June 8 2009 – Tomas Barazza, CEO of LOG607, the company born in 2007 in H-Farm, today received  from the President of The Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano the national award for Innovation in Services,  in the Tourism category.

The prize was awarded to the WHAIWHAI format “for its not only innovative but playful and original method for creating tourist itineraries and (re)discovering tourist destinations.”

WHAIWHAI is a series of unconventional guides that helps tourists seek out the cities’ secrets and transforms them into the main characters of an original adventure story that sets out to unravel enigmas. Every city has its own personality and thus each guide book tells a different story through tales of places and their most interesting details. The tales are coded and can be read one by one using the codes obtained via text messages and solving the puzzles as one goes along the route. So far WHAIWHAI has produced guides for Venice, Rome, Florence and Verona, with new cities in Italy and abroad in the pipeline, as any place – city, museum, territory, site – can become a playing field where one can hunt for treasure. LOG607’s CEO says: “The prize indicates and certifies a trend. The tourist model has changed: it is no longer the geographic location but the experience that exploits technology; tourism and territorial marketing are thus areas of great interest and innovation. Tourists don’t want neutral information about places, they want stories and with WHAIWHAI they can get inside the story.” 

H-Farm and Marsilio Editori, publishing house within the RCS Libri Group, signed the deal granting the majority holding and control of LOG607 to Marsilio, with the aim to develop and create new innovative publishing models. 
In addition to Managing Director Tomas Barazza, LOG607 Board members will be Luca De Michelis, as president, Stefano Micelli, Marcello Giani and Riccardo Donadon.
 
LOG607 was born in H-Farm, a private project aimed at creating an international platform that facilitates and helps new start-ups based on business models in the internet and digital media sectors. H-Farm is a new entity that redefines the roles of incubators and Venture Capital mixing the two and thus generating a new generation of incubators. Born in 2005 it can now boast 17 start-ups, established in the offices of Cà Tron, Treviso, Italy, Seattle (WA), USA, and Mumbai, India.