Archive for April, 2006

“How did you get to know about the Top Talent Award, Mr. Orlando?”

That was the first question an talian voice asked me when I got a call from Austria’s ICNM a few weeks ago. I didn’t remember exactly where I read about it, but it was certainly in the news of a website. The italian manager told me they were having difficulties spreading the word about the contest in Italy, so any help or suggestion would have been welcome.

It’s a marketing job I think, and that might not be a trivial task, even if you put it in the hands of a professional.

However, in the case of my country I also see a certain lack of interest in these kind of events, maybe because of a lack of competitivity by university students or maybe because we’re too busy complaining about the state of the ICT work market to be able to put our creative brains to work and try to make something interesting to compete with other european students… who knows…

In fact from a total of 411 submitted projects there were only 18 participants from Italy. None of them has been selected in any category or even mentioned in the printed publication they sent me, but what surprised me the most has been the quality and the number of submissions from Eastern Europe countries. Talk about lack of competitivity there!

I entered the contest submitting EcPc, including a beta of the PC version. They didn’t have a Pocket PC to test the software, so I had to send them my Axim X3 and when they returned it I risked to loose it because some smartass tried to stole it at the post office in Como, really!

The final selections of the jury in the mobile contents category are good projects, but personally I don’t find anything special in soccer related management software or in Wi-Fi mapping utilities. That’s my opinion of course, the jury evaluated the projects using a number of different criteria.

It’s a good contests overall, it’s not free, but the organization is much better than most of our similar competitions, so I encourage you to participate if you’ve an idea in your brain… and you have the strength to make it real of course! 😉

You should definitely watch the video recording of the award ceremony they made on march 4th at the “Museumsquartier” in Vienna. It was amazing to watch and hear the thrilled winners commenting prize and projects mostly speaking in a not so perfect English. You can almost feel their excitement! 🙂

Congratulations to the winners then, most of them presented interesting projects.

And as Mr. Peter A. Bruck wrote in the introduction of the publication, this contest helps to separate excellence from the huge volume of trash in a digital world full of contents! 🙂