I’m very excited to announce that we won the StartCup Milano Lombardia business plan competition. Actually, we even won two different prizes: €10,000 in cash, kindly offered by SAS Italy, and a networking travel to London, organized by the British Consulate General and UK Trade & Investment.

Winning the local edition of the competition also means participating in the national finals that will be held on December 3rd in Palermo. Let’s see how that goes.

And now, back to work.

The event has been extremely tiring yet quite funny. Here are some pictures. A few interesting events:

• We pitched at a speed-dating event with 26 investors/entrepreneurs/journalists (yep, Matteo and me performed 26 3-minute pitches in less than two hours).
• I’ve been interviewed during a live webcast performed by Microsoft on Windows Azure (video coming soon, although it’s in Italian).
• The guys at Creonomy offered highly-appreciated shooters to other startups at 5 pm, just in case we still had some energy left. Much better than useless gadgets.

The pros:

• We got 40-odd contacts from other startups and companies, 15 of which are quite interesting.
• We met some very cool people, like Corrado and Nicolò from Creonomy and all the HiNii crew.
• There have been some very hilarious moments (which are priceless when you’re working hard).
• We distributed roughly 500 brochures and we had the chance to explain our solution to at least 100 people (and we refined our sales pitch in the process).

The cons:

• Very few potential customers among the attendees.
• General attendance was relatively low across the three days – or – three days are too many, two would probably be better.
• Some logistics issues affected many booths, including ours (no power for a few hours on the first day).
• We printed too many brochures.

Next week we’ll be pitching again as we’re finalists at the StartCup Milano Lombardia. See you there!

Yesterday has been a long, eventful day. We have been presenting Amanuens at the 6th Microsoft European BizSpark Summit in Paris. Among other 17 European startups, we had a chance to pitch in front of an audience of more than 300 people, composed by press, media and investors.

It’s been a a great event, we met quite a lot of bright entrepreneurs and we also talked to some potential investors. We even found a handful of potential customers, which is really great.

Last but not least, we met Guy Kawasaki. Besides giving interesting food for thought, he’s a very funny person. You just can’t avoid to like him. Tagline: “Half a million is too small! Just say half a billion!”

I snapped a few pictures and they’re on my Flickr photostream. The event was available as a live webcast, however there should be some video edits available soon. I just hope to get the video of my pitch.

In two days we’ll be pitching at the Innovate!100 Milan event.

These two events are very important to us, so stay tuned for updates on our strategy for Amanuens. We’ve learned a lot already and we should be able to elaborate a more precise plan on what our product should ultimately be. Just feel free to post your own comments and opinions.

I am very happy to announce the beginning of the beta stage of our new Amanuens SaaS offering.

What is Amanuens?

Amanuens is a web application that allows you, or your translators, to translate RESX files. The peculiarity of our approach is that the application talks directly with your Subversion repository. Moreover, translations are done entirely in the web browser, without the need of any desktop application such as Microsoft Visual Studio. On the Amanuens website there is a 2-minute introductory video that will help you understand how it works and how it can help you and your team.

Amanuens was born to simplify the localization process of ScrewTurn Wiki. You know, sending RESX files via email, waiting weeks, and then (trying) to merge the translated resources is just plain ugly and error prone. We refined the application a bit, and we received good feedback from some STW contributors, so we decided to build a service for everyone.

I have to admit that I did not realize the potential of such approach until Joannes Vermorel, founder of Lokad, mentioned the need for a continuous localization process. He described the process in a slightly different context, but I think that we, as software developers, are used to continuous* processes (most notably continuous integration). Why not strive for continuous localization of software UIs too?

About the Beta Period

The beta period will last for at least three months. During this time, we’ll collect feedback, polish rough edges, and add some features that are still missing. Getting this kind of applications right is difficult, so we decided to hold back some of the more complex parts to first see how the overall approach works.

For the entire duration of the beta, the service can be used free of charge, without any obligation. We’ve just set a limit on the number of projects you can create (just one for now). If you really need more resources, just drop us a line and we’ll be happy to increase your limit.

Open-Source Projects

We use a lot of open-source applications on a daily basis, and they’re of great help for our work. For this reason, we’re committed to make Amanuens totally free for open-source projects.

Tech Stuff

And now a few juicy technical details for all the geeks who might come across this post.

Amanuens is built entirely in ASP.NET MVC 1.0, with C# code. It runs on Windows Azure and makes use of both SQL Azure and Blob Storage. I am personally very happy with ASP.NET MVC 1.0, as it feels like fresh air compared to Web Forms. As for Windows Azure, it still has quite some rough edges, but I think Microsoft is going in the right direction. After all, it’s a 1.0 product, so we can expect a lot of improvements in the near future.

Windows Azure is an infinitely-scalable Platform as a Service, but what about the application? Well, Amanuens is built in a totally stateless way and we do not even use ASP.NET’s SessionState. This means that the application can scale horizontally very well. The first probable bottleneck will be the SQL database (as usual), but I expect that SQL Azure can handle loads of traffic without problems. At any rate, we constantly monitor the response time of the application, and we’ll be able to migrate data off the database in case it will be necessary.

Update 2010/09/29: we no longer use SQL Azure, as we’ve migrated all data to Azure’s Table and Blob Storage. After a bit of tweaking, performance is better than with SQL Azure and costs are way lower.

We Want You!

So, we would be really glad if you could spend some minutes signing up and evaluating the service. We’ll only be able to accept a limited number of new registrations each week, so please be patient if you’re account does not get activated very quickly.

If you have any question or suggestion, don’t hesitate to drop us a line at support@amanuens.com.