MtB 2009 - last week for the business plans!!

As you might know, the deadline for submitting your business plan for the 2009 Mind the Bridge competition is August 25th. Very close. Next Tuesday. Time to act!

For those out there still thinking "should I do it, should I do it?", let me add a piece of advice. Even if you are not thinking about moving to Silicon Valley next week, this is a competition you can't miss, if you are thinking global. It is the best opportunity you will have to get in contact with the world outside our beautiful country. If you are thinking big and global, you should put together a business plan and send it before next Tuesday.

And if you are thinking global but you are still very local, let me give you another reason to join the competition: we have assembled a spectacular Selection Committee, that I have the privilege to coordinate. The people listed below represent the best of the best of Italy, both in the financial world and in the industry. Having one of these members read your idea might give you the opportunity you were looking for. Hey, the best time to write a business plan is summer, whether you are two guys with a brilliant idea or an established Italian company with global aspirations.

Here are the members of the MtB 2009 First Selection Committee:

- Alessio Beverina, Sofinnova Partners
- Claudio Giuliano, Innogest
- Davide Gai, CEO BSI Healthcapital SA
- Fausto Boni, 360 Capital Partner
- Gianluca Dettori, Dpixel
- Giuseppe Serazzi, PNCube
- Lorenzo Franchini, IAG
- Luca Ungarelli, Golden Mouse
- Massimiliano Magrini, Country Manager Google Italia
- Maurizio Petitbon, Kreos Capital
- Mauro Pretolani, TLCOM
- Pietro Dova, XG Ventures
- Pietro Strada, Centerboard Partners
- Roberto Bonanzinga, Balderton
- Stefano Peroncini, Quantica

One week to go!

Save the Date: Venture Camp @ Corriere

We do what we do because we genuinely believe that our activity can have a relevant social and economic impact in Italy.

To spread the word and the insights of our outstanding network, we have always been striving to find the right media partner.

Today we are happy to announce that our media partner is il Corriere della sera.
Il Corriere will be hosting the Venture Camp event in November, where, among an amazing line up of speakers (stay tuned for more), you'll be able to witness the pitches from the semi-finalist startups. What a great opportunity to showcase your great project to such a large audience!

As last year, the whole event will be webcasted live.

Mind the Bridge Social Club!

I'm glad to announce that Mind the Bridge now has a new Facebook Fan Page (thank you, 49 enthusiasts that joined us in the first 18 hours!) and a LinkedIn group.

If you believe in our mission, you are more than welcome to join and help us to spread the "connecting talent" idea, by talking about us in your blog posts, tweets, friendfeed posts... (just use the hashtag #mindthebridge so it'll be easier to search info about MtB).

We are approaching the social media world guradually, so you won't see any Twitter @mindthebridge for now: we want to make sure to give proper attention to every conversation, so it will be a gradual process.

Also, if you feel like browsing our 14 videos, Mind the Bridge's YouTube videochannel is right here.

Monitoring the online buzz will be one of my tasks, so I look forward to your comments and contributions, and hope to meet you at the next Mind the Bridge Venture Camp, in November.

Until then, see you on the web!

Mind the Bridge Foundation

The Gym starts in Milan (Sep 17)

We announced sometime ago our plan for the MTB Gymnasium.

The Gym, in short, is the space (virtual and physical) in Silicon Valley, where Italian entrepreneurs with global dreams, can build their muscles. The project will be presented in Milan (Sep 17th) by one of our most active partners in Italy, the Politecnico di Milano Accelerator (aka Poli).

The Poli has been working with us in the last few months, defining the best fit for the GYM within their stable of startups. After several iteractions, we finally jointly agreed that Neptuny (arguably the most developed project coming out the Accelerator) would have the honor of being the Poli flagship within the GYM.

To give some deserved visibility to this important new channel for Italian startups, we are co-organizing an event at the Politecnico. Our Fabrizio Capobianco will be explaining what are the rules to participating and what are our medium term expectations on the project.

Another date to add to your agendas...

The Open Source Innovation Backbone for Startups

Guest post by Roberto Galoppini
Open innovation is taking over in many areas, and open source plays an important role especially in software sequential innovation, where each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors. Foremost, for the most of us before anything else software (open source included) is a tool towards a goal.

Guy Kawasaki two years ago explained how he managed to create a new venture aiming at delivering UGC through a social media platform, called Truemors (later renamed NowPublic). Below a small excerpt:

• 7.5 weeks went by from the time I registered the domaintruemors.com to the site going live. Life is also good because of opensource and Word Press.


• $4,500. The total software development cost was $4,500. The guy sat Electric Pulp did the work.Honestly, I wasn't a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.

Earlier this winter I had a similar experience. As secretary of an association I have been asked to start a so called web 2.0 portal for the association, and we managed to do it with as less as 3750,00 euros. As a matter of fact, open source is a viable alternative, but there is more than just some dime savings around the corner.

The case for open source innovation.
Open Source innovation is known to be one of the most hyped words: the world split in open source enthusiasts claiming that open source is as much innovative as proprietary software (or even more) and people saying that open source can just mimic.

"Innovation Happens Elsewhere" puts clearly why relying on external sources of innovation make sense:

Innovation happens everywhere, but there is simply more elsewhere than here. Silly as it sounds, this is the brutal truth: Regardless of how smart, creative, and innovative you believe your organization is, there are more smart, creative, and innovative people outside your organization than inside.

Open source can enable innovation, not only in recession times. Companies like Google (probably before anyone else), Facebook or Twitter are all heavily relying upon open source technologies. Beyond standing on giants' shoulders, those companies give also back to the open source community, as seen with Google summer of code and at large with Google code, open source at Facebook as well as open
source at Twitter.

Clayton Christensen back in 1995 began to talk about "disruptive technology", to later replace disruptive technology with the term disruptive innovation. Reason is that he recognized that few technologies are intrinsically disruptive or sustaining in character: what makes a technology an innovation enabler, is the way it is used to deploy a business
strategy.

Open source plays an important role in this respect, either when we talk of low-end disruption innovation or new market disruption. Look at how open source helps Mind the Bridge members, like in the Funambol case, making business out of commercial open source products, as well as innovating partnering with JAJAH to allow mobile users to call abroad at a fraction of the cost. Think of <your company, if there is some open source tell the story about what you're doing>

Low end disruption innovation - happening when technology advances faster than customers' needs (Oracle in the database space, Microsoft in the office automation arena, Filenet in the ECM world, etc) - it is the very first stop in a maturity model for open source adoption.

Open source adoption has to be managed, if you are going to use open source software you need some education and management. You need to pay more attention if you decide to spend time and effort to get off the best from open source coopetition, see what companies like Day Software do in this respect (yet selling innovative proprietary products).

When in doubt about how to adopt open source technologies, remember Dijstra's words:

[..] elegance requires great care to be achieved and education to be appreciated. In contrast we shall stress that in sophisticated designs, elegance is not a dispensable luxury, but a factor that often decides between success and failure.

Introducing MTB ITALIA

This has been my most important personal objective in the last several months as head of the foundation.

Now, after a long selection process, it's with real pleasure that I announce the launch of our Italy based operations.

Here's the team (from left to right):

 - Alberto Onetti, chair

 - Massimo Carraro, communication

 - Tito Costa, dir. of operations

 - Jari Ognibeni, area manager

 

The team will operate under Alberto's leadership and my supervision. Alberto is also joining Matteo Daste, Fabrizio Capobianco and me on the board of directors.

As a group, they bring and outstanding breath of expertise, enthusiasm  and, most importantly, they share our vision: to promote a new Italian entrepreneurial ecosystem that is ethical, highly professional, internationally focused and excellence driven.

I am particularly proud that our dream project can be infectious  for such a bunch of high quality professionals.

Let's keep the level of contamination to a record high: a new wave is finally coming to Italy!

You'll be hearing from them soon. 

For now, let's give them a huge welcome and let's wish them good luck on the ride!

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! :-)