Mastering the Gabetti Second Life press launch

Posted on 08/03/2007 by admin

We’re now through, finally. It’s been a tough week, I’d say a tough period in order to prepare a proper press launch. Both Maurizio Monteverdi (Gabetti Group CEO) and Leandro Agro’ (Italian Second Life main guru) rocked the stage, the machinima and our contents have done the rest.

I’m about to upload In the forthcoming weeks I’ll upload You can find the press video (Italian only, and had to cut it down to 10mins in order to be accepted) on You Tube, the photos are coming up on Flickr accounts.

The results, Geez, are further over our brightest expectations: we knew we’d have been perceived as (as Marcello says) “zupa cool” in Italy, but never expected that Reuter immediately translated a news tha has then been published on the Washington Post, Scientific American, Wired, eWeek and the Financial Times (DE version) just to name a few.

Just a sad point: I’ve asked our PR agency to invite bloggers. Well of the 30 and more invited, just two of them actually came and enjoied the free wi-fi network dedicated to live posting. Guys: what are your daily-life chances to interview a public company CEO, have the answer and even eat for free? Damn: you loose it!

In these days, using mainly Technorati, Google News and Google Blog Search I compiled a list of interesting articles about the entrance of Gabeti Property Solutions in Second Life. Here it is:

International Selection

Gabetti joins Virtual Land rush in Second Life (Washington Post)
“Second Life” jetzt auch mit realen Immobilienmaklern (Financial Times)
Buôn bán nhà đất trong thế giới ảo, kiếm tiền thật Dantri (can you get it ? )
Gabetti eröffnet als erste RL-Immobilienfirma virtuelle Dependance SLinworld

Italian Newspapers/Magazines

Gabetti: affari reali nel mondo virtuale MacWorld Online
Gabetti vende case anche in Second Life Excite
La Gabetti e i suoi agenti sbarcano su Second Life La Stampa
Gabetti, l’affare-mattone si fa virtuale Corriere della Sera

Selected blogs

Gabetti@Second Life (Live Report of the press conference) Infospaces
Gabetti va Inworld! ma il vero punto è il brick’n mortar che fa innovazione Leeander
Gabetti su Second Life: è l’innovazione che conta Infoservi
Gabetti apre una sede in Second Life Tecnozoom News
Pondering The Pond Ambling in Second Life

Switching to Mac

Posted on 25/02/2007 by admin

My new MacBook Black arrived at the office last Friday. It was a nice chance to showcase to my colleagues the “Apple Way”: precision in every single detail; that would a nice method to apply to our daily tasks, I’m planning an internal presentation about this.

At Gabetti we have a whole Microsoft infrastructure (and it’s a kind of a network if you think we manage 1 headquarter, 7 branch offices and more than 700 agencies all over Italy) so we’re about to face the complex task to insert a Mac (well, actually 2 of them since we’ve bought a Mini for the IT meeting room) in this MS world.

In the forthcoming days I’ll update this post on the results of making fully usable this list of applications and tools (and possibly avoiding dual boot):

Microsoft Project
Update: Done! I’ve installed Windows Vista over Parallels and successfully integrated Project over the Project Web Server.
Using iMail and iCal Entourage on an exchange server (obviously using autocompletion for the email addresses)
Update: done! the installation path was as slight as possible and withing a couple of clicks I had all my mails and agenda on the MacBook
Connecting the Address Book to our Active Directory
Exchange complexly formatted Word, Powerpoint and Excel files with my colleagues
Update: partly done I’ve started working on our ppt templates without any assle. Need to explore further though.
Taking advantage of the Application Access Profile I have in my AD profile
Update: partly done. It works in Vista over Parallels; not yet under Mac OS.

While I’m pretty confident that point 4. is not going to be a mess, I’d really like to hear from those of you who already successfully managed one of the remaining points.

Gabetti website redesign – BETA version online

Posted on 12/02/2007 by admin

Just 8 months ago the Gabetti website looked as picted below, starting from July 2006 we worked hard to publish a brand new website with all the bells and whistles a website should have in 2007 (XHTML+CSS, accessibility, cool interfaces, some ajax magic, usability and a little bit of web2.0ness). The first result was a dead-man-walking, low budget version of the site created in a couple of weeks and useful to convey the Group new identity.

I’m now honoured to announce that, after a long & working hard weekend we published this night the redesigned version of the Gabetti Property Solutions Agency website and the brand new version of the Gabetti Group website (disclaimer: Gabetti is the real estate group yours truly works for).

From the very beginning we wanted the interfaces to be user compliant and the whole wireframing and mockuping phases to be striclty user centred: a lot of work both from Nurun (the agency that developed the site) and us was spent into this. Moreover, we performed a full optional eye tracking study on all the interfaces throughout the whole design phase, a tough job that rewarded us with great usability, at last – I’ll talk about the study once we formally publish it.

This is a beta version and a lot of work needs to be done in the forthcoming month. I’ll update you on major releases here, preparing for the official launch by owr very own Marketing department.

Stay tuned. Stay foolish.