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.
Mash-up camp - live blogging
I’m at the Polaris Centre in Pula, near Cagliari in the marvellous island of Sardinia, to speak at a research-driven event named Mash-up camp organized by the guys at CRS4. The event is based on the Mash-up and spacial web applications subject and its aim is to animate and shake the local companies on the subject of innovation and research.
I’m going to live blog each event (surprisingly I’m the only guy I see just two guys - yours truly included - with a laptop connected to the open wi-fi lan here).
Stefano Pezzi - Core Soluzioni Informatiche
Stefano comes from Bologna, his company , CORE, is partnering with CRS4 (who’s hosting the seminar) some other companies in Sardinia to work at the SIT project for the Regione Sardegna.
The SIT project aims at the creation a database to host and communicate geographical data of the Sardinia Region giving the chance to use these data in touristic and city planning applications.
Stefano’s presentation is very VERY technical (probably too much, IMHO) he describe the whole layer structure of the SIT app and the usage possibilities. The whole application is based on standards both W3C and ISO while Stefano admints that some of the services aren’t standards yet such as the tools for path retrieval and the tiled map service.
The intersting thing is that they developed a Javascript API set to interface outside applications with the SIT framework: when the project started Google Maps (and its API) weren’t on the market and they wanted to build something that would have been reusable and extendable. Nice move! (but what about porting the APIs to something more compliant with the current de facto standard?).
Stefano immediately starts with a humorous intro on himself (his a friend, and I can assure his ALWAYS a laughable guy) and then introduce the difference between Mobile Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0.
He says tha if we speak about Web 2.0 is because Web 1.0 existed, so since we speak about Mobile 2.0 it is because mobile 1.0… existed? sure? Who really used WAP? NOBODY! With wap we were entusiasts with the devices not with the applications; we were just trying mobile!
Web 2.0 is about building a platform: develop applications that can be mashed-up together; Mobile web 2.0 is uding Web 2.0 on mobile devices (eg. widsets); Mobile 2.0 means having native apps on the mobile devices that uses web 2.0 services and dedicated sensors.
What is now a barrier for a lot of applications (eg streaming on Mobile) is the cost of traffic; the mobile companies are now fully aware of this and are about to mass release flat mobile connections. So once the costs of connection won’t be a problem any more Mobile web 2.0 can really arise only if user experience and developing costs will be (at least) comparable.
The next step in mobile applications is to transform monodirectional phisical tags (such as Shotcodes) to bi-directional phisical tags users could write and modify (imagine a bi-dir tag at the supermarket were the choice of the product becomes social).
Marco Guiso - Interoperabile
Marco starts talking about openGIS, a system to create HTTP requests for geodata. This is another highly technical speech: I start doubting I’ll be able to properly blog the talk.
Marco’s aim wa to build a software that could “cannibalize” geodata available on the web from different sources. To do this he used AJAX, some OGG web services (SITR, Landsat5, 3D Marine, etc.) and Google maps.
As previously posted, tomorrow I’ll be at the Bicocca University premises to hold a small talk at the World Usability Day 2007 (see details about the event). I’ll present UXnet - the User Experience related org I represent in Milan - introducing WHAT it is and HOW it can practically help other organizations.
Set your agenda on November 14th from 10.00am to 2.00pm (CET+1), Marco Martini Room, U6 building - Milano-Bicocca University. There’s also going to be a live webcast so you can follow the talks from your computer; stay tuned on the event official web site.
UXnet and the World Usability Day
As many of you probably know i am the UXnet ambassador for Milan, which actually means it’s my job to create connections between companies and the UX community, UX professionals and UX associations and son on.
In this continuing effort I decided to volunteer for the organization of the UPA World Usability Day at a global level becoming one of the UXnet provided Regional Liasons.
Since there’re just two of us in EU I’ve had the chance to get in touch with a whole lot of UX people from a lot of countries: UK, Spain, Belgium, Poland, France, and the list might continue… it’s been a WONDERFUL experience.
I think there shouldn’t be a better chance to talk about UXnet; yours truly has been invited for a short (short short short ) talk about our community. See you there.
Mobup: a mash-up between physical and digital worlds
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.
I’m starting my autumn season for seminars next week, and I’d say that yours truly has been invited as a speaker to pretty interesting and high level seminars this year.
We’ll start on Monday 3 October with a so trendy Web 2.0 closed group seminar in Torino (yes, where we had Olimpic Games early this year) in a medieval castle. The stage should be pretty interesting based on what the organizers told me. But just the fact to talk about innovative technologies inside a castle is really amazing.
What am I gonna to talk about? Mobup my friends. And how we managed to have a multi-level mash-up between the phisical and the digital worlds.
On October 10th I’ll daily commute to Rome (Trenitalia PLEASE stay stick to your timetable!) for a talk at the Tor Vergata University organised uber-cool Interfacce06 Conference speaking about the international User Experience group I’m representing in Milan: UXnet.
This year I’m also actively participating as Regional Liason for the organization at a European level of the UPA organized World Usability Day 2006 acting as a link between all the european event organizers and the central comitee (pretty interesting job though). I’ll also have a small speech at the Milan WUD event at the Bicocca University with a UXnet based speech, again.
Next Wednesday, June 27 I’ve been invited to join the Java professional community at the Java Conference, main national event on Java related technologies that will be held at the Milanofiori congress hall in Milan. This is a great honour for me and a kinda strange feelings started pervading me in the last hours: I haven’t used Java - till last Semptember - since when I was at the University; but then I started the Mobup project that finally brought me to such an important stage, speaking to the cream of the crop of Java professionals in Italy.
Life is strange and always surprising.
I’ll quite oviously talk about Mobup BUT since the event is so important, I’ll provide my audience with the very last nightly build of Mobup which has
Bluetooth capabilities
Intelligent geotagging
This great step has been reached thanks to the technical effort by Thomas Landspurg, who’s the In-Fusio CTO. Tom provided the great expertise he got in Geotagging for mobile devices (he’s the mind behind J2MEMAP) to the Mobile project; we’re still in private testing but let the software become public in the very next weeks (for the moment you might want to take a look to a couple of pictures and - if you like - try to mash-upping them using apps such as GeotagIt!).
At the moment Mobup (note: not available to the public yet ) automatically geotags the photos using an external bluetooth connected GPS device but my plans are to overcome this “limit” (making it just an option) using GSM cell geodata (one of the solutions in the countries where this kind of data aren’t provided by the operator is connecting to freely available databases such as GSMcells).
I’m really excited of these last enhancements and - even though a lot of tuning is necessary before going live with the next Mobup version - this capabilities adds IMO great value to the application.
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’ve been in London the last couple of days for a speech at the “
) open to all, a lot of microphones, seats for all, and a great control room that managed both the videos and audios.
We’ll start on Monday 3 October with a so