Tag Archives: mobup

Java Conference

Posted on by
Reply

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

Another change in my life

Posted on by
Reply

“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.

Patent or copyright?

Posted on by
Reply

I recently published an article on an Italian monthly magazine (a PDF version of which – in Italian – is downloadable here) on the patent/copyright for software dispute.

A recent EU parliament decision confirmed the impossibility to patent pieces of programming code, leaving Copyright as the only form of intellectual protection. This has been an higly highlightable decision since it was one of the very few times the Parlament hasn’t followed the EU Commission suggestion.

Even if I’m not going to translate the whole article the’re a few points I’d like to report here

  1. Even if it’s not possible to patent the software itself you could protect the IDEA behind the software+hardware system; this is a de-facto patent for software too
  2. I do believe tha copyright alone is not strong enough to protect companies from sofwtare stealing. But the same could be said for patents too (it would be impossible for small companies to charge for intellectual property infringment the big guys such IBM or Microsoft). Moreover IBM alone files EVERYDAY nearly 10 patents making virtually IMPOSSIBLE to infringe a number of already patented by others technologies, it’s just a matter of big numbers;
  3. Said this in my very personal vision the patent becomes a technology indicator for small research laboratories like the one I manage: if you’re smart enough to invent something that could provide a patent filing then you’re doing a nice job;
  4. Patents are a powerful marketing tool for companies, expecially when they’re small: “Hey, I’m small but so brilliant I have a n patents portfolio!”;

Patents where invented to divulgate innovation. Yes, sure! Have you ever read one of them? I’ve read a whole lot of them, and I can assure that would be – at its best – extremely difficult to replicate the patented invention with just the patent documents in your hands.

Patents (to a different extent, copyright) are today acting as powerful bonds to innovation. They’re filed just to prevent other to copy your idea, not to help them build on that. I’m plenty with examples on this last item, but my suggestion is to give a look to this wonderful books – NOTE: need to properly link them, be patient).

I’m so fond of the open source license Mobup is built on. I think I had a great software concept, we developed it and asked others to help us building it in exchange of the knowledge our source code conveys. Are you smart enough to transform it and taking it to the next level?