Adriano Farano

About Adriano Farano

An entrepreneur-in-residence at StartX, the Stanford startups accelerator, Adriano Farano is a European entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley with a passion for mobile publishing and a background in the media business.

Adriano created his first startup when he was nine. When the Berlin Wall fell down in 1989, he noticed that no one of his classmates had really gotten what had happened. So he created a newspaper that sold well and paid writers enough to let them buy pizza.

Adriano is a digital dinosaur: in 2001 he cofounded Café Babel, one of the oldest Internet-only publications to be still up-and-running and the first to offer news and blogging in 6 languages across Europe.

In 2009, he joined OWNI France, a sort of online-only Wired magazine, he helped transitioning from a super-blog to a media group. In 2010-11, OWNI France received an ONA award and was the only non-US finalist at SXSW Accelerator.

In 2010-11, Adriano was awarded a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University where he researched on how to augment the news experience on mobile and especially tablet devices. This brought Quadmented, a time-machine-like tour of Stanford’s Main Quad publicly available through Layar, the augmented reality browser, and Tactilize, a technology that enables publishers to easily create beautiful iPad apps. Both are part of what Adriano calls Lasagna Journalism or multi-layer storytelling.

Between March and December 2011, Adriano was CEO and co-founder of Tactilize, a US company he exited to focus on new challenges at the intersection of mobile technologies and publishing.

If you’re interested in learning more about Adriano’s new challenges, drop him a message here.

As a true Italian, Adriano loves speaking (both with his Oxford accent and hands) – be it at conferences (Augmented Reality Event, Innovation Journalism Conference, Hearst Media Dialogues etc.) or universities (Columbia J-school, CFPJ, SFSU, Stanford, LSE, Sciences-Po etc.).

Born in the most beautiful place on Earth (Cava de’ Tirreni, close to the Amalfi Coast), he quickly realized that he could not be on holiday all his life long. He then migrated to Rome, Strasbourg, Paris and now Silicon Valley where he lives with his wife and two babel-kids.

Find him on Twitter as @farano, or LinkedIn.

Café Babel, a laboratory of journalism

Adriano Farano steered Café Babel from its inception in 2001, when he was an Erasmus student in Strasbourg, until early 2010. The mirror of the first “Euro-generation”, this magazine, fully translated into six languages, achieved in 2009 an annual budget of 650,000 euros, a community of 10,000 ‘babelians’ and a team of 10 professional journalists.

Being a living laboratory of collaborative journalism, Café Babel is one of the oldest online publications in Europe and has been the first pure player to join the French National Federation of Specialized Press.

Learn more about Café Babel

Journalistic experience

As a journalist Adriano Farano was trained in Paris by Gian Paolo Accardo at Courrier International, and then by Pierre Rousselin at Le Figaro. Over time, Adriano had the chance to report from Bulgaria (for Le Figaro), Estonia, Israel and Iceland (for Café Babel); comment on European issues (Le Figaro, Le Monde, Libération.fr, France Culture, Café Babel); narrate his generation with Eurogeneration babelblog or interviewing anti-Camorra writer Roberto Saviano, Cuban dissident Marta Beatriz Roque and the president of the European Commission José Barroso.

Teaching activities and conferences

Adriano Farano regularly teaches Online Journalism in several universities. Learn more about his teaching here.

As a speaker Adriano Farano has been debating, among others, at Sciences-Po Paris, London School of Economics, Columbia University.

Adriano also serves occasionally as a consultant in digital business and editorial strategies.

The Knight Fellowship at Stanford

Adriano Farano was the holder of a Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists at Stanford University for the year 2010-11. While at Stanford he worked on how to augment the news experience, especially on tablet devices. He is implementing his findings in Tactilize, the startup he runs from Palo Alto, California.

Adriano is said to be an acclaimed cook. If you ever happen to try his lasagna, you won’t regret.

Special thanks for the home page header vespa picture to Iulazzo.

Updated: Jan. 9, 2012