Last week took place in Milan the BroadBandWeek event, a series of seminars and presentations spread out along the whole week from the 6th to the 11th in different places of the city about the new opportunities offered not only by the availability of broadband Internet connections but also by mobile devices, the two hot topics of the Italian ICT.
On Thursday I’ve been able to attend the BroadBand Match Day in which they talked about the business opportunities for young people willing to turn into reality their technology-related innovative ideas. The speakers were very good and experienced and although the number of attendees was pretty low it surprised me to actually see more wannabe business women than men.
The Match Day took place near the Polytechnic of Milan, while on Friday the event moved to the nice Mediateca Santa Teresa assuming the name Multimedia Creativity Day. They presented two European contests for young talents, the eContent Award Italy, which is selecting the best Italian projects to candidate them to the World Summit Award, for which I already submitted my entry, and the Top Talent Award 2005.
It was a bit sad when Cesare Massarenti spoke about Italy and reported that compared to other European countries there are only a few Italians participating at these contests since “the school system doesn’t form students at these levels”, he said. Although I don’t like generalizations at all, that’s a valid assertion in many cases here and I wonder if the so called Business Angels do really exist in Italy or it’s just another cool word as long as start-ups, spin-offs and so on, to make a speech appear more international and hide the fact we’re always lagging behind the other European countries for what concern research and content production, especially high level entertainment software.
Enough ranting for now, the next week in the US is going to be a pretty exciting one…