Who is the owner of this website?
So, you want to know something more about me, right? If you're doing it for work-related reasons, you should read the related section or my curriculum vitae. Otherwise, you'll get a nice tale about my truly interesting life experiences. (It was you who clicked on the link - I didn't force you.)
Vittorio Bertola - often net-wise known as 'vb', and mistakenly confused with a vulgar programming language - was born in Turin, Italy on September 12, 1974, and still lives there, after moving a few years ago in a nice roof apartment onto the former site of a huge chocolate factory, now become a nice neighborhood with a recently opened metro station.
As a complement, I graduated on Friday July 17, 1998 (for you anglo-saxons, Friday 17 is the Italian equivalent of Friday 13 - we got a bigger prime number than you) in Electronical Engineering at the Turin Polytechnic, where I was also busy in a lot of things, such as representing students in the Board of Directors and promoting and managing the students' ISP, where I enjoyed my first "15 minutes of celebrity" on the Internet by freely publishing old cartoon and anime songs in the MP3 format, and by becoming the first website in Italy to get a "cease and desist" letter from a major of the record industry.
After that, and after working for a few months at Vodafone Italy, in 1999 I threw myself into the thrilling adventure of Vitaminic, one of the few examples of pure "dot com" companies in Italy. In fact, I met the CEO (whom I vaguely knew as we had met years before when he was founding a web agency) by chance on a train from Turin to Milan - he started to explain me his project, and half way from Milan I was preparing my resignation letter from Vodafone. I entered the company on the first day as VP Technology, when the company was just a PC in the corner of a friend's office, and after a little more than one year we were a public company, listed in Milan's New Market, with operations in ten countries and capitalizing up to 250 million Euros; and we were the European leaders in digital music download, the "mp3.com of Europe". As a consequence, my department grew from 1 (me) to 15 people, and our systems went from a tiny Sun server housed in Alexandria, VA, US, to a data centre worth 1 million Euros; and this allowed me to learn how the Internet business goes, to know people and companies around the world, and to take part in events and bodies such as the now-almost-defunct SDMI.
After three years with Vitaminic, in fall 2002 I decided to start working on my own - so I co-founded Dynamic Fun, a company that provides Internet and wireless software services to support process innovation in corporations, particularly for what regards logistics, sales force automation and the likes; generally speaking, we tell you how many useful data-oriented things you can actually do with a mobile phone, rather than just talking, and find a way to let you save money, or make more of it. As years went by, I started doing consultancies on my own, and took part as advisor and/or minority partner in further Internet start-up projects, such as Glomera.
In the meantime, I joined two of my passions (Internet and politics) and I started being involved more and more in Internet governance bodies, as an active member of the Italian Naming Authority, the ancient policy-making body for .it domain names, that elected me as a member of the Executive Committee and other committees, and then as a member of its replacement, the Rules Committee of the Italian Registry; as a member and Councillor of Societą Internet, the Italian chapter of the Internet Society; and of various groups and committees in the At Large (individual Internet users) constituency of ICANN, the organization which administers domain names and IP addresses at the worldwide level. In this latter activity, I chaired for over three years the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), which advocates the interests of the billion of global individual users of the Internet, and was later elected in the Board of ICANN, its most important organ.
Thanks to all these activities, I got involved as a civil society participant in a number of international political processes, such as the World Summit on Information Society of the United Nations, and its follow-up, the Internet Governance Forum; I was one of the forty individuals appointed by Kofi Annan to the Working Group on Internet Governance, that dealt with the issue of the global governance of the Internet. I was then appointed as a volunteer consultant by the Italian government as well, specifically by the Ministry for Innovation, first with Minister Lucio Stanca and then with Minister Luigi Nicolais, who appointed me in his Internet Governance Consulting Committee.
I like writing, and I am the author of a busy blog, as well as the author of articles both in Italian and in English, for online and paper magazines, and of presentations and talks at a number of conferences.
My passion for the Internet was born on April 1995, when I got my first Unix account at my University and at the same time I bought my first modem to subscribe to one of the early Italian ISPs. This is to be blamed on an article that La Stampa, our local newspaper, published about Little Italy, a virtual town (and MOO) experiment held at the Milan University. Two months later I opened the first version of this site, at the URL http://www.polito.it/~bertola/, and eight months later, given all the hurdles I had found in becoming connected (and Internet in 1995 was quite different from today - my main online instrument was NCSA Telnet for MS-DOS), I started the Italian Usenet FAQ Archive and my Internet user's guide, that I then maintained for several years. After that, my web pages have been constantly expanded and changed, up to the appearance of the first version of the lift (October 1996). In the following years, I was very active on Usenet; in 1998 I founded a very peculiar newsgroup named it.fan.culo (well, it's a pun impossible to translate, but it means "fuck off" and "fans of the ass" at the same time - we succeeded in hiding a free discussion space under a disguising cover), which had a lot of success for a good amount of time, before being abandoned years later. As my professional life got busier and busier, this website was almost totally abandoned from 2000 to 2006, with the exception of the blog, until the major upheaval that took place at the end of 2006.
Of course, my passion for computers is much older... I started in 1981 with an amazing Mattel Intellivision console, to then move a few months after to the mythical Commodore 64 and then to the Commodore Amiga.
There are a few more things that might be interesting; for example, I play keyboards, even if nowadays only very rarely, and you can even download some of my tracks. I like photography, and I try to upload some of my flicks here. If you want to have a glimpse at my attitudes and ideas, perhaps you should try my writings archive, where you can find a steadily expanding collection of over ten years of online activity.
If you want to contact me, feel free to use this form; my inbox tends to overwhelm me, but I'll do what I can to reply promptly.
