I was really curious to see it since it’s the famous sculpture by Umberto Boccioni represented on the italian 20 cents Euro coins, whose bronze reproduction is now exposed at Palazzo Reale in Milan in an exhibition well organized by Laura Mattioli Rossi focused on the sculptural work of the futurist artist.
I managed to see all the pieces represented on the italian Euro coins, most of them during the Vespatour this summer: Castel del Monte near Bari on the 1 cent coins, the Mole Antonelliana in Torino on the 2 cents, the Colosseum on the 5 cents, the Birth of Venus in Firenze on the 10 cents, the Marcus Aurelius’s equestrian statue in Roma on the 50 cents, while I found the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo and Dante more than once during the section in Tuscany of the Vespatour.
We have lots of beautiful art pieces in Italy and now I can say they made the best choices for our coins.
The sculpture by Boccioni is really fascinating, starting from its name. It expresses a dynamism and a fusion between the human body and the surrounding air unique to say the least!
Even the comment by the curator I listened through the audioguide was great, but if there had been i-muse™…

I didn’t expect it at all since I have to admit I did neglect a bit Euro Coins Pocket Collector over the last months, the educational software I made for Euro coins fans. I actually chose to honor the priorities of my work as consultant and custom software developer.
So I was really pleased to know that even this year the judges of the Best Software Awards 2006, the competition organized by the american Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine, confirmed the value of the software and it got among the finalists in the category Miscellaneous Utilities just as it happened last year.
I have to say that it isn’t easy at all categorizing a so specialized software such as this, but I think that instead of creating a new category like Collecting they could add one like Lifestyle for example to include all the Windows Mobile applications built to manage one’s own digital lifestyle, as they call the modern life with all the technological tools that should simplify our life. Managing one’s own collection of Euro coins with a PDA could be correctly included into this concept, couldn’t it?
Anyway it’s a pleasure that a so atypical software, made from the marriage of my work and passion, did reach the final selection of a contest which gathered only the 20% of the best software existing for the Windows Mobile platform.
The winner of the Miscellaneous Utilities this year was StyleTap, a sort of emulator useful to run applications written for the PalmOS on Windows Mobile devices.
In the meantime the work on the PC version of Ecpc is going on and I think the news will be revealed by the end of the year!

Wouldn’t that sound good as the title for a book about a crazy italian spending his summer holidays riding around Italy on a Vespa?
The “why not?” factor is there, we’ll see if I’ll be inspired enough to maintain the proposal to write a book about my tour when I’ll be back home at the end of August.
The australian Peter Moore did just that since he wrote a nice book about his tour around Italy with a ‘61 Vespa purchased on ebay. Vroom with a view is the title of the book which inspired my incoming journey, starting from here in Como and going from town to town down to Bari in Puglia, powered by the desire to visit places of my country I’ve never seen yet.
My tour will be different from Peter’s one, starting from the latest Vespa model, the award winning GTS 250 i.e., to the best GPS technology available for PDA devices.
And well.. I’m italian, so I’m supposed to know a bit more about my country than an australian traveler!
“Are you going alone?” that’s the first question my friends asked me when I told them about the journey and the best answer I could find so far is: would you feel alone walking around your courtyard?
That’s the spirit which will accompany me in this tour: my country is like my courtyard, just a little bigger!

There are a lot of people I’m going to meet in this journey, some old friends and some new.
We’ll see what will happen.
I’ll be available by e-mail of course. My PDA will be my best tool during this tour.
Have a wonderful sunny August!

PS: I didn’t manage to release version 1.6 of EcPc as promised, but I’d like to leave you with an even better present: the Beta of the PC version!
This is a great chance for you to try the software especially if you don’t have a PDA!

Would such an offer be too good to be true?
Oh no, it’s real actually, since that sentence is the slogan of the 2006 Best of Everything Software Package, a package containing the latest versions of winners and finalists from the Best Software Awards 2005, the annual contest organized by the american Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine.
As I previously wrote on the blog, my EcPc QVGA was a finalist in the 2005 edition of the contest, so it has been included into the package together with 130 of the very best applications and games available for Windows Mobile devices.
I’m very satisfied to see my software listed among other great Pocket PC applications and I’ve been even more proud to read the comment about my software by one of the judges, Jack Cook, Senior Editor of Mobility Today, when they announced the finalists. You can read it in the awards page together with the scan of the nice certificate they sent me.
For the details of the offer please go to the official website, there’s even a so called Value Calculator, an Excel precompiled file actually, to help you determine if the total of the software you’d like to buy exceeds the package price. Very useful addition in my opinion.
They also put together a Best of Everything Smartphone Software Package, selling for $139, which includes over $600 worth of software only for Smartphones based on Windows Mobile. If you have a bunch of Windows Mobile software on your shopping list I’d suggest you to browse the contents of those packages since the probability to find most of them inside them is pretty high.
There’s also the The Best of Everything Demo CD which is part of the main package and contains the demo versions of the software. It’s given for free to 2 year subscribers, but you can order it separately for 15$.
Being a developer I agreed to make available my software free of charge to other developers whose products have been included into the package and who choose the same option to share their own software. I consider a very nice opportunity being able to share software among trusted developers, a sort of digital fair play. Not all of them agreed to this sharing opportunity, but most did, so another thumbs up for the makers of the package.
Speaking about latest versions, I can assure you I’ll release version 1.6 of EcPc before I’ll leave for holidays on August, so that you can upgrade from version 1.5, which is in the package. At the same time we’re building the new EcPc website. It already looks great but it will take some more time to complete.

Two intense days made the weekend pass more swiftly than usual. On Friday I attended the Touristech event in Villa Erba and I spent most of Saturday in Verona at the Veronafil philately and numismatics fair.
Touristech is the first event organized by Wireless dedicated to new technologies and digital innovation at the service of the cultural entertainment and hospitality services for tourists. For this meeting they couldn’t choose a better location than the beautiful Villa Visconti immersed in the even more beautiful Villa Erba park in Cernobbio. It has been a long time since I had the chance to walk in that park, although I’m often in Cernobbio, and I hadn’t remembered how pleasant and relaxing it is. In fact it was the first time I wasn’t tired when I got home after a day full of conference presentations instead of what usually happens after the events organized by Wireless in Milan.
One of the moderators didn’t forget to mention they shot some sequences of the Ocean Twelve Hollywood movie there. After all the benefits of the presence of George Clooney in his villa in Laglio seem to be much more valuable than works of Luchino Visconti…
The presentations were all very interesting, especially for the fact that the subject matter is the basis of a software project I’m working on together with the exceptional group of people I assembled since the beginning of this year. People always makes the difference in everything and this project is shaping up very well I’d like to say thanks to them actually.
I met Paolo Conti, a journalist of Il Sole 24 Ore, the brilliant moderator of the recent Mobile Force & Office Forum 2006 and we had the chance to talk about the project.
After a morning of presentations by representatives of the major players of the tourism market in Italy, such as Touring Club among the others, the event concluded with a series of interesting case histories of mobile technology applied to outdoor journeys, such as the PDA guide they’re experimenting with at the Villa Reale Park of Monza and the PDA guide they currently use at the Swiss National Park.
Then I spent Saturday among the numerous small stands of coins and stamp collectors setup in one of the huge exhibition halls of Verona Fiere. Should I mention this had something to do with the work behind the desktop version of EcPc?
My focus were Eurocoins of course and I had the chance to meet with some kind users from the LaMoneta.it Italian forum, but unexpectedly I came back home with a surprise as much as precious: I managed to recover the Green Vespa, the only Vespa model ever made for the famous Kinder surprise toys series!
I got to know of this particular toy since I read the book Vroom with a view by Peter Moore and I’ll certainly have another chance to write more about that.

“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!

A few months passed since the last update to my blog, a period I actually spent working in silence, trying to reach the mental state in which I’d been able to defeat the so-called information overloading, something that can easily affect workers in the ICT sector (and not only them). Also, as I say to friends when ask me why I don’t keep my blog updated, it’s not easy at all thinking of something interesting to write here.
Now I’m still busy working on the innovation project committed by a local enterprise and coordinated by the Centro Volta. It’s going well and I’d like to write more about it, but I’ll do it only if I’ll get the necessary permissions.
Since the beginning of the year I’ve also started working on the software project for which I committed a doability study to the Centro Volta last year. I had the luck to involve the right people with the right competence into this project and we’re doing very well I’d say, a confirmation of the fact that the people always make the difference. More details about this important project as soon as we’ll start testing the prototype among the public.
The last year ended, and the new one began, with a very nice present from Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine. Their Board of Experts voted Euro Coins Pocket Collector QVGA to be among the best in the category Miscellaneous Utilities in the magazine’s fifth annual Best Software Awards. As a finalist I joined their 2006 Best of Everything Marketing Program which will grant my software some more visibility. Another award which makes me proud of the work I did to create this software and talking about this I can anticipate that in a couple of weeks I’ll start building a new site entirely focused on Ecpc.
Soon then and try to don’t get caught by the frenziness of modern life!

So we are at the end of the year and as usual it’s time to sum up what’s happened in the past 12 months and to make new wishes for the incoming future.
Lots of things happened since the last update to my blog. I’ve been busy working on new software projects for the so called vertical markets, which relegated the work on the new version of Ecpc to a little niche of my spare time, but I couldn’t be more glad closing this year by mentioning that Ecpc was a finalist in the Best Software Awards 2005, the annual competition of the american Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine.
After another award prizing the quality of my software, I’d like to end this year with a thought as much simple as true at the same time, inspired by a conversation I had with a wise old woman who’s directly involved in the work on one of my software projects: we’re going too fast!
Hers was a consideration about the frenzyness of modern life compared to how things went at her times in Como, our town.
I often think about it when I’m not be able to keep up with my emails or reading all my favourite newsletters. Sometimes I think to be suffering from the so called information overload.
With this little pearl of ancient wisdom I wish you a happy celebration of the New Year!
May you enjoy it from the beginning to the end, but without hurry!

That’s what I actually did in these summer months, reorganizing things in my home-office as well as reorganizing thoughts and relaxing my mind with some very good books to get ready for the incoming busy months.
Among the books I read the most entertaining has been Joel on software, a collection of the writings by Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fogcreek software house, originally posted on his well known blog. It contains views, comments, rants and raves about software development so brilliant that I found myself exclamating a “That’s so true!” after reading lots of passages.
Software development is not like any other artigianal work, it’s pure design, as Joel states, that’s why the skills needed to be a good programmer or even a program manager are so peculiar.
I also read a couple of very interesting books about personal leadership and human social relationships. Another one was much more related to my work on mobile devices, Windows Mobile Guida Pratica, a beginner’s guide about devices with the Windows Mobile OS, written by the Italian friend developer Massimo Mangia.
I met him the last evening here in Como with great pleasure since there are only a handful of independent developers in Italy and you can imagine how much such occasion can be so special when guys like us get the chance to share their views and problems about the work they do with so much passion.
So, a needed pause from actual coding work to save energies and prepare myself for the incoming months which do look very busy. More about that in the next update.

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.