iPhone with x-ray vision???

There we are again… I promise (not that you were dying for this..) that I will try and keep this blog space kind of alive from the darkness again!!

So, to start with something interesting, here we are… as you all know, Japan is potentially the most interesting country in terms of mobile usage. I am talking about the actual mobile lifestyle that is alive and kicking in the streets of, say, Tokyo, and the amount of attention the mobile world absorb.

Since the early days of DoCoMo and its venture into the territory of the revenue sharing models, Japan has witnessed a plethora of interesting, useful and appealing services flourishing and landing over the mobile handsets Japanese provide not to have farthest than a meter from their hands… mobile in Japan is not simply technology, but a prosthesis..

Having said all of the above, a company called Tonchidot (team of six…) has created what they called Sekai Camera. A “camera” function that, geotagging your location whilst you literally walk around, provides your iPhone with information about the object/item/monument/whatever you are bashing into it at a given moment…

Fine.. at TechCrunch 50 the audience went off the roof, seemingly..

What sounds slightly complex is the geotagging capability, GPS based, into a supermarket.. still, impressive how six people, highly focused and with a vision, are able to stirr attention this way!!
Lovely, back to the garage?!??!???!

There is always hope…

Asus eee PC… GOT IT!!!! First impression..

It was Saturday.. outside the city wasn’t as busy as usual, yet.. I opened up my fatty 15.4″ laptop and thought.. why not have the little one a go!??!?! My girlfriend saw it some days ago on a magazine, I saw one at the Enterprise 2.0 conference…what the heck, it is just €299, it won’t be all that bad if the thingy is just a blunder… so, I went and hunt for the Asus eee PC!!!!

First, find a place where it was still in stock or sold, as a matter of fact, since hard-to-find tech gadgets make the object itself some sort of an icon straight from day one.. provided the tech-thing is worth the while..

So, I found an Asus Point the other side of town, I jumped into a pair of combats and my boots, girlfriend was fast enough to get the car key in a matter of seconds, shoot out, jump into the Mini and set the GPS up!!

Milan was sort of waking up in a decent sunshine.. spring is almost here, so what’s nicest that have a little, smart, light and fun PC to go out and hunt for WiFi spots??? To be on a beach with nothing to do but sunbathing, I guess, but since we are in town..

Shop was where it was supposed to be, too many people for my liking, but thanks heaven I called before hitting the street, and THE LAST ASUS eee was already booked in my name!!! I could then sit back and relax, waiting for my turn in the cue…

Some ten minutes after, we were outside the shop, holding a smallish box, something like the size of a weekly magazine and a palm thick… the little guy was there, lurking at us from a plastic foil protecting its pale white complexion… back home I let Antonella get the baby out and start playing with it, but after a few hours charge, since the battery was absolutely flat!!

After having spent this waiting in weekly shopping trips, finally the eee went “live”… no more than 30″ and the screen was popping with a start up screen, a matter of seconds to type in name, date, time, the usual stuff and there it was!!!

A nice, tabbed screen with some magic words such as work, entertainment, web, stuff like that!!! So, where to begin???

First.. the overall feeling is of a sturdy little pc, the size of a decent paperback, light as light can be (less than a kilogram..), keyboard is clearly on the small side, and yet is fin to type in, I have to say that I am not really a giant, and my hands are quite small, still, the baby is not made for creating your next trilogy the likes of the lord of the rings, so…

All applications are nicely grouped under “tabs”, the same you have in any decent Web browser… it is all there, ready for you to use! The entire office suite is the Linux version (yep, the entire machine is running on Linux, should you do not know that already!) of OpenOffice, thus dead easy to use, pretty compatible with most of your documents, will do for some work whilst you are out!

Connectivity… the usual Ethernet modem connection which, damn, forces me to wait and try the baby on the web, got a tragic USB modem but, wait… WiFi!!!!! There is a little icon on the bottom left of the tab-screen, why not having a go.. mind you, I still haven’ t got WiFi at home (lazy, waiting to buy an Airport Extreme…), but, eventually, there were some six or seven around.. of which two open, and nicely ranked with an “intensity percentage”… got an87% and bam, there it was, into the Web. Just like that, no configuration of any sort, no hassle, nothing, just hit “connect” after having selected the access point, and wait a few secs..

Firefox was up and running (yep, no configuration, installation, nothing, it is all done for you beforehand!!), fair enough the screen (7″) is not exactly massive, yet it does the job quite nicely.. access speed, downloading and the rest of the web experience were in the norm, so quite fast, not an hiccup, nothing at all.. several kind of web sites, with different graphical layout and “intensity” have been downloaded and rendered without problems.

I wrote some stuff, responded to a few mails, Antonella checked for a new couch on the IKEA site, all in the norm! The baby was there, ready to answer our performance calls!!!

Photo upload was hassle-free… put in your SD loaded with your favourite pictures, click on the “Open” and there you are..

Haven’t tried Skype (pre-loaded…) yet, nor the webcam, but the beginning of the eee era in my flat are pretty fine!!!!

Most interesting feature.. do not know, really, it is the ease of the experience that is stunning, something that could remind me of some tales about the Apple MacBooks and such… the start up time is great, very very fast, battery lasted one day and half of pretty intense usage…

Should you buy it??? As a second PC, something seemingly reliable, packed full with all-you-need-applications, easy to use, WiFi enabled, yes, it is a definite yes!!! As your only machine I would actually think twice about the choice, keyboard too small and some work to do with external storage may hinder the fun!!!

If you bash into it, get the card out and get one!!!!! Your lifestyle as modern, city like chaps will have a boost and, seriously, you won’t pass unnoticed!!!!!!!!!

UPDATE: when I went about the “one day and half” battery life, clearly I didn’t mean that the eee was actually ON for all that time, it meant I used it half of Saturday and the whole of Sunday on and off, doing things for tens of minutes each go.. you know the going..

NOW mobile operators start whinging about being “just pipes”…

Barcelona event is setting up an utterly dynamic environment for each and every mobile user; communication capability dramatically improve in speed and reliability, handsets are becoming the real next-big-thing with their “smart” declination, the outer Web has long since transformed in a social platform able to let you grow, learn, interact and ultimately “be” whomever you like.

In this terribly interesting ecosystemic shake off, mobile operators realise they have been hedged, or rather they are loosing client’s ownership, provided they ever had it…  quite rightly Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone, stated that pundits such as Google or Yahoo have so far delivered a better “mobile experience” than operators’, which is altogether pretty weird, if you come to think to the starting points for both this industry conglomerates..

You know what??? I recall working with some of the big guns in the mobile industry, right at the verge of the UMTS era, say some five years ago, and the overall, consistent, solid approach was along these lines: “the network is my capital, so everyone has to pay to use it”, “clients are topping up and there won’t be much of a market share shake off” and, when presented with service strategy such as the Japanese DoCoMo or KDDI, thus based on an aggressive revenue sharing model (roughly speaking: you provide the service, I put in the network, every penny coming from this wedding will be shared accordingly..), I can still hear the words “no way” resounding all around the room…

Those very shortsighted managers did not even consider the possibility to act and plan in a systemic fashion, thus accepting the fact that the entire industry was not revolving just around “them” but there were some concurrent R&D and marketing strategy that were already shaping the marketplace, absolutely and indisputably well defined. By the way, I have a slide deck dated “2002″ proving the above…

So, now doomsday has come… and clients are slipping through the fingers of mobile operators in terms of “attention” and “equity” perception. The crisp money mobile companies did accumulate in the past years now is merely a remnant of what was once an empire.

Admittingly, that could possibly be slightly harsh and not quite accurate, but the message is all about “expectation”, “relative importance” and “experience”. In this sort of strange equation, users expect from mobile operators to have an always-on pipe, quite likely a fast one (HSDPA/HSUPA as tendency) and that is about the end of it.. ah, nop, one more: all-inclusive tariff plans. End of message.

The experience is about handsets ergonomy and usability (I told them, let me boast this!!!), multiple connectivity opportunity, and all the IP based services you can master, plus the media fundamentals, video-photo-sound, at the highest possible level. The rest (thus the pipe) is commodity, pretty much like expecting light when switching on a lamp..

The Vodafone payoff is “Life is Now”… may I remind that someone said that life is that thing happening whist you are busy doing something else, which is probably the case for some of the mobile execs in the recent past…

Apple is on Air, really!!!!!!!!!!

That time of the year has come, pretty much like xMas, my birthday, the first MotoGP race or the very first swim before summer season starts: MacWorld!!! (One out of the zillion links you may already have…)

The 2008 edition will be remembered possibly for the flashy side of computing, the unbearable lightness of being Apple, the MacBook Air. A thin jewel of hardly 3/4 of an inch max, a featherlight computer… basically a MacBook on diet like, say, comparing Jessica Alba with Kate Moss, without illegal boost, mind you…

I won’t spend more time on it, it is gorgeous, stylish, the ultimate tech fashion statement, nothing all that new when considering Apple, isn’t it???

It is rather interesting the attack Steve Jobs is setting up at the movie industry or, better, how consumer actually USE the movie industry.

iTunes Movie Rentals is going to revolutionise the movie experience.

Rent any movie for 24 hours, choosing from a large collection from majors portfolios such as 20th Century Fox, Universal, Sony, Warner and the rest of the pack, watch it on any device you may like, with obvious preference for Apple hardware (Macs, iPod, iPhone, haven’t read about iTouch…), pay $2.99 or $3.99 and there you go… a thousand titles by the end of February, more to come, and add to the pack some TV shows, concerts, video podcast and some more goodies..

From your couch directly to the smashing flat screen you just bought on sales, your digilife is going to get pampered, boosted, enhanced, whatever!! Isn’t that nice????

This move was somewhat expected, and yet it is quite likely that this will change massively the entire industry approach to entertainment. Also, more significant, it redefines the concept of “ownership” compared to “timely experience”: it is not necessary to own, it is rather more important to experience something. I do not need to “have” everything, to hold it in my safe, I could and possibly will be much more selective, and the entire idea of value could be reorganised.

Clearly, we are talking about movies, really not a cornerstone, but heck, life is a glittery game nonetheless!! See whether Steve Jobs is able to make another miracle, at least for himself and Apple’s shareholders!!!!!!!!!!!!

By the way, nevermind what, in my wardrobe there are no black turtlenecks…

How social are you?? Fast enough??

I have started my blogging experience a little short of a year ago, and I have to admit it has been rewarding and challenging, fun and worrisome, but most of all it has been like a long, unplanned backpacking trip along the roads of social evolution and global changes! And, should you be so nice to have read me all along this time, it is a bless for a curious being the like of myself..

I have started this personal journey when MySpace was one of the coolest place to be in, SecondLife was supposed to position as the next big thing for human interaction and business ventures, one year ago there were articles about how cool is blogging about, the entire 2.0 was an humongous affair encompassing and including the whole of mankind and any aspect derived from it (almost, say…).

Then, I went on holiday in Tanzania, Zanzibar to be precise, and spent a whole week without even thinking about wearing shoes, my feet gorging on white and warm sand and more white and warm sand, my skin crackling into the African sun..let alone considering the World stressed about whether being 1.0 or 2.0 or x.0 at all…

I stepped into a plane, packed full with over-talkative holiday village goers, and slowly but surely I hit the -2° in Milan… a night sleep, on it was the PC the morning after and here it is…

MySpace has been dubbed as “uncool”, nevermind the overall results (incidentally, this drop in page views I saw it first mentioned here, dating back Sept. 11th.. ouch…), SecondLife seems to have trouble in mocking the real world as someone was hoping it would have done (silly, silly, silly!!!), recently the most “real” stuff, money, has been quite regulated and there is no longer that “be there, be rich” sort of approach (something along the lines of the first appearance of the Web in our daily existence back in, say, ‘95), and most of all there is no longer such ranting about “2.0″….

More importantly, CES in Las Vegas has finally completed the transition to a “business-determined” social ecosystem to a “consumer-driven” fabric… I read endless analysis concentrating on how the corporate environment has to mimic the private users dynamics, how important is to accomodate users’ needs, also in technology terms, as to foster a superior working environment, tailored and geared to make the most of each individual working style and “social graph”….

Now, this is the next one you will be pestered about in the coming months: SOCIAL GRAPH.

Six degree of separation, networks, nodes and hubs, this is all making the news, together with complexity theory and chaos.. finally someone have made the point: interconnecting more than a billion people is not as simple as plugging a PC into the socket.. it is a matter of re-defining the social canvass, it is a matter of managing a life of endless information streaming across the planet, it is about one, large, living organism… quite a long time ago I posted about what I called LITO, Living Information Technology Organism.. we may all want to go back and study evolutionary theories instead that SecondLife for Dummies…

Welcome back, I hope a marvellous 2008 for all of you!!! It will be a nice ride, stay tuned!!

Google..MyStuff, RE<C, maps… the Fantastic Duo wants to save our lives!?!?!

In Mountain View it seems that saving the World is currently taking a whole new meaning and a boost.. Google declares its intention to launch a “green” initiative, called RE<C or “Renewable Energies cheaper than Coal”, which should be supported by spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” to hire engineers and experts to study the issue and find a likely solution, first and foremost to cut down the company internal energy bill and, how kind, to distribute the amassed knowledge to the rest of the “common people”..

Furthermore, it is today’s news that the company is planning to launch a service called My Stuff (courtesy of Corriere della Sera and Wall Street Journal), which basically is a remote archiving capability, pretty much like the Yahoo service, but with easier access dynamics and, arguably, a significant amount of free space. Access to My Stuff should be allowed to any user terminal, from desktop to mobile phones and PDA, provided there is an Internet connection at hand, whether this will be supported by Wi Fi, cellular 3G networks (UMTS or HSDPA) is not further specified. Clearly, the service itself is a nice add, there may be issues on how to handle data privacy and compliance to different country regulations, also the Web connectivity is a plus and a drawback (poor coverage in some areas, connection that may go down, no connection at all – e.g. on airplanes – but I trust those issues have been or will be tackled accordingly. Personally, if I want to have infos always with me, I may want to use a multi gigabyte pen-drive, or a SD card, again it depends on the planned usage of the data…

Are those Google chaps going a bit too far, or really we may end up having a small, real small bunch of ICT players, a sort of super power-houses to serve us all???

I still have a Moleskine in my drawer with the most sensitive infos…

Vista, XP and that Apple over there…

As it seems, there are these days plenty of research, papers, articles and talks, a seamless flow of words about Vista and its inadequacy for the enterprise environment…

ComputerWorld US, leveraging an ad-hoc research (here), suggested that 90% of research participants are sort of worried about migrating to Vista, and 53% has no intention whatsoever to do so in the short time… the interesting bits are about 44% considering an alternative OS to Vista, and 28% quite keen in having an Apple environment around, which is a stunning statement considering Cupertino has never made such a great entry into the corporate environment..

Quite nicely added by someone else, Microsoft is releasing the Service Pack 3 for XP, which is supposed to boost performance for the old and stable (I thought it was already messy, but heck..) OS by a nice 10%. Apart from detailing what is all about this 10%, the argument is: why on Earth I have then to change over to Vista!?!?!? The panel, despite being 900+ strong, may not be significant in statistical terms as to pinpoint a flex in OS adoption trend, nevertheless, it is worthwhile considering it.

As for the home environment… I have searched the Vista-to-XP downgrade guide and it is now in my possession…

Call me six feet under!!!! Milan tube network cellular coverage is starting, just in time for the Expo 2015??

Mobile comms are such a great stuff, ever-changing, sooooo cooooool.. you can be connected with the rest of the World, either yours or the outer one, anytime, anywhere… hang on a sec… up until today, there was a place where you could have been safe from being pestered, a place that was able to act as the perfect excuse for all your pressing people and their calls: the tube!!! Six feet under got a new, beautiful meaning, an oasis of peace and tranquility..

Today, busy-bee Milan town centre boasts the first cellular coverage of its tube network, albeit between two fairly trafficked station, but a nice starting point for the coverage of the entire system, just in time to boast that achievement as a “must have” looking forward to the Expo 2015 candidature (Smirne won’t have it, I bet!!!!!!!!!!!).

As stated, today it is possible to call, text message and browse the Web using up to UMTS connectivity, whilst HSDPA should be available by the end of December at 1.8Mbps to rise up to 3.6Mbps within the first few months of 2008.

Pretty nice, huh????!??! Now I believe there should be some public courses on “using your mobile in the Tube” etiquette… by the way, in Tokyo it is clearly marked not to bother other passengers with your silly calls..so, most Japanese tube commuters go for mobile Internet at full blast!!! Or, in case of pretty impolite fellow travelers, you may want to use a portable cell jammer (sample here!!!!!)…

You never know..

Please, would you Kindle drop down that book??

Technology is, clearly, a never-ending race or, as someone put it nicely, “Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born” (yep, Alan Kay, to be precise..), so it seems unavoidable that someone will try (again) to invent, re-invent or envision a bit-and-byte device to substitute all those heavy, environmental unfriendly, space-wasting and, heck, dust collectors called books!!!!! When that innovation-evolution-revolution comes from the very company that made the book itself one of the most rewarding business items on the Planet, an appropriate and bias-free thought is due. Bezos and his Amazon announces the creation and launch of Kindle, the ultimate reading machine..

First, a reading on Newsweek for the “Bezos’ pensiero“, aka his philosophy and the fundamentals behind this tech launch.. I let you go over the detail and the tech specification of the object (notably a sleek, whitish piece of tech… anyone??!?!?), whilst I would like to focus on a couple of remarks.

It has been made a comparison between the digitisation of other media, such as music and video, and for argument’ sake I may question that music went from a vinyl-based experience, enhanced through the years via superior playing and sound amplification capability, to a CD-based reproduction and lately to the full digital mp3 (and Bros..). Vinyl and CD has got roughly the same “playing liturgy”, whilst the mp3 family goes back to replicate and enhance the “walkman” style (a walkable substitute of vinyl via cassettes..), gaining in music storage space / handling and output quality. Bottom line: the acts, the experience of the user was similar to the ol’ days, gains were mainly in space, music library “management”, and quality of output. Then, if in a rainy and cold day you put on a vinyl of Nina Simone or the digitalised version of it, pretty much the same (someone would argue vinyls were more “alive” than the perfection of CDs..). Video goes pretty much along the same lines, better picture, easy storage and management, and the rest.. experience is again fairly similar in its inner procedures, the actual liturgy!

Now, the book… could we say it is an entirely different matter??? You do your thinking, but I believe there are more “senses” involved to make the experience invaluable, the liturgy about reading a book and using an eBook is to me entirely different. One point to the book to this one.

On the other hand, as posted in other occasions, it is not a matter of being a “systematic” user of the new Kindle, but rather finding the own critical way of putting it into our personal technology mix. Do you love to read your Chatwin novels but simply browse and use business books??? Is it great for you to have all those quantum mechanics reference texts in the backpack but you are not the size of a Canadian lumberjack?? There you go.. Kindle does the trick!!

Let me put it in a different way… today Milan has got a wintery set up, sky is grey and kind of rainy, it is cold.. I would love to sit in a comfy armchair, a superb cup of coffee to sip and a nice BOOK to read… now, incidentally I am at work, I have to prepare a presentation to deliver with my speech at the School of Business Administration in Turin, it is about Digital Ecosystems and Professional Networks, I may want to read a few things and would love to go and SEARCH on my Kindle about, say, “metaverse” and “business”… I can browse and access to knowledge, I could potentially link together the power of Internet (reference, information..) with the batch-approach to info-digestion a “kindle” would provide: I find, buy and read when needed, off-line.. cool..

Experience is something complex and multifaceted, we live multi-experience lifestyles, and it would be utterly restrictive to believe there won’t be differences anymore in one’s daily activities… there will be a time for a book, there will be also a time for Kindle, for some those will converge and melt into something new, for others there will always be two separate and rewarding experience nonetheless.

Difference and divergence still make the difference, after all, every innovation stems out from someone diverging from status quo…

UPDATE: you may want to browse through this “live performance”… and do not forget to click and jump to the Amazon site, there is the new born baby in all its glory!!!!

Google Android won’t land in Italy

It may be just marketing, as someone said, it may be a strange and more appealing form of crowdsourcing, nevertheless Google has launched a massive, global and rich contest for the best apps developed over (for???) Android. It will be a stunning (for me, at least!!) $10 million … Great!!! The best developers, the most edgy geniuses worldwide will squeeze their brains and type like hell to deliver the most incredible array of mobile applications (sort of, say..). Everybody apart from the beautiful minds of Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan and Myanmar. That is the club of the thug nations, as it seems. PLUS ITALY AND QUEBEC!!!!!!!!!

It is not the case that “pizzaioli” and lumberjacks are on the list of public enemies, but the two countries are out of the contest for some local legal boundaries… the Italian case here is about

• prizes that must be assigned in presence of notary public and representatives from consumer associations;
• prizes that are not delivered for any reason must be donated to non profit organisations, pre-listed on the contest rules;
• the contest has to be registered, via a truck-load of papers, to a couple of different Ministries in Italy and the State Monopoly….

which, ultimately, build up a nice barrier to an initiative that cannot (I assume) cope with “State” but it is geared, tailored, designed and aimed at speeding up a business issue and create innovation of some sort…  so, Italians are out.. apart from the opportunity someone would have had to gain some money and popularity, the entire Italian IT community and the country itself would somewhat benefit (in terms of “innovative” brand, so to speak) from a local developer in the winner list for such an appealing forward-looking project in a fast paced tech environment… and now I would like to read again that Italy is one of the most advanced mobile communication markets worldwide, maybe after Japan and Korea…

Sky, customer care and Web TV!!!

The weather is turning cold… this morning for the first time I wore gloves and the air was clear and crisp.. fine, another season, other things to do!! And, forecasting frosty evenings and no intention whatsoever to go out in Milan (apart the odd concerts or exhibitions..), me and my girlfriend finally decided to go and get that “satellite” thing once and for all… Sky, the (in)famous satellite broadcaster, was out with a nice offer, a full blown trial at €15 until February ‘08, after which you have to decide the bouquet of your likings.. perfect!!!

As soon as we called in, stating that yes, that was of some interest to us, the nice operator from the Sky call-centre promptly charged our credit card for a €69 one-off charge or something along this line… WHAT???!?!?! We haven’t seen a mere glimpse of a set top box, a smart card, a satellite dish, a technician, let alone the buzz of hundreds of channels and you charge me already??!?!?!!?

A deep breath and some zen exercise after, my other half called in… an half-hour of operators’ bowing and apologies… we end up with an appointment, a hefty helping of “I am sorry, cannot make the reason behind that occurrence…” and there we were, all happy about “Extreme Makeover Home Edition”, “Gray’s Anatomy”, “The incredible sex life of the Southern Pole penguins” and such amenities… I took a couple of hours off work this morning to welcome the chap with the dish, I have pestered the landlord to give us access to the roof, I sat on the sofa and stared to an already old, aged, paleolithic TV show on my LCD, anticipating the time it could finally manifest its glory with a decent program from the National Geographic.. and the cold shower hit!!!! Nobody at the door, no long awaited “ring ring”, nothing at all, deep space silence!!! The matter was???? They (call centre operators I believe..) cancelled the contract, for an unspecified reason.. I am closing the options to utter incompetence, total inaccuracy, lack of professionality, inability to digit, plain stupidity…. (I am often involved in speaking at IDC conferences and the magic words “client”, “centric”, “customer”, “care” are amongst the most uttered.. how this is translated into “facts” is hard to fathom, sometimes…)

I began to steam with indignation, then I realised that there was something I entirely forgot!! Web TV!!!!!! Which, on top of everything else, is a nice excuse to go and buy another laptop…

So, the choice may not be exactly the same, but heck, if I try and put together Joost, Miro, try on Babelgum, I should be pretty much sorted out, also considering that there is always YouTube, at least nine others terrestrial TV channels, DVDs aplenty, eMule (ehm, ehm..), plus anything else you may want to go and search on the Web. I will have a nice HDMI/sVideo/blahblah-enabled PC, and my digital vision will be up and running in a matter of minutes… I am wandering if all of the above will suffice my lust for TV shows (?!?!?!?!?!?!) or whether I really have to pay someone so incredibly customer-unfriendly to define my eves entertainment?!?!?!

Someone of you could also add “C’mon, get a life!!”, comment that I take with the utmost consideration and, as such, this eve I will go and enjoy the MAD in Milan, then will hit the gym for a kickboxing session … life is brighter than the Sky, sometimes!!!!!!!!!!!

Creative Zen: an usage update!!

It seems that the Creative topics yield a certain interest to some of you, thus here we are, after something like a month or so intensive usage…

First and foremost, I bought the screen protection, since the player goes into my messenger bag, coat pockets, on the beach and whilst doing my gym sessions… pretty cool stuff, it looks a bit “foggy” when inactive, whilst the screen performs perfectly well when browsing around the menu or watching a movie.

Movies… I had “This is England” (pretty cool movie, by the way..) on the player, and was forced to watch it in three instances… the visual experience is better than expected, albeit the screen has got some “pixel shading” problem, but heck, you do not want to use the Creative to have a superior movie machine but to waste some time in a more than decent way!! Job done, then. Easy to manage thanks to an “in application” menu (top right button), you may want to stretch the image to “full screen” to enjoy the entire width of the LCD..bit of image distortion, but I guess it is function to the original format the movie was encoded. Sound is perfect, I have changed the original Creative earphones with a Sennheiser OMX 50 VC, due to an useful (whilst gym training) ear clip, but the sound quality was full and rewarding with the Creative set as well, partially due to the customisable equalisation.

The movie upload was straightforward, and codec conversion was handled by the player: open the Media Explorer, fetch the movie, the player communicates it needs to be converted, you click and go minding your business, in a not-too-short while the movie is ready to be uploaded. Done. Enjoy.

Easier than this is the actual songs and playlist management. Not a worry, not a problem, apart from building up the playlist when uploading different songs of the same author from a downloaded collection: you may want to “playlist” the entire collection as to have it played as a whole, which would not be if left into the normal storage of songs: by author, album, genre and so forth.

Playback is perfect, there is an automatic album cover function that will display the cover next to title, author, time left (also supported by a nice progress bar underneath) should you have the embedded info into the download. Whilst listening to mp3 you are able to switch back into other menus without loosing the actual track, something you cannot do whilst listening to the FM radio. With the top-right menu button you play with the song, see artist details, set the track into a playlist, delete if it is absolutely abysmal..  Switching through menus and functions is as fast as a blink, really, nevermind the player is packed full with stuff or almost empty.

The FM is a straightforward affair. The Creative has got some  32 preset stations, which you can clearly change at your liking: press firmly the right part of the central button and the player will go into a granular airways selection, find your favourite FM, top right menu and set it as preference, choose the station number and there you are! Signal clearness is a touch better than the old Creative Zen V Plus I have got.

Whilst listening to your favourite tunes, either in FM or mp3, you may want to browse or slideshow your photos, which you have downloaded in the usual, dead easy way: browse via Media Explorer, choose your “victims” and there you go, upload into the Creative.

Since I have used the 4Gb almost in full, I will play a bit with an SD card to see how the entire thing actually work, but given the icon “Memory Card” into the main menu, I trust the ease of use will be respected!!! Also, if you plan to upload songs and similar from other than the PC you installed the Creative first, you better take care of creating a partition of the flash memory to be used as external drive memory.. otherwise any PC will see the Creative, but won’t be able to use it at all.. this is as far as I went, some amongst you may have further infos or a totally different indication, most welcome to add to the post!!!

By the way, you may want to customise the appearance of your Creative… “System” icon, customise the display.. I personally have chosen the black skin, which comes with a nice orange progress bar and a little purple line at the top… your call anyway!!

Battery life is pretty good. After a full charge, I managed to listen to music and play FM radio for, say, four days of pretty decent usage, four or five hours.. I still have not reached the 25 hours exhaustion (I charged the player before it shut down) as stated into Creative’s website, but admittingly you do not have to worry much when playing music. Same thing apply when watching a movie.. no problem with a full charge.. I started to watch the movie I had with, say, half of battery life displayed and the movie (1h35′ roughly..) missed the last 5′ (bummer!!!)..

Altogether, despite not being able to head-on compare the Creative with an iPod Nano or similar, I must say the experience is rewarding, the ease of use is really one strong plus (I am a fairly skilled tech user, not real geek but not all that dork either… ), it impresses me the fact that the Creative slides immediately into your lifestyle as if you have ever had it.

A nice companion, which I will stick to for a while, I believe!! Recommended?? Most definitely, and the 4Gb is a steal for the retail price tag it has!!

An Android and Google meets the market (with an Asimov flair!)

Here it is.. the long awaited move Google was expected to make to enter the mobile communication industry is clear on the chessboard… albeit somewhat odder than forecast..

Android will land on Earth, and everyone may benefit from meeting the creature… So far, the Open Handset Alliance, the other outer-space creation to build up the perfect landing spot for Android (check here) has signed up companies such as KDDI and NTT DoCoMo, Telecom Italia and Telefonica, T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel. The masterplan is focusing on development, or how to spread the software development kit to anyone interested as to increase the apps production and, basically, the service level required to appeal to already-in-the-know 21st Century customers, which are the less loyal bunch of buyers in the World ever! Yep, ’cause Android is a software platform to build apps upon and not the longed handset the market was murmuring about!!

Mind you, the entire operation resounded of ol’ skool iMode market entry… I give you (developer) the technology, you develop, we share some of the revenue, I own the network and the billing process.. a fairly simple business model aimed at expanding the user base, and it led companies to sign up in 2002 millions of users in a matter of a quarter.. a win-win position…

However, open means.. open, and there are already a number of OS environments in the mobile space Android has to fight for market share and yet are necessary to create a community-based approach: nobody in my peer group, regardless of handset/software/OS has to be cut off from experiencing “me”. So, superior applications, nice features, potentially new handsets and an “ecosystemic” compatibility to ensure global communication capability… Hopefully the Android will follow the Three Laws..

Becoming a “de facto” standard, the most wanted, the sought-after will fit the bill only partially.. there is still the carrier side and the tariffing issue to sort out.. nobody apart from some tech enthusiasts will jump on using Androids apps if the experience is too costly and it reprises some “already seen” features or capability.. beware of the “communication overload” after the “information overload”.. never outguess the market, never..

On the other hand, having the “imprimatur” of carriers and handset manufactures could do a great deal towards positioning Android and its application portfolio into users’ habits set.. the issue is whether maximising the return in the short term or bet on a longer lifecycle and thus aim at permeating the marketplace.

Google generally wants to change the World and make money in the process, I would expect a “farming” strategy to start with.. Steve docet, Apple’s everywhere, you have to face it in any possible digital space, sometime you win, other times you loose, but the battle is against a set enemy.. Google would possibly follow suit, and move from solving a problem to provide an experience.

Whether you like it or not is up to you.

IMF crucifies IT, the source of all evil!!

So much for the evolution of society towards a tech-aware, 2.0, whatever eSociety.. the IMF, in its World Economic Outlook 2007, stated that Information Technology and its ecosystem are the fundamental cause of World’s inequality (here an excerpt..).

There is here an interesting (!!!) theory about globalisation, free trade, financial flows (Foreign Direct Investments) and technology. In short, but you may want to go into deeper details here, PDF version) it is stated that globalisation is, overall, reducing inequality due to a diverse effect combination of free trade (which is a positive impulse to evolution) and a rather not-so-positive FDI (which eliminate some diversities albeit augmenting some turbulence in the countries originating the FDI flows). The reduction in inequality should be better translated into an income rise amongst the (once??!?!? please..) poorer part of the World population, whereas inequality is, whoops, actually rising due to … technology!!

Lots of articles and commentaries have addressed the issue, from Financial Times to The Register, and yet I believe nobody has ultimately pointed out a major factor: technology divide may be a more likely suspect, a better one than tech itself.

FDI flows go to countries that, for a number of reasons, are more attractive than others to investors, and unfortunately this fact cannot fully exploit a real, global organisation of production, wealth, innovation, evolution. China and India are attracting a severely different level of FDI, both in terms of origin (around 60% of Chinese FDI comes from what has being called its “diaspora”, and investments are capital intensive and with – relative – low tech level, 70% of Indian FDI measure comes from Western countries and includes a strong level of technology transfer – courtesy of S. Majumber on The Hindu Business Line on IFM data) and, again, usage: Chinese production vs. Indian services. First point: is the country economic and social development plan that drives inequality within the country, not really the FDI or the technology.

Tech is a first and foremost a fabric, a neural system upon which building up, is an energy source enabling further advances. If this energy is “held in hostage” by a small fraction of any given country, it is not a tech “genetic” fault, isn’t it? Extend this at macro-geographic level and it may still apply.

The actual chasm between deployment and usage of tech resources determines the inadequacy of a given country system to compete in a given “scenario”. What it should be important to notice is the fact that there are multiple scenarios to fit in, and the combination of all scenarios are making up the “global wealth”. Therefore, as far as providing “living energy” for the Planet (since we are talking about globalisation..) is the main task, we all need a China (with less pollution maybe??) and we need an India. We need tech and we need plough. Question is about how to rightly value both.

Capital flows are not actually designed to improve a country systemic wealth, or a macro-geography systemic advance, but generally serve the purpose of few “actors”, and capital moves around to foster any potential mid term return. To ignite technology in a system is the easiest way to foster a mid term return, it is like a steroid cure for the weakest, that seldom conduct to long term gains if the cure is not supported by a targeted and systemic distribution of the new “booster”. Again, it is about the divide and not the tech itself.

Someone, guess it is the FT columnist, argues that on a global scale inequality is certainly shrinking, I am questioning whether this is a statistical statement, which clearly encompass a massive rise of rich limited portions of a country population and a significantly larger grouping still feeding the former with brute manpower….

And on we could go… bottom line is there still are three, if not four “planet Earth” on the same celestial object we all inhabit and whether there are rich or poor nations and people it is not because of technology, which ultimately the human race has developed and still control, but it is about the stronger against the weaker, it is about profit and power, not about bytes and IT services.

Plauto, a latin author of III century B.C, gave us “homo homini lupus”, which Hobbes transformed in a castle of thinking, and Shakespeare, in his Julius Caesar, made Cassius pronouncing “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Have a thought.

Loopt and your whereabouts on display.. why???

I have been reading an article, courtesy of the Italian “Corriere della Sera”, about the advent of GPS based localisation services in USA, nothing new to be honest, and the consequent ramp up within the youngsters.. for a mere $2.99 a month, everybody connected to services from Loopt and Helio Buddy Beacon may actually be seen and found over a GPS-enabled map… OK, fair enough, you do have the possibility (how kind..) to decide who can map you down (try and say “no” to your wife/husband or girl/boyfriend..) but nonetheless other “someone” will always know your whereabouts…

How hard will it be to ask and answer to the question “Where the …. are you???”. Not too long since the power of disconnection will hit the roads..trust me!!!

Hang around and work in Japan!!

Creativity is such an overrated word these days, but sometimes it is more than applicable to everyday’s touch of genius.. This is, roughly, the situation (courtesy of Joy Ito): youngsters in Japan have become some sort of hang-around-and-see-what-happen group, with very little inclination in sorting our their lives and hunt for the proper job, standard life.. the World is mutating so fast, life is a big swirl of occurrences and possibilities and, as the drunken man leaning on a lamp post with his home key in the hand and “if the world is swirling sooo fast, sooner or later my home will pass from here”, they wait and see, doing almost nothing.

So, some businesses may have trouble in finding a decent workforce, or even a workforce altogether… so, the sparkle of genius comes in.. you may know this already, I did not (cannot have a God-like, all-embracing knowledge.. can I???), but here it comes Otetsudai Networks (if you have any Japanese language skill click here)!!!!

The “thingy”, run by Mr Sunagawa, basically puts together demand and offer, nothing new, here but, wait..

Say you need someone to help out your car-wash given the recent sandy rain..you hit ON, in which you put down your request (someone to help washing cars for four hours….), people that are connected (subscribed) to ON will actually see you ads, and will apply to the “position”, if they want, if they need some cash, if they have some spare time, if, if, if…. Now the icing on the cake.. people will be on GPS, thus will see and will let you see the entire picture: where is the job, how far from my position, and for you how many people applied, how far they are and which sort of experience they may have…(in washing cars, yep, you know..). This “referral” is actually applied also to the job advertiser (how good the owner-manager is, the pay, the actual workplace…).

You choose the right chap/lady, and there you are, problem sorted for the car-wash and some cash changes hands, allowing the kiddie to spend it, and having it circulating, and so, and then, and the rest…

Why it is interesting?? Clearly it makes the most of the tech available: mobile networks, GPS, some Web 2.0 features (mashing up sites with location-aware information), the amazing array of mobile devices scattered allover the place (and people living in full symbioses with them..ring any bell, Italy???), but most importantly it is designed after analysing in full details a young tribe that is populating a modern city, the service has leveraged a modification of the social canvass to deliver a win-win solution for all parties involved. Most effective I dare say, and without starting a social debate on temporary jobbing, the condition of the youngest in large urban conglomerates and blah blah, but solving a rather simple equation: problem, solution (in this case good enough..). Add to the recipe some flexible work regulation (I believe..), and above all acceptance of social changes and there you are, a modern city-society problem solving activity. No questioning on whether this is good or bad, and furthermore that is private and not governative (who cares…), if it solves a problem or augment recrudescence, I am just stressing the effectiveness of social and urban tribes analysis. With very little talk on innovation, evolution, case studies, round tables and so forth.. it has been simply done.

Would like to see it happen closer to home..

iPhone, then GooglePhone, now what? The iSkyphone???

Nevertheless, here is another contender!!! Skype wireless phone is going to be launched “by late October” in Europe.. considering that most EU citizens, and most of all Italians are “mobile based” rather than PC-based, I guess this could be a “see-what-happen” kind of situation. The phone will be equipped with a “Skype” button (something along this line..) which should trigger a proprietary application, developed by iSkoot (sounds very much like a viking word, which is all the best for a mobile company..), that will magically connect the little thing with the immense Skype friends’ community everyone’s got these days..

The fact that will be under the “3″ umbrella, as already cited into the BizWeek article, should actually lead to a rather complicated tariffing scheme, like you have to call your favourite number in New Caledonia more than once a day to get a 15% rebate on each and every SMS you send to people more that 250Km away that, ultimately, will build up against your free calls to… ….. ….

Still, it is a nice option, as if we didn’t have aplenty already, into the “mobile experience” slaughter arena…

More to come (I am afraid!!!!)

A day at SMAU!

Just back from SMAU… right, what the heck is SMAU, for those of you that are not Italian??? Simply, that is (should be..) the largest, most famous and historical ICT exibition / convention in Italy, held in Milan and generally in October. The event went through a roller-coaster, somewhat hard times: it once was the reference for anybody in IT (ICT, later..), it was submerged by schoolboys in desperate quest for the latest gaming/pc/whatever cool gadget from, say, end of ‘90 to mid Naughties, then went a bit downhill and then, supposedly, resurged in the last couple of days.. supposedly, as to avoiding the screaming hordes of hormonal youngsters crazy for bytes and bums (companies’ stands swarmed with hostesses..), SMAU became a business-only game… quite sad indeed, to be honest..

The excitement buzz was lost, no perception of technology riding the tidal wave of innovation, no feeling that ICT was out of the basement and into everyone’s house and life… it is back to be a trite and sparkless affair for boring attempted-pin stripes suit wearers … nevertheless, I went.

Scope was to attend a conference (more a workshop as it turned out to be..) on Web 2.0 business opportunities…

A good two-and-a-half hours blew in the wind of Second Life and geomarketing “a la GoogleMaps”… incredibly boring, to be honest, particularly for a couple of issues:

• the SL part, albeit well documented with infos and numbers from the usual sites, including Second Life Insider and KZero, was poorly organised as to give out some new insights on what is business in/with/via SL (if any.. ) and focused on the end user experience guideline (how to fly, why to fly and some other amenities..).. the only biz remark was about the SL potential to extend relationships and create some sort of improved customer care, supposing your customers are actually in..
• nobody stressed the cultural impact of approaching SL to enhance and empower the organisation, that including training, virtual conferencing, interactive product / feature demonstration, workgrouping and so forth.. in a country (Italy) where it is scarcely adopted even the “remotisation” of a workplace, or at least is not as widespread as it should be, I trust it will be hard to explain your boss “I am actually working..” when interacting with a fish called Wanda …

Plus, there were some other statements and pearls of wisdom which I thought were superfluous for those already within a VW and totally out of place for those who are not yet in (remarks included something along the “people buy stuff for the avatars and not something to take back to real world..” lines).. the approach was either druidic or “we and the Others” kind of patronising tone. A big no-no altogether.

There was a nice notation on all of the above: the absolute high percentage of female attendees in the audience. Now, before you start with pub-style comments, it is interesting to notice how an usually male populated area (girls, IT WAS boooooring !!!) today was sort of 50-50.. you give this a nice explanation, I believe it could be due to information technology being increasingly embedded into everyone’s life, with some cool declination quite recently and, more importantly, it is no longer a technical affair but it could well be placed amongst the “humanistic” topics…. (which I rather..)

The interesting presentation from Microsoft about its Virtual Earth application was somewhat too quietly digested by the attendees, I was expecting a rain of questioning, how that could go against Google Thingy(es) and similar amenities, whilst all went out with a mild clapping of hands, unheard it went in the overall buzz-chatty sound of the hangar-like compound SMAU is in..

Some missing companies: Microsoft itself, nobody from the mobile comms industry apart from RIM and Telecom Italia (partly mobile, ok…), none of the networking giants (Cisco and bros..), PC manufacturers went AWOL apart from IBM and a neighbour such as Lenovo, absolutely nobody from the Web 2.0 industry, whatever that may be… if someone of the above was around, either its stand was real tiny or it was placed nearby the toilet area, which I did not explore at all.. furthermore, gadgets were horrible, I ended up with a c@#p yellow yo-yo… poor me, what a day…

So, end game was not so exciting as I supposed it could be, and that is remarkably sad, considering the wealth of innovation and buzz that is going on today all over the World.. and that is scary, for you need to have a stronger grasp and a better picture of ICT as the main change agent at your disposal today, if you want to have an healthy country system, ready to ramp up. I better go to my feed reader and see what is going on…somewhere else??!?!

MySpace loud voice will be heard above the Sky(pe)!!

The very concept of value got an entirely different meaning since the planetary explosion of the Internet phenomena, insofar “value” was increasingly linked to “users” or, more disgustingly put, “eye balls”. Then came the day in which the old World ruler, Money, claimed back its throne and there it was, the Internet bubble….

Slowly but surely, the old remnants of the Internet started to morph and mesh, evolve, develop into new, unprecedentedly seen permutations and those are called the Web 2.0 days, in which the concept of value, again, moved towards more alluring shores, Community and Social Network (again an elegant permutation of “eye balls” to some). This being the present era, it is quite understandable that champions arise and fall, alliances are made and demolished.. and in this context the once-independent Skype, the ever-so-famous “open communication” platform, was bought by the other ever-so-famous eBay, the everyone’s favorite auction site, in the attempt to breed a super-champion (as if we were talking about Varenne…). The attempt failed.

But persistence is a quality not to be overlooked and there we are, another super-breeding exercise on the run: Skype and MySpace, another ever-so-famous social networking site, are somewhat beginning the preliminaries..

This could make some sense, since both companies are involved in the communication arena with a “social” flair.. minor hiccups are found in the presently not so strong (as before) market positioning of both, once the undisputed rulers today are at the most part of an oligarchy..

Whether the voice capability added (going to be added..) to MySpace will revamp the social site, which has experienced a significant drop in visits, pageviews (-20%!!), and a bunch of other variables (data from Compete, August 07 vs. July07…), and more importantly whether users will like to add another way of communicating (also considering that, as it seems from other Compete analysis, MySpace users tend to stick with the site or eventually to drop off altogether and move away – possibly from the social networking two big contenders, the other one being Facebook?!?!?!) .. is it something like the incoming diatribe between convergence-divergence, in this case meaning “I will use the appropriate communication medium (and intensity) according to the people I am interacting with??”. MySpace’s fundamentals were about profiles, bits of digital life gathered for others to see, and with a sort of near real time communication.. if that has to be enhanced by adding voice to the mix I found it quite debatable. Then again, I trust someone have been playing quite thoroughly with the Web tribes concepts…

PS So, why not adding voice capability to avatars, and the possibility to run a sort of “avatar multi-conference” as to interact with several other “Us”??!??! Endless possibility, but heck, do not beat the drums too early!!!

Wii rules!! Nintendo got up on blue chip ranking!!

Some posts ago, we discussed over the impact of the different gaming experience Wii was bringing in the marketplace.. now that experience translated in a shower of dollar (yen..) for Nintendo. The company, as presented, surpassed the 10 trillion yen mark (how many “zeros” in a trillion!?!?!?!), thus becoming the third in market capitalisation at the Japanese stock exchange, joining the Toyota-Mitsubishi UFJ couple in a elitist club of the “amazingly large companies”…

Now, and considering that those numbers are 80% above Sony’s, as stated, we should appreciate that attention economy, users’ tribes and experience are somewhat fairly fundamental keywords for effective World domination… that provided you are able to discount the “innovation” factor and have build up a nice and smooth self-reinforcing product upgrade strategy.. than, there is something else that comes into play, called “retaliation strategy” which is a factor few managers I have met are able to factor into their cunning plans..

Christmas is approaching, more to come I believe!!!

Creative!!! Got it!!

I have finally decided, or better I have been behaving like usual, the impulse buyer in me got hold of my synapses and the credit card and I bought a Creative Zen, 4Gb..

I played with the new baby last eve, and I am pretty happy about it!

The Creative software suite has been extended to include a media “player” to sort out in a number of ways all the songs that are segregated into at least three different directories and over three partitions and two drives…worked out fine (and should clean up my PC…).

Also, dead easy as usual to choose and load the Creative with hundreds of songs, quite easy to combine and sort out playlists, very intuitive particularly if you have already got a Creative player (I have a V plus), same thing apply for the on-board menus and functions.

Nice and captivating interface, simple to navigate and get to the actual media of your interest: player, FM radio, photo, video… this is the most interesting feature or, at least, the one I was sort of interested, as to cope with some tube delays, railways hiccups or simply utter silly fun… the 2,5″ screen does its job perfectly, and the player has also got an internal codec converter which, albeit not at lighting speed, has put over the Creative an original language version of “This is England”, which I will enjoy at a later stage.. I do not go over all the system settig details, equalizer and so forth… all there for you to enjoy..

Altogether, and considering that the entire stuff set me back of about €150, it is a pretty good going! Ah, forgot to mention, the Zen has also got an expansion slot for SD / SDHC cards, which brings up the overall memory capability to a theoretical max of 36Gb (since Toshiba has announced a 32Gb SDHC …. ). However, plenty of room for anything you want!!! Light, handy and sleek, tends to get smudged a little bit, a silicon cover could be a nice add (nice, sort of..) (get the black one…) and would also avoid some of the scratches the player may get whilst into my messenger bag fully packed!

I still have to play a full movie and see whether the declared 5hrs of video playback are actually there or else, nonetheless the first few hours with the Creative are pretty cool!!!!

Virgin Radio and the old “Jump”, Van Halen… have to go..!!!

UPDATE: for those of you that may be interested, here is the review I did on Cnet, together with the other users’ comments!!

Wi Fi in the Park, and Milan goes on air..

You all know that I am not staggeringly in love with Milan, which I believe is somewhat living and pretending way above its current status of second-tier European city, however, “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” and there we are.. there is, for the not-in-the-know, a lovely park in the middle of the city, Parco Sempione, which should actually be considered as the local version of NY Central Park or London’s Hyde Park (sort of..), and it is packed full with the usual fauna of joggers, mums with going-to-be-famous babies, some execs and other city parks’ paraphernalia. The whole community will enjoy the beauty of Wi Fi connection across the park!! Well, most of the park…

There is a “strategically positioned” antenna over the Torre Branca, sort of in the middle of the park, and some smaller antennas in four other location. The tricky part is the access, which is actually going via a “card” that the WiFi surfer should collect in dedicated “outlets” nearby the antennas (as the Corriere della Sera points out), and the card will guarantee access for three hours to be spent throughout the day. The card is free, seemingly for now…. Ah, forgot, to get the card you have to leave your full name, no nicknames allowed , and an identity document number.

Now, that is particularly ludicrous, even for an over-rated city like Milan. Could you actually think about how to complicate something that should be “free” in the first place a tad more???? Why do I have to give out all those info??? To protect who from what?? Do come along….

The nice thing is that the local “assessore” (someone in charge something, at municipality level) for the urban layout stated “the parks are our top priority” when considering the Wi Fi implementation, and the very chap claims “so that we will allure a larger number of people to go about the park to study and work” as if I rather be stuck in the office if I had not my boss checking for my whereabouts.. rubbish, utter rubbish and sounds very much like “parrot talking”…

And yet the entire plan, which entails the coverage of the urban territory by 2009, via more than 4,000 access points, is a nice step forward to the fuellest coverage to be available by 2015 for the “Expo” to be held in Milan. It is interesting, it is a nice way of pushing forward a city that may have lots to offer to residents and tourists alike, but the feeling is, again, that Milan is playing like it were a much larger and much more important city. And it is playing way too bad!!!

It has already been mentioned a “feasibility study” to be prepared in collaboration with the local Polytechnic, which I trust would lead to proving the project will have massive returns for the parties involved.. when, not too long ago, the city of San Francisco (!!!!) had some trouble justifying its project of Wi Fi cabling… SF, at the very heart of the tech evolution!!!

Guess if that rings any bell ….

In the meanwhile, it has already been stated that the wireless coverage of the city will not be free for surfers, and furthermore there will be a public tender to award the project… that would allow an immediate cash back into some pockets, with very little creative effort.. so, nevermind people would eventually pay for some contents, nevermind the fact that the municipality could use the widespread capability of being in touch with a range of potential “customers” via laptop or, increasingly, mobile devices to push for entertainment offers (info, tickets, discounts, coupons…) that may create a flow of activity and opportunities for a plethora of commercial actors (which would pay, say, for advertising… isn’t that the model of all the top flying Web companies today???)… and you could go a long way along these lines… why on Earth hindering the overall uptake of such a nice opportunity just to make money the easy (potentially) way??? That’s silly… (for the project itself, not for the pockets that may benefit from sheer stupidity..)

So, the overall idea of “virtual streets” in Milan along the old, real ones comes to a price.. for the users to pay… guess most of the people will keep on browsing the nice cafes and shops in the Triangolo della Moda and will be oblivious of Wi Fi.. apart from the typical Milanese posers, but that is another story..

PS By the way, if the municipality wanted to measure the citizens’ satisfaction for such a service, first should have not bother everyone with that data collection via crucis, and secondly, should have potentially launched the project not at the very doorstep of the autumn rainy season and winter cold… talking about stupidity…

CEATEC in Tokyo

I know, I did promise to write about my Japanese trip, but since I have landed back over to Italy, I had sort of lulling the experience, everyday a little bit more, every now and then going back to check few pictures, or an article, or some TV show, or.. something like this, the consumer electronic show CEATEC  in Tokyo (a summa of articles if you follow the link..)!!!

For those of you that have been over to Akihabara, there is no need to explain, for the others… it is, provided you like or love technology, like throwing a toddler into the research and development department of Mattel and Walt Disney combined together!!! A Middle-earth of adventurous bytes, never-seen-before tantalising electronic creatures, cavernous subterrains packed full of treasures and blinding lights of colored cathedrals … an amazing experience, truly remarkable!

You know what?? I love this creative buzz, and I sadly pity those who do not even perceive that something is massively changing… OK, fair enough, it is not all about VWs and electronics, but whilst we are at it…

Facebook and how to spoil a piazza…

It seems that today there are two types of frenzy within the business community, either to conquer the outer space or to get hold of a worldwide renown social site… now it is Facebook that makes the press!!

Both may actually signify that “the World is not enough” (I have to stop watchin’ telly…) and there is a dare need to discover new frontiers .. where to place ads, maybe???!??!?!

The valuation Microsoft is currently placing on each and every couple of eyeballs in FB is around 66$, which is significantly higher to the 11$ paid for MySpace’s eyeballs… it seems that users do not really love to be considered “eyeballs” and thus MySpace performances have been going slightly down, as the Italian “La Repubblica” pinpoints, or at least are shadowed by those of the going-to-be-acquired Facebook (541% growth in UK vs. 20%..). Google, incidentally, is part of the race…

However, point is: would it possibly be that the fame of a social network in the business community may become inversely proportional to its resilience within the Web community itself???

Are we still perceiving that the entrance of a revenue-driven behemoth is hindering freedom altogether???

After all, why on Earth Mark Zuckerberg would like to impose or push anything to his beloved audience?? For no reason whatsoever, insofar that would be a risky move and prone to, well, spoil the fun of it all and slightly piss .. sorry, upset customers.. that is exactly why he is cleverly cashing in and selling the whole thing off to someone that will transform a free space into a massive billboard.. or something along the line..

In the meanwhile, waiting for an easy way to move one’s identity around (see other posts..) we will browse around to find the perfect hangout, that lovely place without ads, silly people showing off fake boobs or six-packs, in an attempt to be the next Web-phenomena, and without tens of thousands of friends we do not know anything about!!

Italian eGovernment.. that’s virtualisation of Nothing!!!!

During the past few weeks….during the past few months… ok, fine, during the past few years Italy has been struggling in building up a decent Government infrastructure.. we’ve had it all, thieves, convicted ministries, leaders acting like stand-up comedians at international meetings, singing prime ministers, the whole lot of absurdities.. This was coupled by an appalling public finance management, the disappearance of billions of Euros into someone’s pocket and so forth.. it is impossible to follow it, let alone report it in a post so follow my advice, should you have a burning desire to know this circus and if you are really fitted with strong guts, and go for books such as “La Casta”….

However, in this sort of third world (please, no offense to the third world countries, utmost respect!) mess, Italian rulers have been so barefaced as to foster eGovernment initiatives.. needless to say you should have a Government as such before even remotely trying to apply any sort of virtualisation to it, but nevermind..

Another Italian miracle was accomplished swiftly, since the latest Cap Gemini report states Italy is at around mid-ranking in the eGov evaluation score, and is above par (82% vs. an average of 75%) in overall quality of the services available. (Note: this is not a miracle at all, but, hey, that’s all we have got on the menu these days…)

That is something the entire nation was actually waiting to know (as if…), now it seems Italians would also like to understand whether this immense wealth of technology and cyber-functionalities are able to find something like 98 billion Euros missing (vanished, evaporated really..) from the taxation of gaming machines (aka video pokers and so forth…) across the country… that is a nice amount of money, considering that the latest “Legge Finanziaria” (the sort of yearly set of financial and fiscal measures and activities…) wasn’t remotely close to half of that amount and it made the entire nation shivers in terror for starvation and missing holidays….. the 2008 “Finanziaria” is about 12 billion, as it has been reported, that makes 1/8 (rounded..) of the due amount… you find the money, Italy would happil y trail around for, say, the next five years??? An entire legislature??? wow…

We were such a grand country…damn..

Mashup….wazzuuuuuupppp??????

We all know that some of the features that people keep on tagging as “Web 2.0″ are about content creation, elaboration and management, as to obtain an auto-generated content stream to “widecast” … this is quite nicely combined with the possibility to have two or more set of contents (web sites, information, data, whatever…) interacting to create a brand new entity, an hybrid, an end-results of a careful dosing of ingredients.. aka a “mashup”!!!

Now, that has probably been a kingdom few fairly skilled individuals could fathom and approach, and then mash, mix, combine were all words for the initiated ones ..  but today, this all come down to a dead-easy level, as it seems with this Intel (wow!!) MashMaker!!

Vivienne Westwood has said just yesterday, at the celebration party held in Milan for her 35th anniversary in the fashion industry, that

this is a terrible World, in which anybody thinks anymore: everybody’s watching TV, nobody’s reading or looking for arts, and yet people constantly want to express themselves, but have got nothing inside and nothing interesting to say, they are boring…

This may actually be slightly harsh, but considering Ms Westwood is the least she could have said about the current intellectual bankrupt we are witnessing, still it is nice to sit and wait about the results coming from combination, cross-fertilisation and fusion of different experiences… after all a meticcio is actually stronger than the separate parts…

However, and despite the above, one word of advice (not that I am anybody to take this honour..): as all top DJs could tell you, two good songs do not get mixed nicely together into something worth earing all that easily, superior skills (intelligence) are needed to arbitrate amongst parts to reach a better One.. and skills (…) are in short supply..

The role of IT… an alchemic question..

I am back from the Forum IT held in San Gimignano, right in the middle of Tuscany (home, for a change!!!) and in a wonderful location.. why this sort of “touristic incipit”?? One reason, mainly, a small tiny winy detail: that quiet and lush environment stirred the most stunning flow of conversation, quite a lot of business considerations and an amazing array of personal chats and, quite a rare occurrence these days, of the utmost intelligence and elegance.. I must say a soothing experience and quite refreshing indeed..

The business issues were all related to the current role of Information Technology and its company champion, the CIO, in the present evolutionary scenario.. the debate went on a couple of divergent directions: a sort of initial mainstream idea was pointing out to the IT being a mandatory and, as of today, commodity function within the organisation, the other standpoint, later on in the day, headed towards the strategic role of IT as enabler of a new sort of sentient organisation, therefore forcing the CIO role to a connection, a hub of utmost technology competence coupled with (at least) a thorough business understanding..

That may sounds like “so what..” kind of a stuff, however I have been posed since 1995 with two  questions: the importance of the SMEs market in Italy and how to rise the IT to strategic level within any company’s board… I believe today there are plenty of research and data that pinpoint the alive-and-kicking dichotomy between technology and business, the role of the CIO as a guardian of an almost forgotten druidic knowledge of IT and as the paramount driving force of a new business capability… as per the importance of SMEs in Italy, that is still lingering about..

Around 60% of companies has stated, in a fairly recent survey I happened to read (details upon request…), that the utmost company priority is about cost reduction, and immediately after that 25% quoted “development of new product/services” as a top priority, whilst the main trouble areas for an IT management are about keeping the internal IT skill set alive (39%)  and how to integrate heterogeneous systems into a coherent technology fabric (34%), it is no wander that CIOs complaint about the scarcity of resources to develop new initiatives… and yet, the discussion is always about the strategic role of IT as if all business functions and evolutionary capability would not set their roots into a rather firm IT ground. Most of the IT crowd I generally meet points out that the more pressing need today is about finding the right language pack to discuss with business folks.

As pointed out with some friends at the Forum, the business declinations of information technology today are the pillars of Hercules between success and failure, IT is the detonator for superior strategic acumen…

Ops, there we are again, it is all down to brains and management ability, I guess…. quite an hard call sometimes..

Emerging Technology… why not…

The World is no longer the place it used to be!! This is a nice one I heard few days ago at a meeting, and beside the obvious silliness of the remark (if you have read “Siddhartha” you know already that you cannot bath twice in the same river…), it is interesting to keep track of changes and what technology may represent as evolutionary driver.. not solely to try and guess the future (nice quote here … Niels Bohr..) but to enjoy the possibility of multiple future waiting for us ahead..

A nice factor to consider is the actual social cost and planetary distribution of tech advances, and whether these shows may actually make the press in a six-months-time as they move from talking to doing.. which is what we need most to be on this Planet (and possibly on the surface..) when one of those future may come true. More to come, I believe..

More on SciVee…

Sometimes we get it first!!

More on scientists “youtubing” around..

Everything’s real in virtual worlds..

Every now and then (in Internet time that’s the time in between lunch and dinner..) virtual worlds are coming back (never went away, mind you…) with rejuvenated energy and a bunch of titanium-like statement, pretty much like the one Paul Twomey, CEO of ICANN, made at the Influence Forum 2007 in Australia (here).

Mr Twomey argues the virtual world will most definitely be the future of global commerce, nevermind ecommerce.. One of the most interesting factors would be, seemingly, the migration of “gaming experience” into much more commercial interactions, as thus to maximise an already established “virtual experience” into a real life problem-solver tool.

And, since SecondLife is the current champion, that is the springboard for future thinking..

Now, despite SL keeps on producing nice bits of activity, such as auctions of virtual goods (for real money, to come to that, again!!), there are few issues to be sorted out before ever thinking about having virtual worlds as the solution for troubled consumer spending patterns and new industrial value network..

Again, it is a cultural approach in the first place, do not forget that most of the people interacting at a decent level of complexity over the Web are a well defined tribe and, by no means, a proxy for a more society-wide assumption of what interactions would look like in the near future.

Then, there is a matter of the technology involved or, better, the ease of the virtual experience that would be required to transform it from a game-like system to a more business-effective ecosystem (data flow, control, identity match, data storage, retrieval, regulatory and compliance…).

Then, the “cui prodest”. In a business environment, at least up until today, anything entering the door downstairs should produce a business enhancement in some form, being that strategic positioning, operation streamlining, pure and simple profit, whatever you may consider “enhancement” but, I trust after the Internet bubble of circa 2000, companies would not, and should not do something just because “it is cool”.. What you consider cool and must-have may not be seen likewise by your value network, that meaning a problem in coherent supply strategy, co-marketing, awareness building policies and lots of other nice edgy things..

As already stated by some press, large corporation are reconsidering the SL presence, since early results were not as expected. Which is, per se, a massive blunder… expecting what???? Selling what??? In a place where most people go and interact with others, have fun and live the experience of being there… guess they may be little concern about buying “real” goods (or marketing message) and rather going for fun things such as angel wings to fly around (or gather for discussing issues, as in a large instant messaging platform…at least for now, then we will see….!!!).

They are all missing the point. Virtual worlds are in the first place a nice corporate training ground for alternative positioning strategy and tactics, it is also a nice laboratory to experiment tribe clustering (customer segmentation, to use a paleolithic definition), and to prove the ability to listen instead of pestering with information… virtual worlds are places where the “power of referral” is fundamental, but you should get the referral in the first place, and what you did in a “PreviousLife” is not a guarantee to find one in a byte-based world.

So, culture, technology, strategy, communication. In a world, the entire corporate structure. Get to work, soon. Otherwise don’t bother talking.

Mr Twomey may be right, but he needs convincing a hell of a lot of people, first…