An Italian Job

As this year’s 100 Hottest European Start-ups from Wired showed there’s still a healthy Technology sector growth across the continent. They featured the Tech powerhouse cities of Berlin and London as well as some up and coming hubs in Barcelona and Amsterdam. Recently, I would have said that “one city that wouldn’t come to mind as a hotbed of innovation was Turin”. Well the Think Up Agency and partners at I3P and the Institute Mario Boella changed this. They have created a vibrant ecosystem of start-ups and focused research that are feeding off each to produce tangible technology capabilities and competencies.

If you are looking for design flair and technology backed up with delivery capability I would recommend the trip to investigate the city.  Here are some hot prospects in original home of the economic cluster model.

Founded in 1999, by a group of language technology researchers with the aim to address the growing market in language engineering, Celi is a provider of software solutions in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in mono-, multi-, and cross-language perspective.  When you add in the whole semantic analysis for business with parts the big data challenges we will to continue to face a very interesting offering.

Experientia is an experience design consultancy that practices user research-based and people-centred design. They operate at the front end of the process and help folks come up with their answers, through a qualitative understanding of people, their mental models and their behaviours.

BMooble is the vision of Guido Colombo who back in the day foresaw the concept of Apps as we know them today. bMooble provides a  solution specifically designed to access any Information Data Source from multi-platform mobile phone devices. Impressively, they seem to have all platform including you old Nokia (not so smart) phone covered.  With increasing mobility desires and the build once deploy many they are in for interesting times.

At first glance Synesthesia would be your typical mobile apps design team which springing up around the world. When you get under the covers you’ll find a decade long heritage in cutting edge design and mobile user experience expertise. Having developed the 2012 Olympics App which as an actual user I can say they have a ‘right to play’. They set a good benchmark for sports based Apps and I see the likes of Sky showing an interest.

The brainchild of a physics graduate with a history of Design Support Systems based on multidimensional engines Hicare Research was founded in 1996. The business intelligence software company have built a built their product Lilith. With its impressive functionality set, they look well placed to take advantage of the Big Data and Analytics challenges companies around the world are facing.

Founded in 2003, with 15 employees Seaco2 are a little bit like Layar with their mobile augmented-reality platform. They bring the deep heritage of Italian design credentials together with state of the art augmented reality software and real-time render raytracing to produce incredible interactive solutions. With their patents and copyrights as well as working for folks like UPS and Benetton they are one to watch.

Reply Concept is your more traditional business technology service company or systems integrator. Founded in 1996 and listed on the Italian Star in 2000 they provide consulting, systems integration and Apps Management.  They have neat stuff in the whole digital, mobile retail area with their HI Shop.

With an eight year history and over 20 years experience, Irion operate in the data quality and enterprise data management systems market. Their IrionDQ, which allows you to treat all your corporate data as if it were contained in a single, large virtual database maybe of interest to the Financial services industry as Regulators are setting new standards for Basle 3 and Solvency 2..  

Mediaki.it’s interesting formation can be traced back to the 2006 Olympic Games in Turin.  They are well placed to take advantage of the wave of new portals or business platforms as Internet users become savvier and businesses realise the need to offer and increasing encaging social experience.