Michele Finotto
Wonsys
www.wonsys.net
Milan, Italy
Age: 22
If Michele Finotto has his way, Italy will become known as a hot spot for creating new Web services. He began working as a freelance computer consultant as soon as he got out of high school and in March of last year released his first solo project, a product called 16bugs (16bugs.com), a bug tracker used by thousands of development teams around the world that analyzes what is going wrong with software and helps troubleshoot problems. The product broke even in just a few weeks, thanks to its use of open-source software and viral marketing.
A few months later, in July, 2006, Finotto decided to form his own Web services and consulting company called Wonsys, along with two high school friends, Simone Dall'Angelo and Matteo Nodari. The next month, they launched their first project, a social-networking site for Italian universities called Unilife, which went live in September.
Wonsys has since launched a hosted content management system called Pagety to help Web designers and developers deploy new Web sites. Now, Finotto and his team are on to other projects. "Right now we are working on new Web applications that will hopefully bring some fresh air to their respective markets," says Finotto, who in his spare time is studying for a computer engineering degree at Politecnico di Milano in Milan.
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