Posts Tagged Startup

Innovation and Urban Quality, this is the theme of one of the awards for excellences which will be given during the event EuroP.A. taking place in Fiera di Rimini at the end of march.

An event having its target on innovation and valorization of the results of projects related to the public administration.

In this context there’s the IQU Award, composed of prizes which will be assigned according to the two main categories of works already made and to be made, then divided for thematic areas: Technology, Mobility, City and Architecture.

We submitted i-muse in the Technology category, but also for the special prize “Designing for everyone“. We take this into a lot of consideration since the usability of i-muse is one of the strong points of the product.

There’s also the Online Award in which users visiting the dedicated area of the site can cast their preference after reading the presentation documents of the projects submitted.

You can vote for i-muse if you like the project as a whole or even for a more specific motivation, such as the logo, how it is pronounced, if you like a member of the team, etc… 😉

Cast you vote!

You should pronounce it like this, as Greta says it, a beautiful little blonde jewel! 🙂

She’s the two years old daughter of my cousin Alex, a cousin like a brother since we know each other since I was born.

I heard pronouncing i-muse in different ways since we announced the product together with the logo.

Someone at the Startup Accelerator of the Politecnico in Como, where we’re incubated, thought we played some kind of music 😯 since i-muse recalled the name of the famous pop band, the Muse, author of the song Starlight, one of my favorites.

i-muse is actually the short version of Interactive Museum, but there’s also the assonance with the verb “to amaze” and also it can recall the classic inspirer muse.

A small kiss to Greta then, our voice of truth. 😉

We’ll surely amaze you with i-muse, we’re almost there!

I mean the Christmas holidays… yes, because the email we sent before Christmas with the team’s best wishes granted us the 4° prize of the XMas Email Awards 2006 contest organized by Wireless.

Now that the prize has been delivered to our office, a 5 Megapixels FIAT digital camera with a sub case :o, I’d like to thank the organizers and the jury.

The case is really nice, we’re almost sorry of opening it and use the camera for the immersions into the Lake of Como some mad guy among us already proposed to test the underwater capabilities of the camera.

After all what could you expect from someone writing in the Christmas best wishes email:

“… the three mad guys of the i-muse team, the innovative PDA guide for museums and art exhibitions, so mad to believe their project will succeed simply because they believe in it, wish you:…“? 😉

You can see the graphics made by Luca and the other winners on the site of the contest.

This is the crazy leaflet Luca made to attract the attention on our stage offer, while this is the serious version with a detailed description of the offer and requirements.

It’s actually a search for an extraordinary person! 🙂

Joel Spolsky in his book Joel on Software, recommends searching for brilliant and results-producing people, qualities rarely coexisting in the same person.

Experience in this case isn’t relevant, we know we can’t pretend too much from a student, but it’s clear we’re going to invest in this person so that he or she could take an active role in the entrepreneurial project and watch i-muse grow together with us.

Considering the kind of job, a woman would have a great advantage, but this won’t be a discriminating factor.

A fine presence will, though, and this is not a joke!

Let’s say it: being fine-looking is pretty easy nowadays, it shows respect for yourself and for the people you have to relate to, while being smart is not at all. 😉

As marketing guru Seth Godin wrote: your references are your curriculum, so if you’d like to send it to us write them down before anything else and then write why you’d like to get involved in the project.

Just a few words will be ok, the essential making all the difference!

Do you know what a purple cow is?

It’s a marketing concept invented by Seth Godin to represent a remarkable product.

Remarkable in the sense that it’s so attractive in its market sector to become a commercial success. We think we have a purple cow, and now that we registered the trademark we can reveal what it’s all about: i-muse is not only a PDA guide for museums and art exhibitions, an innovative tool for the visitor well beyond traditional audioguides, but most of all is the entrepreneurial project by three young guys from Como who believed to be able to create something important starting from scratch! 🙂

The logo is self-explanatory, born from a flash of genius by Luca and generated by Guido’s hint, the people to whom at the beginning of 2006 I proposed working on what was then an idea without a true form.

I got the idea while I was using an audioguide during my visit to the Joan Mirò’s exhibition in 2004 in Como. Back then I was developing software for PDAs, I knew their potentialities, and then I asked myself: why not making a guide running on PDA? 💡

In 2005, thanks to the voucher for technology innovation issued by Regione Lombardia, I committed a due diligence study to the Centro Volta, which is actually located in Villa Olmo where Mirò’s exhibition took place. From that point it took me some time to realize how I had to go on: I had to find the right people, people with the skills I was missing.

I talked to Guido, a marketing expert, an old friend I didn’t see for a long time, and to Luca, a great graphics artist with an experience in the videogames industry.

Thanks to them since the beginning of 2006 things went on at the right pace. We explored different paths, analyzed all the components of the project and finalized the application design. Slow but well since we were doing something else for a living.

After the award at the Startcup 2006 there has been the acceleration: the cash prize ( it’s better starting with a little, but a minimum is absolutely necessary 😉 ) and most of all the office inside the incubator at the Politecnico.

We also reached the finals of the ObiettivoICT contest, whose benefits will come the next year.

2007 is the year of the pig as the Chinese friends of Ciren told me.

Does that mean it will bring abundance even for us, in every sense?

We hope so, in the meantime in the category i-muse you can find all the posts related to the project, a category I’ll keep alive and well while the work on the project continues.