It’s my great pleasure to announce that I’m going to be joined by Steve O’Hear on TechCrunch Europe. Some of you may have noticed Steve’s work appear on the blog over the last month. Steve will be Contributing Editor, and will be working closely with me on our continuing coverage of the tech scene in Europe and acting as my “wingman”. In fact, I did try to convince him that Wingman was a great title, but for some reason he preferred something with the word Editor in it. I can’t think why.

Steve has some awesome credentials. Aside from starting up the well-regarded independent gadget blog last100 (formerly a part of the ReadWriteWeb Blog Network) which he’ll continue to write, he’s written for some of the best titles out there including The Guardian, Macworld UK, Mobile Industry Review, TES, ZDNet and of course ReadWriteWeb. In particular he wrote the excellent ZDNet blog ‘The Social Web’ from 2006 to 2008. And to top it all off he previously wrote and directed the documentary film ‘In Search of the Valley’, which interviewed many leading Web 2.0 people in Silicon Valley and was released in September 2006. It was highly recommended by Mike Arrington, FYI.

As usual I’ll remain the first port of call for TechCrunch Europe editorial, but feel free to pitch Steve stories as well. His contact details are on Crunchbase, below, but he is @sohear on Twitter and he can be reached on email here.