This nice song by Will Smith did accompany me during the days I was getting ready for my first trip to the US since the destination was actually Miami, that magical city in the south beaches of Florida.
I spent the whole last week there since I had the great pleasure to have been invited to attend the Handango Partner Summit 2005, which took place from June 22 to 24 in the beautiful Sheraton Bal Harbour Beach Resort located in the Bal Harbour zone of Miami Beach.
It was a three days event of presentations and meeting sessions with software developers, sponsors and the Handango staff who pretty surprised me for his kindness and enthusiasm for their job. I was honored just to have been invited there since there were less than 200 developers selected from the 10.000 partner developers who did choose Handango to sell their software all over the world and also I got the confirmation that I was the only Italian coming from Italy.
So it has been a very important event for my business, the Americans do appreciate what I’m doing as a developer and, as the theme of this year goes, they’re inviting me to unleash my potential. It takes time, especially if you’re doing that in Italy, but they won’t be disappointed, starting with the photo report I’m going to post in the forum to better describe the whole event.
To sum up it has been the perfect combination of business and pleasure, a sort of reward for who takes this profession with great passion, since after the Summit I and my assistant Christian who followed me in this adventure had a great time on the sands of Miami Beach, in the wonderful pool of the Sheraton and in some amazing locals of this enormous city, in particular with some people of the Handango staff.
Stay tuned for the exclusive photo report!

Update: I’ve just posted in the forum both parts of the photo report, the so-called Business Part and the Pleasure Part. Enjoy!

Last week took place in Milan the BroadBandWeek event, a series of seminars and presentations spread out along the whole week from the 6th to the 11th in different places of the city about the new opportunities offered not only by the availability of broadband Internet connections but also by mobile devices, the two hot topics of the Italian ICT.
On Thursday I’ve been able to attend the BroadBand Match Day in which they talked about the business opportunities for young people willing to turn into reality their technology-related innovative ideas. The speakers were very good and experienced and although the number of attendees was pretty low it surprised me to actually see more wannabe business women than men.
The Match Day took place near the Polytechnic of Milan, while on Friday the event moved to the nice Mediateca Santa Teresa assuming the name Multimedia Creativity Day. They presented two European contests for young talents, the eContent Award Italy, which is selecting the best Italian projects to candidate them to the World Summit Award, for which I already submitted my entry, and the Top Talent Award 2005.
It was a bit sad when Cesare Massarenti spoke about Italy and reported that compared to other European countries there are only a few Italians participating at these contests since “the school system doesn’t form students at these levels”, he said. Although I don’t like generalizations at all, that’s a valid assertion in many cases here and I wonder if the so called Business Angels do really exist in Italy or it’s just another cool word as long as start-ups, spin-offs and so on, to make a speech appear more international and hide the fact we’re always lagging behind the other European countries for what concern research and content production, especially high level entertainment software.
Enough ranting for now, the next week in the US is going to be a pretty exciting one…

VoIP (Voice Over IP) is a very hot topic nowadays and among all the different ways the Internet offers to be able to communicate with other people, voice combined with instant messaging is the best combination in my opinion. That’s why I do appreciate so much Skype and I’m suggesting my collaborators to use it.
Easy, fast, free, cheap if you need to call a non-Skype user, desktop and Pocket PC support, version which I can enjoy on my Loox 720 thanks also to OzLooxSpeaker, a small utility enabling the upper secondary speaker on the Loox made just for VoIP purposes.
I just added a Skype-Me button to the contacts page and to my signature in the forum to invite you to use it if you want to get in touch with me in the most direct way. Recently I’m having some English conversation lessons since I’ll be on an important business trip in the US in a couple of weeks, so I’m getting even more confident in speaking the language.
Lastly I’ve posted in the forum a tutorial explaining how to use the Skin Strip feature introduced in the new version of Euro Coins Pocket Collector. You have to be a registered member in order to be able to read this and all the upcoming tutorials.

Update: I’ve discovered a stupid bug which prevents from correctly loading the external graphics file needed to use the new Skin Strip feature. Sorry for the distraction, it’ll be fixed in the next version 1.6.