Fresh from triumph (yes, it went well) of the Italian Tech Week, today’s Almanac comes to remind us that an event, no matter how prestigious, successful and successful, is not enough to change Italy.
On 27 September 2012, the small world of Italian innovation stopped for the first edition of Techcrunch Italy. Techcrunch is one of the global reference sites for startups; its director, Mike Butcher from England, is a true guru; and its events have produced some of the most interesting companies in Silicon Valley. In short, the fact that they had honored us with a real event we lived with an understandable and provincial joy.
The announcement Mike Butcher himself had given it on his very popular site: “TechCrunch Italy – An Event To Showcase Italian Startups Globally”. An event to show the best local startups to the whole world: “We hope this one-day conference will bring Italian tech startups to the center of the debate on what’s changing in technology right now, what’s causing it and how to take advantage of the new economic climate to innovate and grow. Our goal will be to build global companies in Italy and understand how technology can re-engineer our economies to improve them “. We were thrilled. The event was organized in collaboration with the digital publisher Populis by Luca Ascani, which was doing very well at the time; And Mind The Bridge, an initiative of Marco Marinucci and Alberto Onetti which is still an Italic outpost in San Francisco. Spectacular location, the Shakespearean Globe Theater of Villa Borghese. Among the announced speakers, a super big like YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and some of our few stars of the time: Riccardo Zacconi, who at the time led King.com (CandyCrashSaga); Mauro del Rio (Bongiorno), Paolo Ainio (Virgilio and Banzai), Roberto Bonanzinga (here the complete list of attendees).
But the main dish was “the 43 projects that represent the best of the Italian digital entrepreneurial fabric”. The full list was on the Tech section of Fanpage and scrolling through it today you can actually find some startups that then grew a lot (such as MoneyFarm and AdEspresso, as well as Empathic, who won the hackaton). At first on stage, strictly in English, the president of the province of Rome, Nicola Zingaretti, the mayor Alemanno and the minister of economic development, Corrado Passera, who will soon sign the legislation to encourage startups. Conductor, Marco Montemagno.
It was a beautiful autumn day when the light deceives you that it is still summer. At the end the press release spoke of “enormous success” and “extraordinary results”: in fact, we were all convinced that the Italy of startups would have an easy life.
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