Yesterday has been one of the most incredible days of my life!
Not only I won the Cellulari.it Special Award during the 1st Mobile Fun Awards organized by the magazine Wireless for the Mobile Fun Forum 2003, but also the national TV channel La7 recorded the awarding of the prizes and later they even interviewed the winners, including me with Euro coins pocket collector on my Pocket PC!!!
Update: La7 did not broadcast the recording of the event, what a pity.
I’ll keep you updated on all the press coverage of the event, of course, which will include the videos downloadable from my website and I can already say there’s really much more to come! This may turn into the market exposure I was in real need of… oh, and big names like Toshiba, Palm, the Italian QQAAXX and HP ( here not in a casual order ) were much more pleased to hear my sponsorship proposals after I won the award.
I even met some my ex-Trecision’s coworkers there, who did loud cheers during my prize-giving, but I was too deeply stirred to understand they just came from them.
The prize-giving occurred at the end of a long morning with many lecturers talking about the great marketing opportunities of the mobile economy in Italy. The lecture of my friend Enrico Pappolla of Pocket PC Italia, which took place in the afternoon, was the most interesting one for me since he talked about wireless connectivity on Pocket PCs and SmartPhones and showed some amazing hardware like the new XDA 2, two new SmartPhones and the latest GPS Navigation software.
I caught a bit of flue, but this great satisfaction makes me almost forget it, and it better be this way since I’ve got a lot of work to do and I have to be fine for this coming Friday…
Here’s a quick scan of the plate of the award:

The transition to the new hosting on a well known Canadian provider is completed and I think I won’t have no more space or bandwidth problems, at least for the next months.
I want to celebrate this by officially opening the Reviews page, in which you can find all the comments and articles about Ecpc published so far not only by printed magazines, but also by the users. Expect to see more being added shortly.
Now I’m getting ready for the Mobile Fun Forum 2003 of tomorrow in Milan with trepidation, since it could be a very important day for me.
Fingers crossed then!

I’m setting up the new powerful hosting for my website in this very moment, so I hope it’ll be a fast and smooth operation, but the DNS address change may cause the site not to be reachable in the next few days.
In the meantime I’d like to welcome the opening of a new website about Euro coins by Heiko Heubach, the kind German who translated Ecpc in his native language. He used the text he translated for the coins descriptions, so that’s a sort of preview of what you’ll find in the incoming version 1.2 of Ecpc.
I’ve already added his nice website, Euro-Muenzen.net, in the Resources page. Check it out!

This has been a really busy week for me since yesterday was the deadline of two important contests.
Not only I had to complete the tutorial about Pocket PC development for the the Best Tutorial Contest hosted by #GameProg-Ita, which I already mentioned, but also I built a Special Edition of Ecpc for the Mobile Fun Awards, a contest open to all Italian software developers for mobile devices, which will take place on 28 October in Milan during the Mobile Fun Forum 2003, the first event in Italy devoted to content and entertainment software providers for mobile devices.
The event is organized by Wireless, the Italian magazine for the Mobile Economy, and it’s endorsed by the Mobile Entertainment Forum organization.
All of this while I’m working on the last feature of the incoming version 1.2 of Ecpc and on another important thing about my website.
I’ve got a bunch of e-mails who need an answer and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to give them a quick reply, but deadlines are deadlines!
The “Die another day” philosophy, the title of the last James Bond’s film, is not applicable here.

I was really waiting for this day since my Euro coins pocket collector has finally appeared in a full page article in the weekly feature our local daily newspaper La Provincia devotes to the news about Internet and new technologies.
La Provincia is a very important newspaper not only for our province but also for all the Lombardia region and it gets mentioned in the press preview of some national TV channels.
They print about 45.000 copies daily for a total of 300.000 potential readers and now I wonder how many of them do actually know me in flesh!
At this link you can find the page in PDF format, while you can read the whole newspaper on their website.
Thanks to Simone Casiraghi, the Internet feature editor, who gave me this great opportunity.

So here’s the very special picture I was talking about, which just appeared in exclusive on Pocket PC Thoughts!
At the recently closed SMAU 2003 I didn’t miss the opportunity to jump into the cockpit of a real Aermacchi MB-339 jet aircraft used by our world famous Italian Air Force Acrobatic Team, the Frecce Tricolori, obviously bringing with me my faithful Ipaq.
What can I say but thanks to the Air Force specialists who allowed me to merge my two biggest passions ever in this absolutely unique occasion?
Who knows if the Ipaq could survive to the high acceleration acrobatic maneuvers this plane daily performs…
And of course the application running on the Ipaq was my Euro coins pocket collector!

Well, this has been the most profitable SMAU for me since I began visiting it many years ago, simply because it has been the first time I went to the exhibition for work and not just as a visitor.
I had the pleasure to meet the Italian Microsoft MVPs, in particular Giorgio Cifani and Pino Paparone, both MVP specialized in Mobile Devices, who showed me their latest hardware such as the new Motorola Smartphone.
Also I met Enrico Pappolla of Pocket PC Italia, in his crowded stand with the latest Pocket PC and Smartphone novelties and accessories.
Most importantly I had some very important meetings for my work as developer which I hope will turn into great announcements in the next weeks. I also took a very special picture, which I’ll upload shortly.
I’m already back to the big amount of work awaiting me, but I’ll leave you with a curious picture related to the unexpected Italian Black Out happened during the night of Sunday 28th of September. Here’s the graphic of the Internet traffic on the Italian MIX ( Milan Internet eXchange ), where you can notice the flat line in relation to the Black Out hours.
We just hope it won’t happen again…

This is the opening day of SMAU 2003, the 40° International Exhibition of ICT and Consumer Electronics, the biggest event of this kind in Italy, which is taking place in Milan Fair from 2 to 6 October.
I’ll be there on Saturday 4 and I’m trying to setup some interesting meetings for my work, since all the major players of the PDA market will attend the exhibition. If you want to meet me during that day please contact me.
I’d like to thank Riccardo of Internavigare for the ticket invitation he kindly provided me.
Do you know what the initials SMAU mean? They stand for “Salone Macchine e Attrezzature per l’Ufficio”, an old name which survived the test of time since 1964.
Here you can download the SMAU map to bring it with you on your PDA.