alexander Ljung and David Noël of SoundCloud talking about this new breed of startups. “We’re mentoring each other. It’s starting to happen,” said Ljung, excitedly. Then, earlier this year, I met a man sitting behind me at a dinner in Munich. He tapped me on the shoulder. “I have something to show you,” he said. I turned around and he proceeded to show me pictures of a giant building that sat on the old border of East and West Berlin. “We’re building a factory,” he said, with a smile. This week, that ‘factory’ breaks cover. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
