DUEpuntoZERO - live blogging
10.30
Here I am at the Web 2.0 conference in a wonderful castle near turin. Leeander just finished his introduction on the Web 2.0 phenomenon and I’m now listening to the series of talk related to Semantic Web.
11.00
The first talk is by Andrea Marchesini, kinda basic stuff or - better to say - introductory concepts to the semantic web. The audience is very business related (even if I can recognize some geeks among it) so this is probably the reason for the basic content of the talk.
11.15
Valentina Pressutti starts her talk with a Semantic application example based on Mediawiki where some German folks developed a semantic notation plugin.
Her example is based on an semantic based intelligent system that can perform suggestions based on the best user to perform the desired action.
Her VERY interesting talk then introduced the NEON project (CNR) which studies how to create and collaboratively maintain an onthology so to suggest the user the notaqtion to be used.
17.00
I was on the stage till now and - btw - the wi-fi connection had some creepy problems that made it mostly unreliable for most of the time (Murphy’s law in action my dear).
The topics were really cuttin’ edge and I enjoied most of them unfortunately I was only able to take notes on my mind manager, so that you won’t find them blogged but just on the mind map (note: Italian only, sorry).
23.05
Finally some relax on my coach. Some post-portem thoughts on the conference:
- The place was great: a medieval castle with modern art installments all around and a breathless natural scenasio all around
- The organization was great: wi-fi (when working
) open to all, a lot of microphones, seats for all, and a great control room that managed both the videos and audios.
- The speaker choice was great: I’d say that nearly 85% of the speakers really got my attention. (just to give you some more parameters: in the average conference this percentage barely reaches 50%)
- The catering was great: good Piedmont products well cooked and served directly to your dish with a nice choice of cheeses and wine.
Bonus content
Mobup + GEOtagging now available
Flickr has recently released a new tool to display geotagged photos and manually geocode existing ones.
I’m very happy to announce that the NEW version of Mobup (v.0.4) is now freely available with a function to automatically geotag your photos using an external bluetooth GPS device.
We’re supporting ALL the external GPS devices that could be used paired with a bluetooth cameraphone. If you don’t have any you could buy one for few bucks on eBay (I’ve bought mine there, and it’s plain great!)
All the Mobup geotagged photos are visible not only on Flickr and its maps but also on our very own mash-up prepared by Tom Landspurg.
Mobup: a J2ME based photo uploader for your mobile
Mobup. Finally.
Those among you, my loyal readers, who have already given a listen to the podcasted interview on Mobup published by the Podcast Network already know that Mobup - as a DnD pet project - was born specifically to satisfy my own needs on moblogging.
At the time I was an happy (and pretty ignorant on Java for mobiles different implementations) owner of a Sonyericsson T610 cameraphone which - due to a major outage - was later substituted with an old P800 phone.
None of them could however run Mobup due to the impossibility for the J2ME multimedia APIs to control the camera (this is a frequent - yet hopefully slowly disappearing - problem among cell phones), there were nothing we could do to have Mobup running on my devices. The whole world (well, nearly 
is talking about and taking advantage of an app I invented and I was stuck to the pre-history of moblogging.
Till yesterday.
I eventually decided a small investment in a Nokia 6670 cameraphone which comes equipped with a 1Megapixel camera, 64 MB of available space and various other wonderful capabilities for a prices that is comfortably lower than 250€ which makes now possible for me to moblog using Mobup and to have a personal and direct feedback on the application itself (till today I was forced to use Vincenzo’s device or to rely on our beta testers feedback).
In the coming days I’ll probably have the opportunity to do some serious moblogging also here on Yellowline, and this is one of the things I love more on Mobup: to be (mostly) blogging-platform independent and - doing all the blog posting server side once published on Flickr, it costs absolutely nothing.
Mobup Interview on the Mobile Media Show
I’ve had the pleasure to be interviewed (via Skype) by Keren Flavell for a podcast on Mobup to be published in the current number of the Mobile Media Show, one of the blogs under The Podcast Network.
We spoke about the philosophy behind Mobup and our future plans (which include, by the way, the support for video), you’ll know how and why the Mobup project was born and how I think vertical mobile devices could help solving the digital divide in developing Countries better than the mass adoption of computers.
You can find the podcast in MP3 format (24mins / 5.6MB) published here.
Mobup in Sun headquarters
Being in Sun is probably something like being near the gotha of Java, you can thus imagine our happiness when we were invited to join the guys from the Java Mobile Developers Forum this morning for a day packed with great presentations (albeit I was forced to leave the seminar just after lunch, damn).
Note: I’ll have to carefully follow the operations behind the launch of Handango Italy: its 19 yrs old country manager is really unusual fir this country but looks really prepared.
We showcased Mobup; well probably I’d say I just introduced the philosophy behind Mobup while Vincenzo took the listeners down to the source code for the rest of the speech. But we talked to programmers and programmers’ stuff was their bread.
I’d really like to thank Edoardo Schepis from SUN/JMDF for the opportunity and the friendly atmosphere we found (mad props go to Stefano Sanna, probably the greatest of our new - shall I say - friends)
While waiting for Edoardo’s photos you can take a look at some of the shots we mobupped at the beginning of the seminar.
