July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.-  Never separate an Italian entrepreneur from his coffee. That was one of the key takeaways, among others, at Mind the Bridge’s first ever demo day.

Mind the Bridge is a seed fund and accelerator that supports Southern European entrepreneurs from distressed economies, with a focus on Spain, Italy, Greece, Israel. The program helps entrepreneurs set up headquarters, establish a network, and gain exposure for their product in the U.S.

“It used to be there wasn’t good communication and no good way of breaking down international barriers to get all the ideas coming from different parts of the world,” said storied venture capitalist Tim Draper, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Now, I see things from Italy and Southern Europe and they look just like things in Silicon Valley. With the spread of viral marketing and information, and the connection we’ve all got with each other, the ideas are generally based on the same information. These startups are competing head-to-head.”

Draper kicked off the demo event, which featured presentations from six startups. Each of the companies participated in Mind the Bridge’s three-month accelerator program and received coworking space and guidance from mentors who understand the unique position of foreign entrepreneurs. Founder Marco Marinucci advocates a “dual-company model,” whereby development stays in the home country, but headquarters are in Silicon Valley, where the market and the money is.

“These entrepreneurs have a strong sense of creativity that is generally more pronounced than locals and easier and cheaper access to talent,” he said in an interview after the pitches. “Our startups all have a product launched and proved in different geographies, but the bigger challenge is to make it in biggest costumer market in the world- the U.S.. The market here is incomparable. This way you can play the big game of the mass market and find funding here, while maintaining all the development abroad. This is the model that I see working.”

Each of the presenting startup have built consumer-facing startups that span a range of sectors. Italian Atooma is a smartphone app that lets you set up conditional events that automatically trigger simple actions based on things like time of day, location, and favorite apps. Myze is a Spanish-based service that helps consumers collect and maximize their credit card rewards to access discounts, promotions and deals. Bad Seed is a gaming company from Italy developing mobile games that achieve ‘the quality of console games.’ Weendy is a social ‘sports mate’ application where surfers, skiers, kite boarders etc… can share information on weather conditions. The founders are from Greece. Also hailing from Italy, Map2App is a web-based platform that lets travelers create custom mobile travel guides to access on-the-go, and in3Dgallery’s technology turns 2-dimensional content into dynamic 3D presentations.

In true European form, the presentations were punctuated with breaks for h’or dourves, pasta, coffee, and cookies, and the entrepreneurs all seemed remarkably at ease. The event did not have the same level of tension or anxiety that often pervades the room at demo days, and the founders seemed just as eager to chat with each other as with potential investors. Marinucci said European entrepreneurs often have a different attitude than locals, and the Mind the Bridge community is a supportive, rather than a competitive one. “

“There is a more social attitude, he said. “It takes an immigrant to understand an immigrant and the nitty-gritty of the challenges you face. Everyone has different nationalities, but they all have similar issues, and that makes them a tighter community.”

Mind the Bridge was founded in 2007 as a side project while Marinucci worked at Google. It was first conceived as a non-profit accelerator program dedicated to developing Italy’s startup ecosystem, but has grown to encompass a wider geographical scope and includes a seed fund and startup school. Today’s startups were the first to graduate from the accelerator program, but they won’t be the last. Marinucci plans to make between 12 to 15 seed investments a year of between $40,000 and $100, 000 and is raising a second fund. Read more on VentureBeat.  

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The Mediterranean is a land filled with sparking blue seas, rolling olive and grape fields, and ancient ruins. It is not, however, a land filled with successful startups.

Mind the Bridge formed a new seed fund to bring startups from Mediterranean countries to Silicon Valley. The money will support entrepreneurs from distressed economies, focusing on Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, the Balkans, Lebanon, and Turkey, as they establish headquarters in the U.S.

Marco Marinucci founded Mind the Bridge in 2007 as a side project while he was working at Google. He first conceived it as a non-profit accelerator program dedicated to developing Italy’s startup ecosystem. The organization now encompasses a wider geographical scope and also includes a startup school. With this investment arm, Mind the Bridge is able to financially support its startups so they can succeed.

“There are thousands of talented, well educated engineers and potential entrepreneurs living in countries where starting a company is not a feasible option,” Marinucci said in an email interview. “For these people, finding a partner who can appreciate their value, deeply understand their issues, and function as an effective bridge to Silicon Valley is very hard.”

Mind the Bridge also provides strategic support, assisting international entrepreneurs as they secure visas, incorporate in the U.S., learn English, and seek out mentors. Marinucci advocates a “dual-company model,” whereby development stays in the home country but headquarters are in Silicon Valley where the market and the money is. He said this benefits both the countries of origin and the startup scene here, which can benefit from an influx of skilled workers.

The three-month accelerator program will run twice a year and is expected to make 12 to 15 seed investments a year of between $40,000 and $100,000. Investors in the fund include Marinucci himself, CEO of Enel Green Power Franceso Starace, president of the Inter Milan Soccer Club Massimo Moratti, and Fedele Confalonieri, chairman of the Mediaset Group.

The new $5000 EyeSee mannequins contain cameras in their eyes that are connected to facial recognition software that analyzes customers’ faces, classifying them by age, sex, race, and ethnicity. The cameras also, according to a company press release, can tell merchandisers when the store is getting crowded, and what products or clothing are attracting the most attention.

The primary goal of the seeing-eye mannequins is to retailers maximize sales by finding ways to improve product and window displays.

According to Almax, privacy is not an issue, as analyzed pictures are not saved or transmitted, so shopper data is simply aggregated without a record of specific individuals. Bloomberg says the high-tech mannequins are currently being used in three European countries as well as the U.S., and have already led store managers to revise marketing practices after learning that men who shopped early in a sale spent more than women.

Source: Almax

EyeSee mannequins in action

(That may not be a shock to most wives, since some men — OK, yours truly — are horrible shoppers when it comes to getting good deals.)

The facial recognition technology was developed by Italian company Kee Square, a spinoff from the Polytechnical University of Milan. According to its website, Kee Square develops, integrates, and customizes biometrics products for law enforcement agencies and businesses.

The question, I guess, is whether we want our dummies looking back at us, and whether we believe that any collected data will be used, managed, and disposed of responsibly. Many stores, of course, already use sophisticated video surveillance.

But there is definitely something just a little bit creepier about dummies, mannequins, and doppelgängers looking back at us.

Image credits: Almax

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

H-Farm is the most picturesque venture incubator you’ve ever been to, based in the Italian countryside a convenient five minutes from the Venice Airport. While the area’s shoe manufacturing industry struggles to keep profitable, this massive incubator represents a solution to the area’s economic woes.

Set on over 1,300 hectares on a modern campus, the incubator includes massive coworking spaces, a huge produce farm (one startup is monitoring veggie growth), a fresh-foods cafeteria, and huge transparent cubes hosting roughly 300 young, inspired 20-somethings at 400 euros a desk. Wired Italia director Riccardo Luna spent time visiting H-Farm and said afterwards on Twitter that it “intoxicated him: a new Italy is born and is set to grow.”

So far Italy’s technological lag has caused aspiring entrepreneurs to leave the country for startup hubs across Europe where visibility and access to funding is higher. Now H-Farm aims to keep that Italian talent in the motherland, together with other local incubators like Padova’s M31 (which specializes in hardware technology) and Florence’s Nana Bianca (led by Paulo Barberes, startup veteran and founder of Dada, which IPO’d in 2010).

With a €20 million fund backed by international partners like Bertelsmann and Unicredit, H-Farm acts as both an incubator and an investor: It provides startups with the capital required to begin operations while supplying a range of administrative, financial, and commercial services.

To date the group’s portfolio comprises 30 startups, four of which have already been sold with successful track records. Web agency H-art, for instance, got a seed investment of €100,000 and was sold for €5 million to the WPP group, a world leader in advertising and marketing services.

Despite the palpable love of Italy, some of H-Farm’s biggest success stories are still the ones that leave. One mobile commerce company, Garage (backed by Balderton Capital and Holzbrinck), recently opened an office in London, which H-Farm founder Maurizio Rossi mentioned as a point of pride.

As H-Farm expands, it is actively looking to host founders from in and out of the country. Get in touch with the team here.

A version of this story originally appeared on VentureVillage, VentureBeat’s Europe-based syndication partner.

Apple owes $1.2 million to Italian consumers after losing an appeal today. The company is charged with misleading customers into unnecessarily buying its AppleCare service.

AppleCare is Apple’s warranty program, which extends a product’s insurance coverage to two years, in conjunction the company’s complimentary one year coverage. It not only gives customers a guarantee that their products will be repaired if damaged but also provides special customer help lines for those dealing with hardware. In some cases, the help lines do cover software issues as well. The cost for the plan varies by product type but can range from $99 to $349. The problem? European Union law already states that consumers will be given a two-year warranty on their gadgets gratis.

According to The Next Web, the Italian court denied Apple’s appeal, saying the company used an “unfair trade practice” to make consumers believe they had to purchase a warranty that is already theirs by law. As a part of the judgement, Apple will also have to change the wording on its AppleCare package to inform customers of this legislation — making the paid-for service seem unnecessary.

Apple can still re-appeal the decision, however. The court previously said that Apple would have to make its packaging changes within 90 days, but that stipulation has since been lifted.

via The Next Web

The fines came from Italy’s anti-trust authority, which said Apple gave unclear information on payments necessary to maintain customer service (a €400,000 fine) and was unclear about its Apple Care extended warranty (a €500,000 fine), according to an AFP report.

Local laws in Italy require companies to offer a two-year warranty on every product free of charge, which is different from Apple’s standard one-year warranty. While customers have the option of purchasing a longer warranty, Italian regulations have determined that Apple hasn’t fulfilled its obligation.

Apple doesn’t have a huge presence in the Italian market, but it does have nine retail stores there. Assuming the company doesn’t challenge the fees, Italy may be the best place to buy an Apple product, since the two-year warranty comes at no additional cost.

[Image via wallpapers.vintage.it]

The law would force websites to remove any information identified as defamatory to an individual within 48 hours of a complaint. The website would also have to publish an unaltered correction issued by the party that originally made the complain, or face a fine of up to €12,000 (about $16,000). The publisher or owner of the website can’t file an appeal over a complaint, which means the Italian government could basically censor any website.

“The obligation to publish on our site the correction as is… without even the right to discuss and verify the claim, is an unacceptable restriction of the freedom and independence of Wikipedia, to the point of distorting the principles on which the Free Encyclopedia is based,” Wikipedia users wrote in a statement posted on the Italian website’s front page.

The proposed law was introduced by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in 2008. In addition to websites, the law also applies to newspapers — specifically, their ability to publish information from police wiretaps during preliminary investigations.

While Berlusconi claims that the restrictions on the media and websites are necessary to ensure the rights of private citizen, opponents of the law cite accusations that Prime Minister had an illegal sexual relationship with a minor — which was revealed from a police wiretap — as his true justification.

“The Wikimedia Foundation stands with our volunteers in Italy who are challenging the recently drafted ‘DDL intercettazioni‘ (or Wiretapping Bill) bill in Italy,” wrote Wikimedia Foundation Communications Manager Jay Walsh in a blog post. “This bill would hinder the work of projects like Wikipedia: open, volunteer-driven, and collaborative spaces dedicated to sharing high-quality knowledge, not to mention the ability for all users of the internet to engage in democratic, free speech opportunities.”

Wikipedia said it may shut down the Italian site indefinitely if the law is made official.

California’s electric car rebates could run out — The state fund that pays $5,000 rebate California offers for zero-emission cars is currently funded with $8 million, enough to pay out 1,600 car buyers. But the amount of money available doesn’t match the pace of electric car rollouts, and would likely run out by mid-2011, according to advocacy group Plug In America, the Los Angeles Times reports. The state’s financial crisis could also mean the funds won’t be there to support the rebates in the future, the  state’s Air Resources Board said.

Carsharing catching on with major automakers — Daimler’s Car2go pilot program in Austin, Tex. has taken off to 15,000 participants in the first year, and PSA-Peugot-Citroen and BMW have launched similar programs, Autoblog Green points out. Zipcar has filed for an IPO and acquired Streetcar (Zipcar MINI Cooper pictured, left) ; carsharing-friendly legislation has also been passed in California, Earth2Tech notes.

Researchers make thermoelectric breakthrough — An international research effort has resulted in a discovery that could result in more efficient ways to create electricity from waste heat like industrial emissions and car exhaust, CleanTechnica reports. The breakthrough involves the thermoelectric effect — the creation of voltage by arranging materials of different temperatures adjacent to each other.

Federal regulators approve cost sharing for Midwest lines — The Federal Energy Regulation Commission has decided that new transmission lines in the Midwest must be paid for by all who will benefit from it, Greentech Media reports. The agency concludes that the decision will be good for renewable energy since it will allow transmission lines for wind power in the Midwest to be built — though there will likely be future battles over how big a portion individual wind farms will have to pay in conjunction with developers.

SunPower completes sale of 44-megawatt solar park – The company announced it has completed the sale of its Lazio, Italy Montalto di Castro solar park  to a group of international investors that include MetLife, Fondo PPP Italia  and Voigt & Collegen. SunPower designed and built the solar power plant and will continue to provide operations and maintenance.