Thu, September - 9 - 2010 |
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Mixing a surprisingly young skilled management team and a bold determination to launch new innovative services, Alba Project is certainly an unique entrepreneurial project.
Founded in 2003 in southern Italy Puglia region, through a spin-off from the University of Lecce, Alba Project represents a genuine and market-oriented company that, although preserving its roots in the south of Italy, has been thinking globally since the very beginning focusing on three 'must'.
"Inventive solutions"
The first must is “inventive solutions” and, with the clear purpose to play the game in the high fragmented and competitive media and video content market, Alba Project distinguishes itself thanks to the continuous commitment in thinking new solutions, based upon ICT technologies, to better help its clients in performing their business.Starting from a prototype developed by a group of researchers in the Informatics Innovation Dep. of the University of Lecce, Alba Project has entirely designed and financed the engineering of a proprietary software platform, able to generate for any digital video a real time video indexing.
The original idea was simple: videos to be browsed in a user friendly interface, provided with a navigation index generated in real time, to simultaneously avoid never-ending searches with RW/FF buttons and costly post-production duties.
When an idea is simple, rarely fails and quickly the number of clients raised. Exhibitions, meetings & events management companies, e-learning providers and other different entities interested in having effective video proceedings, often recorded on digital support to be immediately delivered to participants.
"Italy is not the primary market"
The second must is “Italy is not the primary market”. In fact, after having developed most of the technical capabilities in Italy, in 2005 Alba Project started targeting the European market and, after that, in 2006, Alba Project arrived in Albuquerque (New Mexico) for an international conference with many simultaneous events; there where participants from all over US and the local ICT community awarded the “Italians” for the highly innovative proposal.
Recently, the increasing interest in video content market, leaded by the video sharing mania exploded in the consumer segment, has strongly influenced the most reactive IT players, who wants to empower their offerings and better fulfill the demand of the business segment (as an example introducing new searching tools or a more efficient management of the video live streaming).
Proactively, in this new context, Alba Project has been extending its platform coverage in order to effectively address the entire value chain of the video content service. As a result, starting from the digital video capture, Alba Project can today master the internet live streaming, the unique handling of a secondary video channel integrated in the software interface, the real time indexing, the video uploading, the post production and the digital support delivering.
After one entire year of platform upgrading, according to the strategic intent of being more competitive and effective in serving the international demand, Alba Project has developed all the required capabilities to manage the video flows and the real time indexing in remote, willing to support clients located in the other side of the world with an fully set of high quality services.
Our formula for Competitiveness: Global Reach rooted in Italian creativity
Competitiveness is now the third “must”.How is Alba Project preserving its southern Italian roots? Is it a competitive factor? Among Italian universities, Lecce often ranks at the top of the list for the quality of ICT graduates and researchers that populate the local academic laboratories. Although many talents start their professional career hundreds miles from home, pressed by both leading international ICT firms and the Damocles’ sword of unemployment, the medium term purpose is to come back home with a strengthened business knowledge and a precious set of successful experiences. In this sense, Alba Project is an illustrative case history.
Moreover, if the tourists appreciate Lecce as conveniently located by the sea, entrepreneurs know they can take advantage of a lower cost of labor: averagely 40% lower than the northern Italian city of Milan. Whether working from remote in Lecce to serve a client located in London or NYC, once preserved the quality of the output, the cost of service should result as the winning factor.
What’s next? Considering the general attractiveness of the market and the quality of the demand, which is quickly changing from pioneering to mass-market, Alba Project aims at promoting its offering in the North America, developing successful relationships with universities, business communities, top players operating in the video content segment (such as Google, satellite networks, media & entertainment firms), also setting up a steady organization in the US.
At the same time, improving its presence in Italy through current and prospect clients, Alba Project foresees tremendous business opportunities for marketing its services in the East Europe countries that, thanks to EU Funds, will soon leave the infancy phase to demand more sophisticated ICT services.
If asking a top MBA teacher or a consulting guru to share the secret of a winning positioning strategy, he will surely suggest a “local” approach driven by a “global” open minded view, when, differently, Alba Project is somehow proud to “act globally” while “thinking locally”. Maybe, also for this reason, Alba Project an unique entrepreneurial project. (www.albaproject.it/Inglese/indexEng.asp)
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