TheStartup.eu

I am very pleased to announce that all our efforts in creating a tech scene in Rome and more generally in Italy are coming through. On Monday, November 23rd we will be hosting our first event, in collaboration with a few roman startups: Publisoftweb, Ibrii, Frestyl and other cool geeks.

UpStartRoma will be a monthly meetup for the italian tech and startup scene. Our fist meeting will be held in Publisoftweb’s offices (thank you) and will feature quite a few pitches and keynotes.

What we aim to do is recreate the London-like ecosystem in Rome. There are a lot of great people, great startups, investors and bloggers but nobody knows each other very well. We hope to help everyone in finding new business contacts, mentors, investors and more generally very cool dudes to hang out with.

We can’t wait to be  able to do this in other cities, but for that we would need your help. Please contact us if you’d like our help with the organization of something similar in your city.

We must say, we got a good inspiration from the first Startup Night, that was held in Milan in September. And, by the way, they are hosting a second one, on Tuesday 24th.

If you’re around Rome this is a must-attend event, see you on November 23rd, 19:00 c/o Publisoftweb, Via Gallonio 6, Rome

I forgot to say that beer and pizza are on us!

LeWeb ‘09 looks more promising than ever. With the recent news of Queen Rania Al Abdullah attending on Dec 10th, the speakers’ list gets even more exciting.

To see the complete list of speakers you can either check the official list or follow the twitter list. As you can see the most famous internet stars will be there, and you should too.

I am an official blogger of LeWeb, and with many others I will be covering the event on twitter and on this blog. I suggest you follow the official bloggers’ twitter list.

The early bird ends on november 10, you can get a 10% discount on top of that with the following code: BLOG09.

Here is a video of the organizers, Loic and Geralindine, explaining the theme, program and speakers of LeWeb ‘09.

I’ll live blog the event, but I’d prefer to meet each and everyone of you over there!

This is a guest post by Marc Rosenfeld, a web entrepreneur  currently developing a web based platform for productive groups. Prior to that, Marc worked at Ericsson Brazil in the pre-sales department contributing to managed service proposals, and having knowledge sharing responsibilities.

Last Saturday I went to BizCamp Belgium and, as a newly self-appointed web entrepreneur, I could already tell: this was a perfect introduction to the web-sphere world.
There were around 20 sessions, in 3 different rooms, where a lot of useful information could be learned with more experienced entrepreneurs.

Ok, so let’s have a summary of some topics discussed:

Many discussions get around PR and promotion. As you can imagine, networking & word of mouth was the main trend here. But another one catch my attention: printed media. Yes, there are still a lot of people paying and reading their newspaper every morning, and  they are customers too. More surprising was the discovery that printed media can be cheaper than online advertising. One great tip that was shared is to ask questions in a “…by the way, would you like to..?.” style in order to engage users, and I must say, this works pretty well.

A second topic discussed was funding. This is what we should keep in mind:

• Seed capitalists don’t invest only in businesses, they invest in people. In the beginning “you”= “your business” so they need to make sure “you” will grow with your business. If you don’t have all the competences needed to run your business, go partner with someone who does. Places like BizCamp are a good way to start (most of the attendees were looking for partners there).
• Public grants exist and are very valuable to young businesses. In order to give you a grant, governments usually only want to make sure you will still be alive in two or three years, and they don’t ask high rates of return for their money. So, before VCs, get a look into public grants, maybe they’re less glamorous, but it’ll surely be cheaper.
• For all sort of funding, business & financial plans are needed. Give special attention to your break even point, knowing it will give investors precious information about their risk.
• (Maybe the most important point here) You should keep your capital needs to minimum. Investors want their money back, and getting capital is still expensive in all cases. The expression: “capital is like junk food: you know you shouldn’t, but it’s so good you can’t resist to ask more.” sums it up pretty well

Finally, there were some good discussions about breaking the rules. The main idea is that, if you are an entrepreneur, you already are an exception and you shouldn’t be afraid to look bigger than you are or even to lie, a little, if this will be good for your business. An example? Well, if you need to be an artist to receive a government grant, then you are an artist! But, note, this doesn’t mean you should cross the limits like void paying taxes. You should always run your business responsibly and obeying the laws.

Concluding, there were also a lot of good business tips shared and a great entrepreneurial vibe, but this, I can’t summaries in a blog’s article

This is a guest post by Andrea La Mesa, founder and CEO of PubliSoftWeb, an italian startup focused on developing social media presence for brands with their white-label My.So product. As I could not attend the event, he kindly offered to share the experience on theStartup.

Last weekend more than 100 web developers, web entrepreneur and other web enthusiasts gathered in London at PayPal offices to work on their ideas and launch a web app in 48 hours.

The weekend started on friday night, after a day-long conference where mentors and experts covered various subjects such as legal 101 for startups, digital PR, marketing and social media. (All the slides are online).

Soonafter everyone had a chance to pitch his own idea, in front of the other attendees. 35 people showed up and only 6 made it to the final round of voting.

Each of us had a chance to pick the idea he liked the most, and join the team.

You can find a video of each idea on TechFluff.tv.

The following 48 hours have been very challenging and inspiring. Each group found his balance, some natural leaders emerged, and tasks were split among the team members. Each of us had a chance to prove his value, sometimes in a field other than his core skills.

I was amazed to see that all of the six startups already had a prototype working by sunday at 4pm, with interesting business plans and marketing strategies.

For those who might be thinking that 48 hours are not enough to launch a business, here’s my point of view.

1) The experience of working with a team of strangers is professionally enriching, entertaining and enlightning.

2) I was actually amazed to see how much work can be achieved in a team, in just 48hrs. I will never allow myself to spend days and days thinking about the best way to do something;, after having seen so many results in just a few hours.

Whether or not these 6 startups will keep on developing their ideas is not what matters the most.

It’s the journey, not the destination.

Yesterday I attended TechCrunch London, an event put together by TechCrunch Europe.

I couldn’t live blog the event, as there was no working wi-fi. Other than that, I think the event was a success. The venue was very nice, the talks were inspiring and the startups who presented were very interesting.

You can find pics of the event on Facebook and Flickr (different sets).

These are the companies that launched yesterday.

Fiabee is a spanish company that presented an online backup solution that focuses on security and ease of use.

Notion Learning is an e-learning web application developed by two London-based students. They have some tough competition, but they had some fairly unique points. Keep an eye on them.

Audioboo is an audio microblogging platform, much like Twitter, but with audio. Posts are kept to at most three minutes long, though for most of us, that’s all we need.

Winner: Festbuzz provides crowsourced reviews about festivals (starting in the Edinburgh area). They’re making the traditional Festival word-of-mouth digital

Kohive is an online collaboration tool with a desktop-like interface. It has many applications and is going the freemium way (plus iphone app). The interesting part is they are building a platform for other developers, and thus have an app store.

Kyubid was a fun presentation. They are developing a new dating site based on bidding (but not with real money, put it away).

Aware Monitoring is, as the name suggests, a monitoring service. It’s SaaS based and it goes behind your login monitoring every component of your web application.

3rd: Social Safe is an application that lets you back up your Facebook friends, photos and profile to your computer. You can keep track of all your posts, and finally own your content.

Yoomoot facilitates mass online discussions which are focused and navigable. Yoomoot merges comments, wikis, forums, blogs and social bookmarks into one simple and flexible format.

En-twyn.com presented a complete high speed networking solution that enables you to connect your media devices and your environmental management devices to the same network running through the power sockets in the home. Think wi-fi and hdtv all around your place.

Mywidz.se is a mobile service that gives users worldwide the power to collect, share and create mobile widgets, independent of subscription, phone brand or nationality. Think an app store for every phone.

2nd: Mixcloud’s vision is to be the YouTube of radio with on-demand radio shows spanning music and talk and truing to make it make it more social, personalised and ‘democratic’.

After those pitches, and some other inspiring talks, the Seedcamp folks came along and we rocked it all night long with a very nice party and networking event.

(pics credits to BitchBuzz)

Here is the live video stream of the TechCrunch London event, brought to you by Hermione Way

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Original TechCrunch post.