Webbified

Uk’s Admiral Group owned Confused.com is going through an European expansion, and it is now the turn of Italy.

The italian version of the insurance comparison portal will be named as http://www.chiarezza.it (funny name, a bit different from confused) and is in the beta version right now. The company is hiring some staff in Milan and it will probably start his business in the next months

Director of EU Policy,Richard Allan, asked today in a note a meeting with the Italian Senate President, Renato Schifani.

Schifani, head of one of the two chambers in the Italian Parliament, has been hardly criticizing the social network this week, blaming it as more dangerous than some terroristick group in the Italian ‘70 decade (where there was a huge socio-political turmoil carried by right and left winded extremist groups).

After the attack to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, some groups on Facebook were encouranging hate for Berlusconi, such as fan groups for the attacker or some groups created to Kill Berlusconi. The minister of Internal affairs asked for an investigation and spoke about measures to block for Social network and websites related to violence.

Facebook asked for the meeting to open a dialogue with italian institutions to discuss about new safety features to avoid new spreads of hate on his platform.

Schifani agreed to the invitation, and we hope this could be a signal of dialogue and a start for a new season for Internet freedom and consideration and in Italy.

Seecamp, a European early stage startup programme released the dates for their mini-camp in Europe in 2010.

The sad news is that Italy is not part of the project, as they are probably receiving very few application from our country. The good news is that people interested could join any European date and submit their project to the panel.

If a startup will be considered interesting, it will be chosen for the final round, where the best 10/15 project will be founded.

Here the dates :

> Zagreb – 11th February
> Prague – 2nd March
> Barcelona – 23rd March
> Paris – 15th April
> Tel Aviv – 6th May
> Copenhagen – 27th May
> Berlin – 16th June
> London – 20th July

Good luck =)

In a Educational webcast today , Google’s CFO and a bunch of Product directors explained their new strategy which aims to become the new leader in the Display advertising scenario.

Googlers believe they can leverage on their search technology to deliver the right ad to the visitor, and improving the web as in their company’s vision. Having reached a leadership in the search market, they believe the next big step to fill the gap between investments Tv and Online advertising is to help advertisers and agencies to find the right users and become the new leader in the banners market.

They explained 3 main points for their strategy:
- Fragmentation reduction: it is actually too complicated for a lot of players to buy and sell ads – too many websites/blogs/social networks
- Performance: There is still a great room for improvment in measurement and optimization of the display adversiting investments
- Open platform: using their Adwords and Doubleclick platform, their goal is to create a platform to be the new standard for online ads.

You can watch the full webcast clicking here

Italian media are giving a great exposure to the news of the attack at the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was hit by a man with an history of mental illness yesterday evening during a rally in central Milan Duomo Square.

Social networks are as usual flooded with people wishing to express their opinion, and as always someone is trying to manipulate the attention of the people.
Yesterday night , monitoring Facebook, we saw a lot of groups supporting Berlusconi or the attacker. The attention was so high that some groups were growing at a huge rate (about 100 fans/second). Pretty impressive, for a country with 58 Mln. people and a one of the lowest internet penetration in Europe.

Something should have happened overnight, since from this morning a lot of people noticed groups supporting the prime minister with something like 1.5 millions or 0.5 millions fans. What happened? Simply, evidently it is possible to change Facebook group names, and someone transformed groups like “Please Facebook don’t charge in 2010″  into something completely different.

Not taking any political position, this is for sure something to check out in your profile unless you want to see yourself supporting something you didnt’ even know!

Welcome to Webbified. This is a new blog about web and new technologies and I hope you’ll like it