TechCrunch
Telcos Like Telecom Italia Are Failing European Startups And It's Got To Stop
Italy, like many Southern European countries, is struggling with an economy in the doldrums. But the innovators in this proud and ancient country are not sitting idly by. As our Techcrunch Italy event attested to this week, there has been an explosion in the number of startups coming out of the country. It may not be the biggest scene in Europe yet, but it is clearly hitting a growth spurt. Young people, in particular, are voting with their feet and joining the ranks of entrepreneurs. So when we put on TechCrunch Italy with out partner Populis, we found a great venue, the amazing Maxxi Museum, and set about getting great speakers. What we didn’t count on was Telecom Italia.
Less than one kilometre from Maxxi Museum is a business and residential area served by third party fibre providers like FastWeb. Fibre of course is amongst the best options when you want real broadband.
And yet the Maxxi Museum, unfortunately, does not have access to fibre, despite having good wifi coverage inside the building. So we found a satellite provider (yes, satellite) and put in a system we thought could serve the conference. The satellite system was sold us by Telecom Italia but was provided by one of their subcontractors, Digitaria.
But although we brought in enough bandwidth into the building to serve the 1,000+ delegates, Telecom Italia failed us. Miserably.
Despite a big satellite connection, Telecom Italia gave us a router that was simply not capable of dealing with the bandwidth we actually had access to. It was only by the second day of the conference that we were able to obtain a bigger router which could serve the conference.
But even then, we had to get the router from another company to fix the problem. Telecom Italia did not even fix the issue and did not supply a new router. This, despite the conference paying tens of thousands of Euros for their “service.”
But this is not a post just to bitch about Telecom Italia.
It’s a post that to highlight the fact that without decent Internet access you simply don’t get economic development. Countless studies are have long since proven this. It’s a fact.
BUt just getting decent, full-blown broadband in some parts of Europe is still a ridiculous experience.
And here’s an international conference, bringing in international speakers, and people who could potentially invest in a country – and what happens? You can’t get online. It’s basically a disgrace to Telecom Italia.
And it’s a disgrace when this happens at other events – when it’s not down to the organisers, who do their best to get often extremely expensive broadband into the building to service Internet-hungry delegates. These are delegates who are part of the fastest moving sector in business, one of the few growth areas in the world today.
This is the way Telecom Italia behaves when often an official from the Italian government turns up and tells all the startups how great they are. Awesome – but everyone knows they are sitting in a conference where people can’t even get online.
So as great as it is that the European Commission is beating the drum about 3G roaming costs and supporting startups, but let’s just be clear – they need to beat up on these lazy ass telecoms companies who are siting on their asses doing nothing to help their own damn technology ecosystems.
It’s highly ironic, because Italy is one European country which contains a passionate set of players, like Luca Ascani of Populis, who are really trying to grab their country by the ears and haul it into the faster era of tech startups. But they simply cannot operate in an environment where basic, simple broadband is hard to come by. Without that, none of the innovation we expect to come from startups will happen.
It was a point well made by Zaryn Dentzel, founder of Tuenti, who has been one of those participating in the Startup Manifesto project to lobby Europe and European governments on behalf of startups.
This is an excellent initiative which addresses issues like taxation, stock options etc etc.
But all of that work will be wasted if we can’t get the broadband speeds we need to create the next generation of companies.
Also, Francesco Caio, head of the Italian government’s “Digital Agenda” initiative. He spoke about how tax benefits will be created by October to ignite Italian startups and investors. He estimates there are now 1148 tech startups in Italy now – an enormous difference in the last 3 years alone.
Unusually for a government appointee he was brutally frank: “Italy is number 9 on the global scale for engineering talent, – it drives me up the fucking wall that people don’t know this.”
We heard from Mattia Corbetta, Chief of the Italian Minister of Economic Development’s Technical Secretariat. He outlined how Italy is trying to re-design its labour laws and regulations around startups, such as flexible pay structures, and new rules around stock options and equity to incentivise entrepreneurs.
So, Italy, like many other European countries, has the talent and is starting to create the will amongst government and business leaders to change its economy and re-orient it towards the future and an information economy.
All of this effort – all of it – will be wasted if state monopolies amongst telcos and the slow-lane of their service culture is not smashed and disrupted.
We do not want to be left with an ecosystem which has a fantastic environment for startups, great incentives for investors, tonnes of talented people – but no-one can get online and get fast broadband.
Period.
GiPStech, A Radical Indoor Location Startup, Wins TechCrunch Italy Competition
The TechCrunch Italy conference featured a startup competition to showcase a number of new, early stage startups emerging from the growing startup ecosystem. In partnership with media company Populis, the Maxxi Museum in Rome witnessed startups pitch for the chance to win €10,000 in cash and €40,000 worth of media exposure on Populis’s media platform.
Selected from more than 200 nominations by an advisory board of innovators, venture capitalists, journalists and well-known entrepreneurs of the digital landscape, there were eight finalists who pitched.
But of course in the end there can be only one winner.
And that was GiPStech. They also win a table at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe in Berlin.
GiPStech has developed a very most advanced indoor positioning technology based on the world’s geo-magnetic field which, they say, is accurate, reliable and cheap. They plan to make this location data available to mobile app developers via an API based on a freemium mechanism.
This is a problem that literally hundreds of startups are trying to solve right now, and if it works as well as they say it does, this could even be a radical new technology for location – especially for indoor positioning which is a hot market right now.
Here are the other finalists:
Aenduo
“With the Aenduo device in home, a physician can offer remote monitoring services to their patients. At home, the patient can automatically send data from the meter that he already uses, without effort and without changing his habits. Doctors have easy access to the biometric data measured by the patients (pressure, blood glucose, …) and are informed automatically via customized alarms.”
Bauzaar
“Bauzaar is the Italian pet food and pet care e-commerce offering a unique Frequent Delivery Service that allows Pet Lovers to choose high quality products, select a delivery frequency and save money and time.”
BeMyEye
“BeMyEye is the innovative service for crowdsourcing store checks and mystery shopping. Thanks to a large and widespread network of on-demand workers using an iPhone app, BeMyEye can provide trustable observations in few days from thousands of locations in Italy.” This is crowd-sourcing the ability to check if marketing in-store and POS promotional campaigns are actually being implemented or not.
Fluentify
“Fluentify, a new way to connect language learners with carefully selected native speakers”. Not designed to compete with language learning sites, this is a language practising marketplace.
Sportboom
“Sportboom is an e-commerce website where you can find and buy every sport activity you may want to do.” You can find and pay in groups for sports.
Vivocha
“Vivocha.com is a cloud service that enables businesses to seamlessly communicate with prospects and customers right on the website, using any combination of VoIP, Video, chat, callbacks and collaboration tools.”
WIB
“WIB is the e-commerce enabled, smart vending machine that reinvents convenience shopping”
Pathflow
“In-store visual tracking to assertion best areas of shops and produce heat maps.” Claims to be better than Wifi.
Fluc, A Lyft For Food, Launches In San Francisco And Mountain View
Since its launch earlier this summer, Palo Alto-based Fluc, one of what’s now many, many food delivery startups, has been targeting the majority of restaurants that don’t offer delivery. Today, the company is officially announcing an expansion beyond its initial service areas of Palo Alto and Menlo Park to San Francisco and Mountain View. The company has also added more than 85 restaurants to the platform in the months following its debut, and with the new expansions, it will reach nearly 140. Fluc has released an updated iPhone application, too, which is now iOS 7-optimized.
The startup was founded earlier this year by Tim Davis, Adam Ahmad and Pako Magdaleno, who were living together in a hacker house in Palo Alto with a messy kitchen and had no time to cook. Fluc (aka Food Lovers United Corp), was inspired by this idea that there should be a “Lyft for food.” That is, instead of trying to sign deals with restaurants to take commissions, Fluc uses an army of independent contractors who fulfill orders. The company had just a few people on board when it got off the ground, and now has around 30, and is growing at a rate of 3 to 5 new hires per week. (Full-time, however, there are just four.)
Because of its early-stage and current fundraising activities, Fluc isn’t talking about order volume or revenue, but Ahmad would say that on both fronts, it’s growing by 20 percent week-over-week.
Food delivery, to put it mildly, is a crowded space that today includes a number of companies like EAT Club, Chewse, Munchery, Plated, PlateJoy, Blue Apron, SpoonRocket, OrderAhead, Caviar, Fresh Dish, ZeroCater, Eat24, DoorDash, Delivery.com, ChowNow, and many others, not to mention larger players like recently merged Seamless and GrubHub.
So to differentiate itself from the pack, Fluc focuses on a few things. For starters, its business model involves onboarding restaurants by snapping photos of menus and then using OCR and other technologies to input that data into its system. This allows it to quickly scale its presence without waiting for restaurants to sign up. It also focuses on having full menus from a range of popular and high-rated and reviewed restaurants (sourced via Yelp and customer requests), including everything from low-end fast food chains like McDonald’s and Taco Bell to 5-star establishments.
As its green-shirted drivers start showing up at restaurants after Fluc’s “food genies” call in orders using customer names, the businesses begin to take notice. Some have told Fluc what they like about the service is that they don’t have to do anything differently on their part. There aren’t new point-of-sale systems or other technologies, like iPads, to install, for example. “We don’t change any process on the backend,” Ahmad explains, saying that restaurant owners can find that kind of change frustrating.
Fluc’s new iPhone app is now working to get Fluc on restaurants’ radar even more. It’s offering a feature called “I so hungry” (yes, really) that offers free delivery at one featured restaurant per day for orders over $10. The idea is that the restaurant will see the influx of Fluc orders, and will then reach out to the company to find out more. This leaves room for potential cross-promotion activities or other advertising opportunities further down the road.
Fluc’s system lets diners customize their meals, too. Instead of having them leave a comment that can get overlooked, they can do this in the app itself, explains Ahmad. “We make it no different than you actually walking into the store and placing an order,” he says.
Currently, the company charges $5.95 per delivery and has slightly inflated menu prices (around 5-10 percent) to make a small margin on sales. Contractors keep the delivery charge and any tips, and make themselves available to pick up orders in blocks of time to meet demand.
Fluc has only just launched in San Francisco, initially in parts including the Castro and SOMA areas, but is expanding coverage to neighboring areas soon. It will also be live in Mountain View in fewer than 24 hours. In these new markets, Fluc will operate from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. at first before expanding to the lunch crowd. Area residents can check out Fluc online or download the app here.
No comments:
Post a Comment