“How did you get to know about the Top Talent Award, Mr. Orlando?”
That was the first question a kind Italian 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 on a website. The Italian representative told me they were having difficulties spreading the word about it in Italy, so any help or suggestion would have been very welcome.
It’s a marketing guy’s job I think, and that might not be such a trivial task even if you put it in the hands of a professional.
However in the case of my beloved country I also see a certain lack of interest in these kind of events, maybe because of a lack of competition by university students or maybe because we’re too busy complaining about the state of our 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 nice 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 competition there…
I entered the contest submitting my EcPc including a beta of the desktop 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 something boiling inside 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 their prize and their projects mostly speaking in a not so perfect English. You can almost feel their embarrassment!
Congratulations to the winners then, most of them presented truly amazing projects.
And as Mr. Peter A. Bruck wrote in the introduction of the publication this contest helps in separating excellence from the huge volume of trash in a digital world so full of different contents!

On April 4th I attended the spring edition of the Wireless forums, a mix of business meetings and conferences organized by the Wireless magazine at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Milan. I followed most of the presentations of the section Mobile Force & Office Forum since automating a mobile workforce is a matter tied to one of my software projects. On the whole, the presentations were very interesting and the moderator, Paolo Conti, was a pretty brilliant guy, but the public was not certainly as numerous as the one attending the Wlan Business Forum, a parallel series of conferences focused on Broadband, Wi-Fi and Wi-Max technologies.
In particular I found interesting the Psion Teklogix Mobile Show, actually one hour of live show with funny performances by the Psion Teklogix’s technical staff showing the latest barcode and RFID technologies while tracking a shipment from the order to the delivery destination. The scenography they set up was pretty mobile I’d say!
Also interesting was the interview with Funambol’s CEO, in which he spoke about the company’s history and how they found the necessary financial support in the US and of course he talked about their SyncML opensource software.
In the exhibition area I had the pleasure to talk to the kind staff of Softwork since I’m currently exploring RFID technology applied to mobile devices.
Also I had the chance to get my hands on the new Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone at the Dangaard’s booth, the Qtek 8500, alias HTC Star Trek… very, very nice design!