Archive for July, 2005

EcPc Nominated in The Best Software Awards 2005 and Smartphone Version Preview

PocketPC NomineeYesterday I’ve been glad to receive the news that EcPc QVGA has been nominated for the Best Software Awards 2005, the fifth annual contest organized by Pocket PC Magazine staff with the collaboration of an extensive Board of Experts of the Windows Mobile world. The category is actually Miscellaneous Utilities, since there wasn’t a more appropriate one to include a software such as EcPc. I hope for the best of course. 😉

I attended the presentation held by Hal Goldstein and Diane Dumas at the recent Handango Partner Summit 2005 about advertising on Pocket PC Magazine, but I hadn’t the opportunity to talk to them face to face. Maybe they should add a new category in their Software Encyclopedia, Hobby or Educational.

In the meantime I just completed a submission for the Top Talent Award 2005 and I’ll be patiently waiting for the outcome of this interesting european contest.

Also I’m glad to announce that a beta of the Smartphone version of EcPc, which I called EcSp :), is up and running on my Motorola MPx 200 and I’d like to invite you to get a look at some pics and screenshots in the preview I posted in the forum.

I’m now working on some minor improvements and according to how many of them I’ll be able to introduce, I’ll decide if a new point release deserves its name, thus making the software version up to 1.6, or I’ll just release the Smartphone version as 1.5.

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Euro Coins Pocket Collector Second Birthday!

2 EuroThis is a day to celebrate for me and the users of EcPc, since on  July16th, 2003 I published the first version of the software, 2 years in which the software made me earn a good reputation in the mobile development arena, although the application aims at a niche market. 🙂

The design of the 2 Euro italian commemorative coin on the left, celebrating the fifth decade of the World Food Program, contains a very curious detail: as you can see there are an ear of wheat, an ear of maize and an ear of rice emerging from behind the globe. They’re the three grains representing the world’s basic sources of nourishment, a bit like the three elements needed to produce quality software I put on my business card: creativity, experience and passion. :mrgreen:

Thank you all the users of the Pocket PC version of the software and to all the people who supported it in a way or the other! I’ll activate a promotion in a few days so that it’ll be possible to purchase EcPc at half the price, both the QVGA and the VGA versions.

At the moment I’m working on the Smartphone version of EcPc, leaving the PC version for a september launch. 😉

On last thursday I attended the eContent Award Italy award ceremony in Palazzo Turati in Milan. I submitted EcPc for evaluation, although I haven’t been able to send the all the materials they required due to the trip to Miami, so it was only mentioned in a presentation of all the submitted projects.

They selected mostly websites, many of which well worth it, but what did really disappoint me was the usual italian way of doing things… I’d better not comment on some aspects of the ceremony because I know I would appear much more evil than I am, but I’d like to share a tip to the creative people, young or not, working on their projects in Italy: don’t limit yourself to a local or national market for your work, think internationally since the beginning, otherwise you’ll waste your time complaining about the lack of resources, investors and so on… and you’ll end up leaving your dreams incomplete.

Just my 2 Euro cents! 😉

Update: the 50% off offer is active and you can access it directly from the Buy EcPc page. It’ll expire on august 1st, so… hurry up!

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