David H. Thorne, Ambassador-Designate to Italy, speaks.

On July 16th, Mr. David H.Thorne, the ambassador-designate to Italy, gave a speech describing is vision of the relationship between the two countries.

Hi speech covers a variety of topics spanning from his personal history (he lived 20 years in Italy) and his passion for soccer, to more serious issues such as geopolitics and international cooperation.

Of particular interest for the friends of MtB, Mt. Thorne declared that he "will use [his] experience as a businessman to deepen commercial ties between Italy and the United States and will build on Ambassador Spogli’s Partnership for Growth initiative to continue to foster high-growth economic ventures in Italy."

For those interested in reading Mr. Thorne's full speech, it can be found here.

Celebrating the european startup community

On July 9th I flew to London to attend the Europas, the awards hosted by TechCrunch Europe.

Let me just say it was a huge success. All of the most important, successful and influencial people in the european tech scene where in the same room exchanging ideas, feedback and (hopefully) capital. I met people from UK, France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Romania, Poland. There were quite a few americans too.

It was a really enjoyable event, and I'm gonna share with you what I got from it:
London is the epicenter of Europe's innovation and startup ecosystem. The money is there, the startups are there, the community is there.
That doesn't mean that you can't buid a successful business in other cities (there were a lot of examples in that same room), it just seems easier. This can be caused by many different factors, first one being language.


So what about Italy then? Well, not great news. There were only two other italians attending the event. The italian innovation community is growing but as always it just focuses on its own country, not attending this events is a HUGE mistake. Networking is one of the most important phases when building a truly global (or any kind, for that matter) business.




I really do hope italians will understand that, and start flying all over Europe and US to meet people, share ideas, get feedback from different markets and cultures. Or simply to have fun.

Let's go back at the event, here are the winners.

• Best Bootstrapped Startup (less than 3 years old) – Soup.io


• Best Design – Songkick


• Best Social Innovation (benefits society, EMEA) – Mendeley


• Best Cleantech / Environmental Startup (EMEA) – Alertme


• Best European Hardware / Real World Gadget (EMEA) – Poken


• Best Entertainment App or Service (EMEA) – SoundCloud


• Best Mobile Startup (EMEA) - Nimbuzz


• Best Mobile Application (EMEA) – Spinvox


• Best Web Application Or Service (EMEA) – Spotify


• Best Enterprise / B2B Startup (EMEA) – Huddle


• Best Startup Founder(s) – Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, jointly for Spotify


• Best Investor (VC or Angel fund, EMEA) – The Accelerator Group


• Best Investor Personality (EMEA) – Yossi Vardi


• Best New Startup, Summer 2008-2009 – Spotify


• “The Europas GRAND PRIX” – Spotify

The european startup community is growing, I urge everyone to be a part of it. Not only will you get to know some amazing peers but you will gain a real competitive advantage for your business.

Ready to Crunch?

...and here it comes our TechCrunch time.
It's been sometime (over 4 years) since the Silicon Valley Tech Crunch has become a sort of a bible in specific environments (technology startups and investments)
Its power has been increasing at such a fast pace that today it can create (or destroy) the dreams of most of the startups at any given time.

Its European cousin has followed suit and even though the URL starts with a UK.techcrunch, it's becoming less UK centric.
In fact there are even a couple of coraugeus Italians in their team.

One of them, Stefano Bernardi, is the author of the most recent Startup.EU blog, one of the best Italian based blogs in the subjects.
In fact, we hope to lure Stefano to share some of his insights for this very blog.

Here is the full article.

MtB on FELLOW

I often thought that it would be cool to have a magazine focused on the bridges between US and Italy.

Well, not too long ago Marco Pratellesi (head of corriere.it) introduced me to the new born FELLOW Magazine, a dual-language magazine on topics of Italian-American interests.

And in their second issue, here's an interview I gave about the activities and prospective of the Mind the Bridge foundation.


When I finally received a physical copy, with a large picture of Obama in the front page, everything looked even more impressive.
Since there's no online version yet, I guess you need to buy the physical version if you are interested in the topics.

I strongly recommend it, they talk about very cool stuff! :-)

Pitfalls and challenges in business plan writing

This article, appeared on the Wall Street Journal's website, covers some interesting points that anyone writing a business plan should be aware of.



The article begins by describing three core elements of a good business plan:

• The logical statement of a problem and its solution.


• Hard evidence supporting the previous.


• Candor and awareness about the risks, gaps and other assumptions.

The author continues by describing what he considers the five most significant kinds of rejected business plans:

• "Here I am, nevermind the problem": business plan is technology centric, while underestimating the importance of identifying the problem it solves. Better technoloogy no always wins!
• "A coke for every kid in China": lack of knowledge about the initial market. Ignore the difficult work of crafting a strategy to gain market awareness, persuade customers, ans set up a distribution.


• "Just look at our (paper) profits": financial projections based on wrong or weak assumptions.


• "Our team walks on water": lack of objectiveness in assessing the team's skillset.


• "All is beautiful": the writer of the business plan can find only good things about his idea, not seeing or aknowledging any potential pitfall associated with the idea.

This article provides precious insight for all perspective participants to Mind The Bridge: read carefully!

Mind The Bridge at Roma III, June 13th

Guest post by Augusto Coppola, ERIS4.

At the University Roma III of Rome there is an interesting and increasing number of initiatives aiming to fill the gap between the Italian academic world and the new emerging industrial eco-system made of a number of national companies no longer interested in making business on the small regional scale, but rather in growing up internationally and provide the global market with high-tech products and services.

In this regard, Roma III is looking at the Mind the Bridge business plan competition as one of the best opportunities for students and researchers to verify their business ideas and collect valuable feedbacks from Silicon Valley experts, market leaders and investors.

In order to prepare its students and researchers to apply for the competition, Roma III is going to set up a number of seminars on how to prepare for the competition and for the Silicon Valley experience. The first seminar will be held on July 13th and the speaker will be MtB veteran Augusto Coppola, from the company ERIS4.

H-Farm, farming humans better than Google

I'm just back from 2 full months in Europe, something that I hadn't done since 2001.
In particular, I spent most of June in Italy.
Of the thousands stereotypes that we hear about Italy, 2 resonated particularly with me in this trip:
1: what happened to the young people? and
2: oh my God, exceptional average food quality really makes a difference.


I had the chance to visit several startups, incubators and corporations.
Among them, my visit to H-Farm was one of the highlights.

Started in Italy less than 4 years ago, H-Farm is already an outstanding success that deserves attention.
Their creativity, starting from the incubator model itself (in fact I'd call them a "company engineering" venture rather the inflated "incubator" term), from the setup of their offices (old farms in the middle of nowhere, renovated hi-tech style, in a technology-farming fusion that includes cow statues and toy-robots) is a notch above everybody else working in the startup creation field these days.
The 2 founders and good friends Riccardo Donadon and Maurizio Rossi have really pushed the envelope of farming talent to streamline new businesses born to be acquired.
The results? 3 important exits under their belt to groups like WPP and RCS (who can claim that in Italy?), a venture that can attract talent from all over the world (several hundreds employees) and the possibility of writing history with the new spur of Italian innovation in the world.

Out of their stable of 17 home-made startups, there's also Zooppa, the mythical winner of our 2008/09 BP competition, nowadays fully US based.

When you walk about their stables, among locally produced fresh organic fruit, video monitors showing international media news-war-room like and panels reminding the visitor what H-Farm stands for, you definitely have the feeling to witness something remarkably fresh in the almost-dead panorama of Italian innovation.

Riccardo and Maurizio will be facing some challenging times to come, a direct result of their success. The expansion in US and India and the steep increase of startups incubated will put undoubtedly some strains on their so-far-successful model.
But risk taking is their bread and butter, and we sincerely root for them.

Chapeau for H-Farm, fellows!

June 26th - MTB at La Sapienza with Alumn

Guest post by Stefano Antonelli, MTB Alumn, ERIS4

On Friday 26th June, I will be presenting the Mind the Bridge initiative to "Scuola Volterra" at the department of Physics of "Sapienza Universita' di Roma".
The presentation will be held together with Renata Sarno one of the founder of www.venere.com. The department of Physics of "Sapienza Universita' di Roma" is where Enrico Fermi used to teach and research before leaving Italy and even now is a very well known research institute.
I am a physic and I graduated at "Sapienza Universita' di Roma", I did my thesis in a laboratory where the APE supercomputers were developed to perform complex Quantum Chromo Dynamic (QCD) simulations.

It was an incredible environment filled with incredibly talented and creative people. From that experience a number of successful spin off were created.
They were not necessarily related to the APE project, but I think that the environment played a role in taking them off. When I came back from SV after the final Phase of the Mind the Bridge competition, I discussed with Marco Marinucci and it came out that there might be someone at Physics departement of "Sapienza Universita' di Roma" interested in the Mind the Bridge Competition. I called Renata Sarno that was at that time a PhD doctor working in the laboratory and contacted Enzo Marinari (director of "Scuola Volterrra").
In short time the presentation was setup and I am very curios about the feedback we will get. I'll keep you all posted about future developments in this blog.

Mind The Bridge is formally recognized as a charitable organization

This post was written by Matteo Daste, member of the Board of Directors of the Mind the Bridge Foundation.

Mind The Bridge is not just a website or a name. It is a California non-profit corporation that is qualified as a tax exempt organization under section 501(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Organizations described in section 501(c)(3) are also commonly referred to as “charitable organizations”.

From a tax standpoint, the primary significance of being qualified as a charitable organization is that contributions made to the organization are tax deductible to the donor in accordance with Code section 170. This is quite an attractive feature to donors, since it makes their donations tax deductible.

However, it is not so easy to become a charitable organization – and, specifically a public charity like Mind the Bridge. A public charity normally receives a substantial part of its income, directly or indirectly, from the general public or from the government. The charity must be approved by the IRS and must meet various strict requirements concerning its organization, activities and management and control.

To summarize, these requirements include the following:

• There must be an organization. An individual will not qualify.


• The organization must be operated for a specific and recognized exempt purpose. The Code only recognizes the following activities: religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, and educational purposes, to foster national or international amateur sports competition, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals.


• The organizing documents must not expressly empower it to engage in activities that are not in furtherance of one or more of those purposes.


• The organization's assets must be permanently dedicated to an exempt purpose. This means that if the organization dissolves, its assets must be distributed for an exempt purpose, to the federal government, or to a state or local government for a public purpose.


• Finally, none of its earnings may inure to any private shareholder or individual.

To maintain public charity status, Mind The Bridge must diligently follow governance practices to assure sound operations and compliance with the tax law.

Nokia Calling all Innovators for Mobile applications

Nokia is sponsoring Calling all Innovators, a world wide competition aimed at mobile and web applications developers.


Applicants have time until June 30th to apply to one of four categories:

• Internet Innovation: applications on Nokia devices using technologies that include Nokia Web Runtime, XHTML, CSS, Java Script, AJAX, widgets and other standards-based web technologies.
• Flash: applications that expand the capabilities and user benefits of Flash Lite on Nokia devices.
• Emerging Markets and Global Necessities: applications across mobile technology platforms – ranging from SMS through Series 40 and S60 device platforms. All applications will be considered, including those developed using Java, Python, or open source.
  
• Apps on Maps: applications that harness the power of location-aware technologies to create an experience that’s relevant and compelling for your users, wherever they are in the world.

The prizes include cash (250.000€ in total); the opportunity to demo the winning application at a Nokia specified event this Fall; and "Spotlight" placement featuring your winning application on Nokia's newly announced Ovi Store, where consumers will find the best mobile applications and content for their Nokia devices.