I recently hit Bucharest in Romania to experience the rising star event of the Central and Eastern European scene, HowToWeb. This annual conference is doing an amazing job of bringing CEE entrepreneurs together, and Bucharest is gradually emerging as one of the key tech hubs in the region. The reason? It’s pretty simple – there is great engineering talent, plenty of it (there are 22 million Romanians) and it’s affordable. I could of course name any other number of cities that fit this profile – Kiev, Ljubljana, Sofia, Warsaw and more – but at the moment HowToWeb is bringing many startups and entrepreneurs in from the region to network and party, and mashing them up with international speakers such as Mark Randall of Adobe, Michael Breidenbruecker, founder of Last.fm and RjDj and Pablos Holman of Intellectual Ventures Lab.
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Mike Butcher (M.B.E.), formerly Editor-at-large of TechCrunch, has written for UK national newspapers and magazines and been named one of the most influential people in European technology by Wired UK. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, Web Summit, and DLD. He has interviewed Tony Blair, Dmitry Medvedev, Kevin Spacey, Lily Cole, Pavel Durov, Jimmy Wales, and many other tech leaders and celebrities. Mike is a regular broadcaster, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, CNBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera and Bloomberg. He has also advised UK Prime Ministers and the Mayor of London on tech startup policy, as well as being a judge on The Apprentice UK. GQ magazine named him one of the 100 Most Connected Men in the UK. He is the co-founder of TheEuropas.com (Top 100 listing of European startups); and the non-profits Techfugees.com, TechVets.co, and Startup Coalition. He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2016 for services to the UK technology industry and journalism.
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