Busy week
I’d say this was really a tough and busy week, not many like this one in a year!
The Interaction Frontiers organizing
After the Interaction Frontiers 2006 site has been launched we started getting confirmation from the potential speakers we have contacted: names like Pabini Gabriel-Petit (who’s gonna key-noting), Sebastiano Bagnara (Politecnico Design), Christian Peters (Fraunhofer Institute) and Antonio Rizzo (Siena University) are all onboard; but other big names are about to be added!
I’m really enjoining this year organizing: having a sponsor (Kallideas) behind us makes possible have speakers from abroad that otherwise would have been difficult to bring to Italy. I’m pretty confident this year Frontiers’re gonna be such a inspiting and wonderful event.
Writing on Eyetracking
The few days of vacation I had have made it possible to write down the analysis I made on label positioning in web forms. I started the whole lab setup from Luke Wroblesky article “Web application form design” and Luke himself who’s to kind to help me both during test prep and results analysis. Cannot wait to see your feedback on my results (quite interesting, I’d say 
)
Card sorting
In the last weeks we conduct some interviews at Regione Lombardia key people in order to design a site devoted to security and prevention. This interviews lead to a 140+ cards to be communitary sorted in a 12 people meeting.
The results were absolutely great and I’m sure that site info architecture will rocks (I’ll spend part of the next week analysing the card sorting results and merging them together in a wireframing prototype).
Family life
Tomorrow we’re having Francesca’s baptism: it’s been a tough week organizing the lunch for our friends and relatives, the small cadeaux and Francesca’s dress (Maurizio and Elena finally solved the situation with a present of a couple of wonderful dresses for our little princess).
The Interaction Frontiers 2006 site is live
Patent or copyright?
I recently published an article on an Italian monthly magazine (a PDF version of which - in Italian - is downloadable here) on the patent/copyright for software dispute.
A recent EU parliament decision confirmed the impossibility to patent pieces of programming code, leaving Copyright as the only form of intellectual protection. This has been an higly highlightable decision since it was one of the very few times the Parlament hasn’t followed the EU Commission suggestion.
Even if I’m not going to translate the whole article the’re a few points I’d like to report here
- Even if it’s not possible to patent the software itself you could protect the IDEA behind the software+hardware system; this is a de-facto patent for software too
- I do believe tha copyright alone is not strong enough to protect companies from sofwtare stealing. But the same could be said for patents too (it would be impossible for small companies to charge for intellectual property infringment the big guys such IBM or Microsoft). Moreover IBM alone files EVERYDAY nearly 10 patents making virtually IMPOSSIBLE to infringe a number of already patented by others technologies, it’s just a matter of big numbers;
- Said this in my very personal vision the patent becomes a technology indicator for small research laboratories like the one I manage: if you’re smart enough to invent something that could provide a patent filing then you’re doing a nice job;
- Patents are a powerful marketing tool for companies, expecially when they’re small: “Hey, I’m small but so brilliant I have a n patents portfolio!”;
Patents where invented to divulgate innovation. Yes, sure! Have you ever read one of them? I’ve read a whole lot of them, and I can assure that would be - at its best - extremely difficult to replicate the patented invention with just the patent documents in your hands.
Patents (to a different extent, copyright) are today acting as powerful bonds to innovation. They’re filed just to prevent other to copy your idea, not to help them build on that. I’m plenty with examples on this last item, but my suggestion is to give a look to this wonderful books - NOTE: need to properly link them, be patient).
I’m so fond of the open source license Mobup is built on. I think I had a great software concept, we developed it and asked others to help us building it in exchange of the knowledge our source code conveys. Are you smart enough to transform it and taking it to the next level?
30
In less than an hour (I was born on the 8th of April) I’ll be 30. Let me say it one more time: 30; believe me when I say that in my mind I’m still 24. Am I an adult now? Not sure or - better - I don’t think I’ll ever be an adult 
.
A lot of things happened in the last year (both in my professional and - most of all - in my personal life) and, from my current position looking down to the time yet to come, I see a lot of things’re going become reality in the next year.
I’ll be in Mantova with my family for the w.e. (+ Friday): a lot of Flickr/Mobup photos’re coming.
Happy birthday.
