Michael L. Smolens, Founder and Chairman of dotSUB, announced today the appointment of David Orban as Chief Executive Officer of dotSUB, the leading technology provider powering video viewing in multiple languages.

David is the chairman of Humanity+, founder and Chief Evangelist of WideTag, Inc., advisor to the prestigious Singularity University, a Scientific Advisory Board Member for the Lifeboat Foundation and founder of the Open Government Data.

His educational background includes studies in Physics at both the University of Milan and the University of Padua. Born in Budapest, Hungary, he and his family currently live in northern Italy, near Milan.

“David Orban brings a wealth of experience as CEO of international technology start-ups, software distributors and online communities, so he is the perfect person to manage dotSUB’s hyper-growth over the coming years,” says Smolens.

“David is in sync with my vision of removing language as a barrier to cross-cultural communications, as well as building dotSUB into a truly global business,” states Smolens. “I also plan to stay actively involved with our activities as Chairman.”

dotSUB powers online videos with translations in all languages across the Internet and mobile screens around the world. The company generates local connections to global businesses, educational institutions and public agencies such as Adobe, GE, TED, The Port Authority of NY / NJ, and the U.S. Army.
“I’m excited to lead a team building language bridges across cultures. Video usage is exploding, and dotSUB provides high quality, audience engagement and international reach. Seeing dotSUB’s crowd-sourcing platform empowering organizations like the TED conferences publishing more than 16,000 TED Talks with captions and subtitles in 88 languages-all with 6,000 volunteer translators-that’s inspiring” stated Orban.

So it turns out that the mind behind that awesome piece of open source called Redis, an open source, advanced key-value store, is italian, and he’s developing it from a small city in Sicily. I had a chance to interview him, and here is what I learned.

Hi Salvatore, could you please tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Salvatore Sanfilippo, I’m 33 years old, live in Sicily, Italy and I spent a great amount of my life writing programs. Currently I’m working for VMware, where I develop an open source database called Redis. In the past I worked in the field of security, embedded systems, system programming, and web applications. I wrote the hping security utility and invented the idle scan. A few years ago I wrote one of the first few web 2.0 applications that appeared in Italy, Oknotizie and Segnalo, and did a partnership with Matrix.
I’m also advisor and shareholder of a small company based in Sicily that is called Kiurma, specialized in writing iPhone and iPad applications.

Awesome, so I see you have a mix of startup experience, open-source development and large-company employment. Which one do you prefer and which one would you suggest to a young CS graduate?

I think that a lot has to do with your temper, but it is really a shame to miss the startup opportunity.
It’s hard for me to argue on the large-company employment since VMware is like the dream job, since I’m free to develop Redis full time, pretty freely, and with the support of some seriously smart guy inside of VMware if I need some hint. But I guess not every corporate job is like this.

I guess that as long as the corporate job is cool, you learn new things and do something that seems useful not just to the management but also to yourself, then it can be a good thing. Otherwise, especially if you are able to bet on yourself (that is, you can manage to live without a fixed income for some time without too much trouble since you are young enough, or with some savings in your bank account), the startup experience could be very rewarding and exciting, I mean, even if the startup will not be a success.

Your path is pretty different from the traditional italian CS graduate, why do you think most people just try to get a boring job in consulting and don’t try to just build cool stuff?

I think that in Italy for cultural traits we tend to do the boring-but-sure path. From what I understand from chatting with people, only a few of them are willing to do extra work for long term rewarding opportunities. People should probably start to shift their mindset. After all what is worse than doing something you don’t care about? Especially in Italy where your IT company is not exactly an exciting place like VMware, or Twitter or Google.

Also in our country many times programmers are payed too little for their work in a company, so it is not so hard to get more earnings even from your single-man-band business.

But there is to admit that startups need an fresh economy and a modern state, to grow up well, without bureaucracy and this is not what I see if I look at the Italian economic environment.

Do you think it’s harder to succeed while living in Italy, and Sicily in particular?

If your target is the world, being here is not a big limit for a programmer. Most of the interesting things are going on the internet anyway. I mean, here or in Paris is almost the same. What could do a difference is instead here or in the bay area.

But if you plan to do a startup that targets your region or country, Italy, and Sicily, are not the best places to stay for sure. For instance the company I advice, Kiurma, is located in Sicily but focused on customers in the north Italy, Europe, and US.

Could you tell us more about Redis? How was it born, why is it awesome, and why should we use it in our applications?

Redis was born almost two years ago, as the result of a need. At the time I was experimenting with a real time analytics service called lloogg.com (now the site is online just in a best effort way, no interest in doing business with it for me). With MySQL it was very hard to scale, since it is a very write intensive application. A pageview in any site with our javascript code would result in a DB write operation, and that’s a lot of writes per second.

The web application of lloogg was an ajax app to show the site traffic in real time. So what I needed was a DB handling fast writes, and fast ”get latest N items” operation.

If you are a programmer, you know how a linked list can solve this kind of problems, so I started wondering, why on the earth is so hard to model this with MySQL with decent performance? Why there is no database that is able to natively handle natural ordering of items, that is, I put things inside with this order, so it should be fast to get the latest N items. After this considerations I started coding a prototype of the system, and shared the first beta on Hacker News, receiving good feedbacks.

Why should you use it? For two reasons I think. One is that for the right use cases Redis is really a game changer performance wise. If your data are in size the kind of order of magnitude that can fit in memory you can scale to an incredible number of users with just one database box. This means lower costs, less problems.

Another reason for using Redis is the following. In the field of programming languages there is a motto: A programming language is worth learning if it is different enough from all you already know to change your mind, exposing you to new abstractions. Well I think Redis definitely is a really different database, and will change the way you think at your data.

And now a few questions from the Italian Startup Scene group on Facebook:
Andrea Reginato asks: How did you convince VMWare into sponsoring your work on Redis?

Actually VMware contacted me! And in a very interesting way… one of the smartest guys I know at VMware started contacting me about the design of Redis internals, with very compelling technical arguments. Our discussion simply evolved into the hiring process. At the time I had offers from a few companies, but I wanted to join VMware because in my opinion this was the best “home” for Redis: a company with high technical value inside, with a focus in cloud technologies, and I think that after a year I can say that this was the best pick.

Francesco Sullo asks: Given the awesome performance of Redis, did you ever plan a persistent mode for the future? I know that Redis was born to manage processes in-memory, but a db version, even if seriously limited, could be a great alternative in many cases.

Our main focus is in the in-memory backend, but actually we already have a disk backend that is called Virtual Memory and is something like the swap file of Redis, where values rarely used are swapped out in order to reclaim memory. This feature is present in both Redis 2.0 and the upcoming 2.2 but I’m not happy with the implementation, so the new focus is on the “diskstore” feature. Diskstore is a combination of an on disk key value store and an in-memory object cache. So in this special mode Redis takes everything on disk but loads the “working set” (the keys you use more often) on memory. When a key changes it gets asynchronously flushed on disk by another thread. All this is currently implemented in the “unstable” branch of Redis on github. The next version of Redis, 2.4, will drop support for Virtual Memory and will instead just support diskstore.

Salvatore, thanks so much for taking the time to answer this questions. I hope, and I’m sure, they’ll inspire someone to take your path.

Thanks Stefano, I had fun replying to your questions, thank you.

Index Ventures Growth announced it has invested in Moleskine, an established italian notebooks and diaries manufacturer.

Index joins Syntegra Capital as a shareholder in the company, which acquired control of the company in October 2006. Syntegra is an independent PE buyout firm focusing on Continental Europe which invests in unquoted, medium sized companies in Benelux, France, Germany and Italy.

Our sources say that Index bought a 15% stake of the company, while Syntegra now owns about 67%. The remainder of Moleskine is owned by founder Francesco Franceschi and management. Size of the investment in unknown, but we do know that they also raised some €64m in debt from GE Interbanca and Banca Popolare di Milano.

Milan-based Moleskine was launched in 1997, aiming to revive the style of notebook used by artists and thinkers over the past two centuries including Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway.

The management team, led by CEO Arrigo Berni, has allowed Moleskine to achieve significant growth over the past four years, in terms of turnover. Since Syntegra’s operation, Moleskine has increased its markets and the number of diaries and notebooks sold has tripled. This growth was achieved by bolstering its organizational structure from just under 20 employees in 2006 to 85 at year-end 2010.

Giuseppe Zocco, Partner at Index Ventures, said “Moleskine and Syntegra have created and developed a company that has built up a loyal customer base all over the world. We are very excited to participate in this next phase of growth and to contribute to the continuous expansion of the online presence.”

Is Index smelling some bubble smell in the web world, and going for more PE and traditional deals?

Beintoo, a young italian startup, just announced the closing of its angel round.

The Milan-based startup, is developing an API framework that allows developers to immediately introduce what they called a “rewards layer”. Developers can decide a set of achievements and their users will be rewarded by receiving sponsored virtual goods from select advertisers when they reach the achievements. Developers monetize when their users receive a sponsored good and when there is a conversion into a real coupon. They just released an alpha version.

At the moment the product looks like a community where users can review and comment on apps, and thus seems to compete with Rome-based iWikiPhone, but the focus seems to lie on the API development.

The company was founded in September 2010 by Antonio Tomarchio and Filippo Privitera, two ex-Dada managers. Tomarchio previously founded AdRight, and ad server acquired by Dada in 2008 and transformed into what is now Simply.com. Privitera has been with Tomarchio since the AdRight days.

I’m trying to gather some names and an amount of the deal.

Fabrizio Capobianco, founder of Funambol, the open source mobile cloud company, today announced that he is stepping down as CEO of the company. Amit Chawla has been appointed CEO to expand the company’s global footprint with carriers and enterprises. Capobianco will assume the positions of President and Chairman of the Board, where he will focus on the company’s strategic direction and partnerships.

Update: Fabrizio explains his move on his blog.

“Amit’s extensive telco and operational background will help Funambol get to the next level,” said Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol President and Board Chairman. “I am thrilled that Amit has joined us and look forward to teaming with him to take the company to new heights.”

Amit Chawla previously was CEO of enterprise mobility specialist Agito Networks, which was acquired by ShoreTel, where he guided the firm from an early stage startup to the acquisition. As CEO of NexVerse Networks, Chawla spearheaded the merger with a division of ECI Telecom to form Veraz Networks which was listed on the NASDAQ in 2007.

“Funambol is the leader of open source mobile cloud sync solutions for billions of phones and connected devices,” said Amit Chawla as newly appointed CEO. “The company’s technology is widely deployed by major mobile companies worldwide. We now have the opportunity to significantly grow this success by expanding Funambol’s global carrier footprint and enterprise adoption.”

My opinion is that Funambol is bringing on Chawla for his major experience in successfully exiting similar businesses, and thus is preparing a huge M&A or IPO in the near future. Funambol has raised close to $20 million to date and is now experiencing unprecedented demand for its open source mobile cloud software. The company recently signed its 50th Carrier Edition customer, including several tier-1 carriers and device makers. Ten companies are launching services based on Carrier Edition this quarter..

Funambol was founded by two italians in Silicon Valley, it has its headquarters in Redwood City and a major tech development center in Pavia, Italy.

This post originally appeared on Jesper’s blog, he is a danish Bocconi graduate, who is in the process of launching his own TLC startup in Italy.

Following the interesting and lively debate about the Italia startup environment kicked off by he founders of Mashape and followed up by Stefano Bernardi, I want to add my point of view of the startup environment in Milan as I have experienced it. Particularly, I like a lot of the ideas and comments to the two blogs about an Italian eco-system and how we can improve the conditions for startups and entrepreneurs in Italy.

My perspective is after finishing a graduate degree at Bocconi and working on a startup idea in the Italian ICT sector for the past year. After two years at Bocconi it is hard to come away with any other conclusion that it is every young Bocconi students’ wet dream to either work in fincance, consulting or for a huge multinational corporation. That can be fine as well but it means that you’re an outsider if you want to start a business and while the US celebrates failure, it is scorned upon in Italy.

It is true that a major problem in Italy is the culture, and most Italians never fail because they never try. I had no contacts in the industry we’re trying to start a company in and yet I have received advice and help from Italian top executives and successful Danish entrepreneurs as well as been introduced to Italian VCs and angels. My experience has been that people are extremely helpful when you approach them as well-prepared and with an open mind.

First of all, there is only one elective in English at Bocconi focused on entrepreneurship and having taken that elective it leaves a lot to be desired. The ideas people had for startups and business plans were mostly very poor and showed the classical mistake to focus much more on the idea than the execution (Italian restaurant in Dubai anyone? Also we have no competitors were often considered to be a good thing).

The problem as Stefano pointed out, is simply that the pool of potential entrepreneurs is extremely small. Therefore the ideal strategy is to bring as many of these people together as often as possible.
What really disappointed me in my experience with the University here is the complete lack of interaction between the different universities. Why aren’t there common classed for CS students from Politecnico, business students from Bocconi and the Design students from Marangoni for example? Interesting things happen when people who think differently meet and I think this is vastly misisng in Italy! In a similar vein, the startup scene in Italy has seemed very un-international to me. Although it is silly and a waste of energy to dream of a Silicon Valley like eco-system there are nice things about Italy: people are friendly and helpful, the weather and food is good and the living standard is high compared to many countries. Certainly, Italy could leverage this to do much more to attract e.g Eastern European and South American talent but for that to happen the culture has to become more international.

Finally, Bocconi like many European business schools suffer from the problem that they view entrepreneurship from a very academic perspective and except for the interesting guest speakers students would be better off reading the list of popular startup and VC blogs. Instead of these courses being taught by accomplished entrepreneurs they are often taught by dry academics and it is easy to lose your hope if you only listen to this type of people. Our professor hated our idea and since it was the only idea that would require VC he also considered it far to risky and big for us to undertake.
This in many ways sums up my experience with entrepreneurship at Bocconi: An Italian restaurant in Dubai is considered a better idea than a business model with several successful exits in other European markets.

p.s a great and much needed initiative to encourage more startups is also to reduce bureaucracy. David Welton’s initiative to reduce the costs of creating an SRL. Read about it here and sign the petition here.

It’s a known fact that seed capital is very scarce in Italy. Entrepreneurs, which by definition are stubborn entities are therefore finding creative and cheap ways to bootstrap their startups.

Tipsandtrip was born from an idea of social media consultant Juliette Bellavita and Blogo.it CEO Marco Magnocavallo. They had the goal of launching a web app and an iphone app in 6 months with less than $10k.

How did they do it? With some great project management and a few crowdsourcing platforms. Let’s break down their costs:

• Logo design: a simple contest on 99designs with a $300 prize. 114 submissions and a professional logo in less than a week.
• Development: using DjangoPeople and Elance a very international team was born. Developers are in Argentina, Ukraine and Russia. Total cost: $5000.
• Iphone development: an italian freelance developer found on the web. Two months of work and $2500.
• Iphone icon: a dutch designer made a professional icon for $350
• Internationalization: translations in german, french and spanish. MyGengo.com and Tolingo.de. 24h turnaround and a great service. Total cost: $100.
• Hosting: pay-as-you-go cloud servers, mostly free in the beginning.
• Debug/usability: UserTesting and $100.
• Sweat Equity: Juliette and Marco put in a bit of work during weekends as project managers, designers, developers, sysadmins, etc.

Total: $8,350.

They say they’re gonna use the remaining $1,650 to fix the numerous bugs that usually come out after the launch.
We still haven’t drilled down into the app. The founders were tired of having to remember all the precious tips their friend were giving them regarding restaurants, B&Bs, shops, etc. in foreign countries prior to their trips. After looking for an online tool to annotate all this information and having found nothing really useful they decided to build it themselves.

Tipsandtrip is your portable notebook where you can write your vacation related notes and find the best tips your friends and other users make public. The app will be a crowdsourced list of the best restaurants, shops, parks, beaches, B&Bs and city spots for tourists. The app obviously geolocalizes every info and integrates with Facebook and other social networks.

They are competing in a very crowded and fragmented market but I’d say that for $10k, they’re off to a good start.

It’s a free app and you can download it here.

Last week Milan saw its ‘Pitch Slam’ event, organised by the Guidwire Group. Threeplicate, an Italian startup whose mission is to create “software that works,” beat out stiff competition to take first place. Runners-up at the Pitch Slam included Sentimetrix, a startup that helps measure sentiments or opinions expressed via electronic media, and Pantea, which allows companies to build tailored mobile media marketing solutions.

The Innovate!2010 Pitch Slam in Milan is one of over 20 Pitch Slam events that Guidewire Group is hosting this year across Europe and the United States. At each Pitch Slam, startups are evaluated by a panel of expert judges using the G/Score, Guidewire Group’s proprietary assessment methodology for evaluating startup success and business viability. The judges at the Milan Pitch Slam were: Maria Teresa Aviles, project manager at the University Incubator of Politecnico di Milano; Evan Nisselson, founder and CEO of Digital Railroad; and Matteo Rizzi, innovation leader at SWIFT.

The G/Scores will be aggregated from all of the Pitch Slams, normalized across markets, stages and segments, and then ranked to determine the Innovate!100. Innovate!2010 partners with market leaders like Best Buy, HP, Microsoft, Motorola, O2, RIM, Oracle and SWIFT and serves as a platform for these corporations to quickly identify and partner with high-potential startups.

Congratulations to all of the startups that were invited to present in Milan:

DriveK: Car configuration platform designed to change the way people select, configure, compare and buy their new car.

GET Corporation: Geo-location service to help customers find the nearest taxi driver.

Intelligrate: Application to detect anomalies in user behavior during online banking transactions to prevent fraud.

LiquidWeb: Creator of WiTube, an interactive lamp delivers Web content like podcasts and news through a wireless Internet connection.

LM: Monetization tool for code and content owners to get paid wherever their work appears on the open web.

Noesis: Revenue optimization platform with automatic real-time learning and adapting capabilities.

Pantea: Provides pre-integrated tools that allow customers to build tailored mobile media marketing, mobile media and social media solutions.

Pervactive: Developer of a new genre of Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) that uses a proprietary, patented MMPGTech engine to allow users to play the same game on a PC and on a mobile device.

Sentimetrix: Technology framework to measure sentiments or opinions expressed in electronic media, such as news, blogs or newsgroups.

Spreaker: Social web radio: a platform for creating and broadcasting audio content over the Internet.

Threeplicate: Simplifies and automates the software UI localization process by integrating with existing tools already in use at software development firms.

TheStartup.eu has partnered with Innovate!2010 to bring you an exciting opportunity and we want to invite you to get involved.

On Monday, April 19^th, at 10am you are invited to participate in the Innovate!2010 Pitch Slam Milan being held at Assolombarda (via Chiaravalle 8 ) for free.

Innovate!2010 is a global competition to identify top technology, media and communications startups from around the world, based on the G/Score assessment methodology. It is designed for companies that have already been established and have a working alpha. Upon successful application, Innovate!100 semi-finalists are invited to participate in the local Pitch Slam to compete to become one of the Innovate!100 and benefit from a year’s worth of global visibility, validation from global investors and partners, and a share of awards valued over $1 million.

You can see what an Innovate! Pitch Slam is like by checking out the videos from prior Pitch Slams in Amsterdam, Dublin, Madrid, Zaragoza, London, Helsinki, Berlin, Barcelona and Tel Aviv (http://www.innovate100.com/blog). The companies confirmed to pitch in Milan include:

• BASE16
• Caja Fuerte Virtual
• Threeplicate
• GET Corporation
• LM
• Noesis:
• Pantea
• SentiMetrix

Local entrepreneurs, investors, journalists and technology executives are invited to attend to have breakfast, support their favorite startup and network for FREE, but register here (http://bit.ly/innovatestartupeu)  right away because spaces are limited.

Innovate! is a great program that will deliver up and coming start-ups global exposure for up to a year, validation from potential investors and partners, and potentially a share of over $1M in prizes, so we encourage you to get involved right away.

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.