Myrsine Island now open

In the nearly couple of month since my last post a lot of tasks of my professional life have reached their place in the cosmical karma.

One of these is the release of the Myrsine Island on Second Life: a perfect replica made by Electric Sheep Company of a residence Gabetti is building on the Island of Sardinia (and that will be ready in 2010).
You can take a look at the product site or take the whole tour at the buildings in Second Life. The choice is yours.

This is a complete new experiment in SL for the Gabetti Group: we’re starting using the metavers not for metaverse’s sake but for RL business stuff; Myrsine island will be used by the Group agencies devoted to its commercialization as a tool to showcase the apartments to potential clients and - at the same time - it’s going to be a tool for foreigners to take a visit to the apartments, before buying, before leaving their countries.

On the island you’ll find a Manfrotto (who’s one of the top tripod producers all over the world) where you can get for free a machinima-o-maker hud to create videos in SL; machinema making has never been so easy! (see a video made with the machinima HUD on YouTube)

Just a bit of info for the moment. And I still owe Leeander a post about his latest innovation disruptive project: Open Spime.

Concentration

Black and green. I mean: green IBM3270 font on a full screen whole black background; no browser, no feeds, no email. Just the black background, your text and you. A cool parenthesis of concentration.

I miss that word so much in my last weeks life: we delivered the most complex release of the Oracle Enterprise One ERP at Gabetti early in December which kept us REALLY concentrated on making all the amount of old data take their right place in the new system (and also fixing some errors inserted in the old systems during years which made OE1 simply mad).

And then there’s the 2008 budget planning, Second Life, analysis to be made and data to be properly understood. And, wow, this is the end of an overwhelming year dude!

On the personal side of life we’re hitting the start of our new house renewal: discussions with the architect, choosing the right pool, planning the suite bathroom (I replicated it on Second Life to help my wife understanding my ideas better), choosing the doors, the windows, managing all the papers…

I’m tired. I’d like to have more time to manage all the things. Need to slow down. Just a little bit. And that’s also why posts lacked here in the last weeks.

Oh… and thank you writeroom for these 15 mins of distractionless writing.

UPDATE Alberto, while back linking this post, discovers a bond I sincerely have bypassed: the concentration feeling you experiment Writeroom donates you follows the same path Ev highlighted in his LeWeb3 speech: it really seems that innovation, more than from making software more complex, arise when you try to make it simpler. Thanks Alberto!

How simplicity can improve your speech

I’m on a fast train connecting Florence to Milan together with my colleague Luciana (aka the uber wonderful Luciana Gabetti): today I had a talk at the Creativity Festival at the Second Life pavillion on the economy of the Gabetti project in the metaverse.

I don’t want to bother you with so much showcased informations and data (but, if interested, you might want to take a look at my latest presentations - both in Italian and English) but - instead - I’d like to share with you the thoughts that are crosing my mind will looking out of the window, in the glowing dark of the Italian countryside.

Simple is effective. Be simple to be effective or - in other words: increase your simplicity to increase your effectiveness.

I’ll talk about presentations in this post, but - probably - you can adapt this to other scenarios too.

I’m a loyal reader of the Presentation Zen blog and always try to strengthen my slide with Garr’s tips: I use more images then text, I write short and memorable sentences, I always try to engage my audience. But there’s one thing I ALWAYS do: I keep the technology aspect of my presentations at the stone age: very very few motion effects, no audio and, most of all, absolutely no need for an Internet connection. (and I use Keynote as my slideware)

Why? Because you don’t know anything of the scenario your going to find and the conference centre; you cannot know whether or not the audio mixer will melt up just before your presentation or the internet connection automagically crashes in the very moment you click on the link.

And, my friend, the today conference (albeight being plenty with SL professionals as speakers and a very interested public) was a PRESENTATION INFERNO:

• A speaker (a dear friend, by the way) presented using a cool mash-up that takes selected photos by flickr and let you organize and access them in presentation style mode; BUT he was plenty with shots (really too much) and not very used at the software shortcuts, resulting in most of his presentation time spent passing from one wrongslide to the other (again, wrong)
• Another guy based his introduction to the usage of a very laughable video of a famous italian showman; please note that the video itself wasn’t important but what the showman said in the video was the topic the speaker would have moved on… but there was no audio cable in the room at all; so the presenter tried to move the mic (with a HUGE tweet while passing in front of the speakers system) the mic nearer to the computer speakers… but no sound were heared at all. Creepy.
• On videos, again: a presenter choosed to use a Flash Video… choosing to compile it, in the Flash IDE, during his speech (and, by the way, audio and video were out of sync);The last one. Promise. It’s been a while I learnt an interesting lesson: your audience NEVER know when something in your presentation has gone wrong… until you tell them.
• This man chose to link a file from his presentation but something gone wrong and the magnificent “file not found” window opened. And, adding problems to problem: he started looking for the file in the operating system!

Conclusion: the simpler your presentation is (and I’m speaking about presentation style and technical aspects) the more chance you have to appear a really smart presenter.

P.S. The organizer told me his appreciation for my presentation saying “It was so obvious the you were the marketing guy among the others looking at your presentation style”. Ehm… It’s now 10 years I’m working in IT related teams/companies

How to run your business through Second Life

I’ve been in London the last couple of days for a speech at the “Achieving real business growth through Second Life” conference together with a bunch really top-notch professionals (coming from Sun, Intel, Amazon etc.) and people from half Europe to talk about Second Life and the business.

They should’ve recorded all the speeches so I might publish mine and link the most interesting in the near future; for the moment you’ll find my slides on Slideshare and the (too few) photos I shooted in this Flickr set.

Back in town

It’s been a while since I haven’t posted a single line here (also my Flickr photo stream deserve a better treatment) but I’ve been travelling through vacations and busy days (and the deadline for my “Achivieng real business growth through Second Life” hasn’t helped).

But now I’m back with a whole lot of things to says and experiences to be told. And, again, with so few time available to write them down.

So, let’s go with a Powerpoint style bullet list of important things happened meanwhile

• I’ve been interviewed on the next phases of the Gabetti presence in Second Life (interview in Italian, here’s an automatic translation)
• I’ve spent 3 whole weeks on holiday (the last time I had so much vacation I was 17). Photo to be uploaded soon.
• My sister Marianna got married. She’s now enjoying her honeymoon in Polynesia.
• Leeander published a video interview with yours truly (again, in Italian) about the Virtual Assistant that’s now managing Gabetti first line IT helpdesk. More on this soon.

That’s all for now.

Gabetti recruits virtual agents for Second Life

Gabetti (note: the company I work for) has released today a job opening to recruit virtual real estate agents for it’s Second Life project.

We’re looking for skilled avatars eager to make some money working directly in Second Life; we can offer a pay in Linden Dollars, an office on the Gabetti Island and the possibility to work in the most cutting edge project of a real life Estate company inside Second Life.

You can take a look at the job opening on our site (Italian only, sorry), Monster (again, Italian only) or send your CV at SLrecruiting[at]gabetti.it; we’re closing the offer during September, so don’t loose this opportunity.

Second Architecture for Second Life

Gabetti sponsored a very interesting initiative by the Italian editor Meltemi who launched a pitch to build its premises in Second Life.

A lot of designers worked hard to build up a whole lot of buildings that will cover the Myrsine Island in the next few days: you can navigate non-spaces with gas walls or 18th century buildings or nature-like projects; you choose!

You can take a look at the building by entering the Myrsine Island in Second Life or you can take a look at the buildings pictured here.

A nice machinima has been shooted too.

30 seconds of celebrity

It’s been a while I haven’t blogged, most of all because of working times expanding widely fagocitating my spare time. But now I’m sick at home and have some time to spend writing. So here we go.

I had my first 30 seconds of celebrity last Wednesday, 18 when a troup of the main Italian TV news entered my office to interview me about the Gabetti/Second Life project and then aired it BOTH on the lunchtime AND primetime show.

Unfortunately I hadn’t the chance to see me “live” but, if you hold a PC - since the video seems not to be working on Macs - you can take a look at the digital version on the TG1 website.

I just have a creepy quality AVI video so won’t post anything at the moment. I’m waiting for a hi-res DVD containing the interview.

Oh… and by the way: I really need my diet objectives to be pursued!

Quick video interview about Second Life/Web 2.0

Web 2.0 The Human Network has been son kind to record an interview with yours truly during the “Il nuovo potere dei consumatori sul web” (The new power of consumers on the web) event in Milan (see my post here).

Today they’re publishing the interview both in their blog and on YouTube.

Slides on Gabetti/Second Life

I’ve recently spoken (together with Rita Tornari, the Marketing Director of the Gabetti Group) at an interesting event in front of a huge public of Marketing/Communication Directors here in Milan about social webs and user generated content.

Our speech generated some feedback from bloggers and I’m trying to keep track of all the posts and replying to them when possible. To do so and track the discussion I’ve fired up a brand new coComment subscription (I’ve met Laurent Haugh at LIFT06, just before he started-up the company): you might want to follow the (mostly in Italian) discussions on my coComment public page.

And obviously you can take a look at the slides on Slideshare (Rita’s slides are written in Italian, mine aren’t written at all: but you might enjoy beautiful photos .

Should you have any question or inquiry on the Gabettipresence in Second Life just drop a line using post comments.