Last week the BroadBandWeek event took place in Milan, a series of seminars and presentations in 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 business.

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 see more wannabe female entrepreneurs than male. 🙂

The Match Day took place near the Polytechnic of Milan, while on friday the event moved to the Mediateca Santa Teresa with 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 an entry, and the Top Talent Award 2005.

It was a bit sad when Cesare Massarenti spoke about Italy and told 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”. Although I don’t like generalizations at all, that’s a valid assertion in many cases, 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 an exciting one… 😉