Yesterday I’ve been very glad to receive the notification 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 actual category is Miscellaneous Utilities since there wasn’t a more appropriate one to include a peculiar 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 Hobby/Educational category in their Software Encyclopedia.
In the meantime I just completed my submission for the Top Talent Award 2005 and I’ll be patiently waiting for the outcome of this very interesting European level contest.
Also I’m glad to announce that a beta of the Smartphone version of EcPc, which I actually called EcSp :), is up and running on my Motorola MPx 200 and I’d like to invite you to get a look at some nice pics and screenshots in the preview I posted here 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 making the software version up to 1.6 or I’ll just release the Smartphone version as 1.5.

This is a day to celebrate for me and the users of EcPc all around the world since on 16th July 2003 I published the first version of the software, 2 years in which it made me earn a good reputation in the mobile software development arena, although the application aims at a pretty niche market.
The design of the 2 Euro Italian commemorative coin here on the left, celebrating the fifth decade of the World Food Program, actually 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 I put together in the logo at the top of the page needed to produce quality software: creativity, experience and passion.
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 then! 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 of course.
At the moment I’m working hard on the Smartphone version of EcPc, leaving the PC version for a September launch with all the bells and whistles.
On last Thursday I attended the award ceremony of the eContent Award Italy in Palazzo Turati in Milan. I did submit EcPc for evaluation, although I haven’t been able to send the all the materials required due to the trip to Miami, so it was only mentioned in a rolling presentation of all the projects submitted. They actually selected mostly websites, many of which well worth of 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 wicked than I actually am, but I’d like to share a tip to the creative people, young or not, working on their projects here in Italy: do not limit yourself to a local or national market for your hard work, think internationally since the beginning, otherwise you’ll waste your time complaining about the lack of resources, no 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!