Silvio Scaglia

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Silvio Scaglia (1958), the Italian telecoms entrepreneur, is currently Chairman and sole owner of web TV platform Babelgum. Scaglia was previously the majority shareholder of Italian telecommunications company Fastweb S.p.A.: on April 9th 2007 he sold his 18.75% share in the company to Swisscom, which had launched a takeover bid of the company at 47 euros per share.

Forbes estimates Scaglia’s wealth at around 1.2 billion USD, making him the thirteenth richest man in Italy (the last in the list of Italian billionaires) and the 799th richest man in the world.

[edit] Biography

In 2005 Scaglia founded Babelgum, a web-tv platform that is based on P2P technology. He set up the venture without carrying out market research, saying "this is built on gut feeling...and is a natural extension of my Fastweb experience." Scaglia made an initial investment of euro 10 million to develop the technology behind the service and expects the venture to break even by the end of the decade. ^[1] The platform is free for its users and operates a revenue sharing system.

Prior to creating Babelgum, Scaglia founded FASTWEB in September 1999; the company invested approximately Euro 4 billion in creating "the first fully IP optical-based access and backbone network in the world". The company was one of the first in the world to create a large-scale "triple-play" integrated IP network, for fixed telephony, high-speed internet and TV. It is also Italy's second-largest fixed-line phone operator after Telecom Italia. ^[2]

Prior to founding FASTWEB, Scaglia was CEO of Omnitel, which later became Vodafone Italia. Vodafone is the second largest wireless telecommunications company in Italy. ^[3] According to an article in Italian newspaper Il Foglio, Scaglia's nickname at the company was Il Mago or "The Magician", because he managed to swell subscriber numbers from 300,000 to 8 million over a short period. ^[4]

After graduating in Telecommunications Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Turin, Scaglia embarked on his professional career at McKinsey e Bain & Co., where he was a consultant.

[edit] References

1. ^ Multimillion backing for the latest bright idea in online video, The Times, Rhys Blakely, March 2 2007
2. ^ Babelgum's Contrarian Approach to Web TV. Business Week (September 04, 2007). Retrieved on 2007-09-04.
3. ^ Babelgum - Silvio Scaglia
4. ^ "L'internazionale Colao sale in cima all'antenna della Vodafone", Il Foglio, 2008-5-28, pp. 3.