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.
Crunchbase profile →Featured Picks from Mike Butcher
Latest from Mike Butcher
-
Octopus Ventures hits 10, with an international push and a healthy rack of exits
Back in the mists of 2014 we revealed how one of the UK’s most active venture investment funds operated. To this day Octopus Ventures continues to rub shoulders with the most active institutional VC funds at the early stage, even though it’s technically an evergreen fund attached to the stock market. It’s backed hits like LoveFilm, Zoopla through to IPO, Graze as well as… Read More
-
Harry Stebbings and more join #PathFounders at #TheEuropas, June 13, London
In partnership with TechCrunch, PathFounders is the exclusive, invitation-only, event for startup Founders at The Europas Conference & Awards. With this, Founders get a special ‘founders and investors only’ half-day, on the day before The Europas (which they also join, for the whole thing), where they have dedicated sessions on building their company, fund-raising and also get… Read More
-
Just some of the investors you’ll run into at #TheEuropas, June 13, London
In partnership with TechCrunch, The Europas Conference & Awards, is a different kind of tech startup event which features smaller breakout sessions on key subjects for startups, as well as main-stage speakers and panels. It’s also very different, in that there’s no “off-limits speaker room” at The Europas, so attendees can mingle easily with VIPs and speakers. What… Read More
-
FanDuel investor Pentech raises new £88M fund for more early-stage startups
You know it’s spring when VC funds start to announce their new fund raises. But it’s buoying to see a new mid-sized fund appear, which over the years has been highly geared toward early-stage startups just starting out on their journey. Pentech has closed its third fund, saying it was oversubscribed at £88 million, surpassing the original target fund size of £70 million. Read More
-
Berlin’s Frontier Car Group lands $22M to disrupt emerging markets car sales
European founders, adept at launching startups which cross many international borders are fast ganging a reputation for launching in emerging markets. In countries where markets are often still very chaotic, there remains a host of opportunities. That’s evidenced by the news today that the Frontier Car Group, which builds and runs marketplaces for used cars in emerging markets, has closed… Read More
-
All the VIP speakers you’ll actually get to meet at #TheEuropas, June 13, London
In partnership with TechCrunch, The Europas Conference & Awards, is a different kind of tech startup event which features smaller breakout sessions on key subjects for startups, as well as main-stage speakers and panels. The Europas conference is followed by a glittering awards show for the hottest startups in Europe, based on voting by expert judges and the industry itself. But key to it… Read More
-
Lucas VonCranach and Ijad Madisch to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin
Disrupt Berlin 2017 is coming up in December, and even though that is a ways off, we are already building out our content. We’re also here to remind you to sign up for our next 2-for-1 ticket release on our website here. We’ll send you an email with more details on how you can obtain these limited supply tickets. By signing up now, you can use this extra ticket to bring a… Read More
-
OSVehicle comes out of stealth with a modular self-driving car called EDIT
OSVehicle is a B2B Self-Driving vehicle startup, backed by Y Combinator, which creates what they call ‘white-label solutions’ for auto fleets owners. Dubbed ‘EDIT’ this claims to be the first “ready-to-use Self-Driving EV” which is modular, open to different designs and “white-labelled”, in that it can be branded with any car marque. Emerging out… Read More
-
Vote now in #TheEuropas 2017 Awards, for the hottest European startups
In partnership with TechCrunch, The Europas Conference & Awards, is a different kind of tech event which features main-stage speakers and panels as well as smaller breakout sessions on key subjects for startups. The Europas conference is followed by a glittering awards show based on voting by expert judges and the industry itself. Voting is now live, so please go and vote! The awards… Read More
-
UK health service hit by ransomware, amid possible global attack on systems
An apparent cyberattack with the motivation of extortion has hit hospitals across England, taking down systems for appointments. Patients are being turned away unless it’s an emergency. Pictures appearing on Twitter showed screens of NHS computers with ‘ransomware’ images demanding payment of $300 worth of Bitcoin, saying: “Ooops, your files have been… Read More
-
Hadean secures $2.6m to put a supercomputer into your laptop
In order to run complex algorithms on data at any scale you normally need a lot of engineering resources and management. Like, a LOT. Over 50% of the total amount of money spent on processing that oft-remarked thing called Big Data is spent on engineering and developer operations. It’s a big problem to solve, and basically a sitting duck for a startup to attack. The problem is, it’s… Read More
-
Cohort is a new take on getting value from your professional network
Human collaboration has been around… a while. But it’s only in the last 10 years that we’ve started begin to work out how to get network effects from it. Platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn arose to tackle that, and it would be fair to assume that this “ship” has sailed. Of course, it doesn’t stop others from trying their hand at making networking better… Read More
-
Skimlinks has figured out how publishers could unshackle themselves from Facebook
The conventional thinking about profiling online users is that Facebook (in particular) has enormous amounts of profile data about your tastes, while Amazon has equivalent quantities of data about your shopping habits. While both are true to some extent, the reality is that your liking of cat videos and flirt-Liking work colleagues’ posts doesn’t amount to a heck of a lot… Read More
-
Userfeeds aims to stop fake news by linking the blockchain to social content
Userfeeds is a new startup which has a platform which applies blockchain tokens to news discovery. The idea is to combat so-called “fake news” by providing an economic incentive to rank content well. The Warsaw based company has raised $800k in seed funding from BlueYard Capital, Fred Ehrsamh (the Coinbase co-founder) and Piotr Smolen (Dataventures). The system of content ranking… Read More
-
InVision picks up TrackDuck to better integrate with Atlassian products
InVision is acquiring the TrackDuck startup to further connect and enable the digital product development process from design to delivery. This is InVision’s seventh acquisition in the last 16 months. Terms were undisclosed. TrackDuck was well-placed for an exit, already having a number of popular integrations with the Atlassian Suite. Its only main competitor is UserSnap. TrackDuck… Read More
-
Middle East startups are growing fast, and that’s even before the flying taxis arrive
The flight from Tehran to Dubai is about two hours, similar to the flight from New York to Chicago. The flight from Cairo to Beirut is one hour and 15 minutes. In more peaceful times, the drive from Beirut to Damascus in Syria would take you less than two hours. The interconnectedness of the Middle East / North Africa (MENA) region is apparent once you start travelling around —… Read More
-
Snapay aims at the unbanked with an app which replaces cash
There are two billion unbanked people in the world today. Unfortunately the banking industry isn’t very interested in these people, so they are forced to use cash. But even though 4.5 billion people have cell phones, including many of the unbanked, the distribution of access to cash via a mobile is at 1%, more or less. As you can see, there’s a problem to be solved here. Yes… Read More
-
Tune in for the The Duke Of York’s live Pitch @ Palace annual event right here
The Duke Of York’s Pitch@Palace event is now a regular annual fixture in the London startup scene, and TechCrunch is delighted to live stream the pitches of the teams Pitch@Palace has selected from its events throughout the year. Today you can watch the event being broadcast live right here from 17.40 London time or 09.40 SF time. Today is the final event of Pitch@Palace 7.0, following… Read More
-
Jimmy Wales’ Wikitribune to combat fake news with wiki-powered journalism
With fake news continuing to dominate the discussion about the future of the media and role of social networks in spreading it, many in the tech world have tried to come up with ways to fight this new cancer. Various pronouncements have been made by Google, Facebook and Twitter about tweaking their algorithms. But it’s hard to get away from the fact that human beings are probably going… Read More
-
How a Berlin startup beat the online giants at image recognition
Can a machine learn aesthetics in a way a human would? Could it then look at a set of photos, and draw on those same aesthetics to reproduce a different set? It’s a big question because it has long-term implications for how AI is going to develop. What are aesthetics anyway? Is it just what you “like”? How does it all work? When you as a human find it hard to express what… Read More
Message Us