TheStartup.eu

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).

After Massimiliano Magrini’s resignation from Google Italy, the company promptly answered to the italian press. Italian financial website Affaritaliani collected a few sentences.

“We are sorry to hear of Massimiliano Magrini’s resignation, but we have a robust and consolidated organization that will allow us to manage the transition”.
“On the other hand, we are very happy to see Magrini’s entrepreneurial choice, which happens to be focused in the area of internet startups, where Google comes from and still operates in. To sustain economy on the web, the whole ecosystem has to evolve”.

The choice for Magrini’s successor is “in progress”, check back this site for updates on the story.

Breaking News: Massimiliano Magrini, Google Italy’s country manager just resigned from the company.
Magrini, who helped the start up of Google in Italy in 2002 after working with Altavista, announced he will start a venture capital fund and a startup incubator.

“I will develop in Italy what venture capitalists are already doing in Usa”.

Joined by 20 other key players in the italian internet tech scene, he aims to bring to Europe a Silicon Valley-like mindset, providing help as well as funding, to very early stage companies.
From the few sentences we could grab he seems quite determined to do so.

“The timing and the place are right. I’m having great feedback from the financial community. I will create a real new Silicon Valley in Milan”.

We will update you on his projects as soon as we have more news.

Today I’m attending Frontiers of Interaction V conference in Rome, a great event that each year brings together all the innovators and interaction designers.
Each year they chose a theme, and 2009’s is “smart cities, internet of things and social networking”.

The program is very interesting:

09,30 Welcome message from Leeander & Matteo Penzo
09:40 Bruce Sterling (Video) | Science Fiction Writer
||| About the Real Frontiers of Interaction |||
09:50 Fabio Sergio | Creative Director FROG DESIGN
||| Sing the Body Electric|||
10:10 Daniele Galiffa & Manuel Lima | Infovis + VISUAL COMPLEXITY
||| Discover the beauty of visual complexity in the age of infinite interconnectedness |||
10:30 Antonio Tombolini | CEO at Simplicissimus
||| Tutto parla: impara ad ascoltare le cose |||
10:50 Demo Site.
11:00 coffee break
11:20 Roberto Bonzio | Journalist at Reuters
||| “Frontiers Italians” |||
11:40 Riccardo Luna | WIRED ITALIA Director
||| ItAliens |||
12:00 KEYNOTE: Adam Greenfield | Author of “Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing”
||| Elements of a networked urbanism |||
12:30 David Orban | European Lead, Singularity University.
||| The Consciousness Panopticon |||
12,50 …video
13,00 Lunch
14:15 Joe Ferrari (Web Art Director di Wave Group) | Korinami (Sound Designer)
||| MUSIC & Video Live performance |||
14:30 KEYNOTE: Davide Bocelli & Alex Rose (video) | Long Now Foundation
||| La Long Now Foundation |||
15:00 Andrea Gaggioli | Università Cattolica di Milano
||| “Ecologia Partecipativa” |||
15:20 Matt Jones | Founder DOPPLR
||| The New Negroponte Switch |||
15,40 Coffee Break
16:00 Max Ramaciotti, Davide Casali & Luca Lisci | Maison,the
||| Community di Percorso: Pollicino nel bosco crossmediale |||
16:20 Carlo Maria Medaglia | Università La Sapienza, CATTID
||| Ubiquitous Computing |||
16:40 Luca Simeone & Salvatore Iaconesi | Vianet + Rhizome
||| Ubiquitous Anthropology |||
17:00 Andrea Vaccari | Senseable City Lab, MIT Boston
||| The Real Time City |||
17:20 Luisella Giani | Country Manager Italy Netlog
||| Web Celebrity |||
17:40 Conclusions with Leeander, Matteo, Carlo
18:00 End

I will try to write about the most important and cool stuff that comes out today, and maybe interview some entrepreneurs.
They also offer live streaming of the event.

Update: Online the first batch of pics.