Posts Tagged La Provincia

The i-muse Team Flies to Toronto

TorontoIn a few days all the five of us will leave for Canada to demonstrate i-muse at the ICHIM 07, the international conference about informatics applied to cultural heritage that will take place in Toronto from the 24th to the 26th of october.

It’s an important chance to show the results of our work to the 300 invited people coming from all over the world, including researchers, sector experts and professionals.

Even the local daily newspaper La Provincia wished us good luck with an article by Sara della Torre.

It’s a big investment for us, although actually facilitated, since we are among the beneficiaries of the Bando Ingenio, a regional announcement of competition which guarantees us that the expenses sustained for the educational mobility will be refunded.

Meanwhile, we got some interest thanks to the paper about i-muse we wrote for the conference.

We’ll try to leave a positive impression and to enjoy the adventure.

We’re getting ready with the last things and then let’s go! 😀

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George, would you like to try i-muse?

Museo della SetaSomething 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! 😉

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i-muse lives! on La Provincia

Museo della SetaA 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?” 😀

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The Virtual Tailor in Cernobbio Featured on La Provincia

Sartoria OreficeAfter the mention on Business People, the brief article on L’Espresso and the interview on RaiDue, even the local daily newspaper La Provincia wrote about this now famous mythological character. 🙂

An article emphasizing the long tradition of the Sartoria Orefice through the words of Mr. Lino Orefice which belongs to the series of articles devoted to innovation projects completed with success since the Centro Volta’s IComo initiative was born less than one year ago.

When the articles was published, on November 30th 2006, I thought something was missing: at least a mention as the author of the hardware and software system born from Cleto Orefice’s idea which now allows the tailor shop to work in a totally different way. 😕

I would have loved to see that not only for personal pride, but also because I’d like to repeat the experience with another local artigianal company willing to start an innovation project by using informatics tools.

Also it has been the result of a great team work and in my opinion this was a chance to highlight the Centro Volta’s role as an effective aggregator of local skills, the mission of IComo.

Maybe it’s better getting back to work and don’t be concerned too much about that, focusing instead on the message this article gave to readers: the tailor in Cernobbio is an example to follow! 🙂

Consider that Mr. Lino, who always had an active role in the project thanks to his experience, works since 60 years and shows his invaluable irony whenever he reads of people complaining about the increase of the retirement age.

He represents an example to follow for me! 😉

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i-muse Featured on La Provincia

It really was a satisfaction being able to tell for the first time how the entrepreneurial idea which led me, Guido and Luca to create i-muse was born and evolved.

Sara Della Torre, the journalist author of the article about our project published on wednesday on the newspaper La Provincia, translated perfectly into words the whole story. 😀

During the interview I noticed that she was amazed by the numerous positive coincidences which happened during the evolution of the project, such as how I managed to involve Luca and Guido or how we created the logo. 😉

We still have a lot to demonstrate, we know this very well, but probably what isn’t too evident from the outside yet, or it’s a bit underestimated, is how much work we did until now to come to this point.

We’re now searching for a fourth extraordinary person. Finding him won’t be easy at all, so we start doing this early.

Thanks to the office at the Polytechnic things are moving fast now!

Meanwhile we enjoy the compliments the article on La Provincia granted us. 🙂

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If Clooney Would Ride a Vespa…

VespaAs the whole world knows by now, George Clooney loves spending holidays on lake Como in his Villa Oleandra in Laglio. Recently the american star was involved in a curious episode reported on the pages of our local daily newspaper La Provincia, here and here. An episode so curious that inspired me to write this letter to the newspaper, published in the Letters to the director feature :

I’m asking myself how many smiles snatched the article published on last Saturday on our daily newspaper about the curious episode which featured the nice George Clooney riding his Harley up to Dizzasco, where as it seems he went for an unannounced visit to the rest house and wasn’t recognized by the doorkeeper.
Being a Vespa enthusiast and a two-wheels lover, I tried to imagine what could have happened if he got there riding a Vespa rather than a roaring Harley-Davidson. The Vespa has been a symbol of freedom for generations of italians as it is nowadays, so I like to believe that if he would have got there on a Vespa the doorkeeper would have had a different attitude, maybe recalling the journeys he did in youth with his own Vespa. Such a passion in common would have acted as a pass much more than the noisy american bike.
It happened to me more than once that not-so-young people stopped to have a look at my Vespa, and with a smile they began telling me their adventures spent riding the Piaggio’s scooter.
George gives a good example by choosing a two-wheels for his trips around the province of Como. This is something more people
should do, while they seem to prefer diving into the chaos and stress caused by the traffic fed by themselves rather than leaving the comfort of their cars even for a few kilometers .
I would lend my Vespa to the american star with pleasure, so that the next time he’ll be luckier during his unannounced visits without press managers along with him. He may know very well every palm of Hollywood and be a lover of the Easy Rider movie, but he still probably ignores how to get welcomed by the people of our lake. 😉

The nice reply by Pierangelo Marengo: Yours, besides being a love hymn for the Vespa, is a pleasant digression into the world of the possible. Of course it has to be demonstrated, but no one can prevent you from indulging in a dream on two wheels.

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We Won!!!

I don’t know if it has been for the logo made by Luca, the strong points of the project, the quality of the documentation we submitted, the presentation held with Guido at the Chamber of Commerce of Como last week or even the elegant suit tailored for that special occasion by the Sartoria Orefice ;), or most probably a combination of all these elements, but the end results is that we won the Special Award of the CCIAA Como at the StartCup 2006. 😀

We’re working on something not really new, something others already did by using the latest mobile technologies applied to the sector of cultural goods, but maybe the difference is that we aim our idea towards excellence and the commission got it and decided to choose us, although they told us the other projects were very interesting.

Yesterday in Milan professor Negrini gave us the award during the exciting ceremony of the StartCup finals.

The first picture captured that moment with me and Luca on the stage. The emotion was great, the same emotion that passed through the hands of the photographer.

The second one depicts the team, almost complete since Guido was missing, with professor Negrini and Paolo and Samantha of Opla S.r.l., our main collaborators. The third one shows all the winner groups on the stage of the main hall of the Università degli Studi.

After the ceremony we had a nice walk around the Duomo of Milan thanks to an exceptionally good weather for the season and I took a pic of the Madunina on top of it.

The cash award will help us to quickly get to the prototipation phase of the project, motivate a team that relied upon its own forces until now, and most importantly it opens the perspective to be incubated as a startup in the offices of the Polo Regionale of Como. This if what we actually were looking for, good job i-boys! :mrgreen:

Here the article about the incubation published by the local daily newspaper La Provincia.

Startcup 2006Startcup 2006Startcup 2006

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Articles on La Provincia and Newsletter Subscription Invitation

LaProvinciaIt 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! :mrgreen:

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.

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Bruno Bozzetto at the Closing Seminar of AnimatiComo

Bozzetto VipThe 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! 🙂

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EcPc 1.5 VGA Beta Version Released and Wireless Forum Spring

Wireless Forum Spring 2005If you have a new Pocket PC device with a VGA display prepare to be stunned just like I was when I run for the first time the VGA version of EcPc on my Loox 720 because I’ve uploaded to FirstLoox.org a public beta! 🙂

I’ts a homage to the community grown around one of the best VGA devices around, but obviously this beta is intended to be tested on any other VGA device on the market. It’s a beta and that means it contains some limitations and possibly even some bugs, so please read this post in the forum for the details and provide any feedback so that I can complete and release the final version as soon as possible.

I also would need some help to complete the dutch translation, which is now at 70%.

If you aren’t a VGA Pocket PC user you can take a look at some screenshots in the updates page, read about the new features such as the background skin and wait for the QVGA version, which will be released together with the VGA one.

On april 21st I attended the Wireless Forum Spring event at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Milan, one whole day of conference sessions about wireless mobile technologies. There were up to nine different sections in order to cover almost the whole spectrum of the subject matter, from the Machine2Machine Forum to the Mobile Force Forum, from the Forum about RFID to the one about VoIP, the most crowded one, from the WLAN Business Forum to the Wired World Forum. I choose to follow most of the Mobile Force Forum and I did a good choice since I found most of the presentations interesting for my future software projects. 😉

Here you can find a brief article about the Wireless Forum Spring I wrote for the local daily newspaper La Provincia.

Now that the beta is out for some public testing I’ll take a few minutes rest before getting back at the code to fix that damned routine!  🙂

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