June 8, 2006: Love Your Cat, Hate Its Litter

This is weird, take a deep breath because this is really weird!
Do you have a cat? Does it live in your house? If so you can't but love it as you created a special relationship with it since it entered your home and actually took possession of it.
So do I with my cat Willy and if you too have a cat then we have a little problem in common: the Litter!
You have to take care of it keeping it clean, regularly refilling it with new sand and disposing of your pet's waste since it can't do that by itself.
And here comes the solution: it's named Litter Kwitter and it's meant to gradually train your cat to use the toilet!
Well, I warned you this was pretty weird... as weird as a genial solution to a common problem that no one has thought of yet can be.
The idea of the Litter Kwitter came to the Australian entrepreneur Jo Lapidge by watching the movie with Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro, Meet the Parents. In the movie you can see the superb performance of the cat, Mr. Jinks, actually using De Niro's toilet.
So Jo designed a particular system to train your pet to do the same thing. There are three steps to follow to make it getting used to climbing onto the toilet pan, putting its claws in the right position, steadying itself and quietly performing its intimate business.
The three stages are well explained on the Litter Kwitter official website and in the DVD that comes with the actual package.
I purchased it since I was amazed by this idea and the advantages resulting from a successful training: no more litter and a bit more hygiene in the house!
Cats are really smart, you know it full well if you live with one, or even more than one, but they are also creatures of habit, so you should proceed very carefully with this method if you'd like to obtain a positive result.
Willy is doing well, he's still at the red stage, almost ready to proceed to the amber one, and with patience and the right encouragement I think he'll be fully trained within a few weeks.
Thanks to Jo for her invention then, now I wonder if she'll come out with a new patented method to train cats to flush the water toilet also!
I told you it was weird!
Love your cat, they're so special.

May 30, 2006: Il Sole and The White Night in Como

Il Sole, the sun in english. They couldn't choose a better and more appropriate name for the dynamic ONLUS (Organization Non Lucrative for Social Affairs), recently become NGO (Non-Governmental Organization), dealing with distance adoptions and international cooperation projects born in Como in 1997 from the initiative of Mrs. Olivia Piro.
Someone says the name is the most important thing for a person, so it is for Il Sole and the people involved in it as volunteers, since this name fully reflects the energy they carry on in the will to help children in far away countries such as India, Ethiopia and Burkina Faso.
They're always busy, but never forget to praise their achievements, so last week they had a small party to inaugurate the new offices in Como, their operative headquarters actually, twice as big as the previous one, but most of all located in a much quieter area and lit by the sunlight for most of the day, making it more pleasant for the volunteers to do their work. They also recently got a brand new Toyota Jeep from the Fondazione Comasca to use in their operations in Burkina.
Now they're preparing for an incredible series of events organized for the incoming Notte Bianca di Como on June 10.
They'll take the whole Piazza De Gasperi near the lake and the Funicolare station and will entertain the public all night long. Even four demented comedians from the popular Zelig italian TV show will perform on the stage. For one long night it will become the Piazza del Sole!
Can't wait for it, even if there will be a lot of work to do as a volunteer!
At this time there are two initiatives if you want to support them: the annual lottery which will last until July 24 and the 5x1000 donation on the income declaration. You can get more information by visiting the website of Il Sole.

May 24, 2006: Touristech 2006 and Veronafil

Two intense days made the weekend pass more swiftly than usual. On Friday I attended the Touristech event in Villa Erba and I spent most of Saturday in Verona at the Veronafil philately and numismatics fair.
Touristech is the first event organized by Wireless dedicated to new technologies and digital innovation at the service of the cultural entertainment and hospitality services for tourists. For this meeting they couldn't choose a better location than the beautiful Villa Visconti immersed in the even more beautiful Villa Erba park in Cernobbio. It has been a long time since I had the chance to walk in that park, although I'm often in Cernobbio, and I hadn't remembered how pleasant and relaxing it is. In fact it was the first time I wasn't tired when I got home after a day full of conference presentations instead of what usually happens after the events organized by Wireless in Milan.
One of the moderators didn't forget to mention they shot some sequences of the Ocean Twelve Hollywood movie there. After all the benefits of the presence of George Clooney in his villa in Laglio seem to be much more valuable than works of Luchino Visconti...
The presentations were all very interesting, especially for the fact that the subject matter is the basis of a software project I'm working on together with the exceptional group of people I assembled since the beginning of this year. People always makes the difference in everything and this project is shaping up very well I'd like to say thanks to them actually.
I met Paolo Conti, a journalist of Il Sole 24 Ore, the brilliant moderator of the recent Mobile Force & Office Forum 2006 and we had the chance to talk about the project.
After a morning of presentations by representatives of the major players of the tourism market in Italy, such as Touring Club among the others, the event concluded with a series of interesting case histories of mobile technology applied to outdoor journeys, such as the PDA guide they're experimenting with at the Villa Reale Park of Monza and the PDA guide they currently use at the Swiss National Park.
Then I spent Saturday among the numerous small stands of coins and stamp collectors setup in one of the huge exhibition halls of Verona Fiere. Should I mention this had something to do with the work behind the desktop version of EcPc?
My focus were Eurocoins of course and I had the chance to meet with some kind users from the LaMoneta.it Italian forum, but unexpectedly I came back home with a surprise as much as precious: I managed to recover the Green Vespa, the only Vespa model ever made for the famous Kinder surprise toys series!
I got to know of this particular toy since I read the book Vroom with a view by Peter Moore and I'll certainly have another chance to write more about that.

May 14, 2006: IComo: Patents and Intellectual Property Rights

Patents and intellectual property rights were the subject matter of the seminar organized by the research center Centro Volta related to the IComo: la fabbrica delle idee initiative, a project aimed to promote technology innovation among the local small and medium enterprises. The meeting took place in Villa Olmo, the place chosen for the current exhibition devoted to Magritte, and consisted of a series of presentations by some company representatives and professional consultants involved in the delicate matter of tutelating intellectual property rights and exploiting the benefits and the added value of patents.
The current tendency is to consider a patent not only as a good tool of legal protection for a company's idea or processing method, but also as an internal asset to make business with, a way of thinking Americans already well know and use pretty effectively. Testimonials of this were the representatives of big companies such as ABB and Fiat with its CRF (Fiat Research Center).
From the conference clearly emerged that evaluating the convenience and opportunity of registering a patent is a very delicate matter and requires the support of experts needed to perform a series of studies and researches in order to be able to produce a strong patent, which may serve as an effective protection tool especially for the local small enterprises constantly facing the counterfeiting phenomenon of a now globalized market.
The innovation technology project I'm currently involved with under the direct coordination of the Centro Volta is evaluating these issues and after this seminar I'm even more convinced in the way of registering a patent to tutelate the work we're doing and then make business with, if possible.
Registering a patent instead of maintaining an industrial secret inside a company has both advantages and disadvantages. With a patent your idea is made public but you tutelate yourself for the number of years you're going to do business with. On the opposite think about the Coca-Cola formula for example. They say they didn't patent it so it still remains an industrial secret.
Software is an even more delicate matter if inserted in the patent issue, but that was not discussed in the meeting. The EU Commission is still debating about software patents and since they're considered a big obstacle to innovation, especially by small developers, I suggest you to read about the NoSoftwarePatents campaign.
The conference ended with a funny and smart presentation by a lawyer who gave the audience some significant examples of the way of working in our country compared to the US. They seem to be different planets in this particular matter, not only by the numbers involved.

May 4, 2006: René Magritte in Como: L'Empire des Lumières

Le basier, La saveur des larmes and L'empire des lumières. These are the three paintings by René Magritte which impressed me the most during the visit to the exhibition now taking place in my town, Como. An exhibition that is getting a lot of positive comments both from the critics and from the public and will probably reach and then exceed the number of visitors of the two exhibitions devoted to Picasso (77,000 visitors) and Mirò (70,000) which have taken place in the same rooms of the awesome Villa Olmo in the last two years.
I really liked it and I recommend that you visit the MagritteComo website to get the right directions to come here in Como and visit the exhibition. It will last until the 16th of July.
I spent two hours admiring all of the 80 creations of the Belgian Genius and felt relaxed and enriched when I exited the Villa. I used the word Genius since he refused the title of "artist" preferring the title "thinking man" since he considered himself as someone who communicated his thoughts through painting just as others did using music or writing.
Villa Olmo and its park on the lake is the perfect place to host such surrealist pieces of art. Inside the Villa they used the "Dilumo", which stands for "Dispositivi luminosi mobili" (mobile lightning devices). They're light metal structures covered with the black sheet used in theatrical sets. Every piece is illuminated by optical fibers. That's the only light in the exhibition and contributes a lot to the mysterious atmosphere you feel along the route.
I read some interesting things about the life of Magritte and in particular I recall that he enjoyed inviting groups of friends to show them his latest paintings and play the "title game" to choose the title for them.
Too bad the audioguides you can use along the exhibition route only cover 22 of the 80 pieces. Probably I won't miss the chance to visit it a second time, maybe accompanied by a really knowledgeable real guide!
In my opinion the latest mobile technology could be very useful in this kind of events and in fact it's the subject matter of a project I've been working on since last year. More news about it soon.

April 26, 2006: Top Talent Award 2006

"How did you get to know about the Top Talent Award, Mr. Orlando?"
That was the first question a kind Italian voice asked me when I got a call from Austria's ICNM a few weeks ago. I didn't remember exactly where I read about it, but it was certainly in the news on a website. The Italian representative told me they were having difficulties spreading the word about it in Italy, so any help or suggestion would have been very welcome.
It's a marketing guy's job I think, and that might not be such a trivial task even if you put it in the hands of a professional.
However in the case of my beloved country I also see a certain lack of interest in these kind of events, maybe because of a lack of competition by university students or maybe because we're too busy complaining about the state of our ICT work market to be able to put our creative brains to work and try to make something interesting to compete with other European students... who knows...
In fact from a total of 411 submitted projects there were only 18 participants from Italy. None of them has been selected in any category or even mentioned in the nice printed publication they sent me, but what surprised me the most has been the quality and the number of submissions from Eastern Europe countries. Talk about lack of competition there...
I entered the contest submitting my EcPc including a beta of the desktop version. They didn't have a Pocket PC to test the software so I had to send them my Axim X3 and when they returned it I risked to loose it because some smartass tried to stole it at the post office in Como, really!
The final selections of the jury in the mobile contents category are good projects, but personally I don't find anything special in soccer related management software or in Wi-Fi mapping utilities. That's my opinion of course, the jury evaluated the projects using a number of different criteria.
It's a good contests overall, it's not free, but the organization is much better than most of our similar competitions, so I encourage you to participate if you've something boiling inside your brain... and you have the strength to make it real of course!
You should definitely watch the video recording of the award ceremony they made on March 4th at the "Museumsquartier" in Vienna. It was amazing to watch and hear the thrilled winners commenting their prize and their projects mostly speaking in a not so perfect English. You can almost feel their embarrassment!
Congratulations to the winners then, most of them presented truly amazing projects.
And as Mr. Peter A. Bruck wrote in the introduction of the publication this contest helps in separating excellence from the huge volume of trash in a digital world so full of different contents!

April 18, 2006: Mobile Force & Office Forum 2006

On April 4th I attended the spring edition of the Wireless forums, a mix of business meetings and conferences organized by the Wireless magazine at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Milan. I followed most of the presentations of the section Mobile Force & Office Forum since automating a mobile workforce is a matter tied to one of my software projects. On the whole, the presentations were very interesting and the moderator, Paolo Conti, was a pretty brilliant guy, but the public was not certainly as numerous as the one attending the Wlan Business Forum, a parallel series of conferences focused on Broadband, Wi-Fi and Wi-Max technologies.
In particular I found interesting the Psion Teklogix Mobile Show, actually one hour of live show with funny performances by the Psion Teklogix's technical staff showing the latest barcode and RFID technologies while tracking a shipment from the order to the delivery destination. The scenography they set up was pretty mobile I'd say!
Also interesting was the interview with Funambol's CEO, in which he spoke about the company's history and how they found the necessary financial support in the US and of course he talked about their SyncML opensource software.
In the exhibition area I had the pleasure to talk to the kind staff of Softwork since I'm currently exploring RFID technology applied to mobile devices.
Also I had the chance to get my hands on the new Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone at the Dangaard's booth, the Qtek 8500, alias HTC Star Trek... very, very nice design!

March 30, 2006: Working in Silence Against Information Overloading

A few months passed since the last update to my blog, a period I actually spent working in silence, trying to reach the mental state in which I'd been able to defeat the so-called information overloading, something that can easily affect workers in the ICT sector (and not only them). Also, as I say to friends when ask me why I don't keep my blog updated, it's not easy at all thinking of something interesting to write here.
Now I'm still busy working on the innovation project committed by a local enterprise and coordinated by the Centro Volta. It's going well and I'd like to write more about it, but I'll do it only if I'll get the necessary permissions.
Since the beginning of the year I've also started working on the software project for which I committed a doability study to the Centro Volta last year. I had the luck to involve the right people with the right competence into this project and we're doing very well I'd say, a confirmation of the fact that the people always make the difference. More details about this important project as soon as we'll start testing the prototype among the public.
The last year ended, and the new one began, with a very nice present from Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine. Their Board of Experts voted Euro Coins Pocket Collector QVGA to be among the best in the category Miscellaneous Utilities in the magazine's fifth annual Best Software Awards. As a finalist I joined their 2006 Best of Everything Marketing Program which will grant my software some more visibility. Another award which makes me proud of the work I did to create this software and talking about this I can anticipate that in a couple of weeks I'll start building a new site entirely focused on Ecpc.
Soon then and try to don't get caught by the frenziness of modern life!

September 26, 2005: IComo: The Factory of Ideas

Last Thursday, I attended the IComo: La Fabbrica delle Idee (the factory of ideas) meeting in Villa Olmo, an event organized by the Centro Volta and the Chamber of Commerce of Como and presented as a matching of technology innovation aimed at the local small and medium enterprises who want to innovate exploiting new ideas to be able to remain competitive on their markets.
The subjects of the presentations ranged from robotics and automation to new manufacturing techniques such as MIM (Metal Injection Moulding), but included also a very interesting presentation about RFID technology by a HP representative as well as a brief overview of the future of information technology by Intel which of course included mobile devices.
For me the relationship 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 realization of their innovative idea from both the hardware and software side.
It looks very stimulating, but at the same time we recently completed the doability study for the project I submitted them some months ago and it appears we've already found the right contacts to actually make it real, something that appeared a bit difficult to me at first.
Looks like I'm building a pretty busy schedule for the next months, but that's what I really wanted when I first got in touch with the staff of the Centro Volta, so I can't complaint at all!

September 23, 2005: Reorganizing Thoughts and Things

That's what I actually did in these summer months, reorganizing things in my home-office as well as reorganizing thoughts and relaxing my mind with some very good books to get ready for the incoming busy months.
Among the books I read the most entertaining has been Joel on software, a collection of the writings by Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fogcreek software house, originally posted on his well known 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 lots of passages.
Software development is not like 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 so peculiar.
I also read a couple of very interesting books about personal leadership and human social relationships. Another one was much more related to my work on mobile devices, Windows Mobile Guida Pratica, a beginner's guide about devices with the Windows Mobile OS, written by the Italian friend developer Massimo Mangia.
I met him the last evening here 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 so special when guys like us get the chance to share their views and problems about the work they do with so much passion.
So, a needed pause from actual coding work to save energies and prepare myself for the incoming months which do look very busy. More about that in the next update.

29th July 2005: EcPc Nominated in The Best Software Awards 2005 and Smartphone Version Preview

Yesterday I've been very glad to receive the notification 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 actual category is Miscellaneous Utilities since there wasn't a more appropriate one to include a peculiar 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 Hobby/Educational category in their Software Encyclopedia.
In the meantime I just completed my submission for the Top Talent Award 2005 and I'll be patiently waiting for the outcome of this very interesting European level contest.
Also I'm glad to announce that a beta of the Smartphone version of EcPc, which I actually called EcSp , is up and running on my Motorola MPx 200 and I'd like to invite you to get a look at some nice pics and screenshots in the preview I posted here 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 making the software version up to 1.6 or I'll just release the Smartphone version as 1.5.

16th July 2005: Euro Coins Pocket Collector Second Birthday!

This is a day to celebrate for me and the users of EcPc all around the world since on 16th July 2003 I published the first version of the software, 2 years in which it made me earn a good reputation in the mobile software development arena, although the application aims at a pretty niche market.
The design of the 2 Euro Italian commemorative coin here on the left, celebrating the fifth decade of the World Food Program, actually 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 I put together in the logo at the top of the page needed to produce quality software: 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 then! 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 of course.
At the moment I'm working hard on the Smartphone version of EcPc, leaving the PC version for a September launch with all the bells and whistles.
On last Thursday I attended the award ceremony of the eContent Award Italy in Palazzo Turati in Milan. I did submit EcPc for evaluation, although I haven't been able to send the all the materials required due to the trip to Miami, so it was only mentioned in a rolling presentation of all the projects submitted. They actually selected mostly websites, many of which well worth of 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 wicked than I actually am, but I'd like to share a tip to the creative people, young or not, working on their projects here in Italy: do not limit yourself to a local or national market for your hard work, think internationally since the beginning, otherwise you'll waste your time complaining about the lack of resources, no 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!