I am in Winchester, the AlifeXI conference starts tomorrow. An (indoor!) BBQ will take place in a few minutes. It's raining and I am looking forward to see how an indoor BBQ works ;-) that's England! When I left this morning Milan was hot and mosquitoes would not let me

Today I finally had time to comment on this article, which three different people mentioned to me. The article is about how the way we think is being changed by new technology, the Internet and the Web. To make the point, there are a lot of good examples of how

Last Thursday I participated to a round table with President George W. Bush, while he was visiting Rome. Politics was not involved in this, I was invited to talk about 1GN, the not for profit network that we created last year to foster entrepreneurship in Italy. The transcript of my

This article, by Paul Graham, perfectly describes our state of mind when building Splinder into the largest blogging platform in Italy. We focused on users, that was our compass, and we focused on usage growth, not on generating revenues, because that would have killed the project. We kept costs down

While thinking about the emergence of "new rules" from simple rules and the inadequacy of mathematics to model across levels, I never thought about the implication of this line of reasoning beyond science and technology into the realm of philosophy and religion. This is what Stuart A. Kauffman has done

One of the first things I noticed, when I started reading about Bio-Inspired AI and neuroscience, is the notion that we cannot say that we "really" understand something unless we find a suitable "traditional" mathematical model that approximates it in a way or another. We are so used to mathematics

A year ago I sold Tipic Inc., the company that created the largest blogging and community platform in Italy. Now Splinder is handed over and has doubled in users since the sale. I am now free to go after my interests which are, broadly speaking, Bio Inspired Artificial Intelligence and

Here is the opportunity: how do you eliminate 50% of fraudulent clicks that you pay when you buy a campaign on Google? Well, to put things in perspective, 50% seems a lot, but it is not much compared to more than 50% which is lost on TV ads, and who

I studied Engineering and graduated with honors, but I must admit that I never liked mathematical analysis, and was never too good at it. I found it as being too abstract and hard to visualize; on the other hand, I loved computer science, it was my second nature, I could

The average age of Italian politicians is one of the highest in the world. Regardless of their background, either on the left or on the right, Italian politicians have been trying to "regulate" the Internet for a while now. Their latest proposal is to oblige any site or blog owner

I finally got to NYC at 10:00 pm local time, 6 hours late on a 5 hours flight, not bad! We left San Francisco at 8:00 am, but over Chicago, we started flying in circles, and after a few minutes the captain announced that the FAA was not

The last 2 weeks in the Bay Area have been really productive. The quality and quantity of people that I met is really impressive. I like technology, so I guess that's the place where it makes sense to be for me. The reality, though, is that it is not just

Yesterday Shel gave me the first lesson of "Silicon Valley 101" :-) He was a great host taking me around Palo Alto and Stanford. As usual we had a great conversation about many subjects: cultural diversities, social media, the economy, life, etc ... He also wrote an interesting post about how

This week I attended the AAAI - Artificial Intelligence conference in Vancouver. I was a bit disappointed because I did not find much Artificial Intelligence, but rather a lot of Human Intelligence applied to solve specific problems with the aid of computers. I found a lot of mathematics and logic

I know it, yet I keep making the same mistake. I have my vision of the future; it's obviously a partial one, but I know it is a plausible one. And yet I keep trying to talk to friends who are not technologists and I try to explain to them

Back from the Synthetic Biology (SB) conference in Zurich. I did not understand most of the details because I lack a biology background, but I came away with a few ideas: * they are trying to define the boundaries of the field, but they lack the technical tools to lower the

Reading about physics, biology, nanotechnology and AI is very refreshing. After 5 years spent concentrating on community building, blogs, IM and the WEB in general, I am taking my time to understand the big picture. So many things have changed in 5 years, and so many different fields are coming

Starting a new blog I feel free to do or write whatever I want. Today is no different!

I wrote this post back in 2001 to crystallize the ideas that would lead to Tipic Inc., the company that created Splinder. Splinder became the largest blogging and community site in Italy; it was acquired by the Rizzoli Corriere della Sera Group in 2006. Using the Net today can be