MtB Italy Tour: this week we are in Milan and Bergamo

This week you can meet Mind the Bridge in Milan and Bergamo.
Tomorrow (May 18th), starting at 6:30pm we are at Università Cattolica. The venue is Aula Luzzati (Largo Gemelli 1).
On Wednesday (May 19th) our Italy Tour stops in Bergamo: we are hosted by the local university. The presentation starts at 10:30am (viale Marconi 5, Dalmine). Meet you there.
Menawhile, if you live in Turin, save the date: we will be there on Jun 10th, for a full day event. Stay tuned for more details.

MtB Italy Tour: next week (May 11th) in Novara

On May 11th, MtB Italy Tour lands in Piedmont, in Novara.
The event is organized jointly with Università del Piemonte Orientale and Incubatore d'Impresa del Polo di Innovazione di Novara.
The venue is the Faculty of Economics (Aula 204, Via Perrone 18, Novara). The event starts at 4pm.
We are looking forward to meeting students, Ph.Ds., reseachers and everyone is interested in understanding how to start-up a new business. See you in Novara!
Yesterday (May 3rd) over 150 students crowded Aula Manzoni (one of the most famous university places thanks to a well-known commercial)at Politecnico in Milan. 10 students stopped us at the door right after the conference for presenting their own ideas. This is the feedback we are looking for. Guys, we wait for you submitting your plans to our Business Plan Competion or Call for Ideas.
A special thank you to Professor Moramarco for the hospitality and for supporting us throghout the presentation.

Post Gran Finale: startup interviews and pics

New York:


From Sausalito, with San Francisco in the background:

MtB Italy Tour: the agenda for the incoming week

Quite intense program for the incoming week.
On Wednesday 13th, 3 presentations are scheduled at Politecnico of Milan, while on Thursday 14th we are at Parco Tecnologico Padano, the agri-food cluster that is located south-east of Milan.
See below for the details.



April 13, 10:15am
Politecnico di Milano
Corso di Impianti Informatici, Prof. Giuseppe Serazzi
Aula EG2, Milano Città Studi,
Via Golgi 39

April 13, 10:15am
Politecnico di Milano
Corso di Sistemi di Elaborazione dell’Informazione, Prof. Paolo Cremonesi
Aula EG3, Milano Città Studi,
Via Golgi 39

April 13, 4:00pm
Politecnico di Milano
Corso di Energie Rinnovabili, Prof. Paolo Silva
Aula CT 38, Milano Bovisa,
Via Lambruschini 4

April 14, 2:30pm
Parco Tecnologico Padano
Sala Convegni, Lodi,
Via Einstein-Loc. Cascina Codazza

MtB Italy Tour: next week dates

The week after Easter we have three additional presentations, all scheduled on Wednesday (Apr 7th). The venue is the Politecnico of Milan, where we will be hosted by Prof. Frattini (Corso di Impianti Industriali, starting at 9:45am, Aula BL 27.0.8, Via Lambruschini 4),Prof. Mainetti (Corso di Tecnologie Applicazioni e Servizi Internet, at 3.15pm, Aula BL 27.1.4, Via Lambruschini 4)and Prof. Colombo (Corso di High Tech Entrepreneurship, at 3.30pm). Thank to all of them for welcoming us (and obviously to our speakers, Giuseppe De Giorgi and Tommaso Minola).

Where you can meet MtB this week

MtB Italy Tour is on the road also this week. 3 presentations are scheduled in Milan. See below for the details



Tuesday, March 30th, 10am
Politecnico di Milano
Ingegneria Energetica
Corso di Impianti industriali (Prof. Chiaroni)

Tuesday, March 30th, 2:30pm
Politecnico di Milano
Ingegneria Gestionale - Corso di Finanza immobiliare (Prof. Colarossi)

Wedesday, March 31st, 4:30pm
Università degli Studi di Milano
Corso di Economia e gestione dell'innovazione (Prof. Ganzaroli)

Gran Finale Stanford: videos available

You can find the full event here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/mindthebridgeTV

Special thanks to Gabriele, for another sleepless night.

Mtb moves to the East Cost: on Thursday we are in NY

After the Gran Finale at Stanford, we replicate on the East Cost.
On Thursday (Mar 25th) we are in New York, hosted by Consulate General of Italy (690 Park Avenue @69th Street) and in collaboration with ICE (Istituto Commercio Estero).
Join us and meet the selected finalists from the Mind the Bridge business plan competition. Click here for the full program.
The event is close to be sold out. Registration is required. Click here for reserving your free ticket.


This week the Mtb Italy Tour is again on the road. On Thursady we are in Milan, at Politecnico (Campus Bovisa). We present at the Corso di Sistemi per l’energia e l’ambiente (starting at 2.15pm). Thank you to Prof. Manzolini for the accepting to host our tour
On March 26, we are at Corso di Sistemi per l’energia e l’ambiente held by Prof. Silva, again at Politecnico in Milan.

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!

Selection Committee for Gran Finale

We are very pleased to announce our Selection Committee for the upcoming MTB Gran Finale 2010 event @ Stanford:

Fabrizio Capobianco - Funambol (Coordinator)
Alessandro Biral - KeyNote Ventures
Dino Vendetti - Formative Ventures
Michel Wendell - Nexit Ventures
Hashul Sanghi - Motorola Ventures
Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf - YL Ventures

This group of top notch Silicon Valley investors will have the hard task of selecting the "best business idea" among the 5 participating startups.
The startups have been mentored in the last few weeks by: Alessandro Zago, Matteo Fabiano, Maurizio Liverani and Elisabetta Ghisini.

Now, we really look forward to hearing their pitch!