What is the use of Mahler?

This post borrows its title and most of its content from an article in The Face (the British 1980s precursor to both Wired and Wallpaper) by music critic Ian MacDonald. I don’t know exactly what year it was, but I must have been close to the end of high school, because the clipping carries the words “Carnap – Feyerabend – Popper” handwitten in purple marker by my know-it-all adolescent self, as a footnote to a parenthetic remark on the impossibility of proving the non-existence of something in an infinite universe. She also highlighted numerous passages with a pink highlighter, and some with a green one. The article is, in summary, about the loss of the soul. Let me quote from it.

Earlier this year, Channel 4 transmitted a series of discussions under the title Modernity And Its Discontents. What stood out most from these programmes – apart from a general agreement that public life is melting into a “moronic inferno” of meaningless instantaneity – was that the modern self is in a lot of trouble. [...] We’ve become “thinned out” – and the world with us. We’ve lost that sense of “depth” in people and things which, whether or not we ever appreciated it, we were at least once trained to respect. In fact, so far has this process of thinning out gone that to say something is “deep” is tantamount to mocking it as meaningless. We no longer believe in deep things. We think thinks are all about equally worthless.

Our great-grandparents would doubtless have found our attitudes appalling, but then they were different from us. They believed they had immortal souls. We don’t.

[...] The “shallowness” we feel in modern life is no more and no less than the loss of the soul. The “depth” we used to sense behind appearances was the depth of the soul. Now that’s gone, we’re paper-thin. No wonder we don’t take each other quite as seriously as we used to. [...]

We are becoming a very sick society. It was this that Mahler was upset about. [...]

When, aged 34, he wrote Resurrection, he was as secure in his belief in ultimate redemption as anyone could be. By the time he came to write his Ninth Symphony, at the age of 50, he had suffered a catastrophic experience (we don’t know what it was) which completely destroyed that belief, hurling him without ceremony into our modern world. As a man used to thinking out his situation, he saw all the implications at once. “I stand”, he wrote, “face to face with nothingness.” [...]

It’s something we decide according to whether we belong to tradition or modernity, whether we think we’re souls or selves. Mahler started as a soul, ended as a self. The use of his music is that it charts that change, at once personal and historic, in such fearlessly graphic detail.

If my carbon dating is right, Ian MacDonald wrote this piece well before the Web was even a spark in CERN’s underground tunnels. Before reality shows, before 9/11, before the Eurozone crisis. Before Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat and before Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Who knows how he would have written this article today.

We will never know. In August 2003, aged 54, Ian MacDonald committed suicide following a lengthy period of clinical depression. He fully belonged to modernity. He too stood face to face with nothingness, until the abyss got the better of him.

Lorenzo Petrantoni. “The Internet? That’s a world I know nothing about”

Today I caught the last day of Timestory, the exhibition of Lorenzo Petrantoni‘s graphic work at the gallery of Credito Valtellinese in Milan.

The artist was present. I complimented him on the exhibition and had a brief chat with him. We talked about his visual sources such as 19th-century books, and I remarked that Max Ernst too made collages out of old old illustration books.

“But you scan everything and then do the work on the computer, right?”

“No, I actually cut up everything with scissors and do the work by hand. I use the computer only at the end, for finishing.”

“Oh, I had no idea. I thought graphic artists were completely digital by now. See how misinformed I am.”

“And what do you do?”

“Well, I do Internet stuff.”

“The Internet? That’s a world I know nothing about”.

“Nothing? That’s too bad. For example, I’m sure you could buy a lot of old illustrated books for cheap on eBay.”

“eBay? Not sure… But there’s one thing I do I do on the Internet: I buy old books on AbeBooks. After all, I couldn’t very well travel each time to buy them.”

“You see? That’s great. And this here on the tripod is your camera?”

“Yes, I am documenting everything. It is the last day of the show. Kind of sorry to dismantle it.”

“Well yeah, that makes sense. How long did it take you to put up the Timestory on the big wall? You must have had assistants helping you out, right?”

“Yes, there were three of us. But still, it’s 22,000 small pieces of paper, so it took us about ten days. And the exhibition is only one month. The PR did not work out too well. Too bad. Just as it was picking up, people were starting to come…”

“Well, that’s right. I only came myself because my friend Serena tweeted about it yesterday.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. Well then. Nice meeting you. Well done, again.”

“Thanks. Nice meeting you, too.”

One wonders, if this charming man had had a thousand Facebook fans, or a hundred Twitter followers, and they had liked and retweeted the news of the exhibition, and their friends and followers had liked it and so on… the exhibition would have been packed on day one (entry was free, too). But he’s just not into it (except for buying the books).

Below: Une Semaine de Bonté, the cover of Max Ernst’s collage book. Two works by Ashley Bickerton. An umbrella by Marcel Wanders.

Is Volunia search or social? It doesn’t matter.

The launch of Massimo Marchiori‘s new search project, Volunia (live streaming tomorrow, Feb. 6, at 12 CET on the University of Padua site), could not come at a more interesting time for the discussion of what the Web will look like in the next five years.

This weekend we have been variously entertained by the discussion between Robert Scoble, John Battelle, Dave Winer and many others about whether the Web we have known and loved for the past 15 years or so is melting away, like polar ice caps (Battelle’s metaphor), under the heat of our planetary addiction for Facebook’s “walled garden” (an odd term from the ’90s era of AOL, but one that is making a far bigger comeback – under Zuckerberg’s leadership – than we ever thought it could).

And that’s just the PC- and browser-based Web, and now the Android-based Web, the one that was defined by Google and that Google defined. But search is changing, morphing beyond recognition. As a user, one of my most common search question is “where on my iPad is that app I downloaded two months ago but whose name I don’t remember”. As a business leader, I need to deal with whole new domains for SEO, such as ensuring the in-Market and in-iTunes Store ranking of my company’s apps. As a strategist, I wonder whether the whole debate between the open search model and the social silos model is somewhat overblown: they’re really two sides of the same coin, and the heft of that coin is the solid metal of advertising, the business that funded search for years and that is funding social today, as Facebook’s IPO filing confirmed just last week.

So, is Volunia going to be a search platform or a social platform or both? “Seek & meet”, says the company’s tagline, hinting at both. But it does not really matter. It is going to be – sometime, at a later stage, post-launch – an advertising platform. It will need to be. Because Marchiori’s backers, led by Mariano Pireddu, have reportedly invested a couple of million euros in the project; and even with the best researchers and engineers, even at Padua-level salaries and not Silicon Valley- level salaries, a couple of million barely gets you a workable beta, if at all.

So, consider Volunia a nascent advertising platform. To attract advertisers, it will need to attract eyeballs. Details are hazy, but today’s paper edition of Nòva, the Sunday supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore, reveals some hints (and promises a video with Marchiori showing off his creature, on the site later today).Many are rooting for Volunia, but early screenshots seem disappointing. The search box searches for sites, within a site, or for Volunia users; you can see which users have been to a certain page, and which ones are there now, with an interface oddly reminiscent of the Rockmelt browser. You can comment and chat on a Web page with other users (Google Sidewiki, anyone?) You can make friends with people who share your interests, based on the pages they visit. According to Pireddu, the engine can be used anonymously if one wishes, users will not be profiled, and navigation data will not be tracked – so there is a bit of DuckDuckGo in there, for now.

If Marchiori and Pireddu get traction, they will be able to raise serious money and build up their dream. If the Volunia beta disappoints (and disappointments loom large in both search and social: remember Cuil? remember Color?), they will have to pivot very quickly and downscale to lesser ambitions. But I am an optimist, and an Italian: so I wish them all the best and I look forward to being wowed by their creature.

(Updates: screenshots here; video – in Italian – here.)

The Internet of the Future: Nouveau Monde 2.0, Paris, October 21, 2011

I had the pleasure to represent Italian Angels for Growth yesterday at a seminar held at the French Ministry for the Economy, Finance and Industry in order to advance the G8 Deauville agenda for the digital economy. It is a bit unusual for me to participate in a governmental event, but since the invitees were “Ministers for the digital economy, leading firms, start-ups, venture capitalists, bloggers and think tanks”, I thought at least it would be a place where interesting people gathered.

“New World 2.0: Concretizing the Internet of the Future”, or “Nouveau Monde 2.0″, was indeed packed with content and not too long on rhetorics. I had to miss the opening session on Thursday night, which dealt with Democracy 2.0 and saw Minister Eric Besson, the event host, engaged – quite empathically, I am told – with a number of Tunisian bloggers. (Here is a short interview he gave about Nouveau Monde 2.0).

Friday started with a discussion on network infrastructure that is by now familiar to me from working in a telco (I almost felt like crying out: “Those numbers on video traffic on cellular networks? They’re not tomorrow! They are practically today!”) and was framed by Cisco’s Robert Pepper, who showed projections from the Visual Networking Index leading us into the “Zettabyte Era” by 2015. Two key facts here: the volume of data transmitted around the world is increasingly driven by consumers, not businesses; and the biggest consumer demand is for video, in its many incarnations (short- and long-form, recorded and real-time, and so on). It is, also, a remarkably global demand: according to Google’s David Drummond, half of the views for videos uploaded from France this year were due to users ouside France. The question is, obviously, who’s going to pay for the networks we need to put in place. There was a full range of policy options represented on stage: the most laissez-faire was probably the U.S., whose Department of Commerce representative, Lawrence Strickland, maintained that regulators’ job is to “get out of the way”, but nevertheless admitted that there is at least one case, rural broadband, where the government should step in. The most interventionist? Not Sweden, not Finland, but Australia, where fruitless haggling with the incumbent, Minister Stephen Conroy told the audience, led the government to give up in frustration and launch a Newco tasked with building the National Broadband Network out of taxpayers’ money; one guesses that having Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea as “neighbors” and competitors tends to sharpen resolve. The proceedings were lent gravitas by European Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who reminded us that not only do we have a financial crisis to solve, but we must also find the resources to invest in our digital future. She deplored the lack of a single digital market across the Union (think of the mess that national copyright systems have gotten us into), and shone the spotlight on the recent Commission recommendation to establish a €9.2bn “Connecting Europe Facility” (here’s how it should work). Kroes was the star of the session: in a way, at at time when almost all politicians seem to think desperately short-term, she seemed to show how politics should care for the long run. (I am, needless to say, a fan of her commitment to put more “girl power” into technology).

The second session was moderated by entrepreneur, angel investor and independent board member Sherry Coutu, and focused on privacy on the Internet: “as a mother, I worry about these things”, she said in introducing the panel. Barbs were exchanged, as expected, between Simon Davies of Transparency International and Elliot Schrage from Facebook. Schrage was also challenged by the audience, notably when Tunisian journalist Emna Ben Jemaa took Schrage to task about a number of decisions on Tunisian pages made, or rather not made, by Facebook administrators during the Arab spring: if you followed the hashtag #NMwww, you could almost hear the Twittershphere cheering her on.

The third session, introduced by Alcatel-Lucent CEO (and former BT CEO) Ben Verwaayen, took on the issue of the digital divide. In opening the panel discussion, Mr. Verwaayen admitted that even in the West we are absolutely nowhere with “Internet for all”, and asked whether spectrum is treated as a strategic scarce resource or a milk cow for finance ministers. Again, representatives from places such as Japan and Sweden shared the stage with politicians from Kenya and Morocco. Digital inclusion is a tough challenge, both in terms of infrastructure and in terms of awareness and culture: there are lots of inspiring experiments going on, from tools to get cashew nuts to market at the right time in Ghana to telecommuting after the quake in Japan, but no one has any easy answers.

After the “official” conference was over, there followed a start-up evening (“Innovation Night 2.0″) put together by the outstanding team from Le Camping: three nascent start-ups and three slightly more mature ones got to present one-minute pitches and be grilled by senior executives from Microsoft, Google, Facebook… Here, the star performer was Criteo, a business that barely existed three years ago and plans to book $200m in revenues in 2011. When research reports talk about the jobs and the share of GDP growth created by the digital economy, folks like those at Criteo are the reality behing the numbers. Well done, guys!

Overall, the day felt like one of those rare occasions where my generation (the 40-year-olds), the previous generation (Ms. Kroes’s), and the younger generation (the university students presenting their start-ups in the evening) almost spoke the same language. The Ministry (where Mr. Besson holds, in addition to Industry and Energy, a specific mandate for the Digital Economy) deserves credit for creating a common space where this could happen. It was a showcase for a very dynamic France, and perhaps an example to the many other countries where participants came from.

My Facebook profile: Now open to subscribers

Has Facebook jumped the shark? It’s churning out platform changes faster than you can say “f8″. Yet, we don’t know today whether the changes will weave Facebook into the fabric of our lives even more tightly than today, or whether they will, on the contrary, turn out to be undigestible.

The most significant change in years, I believe, is the Subscribe feature: a full and irreversible move to the asymmetrical model (see my 2010 post about platform choices and personal policy), as if to say that the folks at Twitter (and Quora, and Google+) have been right all along. I think that recognizing this – better late than never – will be a big win for Facebook. Starting from today, my Facebook profile is open to subscribers; at least at the beginning, the majority of the content will still be shared with friends only.

Of course, it’s not enough to make a winning choice of relationship model (asymmetrical vs. symmetrical) for a social utility to win: you have to get a million other little things right. Google Buzz floundered on the wrong defaults. The TimesPeople feature on nytimes.com, one that I liked and used, appears to have been quietly rolled back last summer. Friendfeed, one of my personal favorite sites ever, was terminally mothballed after its 2009 acquisition by Facebook. (This will sound sentimental, but I haven’t loved a social networking site the way I loved Friendfeed since the pre-bubble days of SixDegrees.com). Yet, I maintain that, as I wrote last year, “asymmetry is the right choice for this type of application: it allows you to follow whoever you want, key opinion leaders to behave normally, and the community to grow more fluidly.”

The other major change in the Facebook platform, and the one that got the most hype this week, is the much deeper integration of media services such as Spotify, Hulu and Netflix. I’m starting to see in my Ticker what some of my friends are listening to. There’s probably a rather robust algorithmic tweak in progress to prevent our feeds from being overrun with meaningless chatter about songs, TV shows, products and God knows what else: I joked a few days ago that “if [Facebook] turns into MySpace, I’m gone.” Your genuine friends risk being squeezed out by a minority of oversharers drip-feeding you every song that they sample, every video they watch, every product they put into a basket. Of course, you can unfriend the oversharers (… and they can follow you without you following them back): however, as has already been noticed, it is entirely possible that some of your nearest and dearest friends may have poor musical taste.

To Facebook users outside the U.S., these changes won’t make a major difference. Since the media rights landscape is hopelessly fragmented on a national basis, most services such as Spotify, Hulu and Netflix are either available in a very restricted set of countries, or only available in the United States. If you are, say, Italian, you will hardly notice such updates, unless you have a lot of friends in the U.S.  and they use these services a lot.

What will Facebook do to vertical sites built around media and entertainment consumption? Will it swallow them slowly, keep them alive on life support, or just make them irrelevant? I don’t have the answers for you. I’ll keep my eyes open; in the meantime, do enjoy the new Facebook.

The secret sauce in the Google+ design: AngelList

In the couple of weeks since Google+ was unveiled, oceans of digital ink have been poured in reviewing the service, sharing tips and tricks, loving/hating Google for it, as well as in the ultimately futile exercise of predicting whether it will succeed.

I have abstained from such predictions. I have not yet, however, come across any commenters remarking on the Google+ look and feel: it seems to me very much that it took its inspiration from AngelList, the business angels hangout started by Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi. That is, perhaps, because it is (rightly) difficult to get invited to join AngelList, and therefore a lot fewer people have access to it than to Google+.

But if you look at two screenshots, the resemblance is evident. I sometimes have trouble telling which page I’m on. (Then, of course, I read the content). Do you share this feeling?

The Illusionists: Help fund it on Kickstarter

A few weeks ago, I had drinks with a young filmmaker I had started following on Twitter months ago. Her name is Elena Rossini and she lives in Paris. We talked extensively about her feature-length documentary project, The Illusionists. I’ll let her explain it in her own words:

As you may know, in late June I’ve launched an ambitious fundraising campaign for my feature-length documentary The Illusionists, which I wrote and I am co-producing and directing.

Here is the synopsis of the film:

THE ILLUSIONISTS is a feature-length documentary about the commodification of the body and the marketing of unattainable beauty around the world. The film will explore the influence that corporations have on our perceptions of ourselves, showing how mass media, advertising, and several industries manipulate people’s insecurities about their bodies for profit.

The Illusionists’ Kickstarter page has a video teaser and a longer explanation of the project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1085595579/the-illusionists-documentary-insecurity-sells (its themes, style, and my motivations for making the film).

There are amazing experts already lined up for the interviews, including author & filmmaker Jean Kilbourne (best known for her iconic film series “Killing Us Softly”), psychotherapist Susie Orbach (best known for her books “Fat is a Feminist Issue” and “Bodies”) and Jenn Pozner (author of “Reality Bites Back”; she was recently featured in the New Yorker and on NPR). I’m also hoping to interview Umberto Eco, Gloria Steinem, Oliviero Toscani and Maurice Levy of Publicis, amongst others. 

Thanks to the incredible generosity of friends, friends-of-friends, Twitter and Facebook followers, the fundraising campaign has already achieved some amazing milestones. 12 days in, I’ve reached 43% of the total funding goal, with over 110 backers and more than 1,100 Facebook “likes” of my Kickstarter page. In short, I’m on cloud nine. But the road ahead is still long… if I don’t reach 100% of the funding goal by August 5th, I will lose all the pledges made so far.

On Kickstarter, I am offering “regular people” pre-sales of the film and various other gifts as rewards for donations:http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1085595579/the-illusionists-documentary-insecurity-sells (the column on the right). I’m also developing a special package for sponsors whose mission is aligned with the message of the film that would offer exposure on the site, in all press material, and in the end credits of the film.

If this is something that resonates with you, go to Kickstarter.com and fund it. I just did.

Gary Hamel: The Future Happens on the Fringe

How do we move from the theory and practice of management that were invented 100 years ago to building and running organizations that are fit for the future? Gary Hamel, in this short lecture, points out that we are the first generation of managers and leaders who has had to deal with an exponential rate of change;  our companies face hypercompetition; and any knowledge advantages dissipate quickly.

How can we then build organizations that are fit for the future? Today, “for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, you cannot build a company that’s fit for the future without building one that’s fit for human beings.“ Hamel suggests three mindsets. Have high aspirations (see the “reverse accountability” put in place by Vineet Nayar at HCL Technologies); challenge dogma, be a contrarian; and learn from the fringe. Because “the future happens on the fringe”. And the fringe – at least of you look at it from the perspective of a Fortune 500 corporation – is the Web: the Web with its openness, meritocracy, flexibility, collaboration: the greatest operating system for innovation ever invented.

“The values that today characterize the Web, we’re going to have to bake them into our organizations.”

Amazon.co.uk, order updates, revised delivery dates and apologies (Updated)

On March 20, I placed an order on Amazon.co.uk.

For a physical book. (I know: for my own consumption, I’ve only bought ebooks for the last six months or so. But this is a richly illustrated book, and it’s meant as a gift, so I want it in its full physicality, its cellulosic, tree-killing, chemically enhanced glossy incarnation. Plus, it’s not sold in ebook form.)

In the space of 40 days, I have received 10 order updates from amazon.co.uk.

The first (April 6) told me:

“We regret to inform you that your order will take longer to fulfill than originally estimated.”

On April 14, I received a new estimated delivery date: April 29. On April 15, I was told “We are pleased to report that the following item will dispatch sooner than expected”, i.e. April 21-22.

On April 18, a new delay (estimated delivery date: April 23-30), together with an appropriately contrite apology statement:

“One of Amazon’s aims is to provide a convenient and efficient service; in this case, we have fallen short. Please accept our sincere apologies.”

On April 20, a new estimated delivery date (April 27 – May 4), with the same statement. Again, on April 22 (estimated delivery date: April 28-May 5), April 24 (estimated delivery date: April 30 – May 6), April 27 (estimated delivery date: May 4-9), and April 29 (estimated delivery date: May 5-10): all with Amazon’s sincere apologies.

Then, the apologies stopped. On May 1, “We are awaiting a revised estimate from our supplier, and will email you as soon as we receive this information.” On the same day, two minutes later, another email with a new estimated delivery date: May 6.

I wonder if I’m heading into another loop of apologies, revisions, notifications and estimates. I have tons of respect for Amazon’s operational abilities and I like knowing what’s going on with my order, but this is starting to feel like a case where making the catalog item available for ordering was perhaps premature.

And in terms of communicating with the customer… more than, say, one update per week feels like too much information. It’s a book, after all: not a kidney, or a new set of corneas. Just get it to me when it’s ready, OK?

Update, May 22: Since writing this post, I received  13 more email updates from Amazon along the same lines. The 14th was different: “We regret to inform you that we have been unable to obtain the following item… We apologise for the length of time it has taken us to reach this conclusion.  Until recently, we had still hoped to obtain this item for you.” After 24 emails, it’s almost a relief.

Technology, innovation and creativity in Italy: SXSW Technology Summit

Terminal decline or lull before a comeback? That was the question on our minds as Gianfranco Chicco, Marco Massarotto, Luca Conti and I prepared for our panel about Italy on March 17 at the 2011 SXSW Technology Summit (photo courtesy of Paolo Privitera). And I like to think it’s the latter.

Our organizers asked us to address questions ranging from “Who are the leading mobile carriers / companies in your country?” and “Is there enough talent for high-tech work?” to “What companies / individuals are leaders in terms of overall creative technology?” and “What are the best resources / blogs / websites for people to learn more about new media in your country?”

I worked on the first chapter, summarizing in a few slides the key data points about the country’s human capital and technology infrastructure, and I’d like to share my speaking notes with you. (You can see my slides, together the chapters about technology innovators (Marco) and social/new media trends (Luca), at this link or embedded below.) Here’s my section of the talk – let me know where you agree and where you disagree.

• What I will argue today is that you should think of Italy as two countries; not in terms of geopolitics (we are celebrating today 150 years since unification), but in terms of culture, society, economics and technological environment.
• One part of the country – mostly young, mostly urban, mostly in the prosperous North (but not only: you will see later some examples of innovation leaders from the Center and South of the country) – works and feels like Bavaria or Sweden, from Internet penetration to women’s participation in the workforce. The rest, though, is very different.
• Our education system is an active contributor to this inequality:  for secondary school students, the gap in standardized OECD PISA test scores between the North-East and the South of Italy is larger than the gap between Finland and Spain. As Roger Abravanel documented in his Meritocrazia, schools in the South of Italy perform no better than the average school in Uruguay or Thailand.
• What about university education? Well, it was pretty much invented in Italy (the University of Bologna traces its roots back to 1088 A.D.) We could have performed some more upkeep, though. For many centuries, universities were by definition elite institutions; a serious push for a broader diffusion of upper education only started for good with the 1968 student movement. Yet, over 40 years later, according to OECD statistics, only about 10% of Italians aged 55-64 have obtained a university degree, and only about 20% of of Italians aged 25-34. A lot more people start university studies, but the drop-out rate is very high. Furthermore, the return on investment for those who complete a university education is over twice as high for young men than for young women. So do we, as a nation, have the skills to compete, almost ten centuries after the first place of higher learning was founded?
• I argue that spikes count for more than the general level of education; that deviation from the mean is more important than the mean. So the question is not whether everybody gets a degree, but whether the system is able to take in talented students and churn out a number of exceptionally creative people who then go on to change the world. And I believe it does: take three of our centers of excellence – the Polytechnics of Milan and Turin, and Bocconi University in Milan – and you’ll see not only that their graduates on average find jobs quickly and go on doing well for themselves, but also that many of their alumni have left a mark on the world as architects, designers, technologists, economists and entrepreneurs.  It may be a stereotype that Italy stands for creativity, but it’s hard to challenge it.
• Having talked about human capital, what does the infrastructure look like? Well, again – Italy is at least two countries. One country has broadband at home, banks online, shops online, and prints out its own boarding pass at home before going to the airport. The other one is stuck in the 20th century.
• That second country (older, less educated, less urban…) is still big enough that the most successful technology of the 20th century, television, remains the leading media technology in the country as a whole. More than half of the advertising money spent in the country goes to one media: television. TV grew through the recession, and it’s still growing. Yes, the Internet is growing too: but we’re still very far from being a market like the UK, where the Internet left TV behind two years ago. TV is the winner and we’re in a market where the winner takes all: not just the advertising money, but the nation’s collective attention.
• Fortunately, we have a vibrant telecommunication market, especially in mobile. Mobile is important not just because it’s a bigger market than fixed line, but because in the absence of a national broadband policy mobile may well turn out to be the key to reuniting that divided country I talked about. We’re already among the leading European countries in terms of mobile broadband penetration through devices such as Internet keys and dongles. The operator I work for, Vodafone, has committed to bringing mobile broadband over three years to 1,000 towns in Italy that today have no broadband access at all, fixed or mobile.
• Still, the recent recession has made it a tough ride. In 2009, we lost 5% of our GDP, and we’re merely inching back to growth, not sprinting. The investment environment took a hit. The ICT sector was hit very hard; telecommunication spend did not collapse as dramatically, but is now likely to be in its fourth consecutive year of slow contraction. As consumers have adopted recessionary mindsets, businesses have had to learn to cope.
• So what are the drivers for technology and innovation, looking ahead? For Italy, the tech lobby Assinform identifies the usual suspects: cloud computing, eGovernment, mobile broadband, tablets, SMEs. But don’t underestimate the role of Europe. The European Union as a forum, in spite of the recent debt crisis, is still a very active bureaucracy working for competition within the EU, for consumers and for citizens. It exercises both legislative power and moral suasion, such as in standardization initiatives – essentially banging people’s heads together until they agree to make sure that whatever they’re doing is interoperable with what their other fellow Europeans are doing. (GSM, as you will recall, was started in the 1980s by a bunch of postal and telecommunication bureaucrats. Who would have thought?)
• Back to Italy: are we in tune with the Digital Agenda for Europe? No, I would not say we are in tune. Our government has been preoccupied with other political priorities, such as fiscal devolution and reform of the criminal justice system. Ask any of our political leaders, government or opposition, whether a digital agenda for Italy is among their top ten priorities, and my guess is that hardly any of them will even have a clue of what you’re talking about. (Remember: they are elected, overwhelmingly, by people who watch TV.) So lobbying has started, most recently with Agenda Digitale – a plea by 100 Italian technology and media figures for the political establishment to define what we’re going to do about the digital divide -, and must continue.
• Having said all that, should you lose hope in the country? No, no, no. We do have enablers that we didn’t have ten or fifteen years ago: VCs with proven track records, incubators and seed funds started by successful entrepreneurs and managers, angel investors and angel groups. (I am a member of Italian Angels for Growth). We do have skills, creativity and talent – as shown by the many achievements of Italians around the world. We have bureaucracy, yes, and we are badly governed: but that won’t last much longer. We are proud of being Italian, and we want to fix our country. Each of us here today is doing their small or big part.