Mike Butcher
Mike Butcher is currently Editor of TechCrunch Europe. In addition he is involved in a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club environment called TechHub (@TechHub), in London initially. 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.
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. 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, while he Twitters as @mikebutcher.
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Latest from Mike Butcher
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UK’s Prodigy Finance raises $240M to crowdfund students from emerging markets
UK fintech startup Prodigy Finance has raised a whopping $240 million funding round, certainly one of the largest by a UK company this year. The company provides loans to international students from emerging markets, enabling them to study at business schools in the US, the UK and Europe. The fundraise includes a $40 million Series C equity round led by London’s Index Ventures, with… Read More
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Online hate crime to be treated the same as face-to-face crime in the UK
Sometimes the most obvious solutions might be the best. While the U.S. wrings its hands over what to do with online haters and abusers on social media, other countries have a more direct approach: throw the book at them. That’s effectively the U.K.’s new approach, which will now treat online “hate crime” as seriously as offences carried out in real life. Read More
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Value Voting launches from YC to supercharge the work of political advocates
The ascendance of the so-called “hard right” in the US and the Trump administration’s work to protect its power means it’s unlikely the movement will be beaten by Democrats or left leaning parties at this point. The power of the hard right in red-states has become
institutionalized. So perhaps the answer is, instead, empowering traditional Conservatives who are… Read More -
Welltory packs a lot of science into its app to measure your stress levels
There’s a lot of talk about the quantified self, but one of the grey areas remains working out your levels of stress. Usually this requires hardware devices. Now a New York-based startup thinks it’s come up with an approach based on specially developed algorithms and machine learning using simple heartbeat readings taken with a smartphone app. Read More
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The growing band of startups donating their platforms to refugees
Since founding the Techfugees non-profit two years ago, I’ve come acutely aware off the huge problems refugees face. With over 65 million refugees globally (according to the UN), and their ranks being swelled considerably by the civil war in Syria, it became clear to me that any solutions might help refugees would have to be scalable. Scaling solutions to problems is what the tech… Read More
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Mozoo acquires AdinCube, to create one ad platform for mobile publishers
Mobile publishers tend to struggle to optimise ad revenue and fill their mobile inventory, despite the abundance of options. What’s required is a one-stop solution for ad revenue optimisation that is simple to integrate and manage. That’s the potential prospect with the acquisition today of French founded company AdinCube, in a deal claimed to be worth $20m. This is an… Read More
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TrackR secures a $50M Series B funding round led by Revolution Growth
TrackR, one of the better known of the little Bluetooth devices that track your lost keys and EDCs (Everyday Carry, don’t you know?) has now gone big with the securing of a $50 million Series B round led by Steve Murray at Revolution Growth. Also participating was the Foundry Group, Amazon Alexa Fund, DoCoMo Capital, The Glenmede Trust and Bespoke Strategies. Read More
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Bitrise raises $3.2M A led by OpenOcean to attack the complexity of building apps
There’s a problem out there in Developer Land in that developers of apps in iOS, Android and other platforms have to manually set up every step for their application. It means they can easily customize things, but that then creates more maintenance costs. The ideal solution would be the automation of all the mobile building, testing and deployment, allowing developers the ability to… Read More
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Apple’s capitulation to China’s VPN crack-down will return to haunt it at home
Yesterday Apple removed all major VPN apps from its App Store in the country. These VPNs aided internet users there to get around the government’s vast system of censorship and access uncensored sources of media. But by doing so, Apple has clearly decided to put its business before the interests of the population, opposition leaders and activists. For example, Golden Frog, which… Read More
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Cristiano Ronaldo acquires digital agency to launch his 7EGEND venture
Sporting stars have followed Hollywood and music industry celebrities into the world of startups and tech investing, but until now the world’s biggest soccer player, Cristiano Ronaldo, has played the tech ball close to his feet. Not any more. The highest paid player in the world has bought the lion’s share of one of Portugal’s biggest digital agencies with a view to create a… Read More
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Cool Cousin’s social app for travellers raises $2M round, led by Elevator Fund
Imagine if you could go to the profile of a friend of Foursquare and instead of scrolling through the long list of coffee shops they’d checked into in Berlin, you could simply click a button and add all their recommendations to your personal map in one go. That’s essentially the offering of Cool Cousin, an app and web site which is mining one of the last bastions of social media… Read More
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Startup hub builder Factory plans gargantuan new campus in Lisbon
This year Lisbon is roaring along with noted startups like Uniplaces, Aptoide, Farfetch, Seedrs and Unbabel putting the Portuguese capital on the map. Vast annual startup conference Web Summit arrived last year with 53,000 people, and entrepreneurs and investors have been increasingly eyeing-up the city as a viable alternative to equally cheap Berlin, especially since the government… Read More
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SF-based Grabr grabs $2.7M to scale its traveler-driven shopping community
Grabr, an SF-based platform with a convenient way for people to buy international goods, has secured a $2.7 million funding round led by SignalFire. FF Angel, NFX, Global Founders Capital and multiple angel investors, including Diana Moldavsky and Charles Songhurst, also participated. Grabr plans to use the cash to scale up its operations and attract more travelers to its platform. Read More
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Australia’s Expert360 raises $10M for its freelance consultant marketplace
Freelance workers and consultants make up a third of the US workforce, but that figure is expected to approach 40 per cent according to some studies. And we know how big the overall gig economy is going to become. Thus, marketplaces which meet that need are going to continue to grow. Hence, this is probably why Expert360, an online marketplace to access and manage freelance consultant talent… Read More
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Accountants, get worried — Rimilia raises $25m growth funding
Currently large enterprises require large accounting teams to do what’s known as cash matching and credit collection. This is very manual stuff. Some of the ERP vendors (most notably SAP) have their own modules to do this, but in this world the big players are firms like Hanse Orga which is focused on Germany and the SAP ecosystem, and US players HighRadius and Billtrust. However, much… Read More
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Amid a tough field, Vyking.io wins the TechCrunch London Pitch-Off
Well the TechCrunch London Meetup + Pitch-Off in London is over for another year, and this one was arguably the best vintage ever in terms of quality of startups and the sheer enthusiasm from the attendees! Hundreds of startups entered the competition, creating a very competitive field. We packed out the Old Truman Brewery in East London with over 500 people, to hear the pitches of the… Read More
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Leading VC Tim Draper invests in Gravity’s ‘Iron Man’ flight suit, on a $100 bill
You’re a bored former finance guy who decides one day to strap on some micro-jet engines and see if you can become Iron Man. Hey it happens all the time. Or maybe not. But that’s what British entrepreneur Richard Browning decided to do and just this year found himself demoing his ‘flight suit’ to venture capitalist Tim Draper in the parking lot of Boost VC. Moments… Read More
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Zego raises £1M to give gig-economy drivers a pay-as-you-go insurance platform
The gig economy, as we know, is big and just getting bigger. But companies like Uber and Deliveroo have a huge problem and it’s called insurance. How do you insure all these workers and how do the workers cover themselves in the gig economy? Step in Zego. This London startup has just raised just over £1 million in seed funding from investors, including LocalGlobe, with FTSE 100… Read More
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Mangrove raises $170M for its new fund to invest in Europe and Israeli startups
Luxembourg-based Mangrove Capital Partners, one of Europe’s leading early-stage venture capital firms, has raised $170 million for its latest fund. Mangrove V will be used to invest across Europe and Israel. The amount matches that of its previous funds, and was completed inside two months with 90 percent coming from returning investors, said the firm. Read More
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Rajeeb Dey’s new career platform Learnerbly secures £1.6M led by Frontline Ventures
Professional development is one of the hot areas for big corporates grappling with their millennials influx who are hungry to learn, so it makes sense that new platforms are now appearing to service this need. Today, Learnerbly, a “curated professional development SaaS platform” based in London announces that it has raised £1.6 million in seed financing to create a so-called… Read More
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