Mike Butcher ♥ Europe

Written on 9th December 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Mike Butcher, the UK editor of TechCrunch gave a nice update Europe’s Start-up Scene. The first thing he wants to get out of the way is that he ALSO writes about Europe and for the US version of Techcrunch. Duly noted!

Mike explains the audience that the last bubble was our summer of love and he has photos of naked girls with flowers in their hair to prove it. He also has less interesting graphic material (graphs) showing that 2007 was the peak of activity for European start-ups.

One of the big trends, according to Mike, was the growth of data services and companies. Another trend: immersive gaming. In an economic downturn people don’t stop shopping, they shop more, but differently. So that is another arena where money is to be made.

Mike went all over Europe on his Techrunch meetup tour and hundreds of entrepreneurs are everywhere. He expected 40 people to turn up in Turkey and 400 did. What he found out is that Europe has key strenghts in the following fields: Social Applications, Mobile 3G, Data creation, First class engineers, 2nd generation startups and he sees less and less clones and more original first generation startups.

And… that was it!

Mike ended his story with an invitation for all entrepreneurs to come to Techcrunch50. Who is planning on going? Let us know…