TheStartup.eu

This is a post I recently wrote for TechCrunch Europe. They did some major editing on it.

Rome-based iWikiPhone, a social network for iPhone users where they can discover, share and discuss the best apps, has closed a €250k round of funding. The money comes from a number of private investors and also from Egolab, a Rome based company specializing in online media. Egolab has provided 100k of funding by way of services and a cash investment in return for 20% equity in the company.
With 100,000 apps available from the iPhone App store, finding the good ones is becoming increasingly difficult. iWikiPhone’s answer is that the best way to discover the most interesting and relevant apps for Apple’s smartphone is through recommendations from friends and from knowing which apps your friends are actually using.
The most interesting part, however, is that they also plan to crowdsource ideas for new iPhone apps from the iWikiPhone community. Users will be able to suggest apps and make money. The “idea owner” will be paid $500 and a share of revenue generated through selling the app in the iPhone App Store, which of course is how iWikiPhone plans to make money too.

Luca Di Persio, one of the founding partners of Egolab, was immediately enticed by the concept: “…among the most important things that characterizes today’s online environment is collaboration, and with that, the ability to overcome traditional barriers of communication by bringing together those who have the ideas and those who can execute these ideas”, says Di Persio.

iWikiPhone was founded in June this year by the former CTO of start-up dooyoo.com, Luca Di Cesare, 40. Since leaving Dooyoo, Luca has worked as a DoubleClick consultant at Google, and after reading Wikinomics he was inspired to launch iWikiPhone.

I’ve embedded a video below that explains how the service works.

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!

Note: This is a post I wrote on TechCrunch Europe a few days ago.

Online password management startup Passpack, recently announced it’s follow-on funding. The company raised €350,000 in June 2008 and now previous investor Zernike Meta Ventures is topping that with additional €74,000.

This new capital injection will enable the company to finish the development of their product and start to actively market it. There is a great blog post about this new round in wich they explain what the funds will be used for. +1 for transparency.

The Rome-based company is not looking for venture capital until it hits profitability. Apparently, the new round was determined by reaching a major milestone in development and user-base.

The founders, an italo-american couple: Tara Kelly and Francesco Sullo that I recently met with in the attempt to create a roman startup community, stated that their revenue from premium packages is growing at a 2 digit percentage each month.

While this is great news for the italian startup ecosystem, it still raises many questions and doubts. €74,000, really? Let’s analyze the situation: Passpack has a working and cheap product, revenue growing every month, a committed team raising it like a child, great international press coverage and recently launched a desktop version to take on its competitors.Even thought the company is not looking for VC money right now, I still think it deserves some faith from investors.

If Passpack raises this modest amount what can other italian seed-stage startups aim for?

This is a post I wrote for TechCrunch Europe last week. Some editing by Mike Butcher.

As you may know, there is a large Italian-expat community in Silicon Valley. A lot of first-time entrepreneurs decided to move there for all the obvious reasons and the lack of opportunity in Italy. But, luckily, some of them haven’t forgotten those they left behind. Some of them are trying to help Italian startups move to the Valley and thus gain a global perspective and a cycle of companies coming back and forth.

One of the most interesting initiatives is the Mind The Bridge foundation. It is a non profit association, founded by Marco Marinucci, a top executive at Google, and Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol. Among all their activities one of the most interesting is the Business Plan competition they hold every year. The winners get mentoring and possibly a chance at a 3 month incubation in San Francisco’s Plug&Play Tech Center.

The deadline for applications is set on August 25th, finalists will be announced in September and winners will have the opportunity to fly to the Valley between December and April. Previous winners of the event include Zooppa, Eris4, and Econoetica.

In their own words: What is Mind the Bridge?
“It’s an opportunity for Italian entrepreneurs to get valuable mentorship from successful serial entrepreneurs and to present their ideas to a core group of experienced executives and potential investors in the Silicon Valley”

It looks like a pretty unique opportunity to get a grasp of the Valley’s spirit and try to bring it back in Europe – possibly with some fresh capital in hand…

Disclosure: I also write for the Mind The Bridge blog.

H-Farm is one of the most interesting projects in the italian and european startup scene. As the name suggests, it is a real farm located in the middle of the venetian country near Treviso where people every day are trying to redefine the traditional incubation process.

Founded in 2005 by Riccardo Donadon and Maurizio Rossi, H-Farm has now more than 15 startups, and some very successful ones too: Zooppa is the best example.

The company already has offices in Treviso, Seattle and Mumbay. The Old Truman Brewery complex located around Brick Lane, very close to the financial district, will host their new Uk office. This addition will help them create that international incubator they are aspiring to.

Here is how Riccardo Donadon, founding partner, explains it to us: “H-Farm objective is to build an international incubation platform that can take advantage of the different economic opportunities and move ideas and business around the world with minimal effort.
With this in mind, the new UK offices are a necessary step that will allow us to offer our startups a unique european visibility and market presence.”

All their services can now be enjoyed by UK-startups, we are talking about capital resources and a full range of of services and logistics to enable rapid growth. Of course the classic incubation services are offered too: office space and facilities, support for marketing, financial advice, human resources, legal, accounting and business development. On top of that they add strategy advice, branding and corporate structure. Read their mini press release.

Italy has today witnessed the announcement of GoJajah, a new service offered by Mountain View, CA-based Jajah in partnership with italo-american Funambol.

The service, that will be tested in Italy as a “world premiere” as they like to call it, promises to make your international calls 98% cheaper. The process is really simple.
You login or signup on GoJajah and insert your mobile phone information and carrier. You will then receive and SMS and your phone will be configured to use the service, basically it will create a duplice JAJAH contact with a local number for every international number it finds in your phone.
This means that every call you will make to any foreign country will be billed by your mobile operator as a local call (it will also count into your minutes if you have such a plan), on top of that you will need to pay the standard Jajah rates that are ridiculously cheap.

The service will benefit and appeal to many diverse and new type of clients, from the immigrant wanting to call home, to the budget focused executive.

“We are using Italy as a test market because of its mobile penetration, always ahead when it comes to mobile phones”, says Fabrizio Capobianco, italian expat in silicon valley and now Funambol CEO. His company is the most advanced provider of email and mobile data synchronization, based on open source software and web applications. The software, that has been developed in Italy, in their R&D labs near Pavia, synchronizes data over-the-air (Ota), provides the platform for the online registration in addition to security, monitoring, diagnose and reporting services.

Capobianco ironically says “this could also be a stimulus for italian mobile operators that never really considered international calls”.

“Italy is one of the leading countries in wireless technologies. We are happy to launch GoJajah here, especially in partnership with Funambol” said Trevor Healy, Jajah CEO. “Jajah’s services are very popular in Italy, which is one of our most important markets. We are happy to work with Funambol, their mobile open source platform integrates perfectly with us”.

World class chats.

You can watch Fabrizio’s announcement on YouTube (in Italian).