Posts Tagged Milan
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… 😉
EcPc 1.5 VGA Beta Version Released and Wireless Forum Spring
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on April 28, 2005
If 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! 🙂
Bill Gates at the Microsoft Technical Conference 2004
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on November 22, 2004
On Thursday 18 November I’ve been in Milan to attend to the Microsoft Technical Conference, held at the Assago Forum.
3008 people were present at the event, mostly developers and Technet or Msdn subscribers. The day quickly passed away among the presentations by Microsoft staff divided in four main areas.
Of particular interest have been the application installation and deployment issues discussed by the always brilliant and friendly Fabio Santini, although a bit unlucky with his demos ;), and a preview of the features of Visual Studio 2005 by Gabriele Castellani-Donald Duck voice, as a friend funnily pointed out.
Then Bill Gates performed the final speech in the crowded auditorium. It was the first time I saw him in person and I must say that it has been fascinating hearing about his visions of the incoming future and his intentions on focusing on well-made software to provide a challenging experience to the common non technical user.
After the speech he answered to three questions from as many MVPs and then he disappeared just as he came in. Here are some pictures of the event, sorry for the low quality of the digital camera I used.
Now some news about the incoming version of Ecpc: there’s still some testing to do, but judging from the increase of traffic towards the website it seems this release is getting some attention and that’s a positive sign considering the important switch to the Shareware distribution model I already announced.
This additional time will be well spent since I’ll probably also include the full spanish translation! 🙂
New Devices and Old Friends at SMAU 2004
On Friday 22 October I’ve been in Milan to attend SMAU 2004, the 41st International Exhibition of ICT and Consumer Electronics, the biggest event of this kind in Italy.
Although it’s getting smaller at every edition and this year even the big telecommunication operators such as TIM, Vodafone and Tiscali weren’t present, I’ve been able to spot something interesting in both the Windows Mobile and Palm worlds, to meet some old friends and to make a few new contacts.
In particular it has been a pleasure to meet again with Giorgio Cifani and Pino Paparone, the two Italian Microsoft MVPs for mobile devices, Enrico of Pocket PC Italia and Diego, editor of the Italian magazine Il Mio Palmare. There was even the troupe of Netcafé walking around the stands. 🙂
Here are some pictures I shot at the show. The first one is pretty curious. The new Asus A730 in VGA landscape mode with its 1.3Mpixel integrated camera pointed towards the HP stand, where visitors could find notebooks and printers, but alas none of their new iPAQs…
In the Windows Mobile corner of the big Microsoft stand Enrico showed me the new Qtek 9090, the Qtek 8010, the iPAQ 1710 and the Sagem My S7. For the Palm side of things at the Palmosoft stand I’ve been able to make a confrontation between the Tungsten T3 and the brand new Tungsten T5, both in 480×320 landscape mode.
At the end of the day I even got a good deal by purchasing the 2 DVDs box of the Schindler’s List movie, which I was searching for some time but I was not willing to pay it at full retail price. 😉
New links and second Hardware Upgrade Technical Workshop
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on January 26, 2004
The last week has been busy in terms of public relations and I’d like to thank all the webzines that published the announcement of the new release of Ecpc and led you here to browse the website! 🙂
In particular thanks to the portuguese websites Pocket PT and Palmtops On-line, which I added to the Links page, although I have some other links to add as soon as possible.
The weekend has been pleasant since on saturday 24th I attended to the second Technical Workshop organized by Hardware Upgrade, the leading webzine about technology in Italy, after the first one organized at SMAU 2003.
The main theme of this workshop was about Video chips and DirectX 9. The focus was on the latest powerful video cards for PCs, but since the event was sponsored by ATI, at the end I had the chance to get in touch with an ATI manager asking for more info about the introduction of new chipsets for mobile devices like the Imageon 2300. 😉
The event was interesting and the atmosphere relaxed, thanks also to the location, the Michelangelo Hotel in Milan, and also to the participation of many members of the Hardware Upgrade forum.
So while they’re discussing how fun the event was, I’d better go back to my to-do list…
Windows and Matrix Revolutions
Yesterday has been a pleasant day since I attended to the Windows Revolutions event in Milan, in which Microsoft’s staff, in a very informal and friendly atmosphere, presented to a public of developers some interesting features of Longhorn, the future successor of Windows XP, Yukon, the successor of SQL Server and Whidbey, the next version of Visual Studio .NET.
At the end of the presentation Microsoft invited the attendees to the nearby Arcadia theater to watch the movie Matrix Revolutions.
I don’t want to write anything about the movie, especially how it ends, but I can say a THX Certified theater grants an incredible audiovisual experience, in particular for this kind of movies.
Thanks to Microsoft, then. Let’s hope they’ll organize similar events in the future, but more focused on mobile devices. 😉
Now let’s back to work since I’ve got the forum to open, among other things…
Back from SMAU and curiosity about the recent Italian Black Out
This was the most profitable SMAU for me since I began visiting it many years ago, and it was the first time I went to the exhibition for work and not just as a visitor.
I had the pleasure to meet italian Microsoft MVPs, in particular Giorgio Cifani and Pino Paparone, both MVP specialized in mobile devices, who showed me the hardware such as the new Motorola Smartphone. 
Also I met Enrico of Pocket PC Italia, in his crowded stand with the latest Pocket PC and Smartphone novelties and accessories.
Most importantly I had some important meetings which I hope will turn into great announcements in the next weeks. I also took a very special picture, which I’ll upload shortly. 😉
I’m already back to the big amount of work waiting for me, but I’ll leave you with a curious picture about the unexpected italian Black Out happened during the night of sunday 28th of september. Here’s the graphic of the Internet traffic on the MIX ( Milan Internet eXchange ), where you can notice the flat line in relation to the Black Out hours.
We hope it won’t happen again…
SMAU 2003 opening day
Today is the opening day of SMAU 2003, the 40° International Exhibition of ICT and Consumer Electronics, the biggest event of this kind in Italy, which is taking place in Milan Fair from 2 to 6 October.
I’ll go there on Saturday 4 and I’m trying to setup some interesting meetings, since all the major players of the PDA market will attend the exhibition. If you want to meet me during that day please contact me.
I’d like to thank Riccardo of Internavigare for the ticket invitation he provided me. 😉
Do you know what the initials SMAU mean? They stand for “Salone Macchine e Attrezzature per l’Ufficio”, an old name which survived the test of time since 1964.
Here you can download the SMAU map to bring it with you on your PDA.