Archive for category Mobile
i-muse Awarded by FinancIdea in Milan
It’s the biggest prize we won so far! 😀
The confirmation of the validity of our entrepreneurial project started with i-muse!
On monday 8 october, in the wonderful Sala Parlamentino of the Palazzo Affari ai Giureconsulti in Milan, I received the 1st prize of the Evaluate your entrepreneurial idea contest , organized by the Chamber of Commerce of Milan in collaboration with Fondazione FinancIdea and the support of Rasbank and Unicredit Bank: a thick plexiglass plate and a money contribute to help starting the business.
Some of the people I met during the last months attended the award ceremony, something I appreciated since it means I captured their interest. 😉
An important prize then, maybe more important than we think, since now we’re busy getting ready for the ICHIM in Toronto.
On the Milan’s CCIAA website they’ll publish the official chart of the contest.
i-muse Back on TV for ZeroTreUno
After the interview on last February on ZeroTreUno during which, together with Luca and Paolo, I explained what we would have done to make i-muse, I went back to Espansione TV to tell what we actually did at the Educational Silk Museum.
Elda De Mattei, the presenter, was curious to know if we managed to keep our promises and created an innovative tool to visit museums and art exhibitions.
With a PDA in my hand, I showed her how much easy using i-muse actually is, and I believe I got the attention of the viewers by showing some of the best pieces of the video guide.
Elda wished us good luck for the incoming trip to Toronto where we’ll present i-muse at the ICHIM 07 and I appreciated when she gave me the opportunity to tell about the passion for the Vespa and my wish to be able to see i-muse guiding visitors at the Museo Piaggio someday. 😀
Elda called Alice our virtual guide Chiara, a little mistake, certainly lesser than the comparison with the atomic bomb during the interview in february! 😉
Here is the 12 minutes interview.
An Award for i-muse in Venice
After the presentation on saturday 29 september for the event A Night at the Museum 2007, which attracted important guests as Paolo De Santis, President of the Como’s Chamber of Commerce, and Pierluigi della Vigna, professor at the Politecnico di Milano, together with numerous friends and curious people, yesterday I went to Venice to get an award for the i-muse project: a special nomination in the e-culture category of the eContentAward 2007 contest.
The journey has been the opportunity for me to visit for the first time a fascinating town such as Venice.
Dario, a student at Ca’ Foscari university, who kindly guided me through the town’s Calle, told me with a bit of irony: “First time in Venice? It shouldn’t have been easy missing it!”.
Once filled the laguna gap, for i-muse there are other surprises coming! 😉
A Night at the Museum 2007
By reading the name of the event maybe someone will recall the movie with Ben Stiller.
Actually it’s an event involving 250 museums in Lombardia, each one offering different cultural initiatives: free guided tours, musical events, videos, exhibitions and degustations.
If I hadn’t had to be at the Educational Silk Museum of Como for the scheduled public presentation of i-muse at 18:30 I would be really pleased to attend some of the events!
I’m just joking, it’ll be an important event for us. 🙂
The staff of “our” museum is very active lately to say the least. On wednesday 20 they inaugurated a wonderful temporary exhibition dedicated to a collection of american bags from 1930 to 1970, while on wednesday 27 it’ll be the turn of the second edition of the bobbin lace competition.
Three reasons, two exhibitions and the presentation of i-muse, good enough to choose the Educational Silk Museum of Como among the numerous cultural offerings on saturday 29 september.
I’ll be waiting for you together with the i-muse team for our first Night at the Museum! 😉
PS: After the interview on Telereporter even the local broadcast Espansione TV dedicated us a brief but effective two minutes long service during the evening news.
The Gallery of i-muse Testers
In july and august we invited more than 70 people to the Educational Silk Museum of Como to complete the usability tests for i-muse, a fundamental step of the project which absorbed me completely and allowed us to refine the software in its different components.
Thanks to all the people who come and enjoyed using i-muse. Thanks also to the museum’s staff who has always been kind and welcomed our testers.
Testers have been impressed by the overall quality of our video guide, as if they didn’t expect a result of a such level, a result obtained by a group of five young people who are “playing” as entrepreneurs. 😉
Enthusiastic for the video guide, at the end of the visit with i-muse, someone often commented about the workers’ labour inside factories in the recent past.
Now that usability tests are completed the second step is waiting for us: promoting what we did so far and setting up a competitive commercial offer.
The way is still a long one, as the experts tell us…
Interview on Telereporter
The chance has been as much unexpected as important: together with Davide Marrone, author of the now celeb Skebby, I’ve been interviewed by the journalist Stefano Peduzzi for the TV broadcast Estate con Reporter! 😀
I talked about i-muse and the work we did at the Educational Silk Museum of Como.
In the studio there was also Prof. Mario Benassi of the Università degli Studi di Milano and Giovanni Giovannini, vice mayor in Corsico, who presented an innovative method to remove graffiti.
It was a long and challenging interview. I hope my performance was a good one and I managed to shown the competitive points that make i-muse great: here are the videos so that you can see for yourself! 😉
The Ingenio inside i-muse
While usability tests of the videoguide at the Educational Silk Museum of Como are going on and continue to give us great results, the value of our entrepreneurial project granted us the admission to the Bando Ingenio, now managed by Regione Lombardia.
It’s a pretty articulate announcement of competition which includes a series of facilities: vouchers to spend for base and advanced courses about different matters, consultancies by tutors and experts qualified to support the beneficiaries of the competition, and also the expenses refund for educational mobility, that is to say for the participation to seminaries and education courses useful to complete the entrepreneurial project.
This last kind of facilitation is very important to us since it will allow us participating to the ICHIM 07 international conference which will take place in Toronto at the end of october, during which we’ll have the chance to present i-muse.
In my opinion there’s no better way to professionally grow up than being able to confront with experienced people and these high profile conferences are the right place to do that. 🙂
i-muse Usability Tests on Tafter
It’s a satisfaction watching the result of our work in the hands of people while they visit the Educational Silk museum of Como with i-muse, seeing them at ease and at the end satisfied while they recall the things which impressed them the most! 🙂
Most of them actually didn’t expect such a high quality of the guide in all its components: workings, graphics and contents.
Usability tests are going on, they’re allowing us to refine the software and recently I had the chance to explain how they are performed in an article published on the italian online magazine Tafter.
Usability is common sense, as Donald A. Norman says, and from the tests we made so far it seems result we wished to obtain is getting near: when people, at the end of their visit, comment only the contents it means the rest is ok, the i-muse formula works! 😉
George, would you like to try i-muse?
Something was missing in the article about i-muse published on last saturday by the daily newspaper La Provincia: all the names of the team members thanks to whom we got up to this point!
So I wrote a letter for the Letters to the Director feature, thanking the team and pointing out that we’ll continue the invitation-only usability tests at the Educational Silk Museum in Como during the whole august, so even the people who now are busy at work will be able to find the time to come and try the videoguide and discover the wonders of a museum so little known by the people living in Como.
In the letter I also invited the famous american actor George Clooney, who’s spending the holidays in his Villa Oleandra in Laglio, to come and try i-muse and visit the museum.
Who knows, maybe you’ll find him in the gallery of photos we’re shooting during the tests! 😉
i-muse lives! on La Provincia
A full page article, printed in colors, clearly conveys the enthusiasm of the journalist Chiara Sirna who previewed the videoguide at the Educational Silk Museum in Como.
After the article of the last january, the daily newspaper La Provincia didn’t waste any time and let its readers know we got to the point, i-muse lives, and we started the invitation-only usability testing phase that will last until the end of august.
We also set up a gallery of photos shot during the tests showing the invited people as they walk inside the museum with i-muse.
This will also be a good opportunity for many people living in Como to discover a museum preserving a piece of the glorious history of the town related to silk processing if they didn’t have the chance to visit it yet. 🙂
For the moment i-muse is available only for the invitation-only usability tests. I point that out since the article isn’t too clear about it.
Come to try i-muse and we hope you’ll get impressed just like Chiara, who at the end of the visit asked us surprised: “How did you manage to put the videos on the PDA?” 😀