Yesterday evening startuppers from Milan and its hinterland took some time off for the 3rd edition of StartuParty at FIAT Open Lounge in the Garibaldi area of Milano. At the party there were also the other stakeholders of the Italian startup ecosystem: investors, designers and developers, bloggers who joined for some fun and precious networking. Overall there were more than 800 people!
5 selected startups had the task to warm up the ambient with the format Road 55: 5 presentations in 5 minutes + 5 for Q&A; a pitch session that took the audience into the publishing world, in a sharing platform with a jump into marketing and geo-tagging. The trip was guided by Francesco Inguscio, one of the organizers of the event, who well balanced the pretty quite audience, silence that was mainly due to the many mojitos and spritz.
The opportunity for the 5 startups was great, 5 minutes to boost their project seeking for some media attention, partners or even investors, with in addition the possibility to be selected by the seed-incubation program SeedCamp. The project presented are promising startups with already some positive feedbacks coming from their testing phase, some of them have already built a community, some others have even caught the attention of the US bigs.
The first to climb the stage was Alessandro Biggi for 20Lin.es, a co-creation platform for narratives. In Italy we used to say that there are more authors than readers, 20lin.es levarege exactly on this principle offering the digital evolution of the old Game Books (a book where the story offered some variables the reader could choose from to “customize” the story). 20lin.es readers can still choose among many different stories and if they don’t like the offer, they can write their own version. The most popular draft will then become an ebook to sustain the business.
Massimo Chieruzzi followed presenting AdEspresso.com, an application that will make marketeers’ life much easier on Facebook. The social network already offer the possibility to link a campaign to some interests of the target audience, but it’s yet impossible to see which community better answer to the campaign. AdEspresso optimizes the testing phase of every campaign refining the ROI calculation and consequently the planning of the following campaigns. The team already got the attention of Facebook who is helping them to optimize the service.
Michele Orsi presented Map2App a platform that make accessible for no-developer to realize mobile touristic guides geo-localizing content such as images, videos and audio. The greatest innovation for the many Travel bloggers from all over the world.
Simone Santagata brought us back to talk about Facebook and in detail about its Like button. Everyone of us has once thought that it doesn’t always express what we’d like to say. Proliker.com bring us the soultion. It allows developer to customize the text shown on the button. We will soon see the famous white hand close to message like: “I cooked it” or “I’d read it”.
At the end of our 55 Road we met Massimo Mauri with Youmpa.com. How many times one of your friends told you about a super cool event that you didn’t know about? With Youmpa this won’t happen so often! The startup consist in a platform like Pinterest where everyone can create and share events, helping people to discover new locations and keep up-to-date with what happen around them.
At the end of the pitching session everyone put his hands on his Smartphone to vote the most promising project and waiting for the prize-giving everyone started networking: startuppers kept repeating their elevator pitches as they were their names, one hand carrying a drink and the other ready to grab a Business Card. By the end of the party many Cinderellas already left the party, but the once who resisted had the pleasure to see Proliker.com being prized.
The event was also the occasion to present officially Junior Jedi a new young group of italian motivated, skilled professionals who work as different players in the innovation ecosystem and who decided to get together to share their respective knowledge in order to boost the Italian innovation ecosystem.
reporter Carla Zorzo
