The winner of MTB Italy Tour in Catania is... Flavio Fazio!

Last Friday the Mind the Bridge Italy Tour stopped in one of the most vital cities of Sicily, Catania.

We finally reached the South of Italy, a place we liked a lot not only for the amazing places, the delicious food and the welcoming people we found there (yes, we had fun J), but above all for the enthusiasm and reactive response we had from the local community.

The last stop of the MTB Italy Tour 2012 was organized in partnership with Ethyca Association, Comune di Catania and Principia SGR. The event was hosted at Le Ciminiere di Catania, the ideal location to promote innovation.
We really want to thank all the local actors who actively supported the event: a special mention to our MTB local Alumni, in particular to  Giuseppe Suriani from eRalos3, who devoted his time and passion helping and supporting the startups and dealing (together with Indigeni Digitali) with all the logistics. All that "community-effort', created the right atmosphere and contributed to make it a blast!

After the opening from Francesca Spataro, President of Ethyca, the morning session continued, as usual, with our Startup School. Marco Marinucci (MTB Executive Director) and Alberto Onetti (MTB Chairman) provided the audience with nuts and bolts about business planning and fundraising and introduced the 2012 SeedQuest. Barbara Labate from RisparmioSuper and Giuseppe Suriani from eRalos3 shared with the audience their experiences with MTB. 

In the afternoon, as usual, we run a GYM Session: five locally selected startups presented in front of representatives of the most important funds that invest in Southern Italy.
Thanks to Principia SGR, the best startup of the Gym Session was awarded with a free entry at the MTB Startup School.
The winner is... Flavio Fazio with his project Flazio, a web platform that allows users with no technical skills to create their own personal and customized website in a snapshot.
Flavio in September will fly to San Francisco with his great passion and skills. Good luck!

In the meantime, do not miss Seed Quest 2012! MTB offers an incredible opportunity to startuppers and wanna-be entrepreneurs. Applications are open, deadline is July 31st, 2012. 

Do you wanna become the next Italian success story? Apply now! More information here. 

Emanuele Guglielmino wins the MTB Startup School!

Last Thursday the MTB Italy Tour stopped in Genoa.
Genova is a home of  the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), the new Technology Park "Erzelli" and a prestigious University:  an enormous but highly unexploited potential for innovation.

Our goal for this second stop of our Tour is Genova was simple:  spread the message, as loud as possible, that building a company, create your own job is cool, heroic even.
A mission fully shared by Francesco Oddone, Assessore Sviluppo Genova, Paola Girdinio, Dean of the Genoa Engineering School, Paolo Marenco (Silicon Valley Study tour), Renato Soru (Tiscali) and, last but not least, Maria Silva from Genova High Tech who successfully promoted and coordinated this event in Genova.

In the morning panel, coordinated by Marco Marinucci, Renato Soru from Tiscali and Marco Salvadori from Cisco Systems shared their invaluable experience with the audience.

In the afternoon, as usual, we run a Gym Session. Five selected startups were invited to present in front of investors and entrepreneurs with the goal of receiving constructive feedback. 

Genova High Tech sponsored a free entry to our Startup School in San Francisco to the most promising project.

And the winner is... Emanuele Guglielmino, a team leader at IIT, with a background of electrical and control engineering and 13-years of research experience in big companies such as Westinghouse (UK) and General Electric and R&D Institutions. 

His project (called microturbine) is a patented coin-size high speed microturbine able to harvest energy exploiting airflow to produce electric energy with applications ranging  from pipeline monitoring to web farm servers power supply back up. 

We think this idea has the potential to turn into a solid product that can successfully address global markets. MTB is going to give him the tools and skills  to make it happen! 

We are not done yet... Next week we will land in Sicily.
On June 29th MTB will be in Catania for the last date of our Italy Tour 2012. 
Principia SGR will be sponsoring a MTB School to the best presenting startup.

If you are interested to send your business plan or to participate to the event, you are still in time to submit your application or register! More information here. 

See you at the foot of Etna...