In the past days, in the News section I posted about the launch of the Enel Innovation Hub at the University of California here in Berkeley (Enel is the Italian biggest player in the power sector), in collaboration with the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and Banatao Institute. The goal is to build synergies with the most innovative and promising startups here in the Bay, and naturally I guess I don’t have to spend many words in explaining why Enel has chosen the Silicon Valley area.

Naturally it was a surprise for me. Upon my arrival on Monday, I immediately saw some guys at work in my open space: it didn’t take me too much to understand who was involved 🙂

The Enel delegation also came in the afternoon to view the location and to have a final briefing before the event. Naturally, as the only Italian here in the open space I couldn’t but introduce myself and have a chat with my fellow countrymen and women, who explained to me in detail what the whole thing was about. By the way, I actually think I am the only Italian here, but I am not fully sure: indeed the office is quite large, many research teams are based here and I haven’t interacted with all the guys working here yet. Anyway, the Enel personnel also told me that they had done an effective communication job, and that the following day there would be an extensive media coverage.

The next day there were indeed a lot of Italian journalists. Actually I was not directly interested in the event, since it was not something correlated to my work (at least for the moment), so I didn’t follow it, apart from some brief moments. However, the breaks were, again, a good opportunity to talk and get in touch with new people. I also met the Italian Consul here in San Francisco, Mr. Lorenzo Ortona, who by the way is a very warm and polite person.

I mostly talked with Michele Masneri, correspondent of the Italian newspaper “Il Foglio”, who is here in the Bay to be on the front line in the place that is by now the center of the world. We talked about the Italian situation in general and, more practically, we also discussed about the cost of living in the Bay (about which he also wrote an article – it’s in Italian, of course, but if you are curious, here’s the link). Indeed, he lives in San Francisco and the situation is much worse there (even if I didn’t expect to the extent he mentions in his article). I don’t report the article that he wrote about the Enel event nor the many others that were written by Italian journalists, though: I think that the UC Berkeley article that I reported in the News section is sufficient to describe the event.

Bottom line, very good then: it was quite a special occasion for me to get to know new and interesting people and to learn about an initiative which is for sure positive for the Italian and the European economy.