Italy’s undeveloped web market has a wealth of opportunities

Written on 29th September 2008                                                                                                              7 COMMENTS
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web

Written by Luca Fracassi

Italy is certainly not the first country you think of when it comes to web technologies. This post will not argue the contrary, but it will try to explain a little bit about the Italian web scene.

That’s so six years ago

Internet usage in Italy is extremely low compared to most other developed economies. The penetration rate was only 36 percent in 2007. The Italians that use the web still see it mainly as a communication/information tool. The most visited websites include news sites and blogs.

E-commerce is rising, but still far from the average. In 2007 e-commerce represented 0.49% of retail sales, while this figure is around 6% in the UK, the top performer in Europe. Take a look at the Internet Book Shop to see a clear example of how young this market still is. IBS is the top e-commerce site in Italy with over 1.3 million uniques per month in 2007 and with €30 million turnover. The site’s graphics and layout are horrible by current standards, but there’s a simple explanation for this: the site hasn’t changed in the past 6 years! For a country known for its design and style this is outrageous, we can and should do better than this.

Computer lessons on the chalkboard

There are several reasons for the slow growth of the web in Italy, but I can certainly mention some major ones:

• Slow deployment of broadband
  Only 8.7 million families (37% of the total) have an ADSL connection in 2008!
• Low IT-alphabetization
  I hope things have improved since I was young (I am only 30), but I doubt it. I went through five years of high school and never had a computer lesson or even saw a computer. The first computer lesson I had was at University (1998) and the teacher was explaining us how a PC worked (cpu, hard-disk, memory, etc), all on the chalkboard!
• Culture & habits
  Italians still spend a lot of time watching television, though the younger generations are more aligned to the European/western standards and are spending more and more time online. Generally speaking Italian society is still very much run by very “wise” people and that means there’s a huge disconnection between the new technologies and the ruling class. This can also be seen by the low investments made by companies in the web industry.

There are some exceptions

Though they’re not brilliant, the Italian web scene has some interesting cases. I will mention a few good ones.

Beppegrillo.it
Beppegrillo.it is probably the best known Italian blog (ranking #20 on Technorati). This comedian has understood the power of the web and is fully exploiting it. Through his blog he managed to gather 50,000 people in a square for a demonstration last year. Not bad…

Beppegrillo.it demonstration

Babelgum
A free Internet TV platform supported by advertising, Babelgum offers professionally produced programming on-demand. Babelgum is a creation of Silvio Scaglia, former founder and CEO of FASTWEB a major italian cable television-internet provider.

Crosscast-system.com
This is another video startup that aims at competing with the likes of Joost. A good review with screenshots can be found at WebTvWire. Not sure what they will manage to do in the long run, but seems very promising…

Big potential

The Italian market is largely underdeveloped which, in my opinion, leads to a simple conclusion: huge opportunities. Sooner or later, the Italian market will catch up with the rest of the world and, given the population (60 million people), it has a big potential.

Personally, I believe that the web can bring bring a positive disruptive change to the Italian market, a market that is too often dominated by “dodgy” practices. There’s still time to enter this market, you just need to get the ingredients right. For example: get some decent graphics and you will already have a competitive advantage!

If you know some interesting Italian startups. just drop me a line. It’s time to show internationally what the Italian web scene can produce…

Babelgum, beppegrillo, italy, joost, Silvio Scaglia, Television

7 Comments »

PirateBay blocked in Italy, pirates fight back

Written on 10th August 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

TorrentFreak reports that the PirateBay has been blocked by all major Italian ISP’s who forced to do so due to a court order. The deputy public prosecutor who asked for the PirateBay block is on a mission, as this is his second success in two weeks. He managed to shut down the largest Italian torrent site, Columbo-BT, on July 29th.

The pirates fight back though, they want all Italians to have access to their torrent service. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunder told TorrentFreak that they “are working on setting up a really annoying system for them to filter. “Some of the ISPs decided to nullroute – so we changed IP so it works for them now some other decided to block the domain name so we added labaia.org, which means “the bay” in Italian.”

In a blog post, Sunder calls Italy a “fascist state” predicts that they’ll win the fight: “We have had fights previously in Italy, recently with our successful art installation where we had to storm Fortezza in order to get our art done. And as usual, we won. We will also win this time.”

italy, politics, priate bay, torrents

3 Comments »

User generated predictions for Euro 2008

Written on 9th June 2008                                                                                                              1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Just before the start of a manic football night, I found an interesting blog post by a blogger from the evil side, Italy. Web professional Marco Corsaro wondered whether an “innovative player” was taking advantage of social media to market his services by using the euphoric state Europe is in. People are so sucked up into the game, that they will just participate in anything – as long as it has to do with football. A stupid example: I just dropped by the supermarket where you get a small lion – the Dutch mascot – for every 15 euros you spend.

When Corsaro browsed Facebook to find such an application, he found over 100 applications and probably chose the most logical way to go – number one on the list. It’s developed by the sports TV network Eurosport and Yahoo. This application allows its contestants to compete by predicting the right tournament results. The best will get.. a 42-inch Plasma TV. Corsaro joined the club and says the following:

So whoever thought about this initiative to drive traffic to the Yahoo!-Eurosport joint portal, is also using it as a “teaser” so users install the applications. And looking at the results achieved so far, I’d say, its not bad at all. My rank (I am the last one since I just joined in) is 38.648 out of 60.651 members…that makes me think that about half the people that have installed the application are also actively playing.

Good post mr. Corsaro, I hope your national team won’t play as nice.

euro2008, football, italy

1 Comment »

Italy accidentally legalizes music sharing

Written on 4th February 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web

Article written by on-line media planner and tech blogger Jerry Houtman

Napster started it, and it has been going on ever since: the fight over online music sharing. Copyright issues are the core of this battle between the music industry and consumers, which recently took a turn for the unexpected. Ars Technica reported on the latest news on this matter, which came from Italy. What’s the story? The Italian government has unintentionally proved a considerable service to everyone who shares music through the Internet. The parliament has, as it happens, adopted a new law on the copyright, which permits Italians to spread and share music on-line, under the condition that they do this is for non-commercial aims and that it concerns music of lower quality. That might not sound as revolutionary as the headline suggests, but it most definitely is, for that second criterion is exactly where the Italian policy makers haven’t done their research all too well on.

According to Andrea Monti, a lawyer specialized in copyright, ‘lower quality’ is a term that can be interpreted very widely. The conversion necessary for sharing makes every music file circulating on the web one of lower quality than the original recording. That permit Italians to distribute music on the Internet without any restrictions. Although the law limits such sharing for scientific or educational aims, Monti believes it will make prosecuting a lot harder. Because let’s be honest: how many of us truly follow these particular rules?

Whereas the French policy makers tried to tackle illegal file sharing with a ban on Internet access, their Italian colleagues have made themselves the laughing stock of Europe by committing an enormous legal blunder. The law cannot be withdrawn or reconsidered, since it has already been approved of and only publication in the Official Journal keeps it from being official. The Italian government thus has to come up with a new law and make it pass through both Houses of Parliament again. It is almost too good to be true, and a small victory for consumers. If only I’d live in Italy.

file sharing, humor, italy, law

4 Comments »