Category Archives: Beef

Test driving the iLiad

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I appreciated the marketing initiatives of the Simplicissimus patron Antonio Tombolini since when I first met them during the “Pesto al blogger” promo. Antonio is now in the eBook business (too, I’d add) and his company is the Italian distributor for the iRex iLiad ebook reader; and again they came up with a cool marketing idea: taking one iLiad and have it travel through Italy from one blogger to the other.That’s how some weeks ago I received a box with the iLiad that travelled for more then 6 months from blogger to blogger (and sign of this travel were visible both externally and internally the device :-) ) and tested it for a whole week (it also happened to pass to my friend Massimo Pettiti, Innovation Director at 3 Italy).The main reason I subscribed to the test was that I am really interested in this type of technology and wanted to touch it before spending money.

Fast forward to the end, before my personal considerations, am I going to buy it? In one word: no.Here below the four main aspects I consider relevant:

  • Screen technology: the iLiad uses the eInk technology for displays and boys it really rocks! The reading experience (and the images too) was far better then any other digital display (LCDs/LEDs based or portable devices such as the iPhone/iPod Touch) I ever owned. It was really like reading paper: the more the light the better the experience. YES.
  • Haptic interface: even if the iLiad weights more or less as a normal paper book I had serious problems in managing it in every position but being sitted with the device (preferably) in both my hands: reading while in bed was almost impossible since my hand covered part of the screen and every time I had to turn the page I had to change position. All the navigation buttons are placed on the left and are quite difficult to be understood (even if the affordance of the “turn page bar” is really good). NO.
  • User interface: page selection is a pain in the arse; the icons meaning is mostly obscure and no alternative text appears to help; I really disliked everything about it. NO NO.
  • Battery life: I received it with half the battery, used it daily, passed to Massimo for one week and sent it to the next blogger without recharging. Cool! YES.

The iLiad is a great reader; it’s plenty with connections (comes with wi-fi on board) and expansions (two different MM card slots) capabilities. But unfortunately the overall experience is too low on user interaction and the paper-book still wins.

Oh my!

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I was adding WordPress as one of my Linkedin profile apps (since its “Facebookization”) while I noticed it’s been 85 (!!) days without updating Yellow Line: oh my, oh my! My loyal RSS feed readers haven’t been abandoned with pics from Flickr and links from Yahoo My Web. but what about the rest of You? For those who cares, obviously!Let me share with you a quick, and casually ordered, “facts of notice” list in Matteo’s life:

Are some of this bullets going to become blog posts? Hopefully I’ll be able to use this list as a track for future work on Yellow Line!

New map tool for real estate listings

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While the Microsoft database Utility rebuilds, AGAIN!, my entourage database (and yes, I know I’ll have to delete the file and have it recreated from the Exchange server, but I’m always optimistics with computers) I decided to finally find some time to write something on this now seldom updated blog (and my feeds stats are here to prove this).

After a couple of weeks of implementation and tuning (where we learned that messy Javascript code performs better then the state-of-the-art) we finally released to the public the beta version of the Gabetti map search (a demo video lays on my Flickr page) for real estate listings (those of Gabetti obviously – at the moment).

Nothing so new (apart from the fact that – as far as I know – the ONLY other similar tool in Italy is MAIOM – which we tried back in 2006 to explore the potential of geomapping tools potential for the real estate market): satellite view, small geocoded houses, balloons with overview of the house, AJAX, panning, etc.But I really find useful, and haven’t find in any other site apart Coldwell Banker’s (which works only in Firefox, on my Mac), is the usage of Point Of Interests (POI): we started from the hypothesis that price, square meters, number of rooms are important DETAILS not something you use when deciding to buy or not to buy (I find VERY interesting the usage of POI tha has been done in Walkscore) When I bought my home I had two main objectives: i. find it in a pleasant neighborhood and ii. near to all the services that make life more comfortable (supermarkets, cinemas, restaurants, kinder-gardens, etc.) and a satellite view enhanced with POIs makes this task extremely straightforward.We’re still in BETA and are plenty with enhancements to code and deliver (better user experience, better feedback, capability to search for streets and not only for cities, price/sqm filtering capabilities just to cite a few) but are really curious in evaluate how will the tool perform on our web users and how will our RE agents perceive it.