VRMedia is the 2009-10 winner!

Yes, you must have heard it already... VRMedia (augmented reality for industrial maintenance) is officially the winner of the 2009-10 MTB Business Plan competition.

But I'll take you there step by step.

It's been an intense week of meetings, presentations and set up with one main objective in mind: the Gran Finale event!

As the name suggests, this is virtually the equivalent of the worldcup final for our participating startups. Almost one year of building the right strategy, plans, presentation gymnics and much more, go into a mere 7 minutes of passion in front of 5 members of the selection committee (the best of class of investors), 150+ people watching you live in the room, but many, many more watching online.

We've been raising the bar constantly for our startups. The first edition of the Gran Finale 2008 took place in a San Franciscan art gallery, followed in 2009 by a presentation in the renowned Plug and Play center, where our startups spend a few weeks, from time to time.

This year, following the already memorable Venture Camp event @ Il Corriere della Sera, we decided to include Stanford University in our plans.

In addition, we added a keynote focused on the Israel case study, the keys to replicate a successful model of bridges between the country of origin and the Silicon Valley.

So we started, putting up a very full program, mixed with some good Italian food & wine, with very high expectations on the results.

And, in fact, the event, didn't disappoint anyone (nor did the food&wine).

We'll add a few videos shortly (once we recover), but let me summarize my personal highlights before my memories begin to blur:

• the work done by a passionate community, that strongly believes in good faith in a project, can make wonders
• Italians are generally unreliable, mostly unprofessional, unequivocally whiners ... but most of all, Italians are good people. When you put them together, their ability of mixing and matching, of being affable and deeply warm goes unsurpassed
• a country can change its corse of history in a very short time for the better if (that's a capital IF) it's able to produce, retain and nurture its best talents. Exactly as a company.

But this will be the topic of future posts.

For now, let's raise our glass of prosecco to the winners.
Chapeau to them, and chapeau to all the other talents. Go back and show what you have!