When we brought our app to Wired Next Fest for the first time — and an all-nighter saved us from the most important launch in our history.
It was 2015. The Giardini Indro Montanelli in Milan. Wired Next Fest was about to open its doors and we were about to bring our simultaneous translation app for smartphones to the world — the thing we now call the WebApp and take for granted, but which back then seemed either ahead of its time or, depending on who you asked, applied science fiction.
We were partners of the festival. Not by chance: we were there because we believed in the same thing — that technology is for building bridges. And Wired Next Fest was exactly that kind of place: somewhere an unfinished idea could find the right people to become real.
The night before
The evening of the opening — the evening before, to be precise — we spotted a bug. In the app. The very same app we were supposed to show the world the next day.
Back then it was still a native app. We worked through the night. The Android update went through without a hitch. But Apple was a different story: App Store review waits for no one, not even a tech festival opening at dawn.
We asked our friends at Wired Italia to intercede through the American channel — Wired USA — to try to unlock an expedited release on the App Store. And we also submitted our own direct request: back then, each developer had exactly one expedited review request to use. One. We played that card that night.
We're not entirely sure who deserves the credit. Maybe the American Wired colleagues. Maybe our own request. Maybe both. What we know is that on the morning of the opening, the app was updated, working, and ready.
That moment taught us two things we've never forgotten: that real launches happen with your back against the wall, and that the right partners help you not to fall.
Eleven years later
On April 16, 2026, Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch announced the closure of Wired Italia, seventeen years after the first issue featuring Rita Levi-Montalcini on the cover. The official reason: an edition representing just over 1% of the group's total revenue, which in its current form was limiting the ability to invest where opportunities seemed more promising.
The news arrived, as so often happens in these cases, without enough warning for those who worked there. The editorial team found out about the closure ten minutes before the press release went public. That's not a good way to close seventeen years of work.
We're sorry. Genuinely.
We're sorry for the editorial team — journalists who built a way of telling the story of technology in Italian, a lexicon, a voice. We're sorry for Wired Next Fest, a format that over the years had turned Milan into a starting point, then expanded to Florence, Rovereto, and across Italy — bringing together ideas and people who would never have met otherwise.
But there's good news
Wired Consulting and live events will continue across Europe, managed primarily by the UK team. That's the part we work with most directly — and the part we hope to keep seeing at future events.
At Wired Next Fest 2015, we understood that building technology for events means standing alongside the people who create those events. We've carried that lesson with us ever since.
See you around, Wired.