Java Conference

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.

Hope to meet you at the Java Conference!

Update: Some cameraphone shots from the conference here

Monday morning at the IDII

As previously anticipated I spent a nice morning at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Milan listening to a couple of thesis project (which are now approaching 50% of their completion). I was invited to listen to Vinay Venkatraman presentation: a bright minded Indian guy who came out with this nifty prototype of a new way to interact with web content for visually impairedusers.

The main idea is that actual screen readers (Flash Voice exluded, I dare to say :-) are specifically linear (e.g. they scan the page top to bottom and have the transformed in interactable synthetized voice. full stop.) while we (and with we I mean someone who can see) usually interact with web content in non-linear ways. So Vinay came out with a solution which translates web page elements into different sounds: a TNICK for a form, a PLICK for a paragraph, a TRSTCH for a link and so on; everything is controlled via a motion-feedback enabled roller which is USB connected to the computer and manipulated by the user.

His prototype (which is made for nearly 70% of wood) targets developing countries thus trying to be EXTREMELY cheap to be built and based on open source software and ready-to-build hardware kits. Vinay is probably taking into account that the 100$ laptop is really becoming a smashing hit in the next few years (after the speech I suggested him to take into account the 20$ cellphone too). I tried to test the prototype but – thankyou Murphy – all the app crashed and didn’t re-started; I’m looking forward to retest it soon.

My visit ended with a quick chat with Fabio and a Pizza with JC /thankyou for spreading the word on Flash Voice!), Phil Tabor and Neil Churcher, with whom I had an enlighting discussion on the future of mobile television.

Mobup on tour: first speech

Yesterday we were hosted by the wonderful people at the Milan Java User Group: the seminar room at the Mac shop was really crowded and I was pleased to see a couple of known faces among the public.

Our slides (available online) on the strategy, user experience and technical aspects on Mobup raised a lot of interest (we mobupped some photos while speaking), it’s always cool speaking to smart programmers who make smart questions and suggestion.

We’ve also been so lucky to be invited in another couple of Italian Java events (one of those is really HUGE), more on this in the time coming.