Startupper’s Swing / Silvio Porcellana / mob.is.it

A few years later, another computer, another memory: a cacophony of sounds, whistles and noises, bounces and pauses – my 1200 baud modem was for the first time connected to a remote database. I don’t have the slightest idea of what the heck of a database that was nor what kind of information it contained: all I know is that I stood there, watching that blinking cursor asking me what piece of knowledge I wanted to grasp, my heart pounding in my chest. I was Alice in front of the entrance of Wonderland.

Then, the last milestone, the most recent one – not exactly thou as it was at least 15 years ago: the first time somebody paid me for having done something with a computer. At first it seemed strange, nearly incredible: WTF, when I was a kid my mom used to hide my keyboard because I had homework to do and now somebody is willing to hand me some money to make me work (…play?) with the Internet? Well boys, if it’s a dream, don’t wake me up!

And finally, today. Nowadays I try to be a “startupper” – it looks like that’s what they call it – and I keep playing with the grandchildren of my maroon MSX: smartphones and mobile phones with more CPU than the one the NASA used to put a man on the moon, pieces of technology that allow us to feel always connected and always at home, everywhere we are. Or at least, everywhere covered by 3G.

My startup is called mob.is.it and it’s the quintessence of everything I have done so far: I’ve built CMS’s for maintainers and web agencies, I’ve created WAP games, I’ve done SEO and online marketing. The alchemical combination of all this produced mob.is.it: an online CMS for allowing anybody to easily and quickly build mobile optimized websites.

Why? Because the mobile web is the most exploding market in human history, with growth rates measured in thousand percent. Because no business, small, medium or big, can afford to miss this golden opportunity and this huge new market made of billions of smartphone owners. Because all marketing agencies have clearly understood that the future of advertising is in being local, being personal, being everywhere – and there’s no better way to do this than by being always in your customer’s pocket.

But that’s pure and simple BS. The truth is that I like to build things that are useful to people. It makes me feel good, it makes me feel needed. I am not able to make pottery out of clay or to draw beautiful paintings. I know a little bit of PHP and a few HTML rules. That’s my toolbox. That’s what I use to create more tools that wonderful people choose to use to build their projects, their dreams, their ventures.