Workstiff

Posted on 12/12/2006 by admin

I’m at home recaping from a bad flu and spending a lot of time reading my (too trascurated due to my daily job) Bloglines feeds and watching movies. The longer the flu the tougher the job for my DVD/DiVX library: I’m not yet so frustrated to switch to (yeeeck!) afternoon TV programs so I looked around for some nice online video to watch and, via Sanbaldo blog, I found “Working Stiff“: a low-budget indipendent movie available for free on the web.

Here’s the synopsis:

Gene is a beleaguered corporate filmmaker who directs training videos for a large corporation. Facing a financial crunch that could cost him his home, he decides to use the company studio at night to produce an â€adultâ€ version of the anti-sexual harassment training video he’s shooting during the day. Comedy, 94 minutes.

If you love comedies and know a little bit of big-corp life this movie is for you!

I also really enjoied the whole Brightcove experience (Brightcove is the platform the movie is distributed on): I followed the Allaire‘s company first betas before joining Gabetti for an IPTV related RnD project for a big Italian company and I’m really amused of how brughtly great the product is now.

Busy week

Posted on 05/05/2006 by admin

I’d say this was really a tough and busy week, not many like this one in a year!

The Interaction Frontiers organizing

After the Interaction Frontiers 2006 site has been launched we started getting confirmation from the potential speakers we have contacted: names like Pabini Gabriel-Petit (who’s gonna key-noting), Sebastiano Bagnara (Politecnico Design), Christian Peters (Fraunhofer Institute) and Antonio Rizzo (Siena University) are all onboard; but other big names are about to be added!

I’m really enjoining this year organizing: having a sponsor (Kallideas) behind us makes possible have speakers from abroad that otherwise would have been difficult to bring to Italy. I’m pretty confident this year Frontiers’re gonna be such a inspiting and wonderful event.

Writing on Eyetracking

The few days of vacation I had have made it possible to write down the analysis I made on label positioning in web forms. I started the whole lab setup from Luke Wroblesky article “Web application form design” and Luke himself who’s to kind to help me both during test prep and results analysis. Cannot wait to see your feedback on my results (quite interesting, I’d say )

Card sorting

In the last weeks we conduct some interviews at Regione Lombardia key people in order to design a site devoted to security and prevention. This interviews lead to a 140+ cards to be communitary sorted in a 12 people meeting.

The results were absolutely great and I’m sure that site info architecture will rocks (I’ll spend part of the next week analysing the card sorting results and merging them together in a wireframing prototype).

Family life

Tomorrow we’re having Francesca’s baptism: it’s been a tough week organizing the lunch for our friends and relatives, the small cadeaux and Francesca’s dress (Maurizio and Elena finally solved the situation with a present of a couple of wonderful dresses for our little princess).

Another change in my life

Posted on 21/04/2006 by admin

“It’s something past 2 in the afternoon and I’m at home on the sofa quietly sipping my espresso coffee. You’re probably asking WHY I’m at home, right now, during a working day.

I think there is no other way to say it, so I’m gonna straight to the point: I quit from Consultechnology and yesterday was my last day in the office; I won’t be offiicially out since the first weeks of June but I’m going to spend these weeks as vacation time.

I had great times during these 2 and a half years (I started there in November 2003) and was fortunate enough to meet very bright minded people both among colleagues, clients and consultants.

I think I’ve been able to build a crew of professionals very near to the Leandro defined “dream team” (in Italian, sorry): we innovated a lot the production processes for web sites and applications and were also able to file some patents and produce bright product prototypes such as Mobup and Flash Voice. I’d say we were among the first to include Eye Tracking tests on interfaces in the production pipeline (for every interface we’ve built we tested each iteration starting from the paper prototype).

I also managed the internazionalization of the RnD team (helped also by the great Giuseppe Baroni at Innovazione+) raising interest from universities and labs in a lot of EU countries.

I had good years there and ejoyed a lot the projects I was involved in. But now (as Richard Florida says) is time to move to new experiences. And – after 10 years working in IT companies, I’ll completely change the scenario around me; but won’t say anything more till mid June.

If you like, we can meet at The Interaction Frontiers 2006 just to say ciao and listen to some cuttin edge talks.