End of The Year Thought 2005
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on December 31, 2005
So we are at the end of the year and it’s time to sum up what’s happened in the past 12 months and to make new wishes for the future.
Lots of things happened since the last blog post. 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 niche of 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 rewarding Ecpc, 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 elder woman who’s involved in one of my projects: we’re going too fast! 🙄
Hers was a consideration about the frenzyness of modern life compared to how things went at her times.
I often think about it when I’m not be able to keep up with emails or reading all the 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!
Enjoy it from the beginning to the end, but without hurry! 😉
IComo: The Factory of Ideas
Last thursday, I attended the IComo: La Fabbrica delle Idee (the factory of ideas) in Villa Olmo, an event organized by the Centro Volta and the Chamber of Commerce of Como and presented as a matching point for technology innovation aimed at local small and medium companies willing to innovate by exploiting new ideas to be able to remain competitive on the market.
The subjects of the presentations ranged from robotics and automation to new manufacturing techniques such as MIM (Metal Injection Moulding), but included also a presentation about RFID technology by a HP manager, as well as a brief overview of the future of information technology by Intel which included mobile devices.
My collaboration with the Centro Volta is already generating positive results. We’re starting a project committed by a small artigianal enterprise who was searching for a partner to take care of the development of their innovative idea from both the hardware and software sides.
It looks very stimulating, but at the same time we recently completed the due diligence study for the project I submitted some months ago and it appears we’ve found the right contacts to make it real, something that appeared difficult to me at first.
Looks like I’m building a busy schedule for the next months, but that’s what I wanted when I first got in touch with the staff of the Centro Volta, so I can’t complain at all! 😉
Reorganizing Thoughts and Things
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Books, Mobile, Software on September 23, 2005
That’s what I did in these summer months: reorganizing things in my studio, as well as reorganizing thoughts and relaxing my mind with some good books to get ready for the incoming months.
Among the books I read the most entertaining was Joel on software, a collection of the writings by Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fogcreek, originally posted on his 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 many articles. 🙂
Software development is unlike 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 peculiar.
I also read a couple of books about personal leadership and social relationships. Another one was much more related to mobile devices, Windows Mobile Guida Pratica, a beginner’s guide about devices with the Windows Mobile OS, written by the italian developer Massimo Mangia.
I met him the last evening 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 special when guys like us get the chance to share their views and problems about a job they do with passion. 😉
So, a pause from actual coding work to recharge batteries and get ready for the next months which look busy.
More about that in the next post.
EcPc Nominated in The Best Software Awards 2005 and Smartphone Version Preview
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on July 29, 2005
Yesterday I’ve been glad to receive the news 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 category is actually Miscellaneous Utilities, since there wasn’t a more appropriate one to include a 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 category in their Software Encyclopedia, Hobby or Educational.
In the meantime I just completed a submission for the Top Talent Award 2005 and I’ll be patiently waiting for the outcome of this interesting european contest.
Also I’m glad to announce that a beta of the Smartphone version of EcPc, which I called EcSp :), is up and running on my Motorola MPx 200 and I’d like to invite you to get a look at some pics and screenshots in the preview I posted 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, thus making the software version up to 1.6, or I’ll just release the Smartphone version as 1.5.
Euro Coins Pocket Collector Second Birthday!
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on July 16, 2005
This is a day to celebrate for me and the users of EcPc, since on July16th, 2003 I published the first version of the software, 2 years in which the software made me earn a good reputation in the mobile development arena, although the application aims at a niche market. 🙂
The design of the 2 Euro italian commemorative coin on the left, celebrating the fifth decade of the World Food Program, 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 needed to produce quality software I put on my business card: 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! 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.
At the moment I’m working on the Smartphone version of EcPc, leaving the PC version for a september launch. 😉
On last thursday I attended the eContent Award Italy award ceremony in Palazzo Turati in Milan. I submitted EcPc for evaluation, although I haven’t been able to send the all the materials they required due to the trip to Miami, so it was only mentioned in a presentation of all the submitted projects.
They selected mostly websites, many of which well worth 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 evil than I am, but I’d like to share a tip to the creative people, young or not, working on their projects in Italy: don’t limit yourself to a local or national market for your work, think internationally since the beginning, otherwise you’ll waste your time complaining about the lack of resources, 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!
Welcome to Miami, Bienvenido a Miami
This song by Will Smith did accompany me during the days I was getting ready for my first trip to the US, since the destination was Miami, that magical city in the south beaches of Florida. 🙂
I spent the whole last week there since I was invited to attend the Handango Partner Summit 2005, which took place from june 22 to 24 in the beautiful Sheraton Bal Harbour Beach Resort located in the Bal Harbour zone of Miami Beach.
It was a three days long event of presentations and meeting sessions with software developers, sponsors and the Handango staff, who surprised me for his kindness and enthusiasm for their job. I was honored just to have been invited there since there were less than 200 developers selected from the 10.000 ones who chose Handango to sell their software all over the world, and also I got the confirmation that I was the only italian coming from Italy. 🙂
So it has been an important event for my business, Handango staff appreciate what I’m doing as a developer and, as the theme of this year goes, they’re inviting me to unleash my potential. It takes time, especially if you’re doing it in Italy, but they won’t be disappointed.
To sum up it has been the perfect combination of business and pleasure, a sort of reward for who takes this job with passion, since after the Summit me and Christian, a friend who followed me in this adventure, had a great time on the sands of Miami Beach, in the wonderful pool of the Sheraton and in the locals of this huge city. 🙂
BroadBandWeek Event in Milan and European Contests Submission
Last week the BroadBandWeek event took place in Milan, a series of seminars and presentations in week from the 6th to the 11th in different places of the city about the new opportunities offered not only by the availability of broadband Internet connections but also by mobile devices, the two hot topics of the italian ICT business.
On thursday I’ve been able to attend the BroadBand Match Day in which they talked about the business opportunities for young people willing to turn into reality their technology-related innovative ideas. The speakers were very good and experienced, and although the number of attendees was pretty low, it surprised me to see more wannabe female entrepreneurs than male. 🙂
The Match Day took place near the Polytechnic of Milan, while on friday the event moved to the Mediateca Santa Teresa with the name Multimedia Creativity Day. They presented two european contests for young talents, the eContent Award Italy, which is selecting the best italian projects to candidate them to the World Summit Award, for which I already submitted an entry, and the Top Talent Award 2005.
It was a bit sad when Cesare Massarenti spoke about Italy and told that compared to other european countries there are only a few italians participating at these contests since “the school system doesn’t form students at these levels”. Although I don’t like generalizations at all, that’s a valid assertion in many cases, and I wonder if the so called Business Angels do really exist in Italy or it’s just another cool word as long as start-ups, spin-offs and so on, to make a speech appear more international and hide the fact we’re always lagging behind the other european countries for what concern research and content production, especially high level entertainment software.
Enough ranting for now, the next week in the US is going to be an exciting one… 😉
Speaking English Using Skype and Skin Strip Feature Tutorial
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on June 12, 2005
VoIP (Voice Over IP) is a very hot topic nowadays and among all the different ways the Internet offers to be able to communicate with other people, voice combined with instant messaging is the best one in my opinion. That’s why I appreciate Skype and I’m suggesting my collaborators to use it.
Easy, fast, free, cheap if you need to call a non-Skype user, and runs on PC and Pocket PC, version that I can enjoy on the Loox 720 thanks also to OzLooxSpeaker, an utility enabling the upper secondary speaker on the Loox made just for VoIP purposes.
I just added a Skype-Me button to the contacts page and to the signature in the forum to invite you to use it if you want to get in touch in the most direct way.
In this period I’m attending english conversation lessons since I’ll be on an business trip in the US in a couple of weeks, and I’m getting confident in speaking the language. 😉
Lastly I’ve posted a tutorial in the forum explaining how to use the Skin Strip feature introduced in the new version of Euro Coins Pocket Collector. You have to be a registered member in order to be able to read it as well as all the upcoming tutorials.
Update: I’ve discovered a stupid bug which prevents from correctly loading the external graphics file needed to use the Skin Strip feature. Sorry for the distraction, it’ll be fixed in version 1.6.
Articles on La Provincia and Newsletter Subscription Invitation
Posted by Albegor in Como, Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on May 29, 2005
It has been a busy week after the release of the new version of EcPc, and although I hadn’t much time to do marketing activities, it has been appreciated not only by owners of high-end VGA devices, but also by the users of the QVGA version, as you can read from the comment Jim Bruce posted on Handango.
On tuesday the local daily newspaper La Provincia published the letter I wrote to reply to a couple ones discussing about multimedia piracy. It’s a very delicate matter and I tried to describe my position both as a consumer and as a software developer. I’ll dedicate a separate space on the site about this soon, in the meantime you can read the reply to my letter written by one of the two original readers.
Then on thursday they published my full page article about the presentation of Windows Mobile 5.0, codename Magneto, and the smaller one about the big growth of the PDA market in the first quarter of the year.
Window Mobile 5.0 is really big news. I just got Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and I’m having a good look at the new SDKs and to the stand-alone emulator in particular, then I’ll write more about this. The logo of the Beta Experience program is really curious: it’s a bug!
I’m now using Dada Mail, a excellent free software for mailing list management, to send newsletters both in italian and in english, so I’d like to invite you to subscribe to the one of your interest if you’d like to be updated about the most important announcements such as the release of new software or even what I wrote here on the blog. 😉
The italian version of the newsletter has a generally richer content.
Bruno Bozzetto at the Closing Seminar of AnimatiComo
The presentation by Bruno Bozzetto, the father of the italian animated cartoons, concluded the first edition of AnimatiComo, a series of three seminars about computer animation organized by the researchers of the Polytechnic of Como.
All the attendees have been fascinated by the words of the “father”, although he actually preferred to be called grandfather. 🙂
What impressed me the most, apart from his extreme clarity of exposition, was the firm belief which lead all of his career, that is you can do great things even with poor resources. It all begins from creativity, then you use the tools at your disposal to express it, tools that don’t have to be necessarily the most technologically advanced and expensive. Just take a look at what he produced by using Flash and a lot of irony about the worst attitudes of italians in Europa&Italia, a short animation he made in 1999.
The seminar concluded with the projection of the cartoon Vip Mio Fratello Superuomo, one of his three full length movies, made in 1968.
Here you can read a brief interview with Bozzetto published by the local daily newspaper La Provincia.
All this contrasts al lot with the final results obtained by the spanish big budget, for European standards at least, animation team who produced the 3D animation El Guerrero Sin Nombre, presented for the first time after its completion by Nacho Martin last week during the second of the three seminars. The cartoon rendering technique granted a unique and impressive look to the movie, but the empathy generated by the characters was light years from that stirred up into spectators by Bozzetto’s Vip Brothers, in my opinion.
I had the chance to talk a bit with Nacho and he told me a phrase I only partially share: the important is getting to the end…
AnimatiComo has been a really pleasant experience, made even more interesting by the fact I’m reading the book Animazione 3D wrote by Nicolò Ceccarelli and Daniele Bigi, the two main brains behind the event.
Can’t wait for the next edition then! 🙂