Tag Archives: personal

Small world

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Today’s been really tough. Francesca just fell asleep and I’m here on the couch watching C.S.I. Miami with my wife laying here beneath; this after 12 hours of meetings, analysis, chats, phone calls, emails, emails, emails, cooking and, last but – really my friends – not least, baby care.

One of my memes says that the higher the quality of your network, the brighter your future. It’s now something like 5 years I’m subscribed to Linkedin, so I should be accustomed with the 6 degrees law (actually Linkedin service is based on just 3 of these degrees).

Sais this, I am always impressed when this law suddenly manifests in front of me.

1) Today I had lunch with some people from Maggioli to discuss about our businesses in Second Life (they publish two magazines on the Virtual World); just before this I discovered that one of the two guys is in business with Gabetti’s investor relations consultant; which, by the way, is the same person who introduced me to Poligrafica S. Faustino (and this introduction eventually led to the Franciacorta Festival on the Gabetti Island). Networking at its best!

2) The other day my wife was travelling to Merano with some colleagues to attend a company marketing event; one of these colleagues started telling about one of his high school fellows that started a successful niche business… and then suddenly my wife realized he was talking about our friend Alex; he was at his wedding too (but we hadn’t met). She worked more then 3 years with him without knowing we had a friend in common.

3) Today I was taking a look at Linkedin managers profiles. Looked at its founder’s and suddenly noticed that I’m just one degree away from him. Me, this humble Italian guy. Not bad, huh?
Three different examples of how this world is getting smaller and smaller. And this networking effects are simply exploding since the birth of the web. Impressive.

Oh, and if you like you can take a look at my Linkedin profile.

The importance of the place

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St. Andrew church, MantovaI’m writing from my parents’ couch in Mantua, a small and ancient city a couple of hours from Milan, the city who hosted me for the first 18 years of my life; before moving to Padua for the University and then to Milan to start my “adult” life.

Mantova in the last 15 years has become a liveable city rich in culture events (Festival Della Letteratura, Mantua Jazz Festival, live concerts, etc.), museums and, last but not least, an almost endless choice of restaurants.

My wife always enjoys shopping in Mantua due to the small dimensions of the city itself: you can tour it by feet all its trendy shops in a couple of hours; and you can also stop by an excellent bar for a delicious cappuccino; doing this it’s not unusual to step by one of my childhood friends (just tomorrow I had a chat with Zelo, who’s now working part-time at a local bookshop plus continuing his artistic career).

Life in Mantua is stressless and quiet; you can feel the raising lifestyle od the inhabitants; and the food is terrific.

In Milan everything is fast. You don’t have time for nothing but business. Chaos & disorder are powerful forces in this city. Concrete is everywhere. You barely can use your car to do shopping but public transportation really deserve an empowerment.

But I still leave in Milan. And I’m so happy with this that I just bought a new and bigger house (we’re still in the redesign phase; I’ll post some shots on Flickr once we cosolidate the architect’s proposal).

Why?

I think that part of the answer reside in Richard Florida‘s theory on Creative Cities (and Milan is the Design World capital): The Frontiers of Interaction wouldn’t have been possible in Mantua; meeting with top-notch professionals such as Leeander, Simone, Flavio, the people at the Bicocca University, Fabio and many many others barely unthinkable.

But the rest of the answer is about potential; Milan has the potential to become more liveable, to transform itself from the ground up cutting the distance between the city and its inhabitants; continuing to remain an innovative city. Milan is a city for the youngsters, for the makers, for the thinkers.

Milan is a city where this is possible. But this and this too.

My professional life is still based in Milan and my forecast is that this won’t change in the next 10 years. But I won’t age in this city: I prefere move my family to cities more similar to the one I was born in. I prefere a return to my roots while keeping my innovation potential intact.

The power of the web

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I know I know, this is definitely the worst of the starts: I promised to write (at least) each Friday evening and I’m posting late on Saturday evening; but there’s quite a bunch of things you still need to know about me (I’ll going deep into this in the forthcoming weeks) that’s bringing me quite busy at the moment. So: I’m sorry dudes.

I’ve read on the last number of MyGabetti News (the newsletter we monthly publish at Gabetti for our site subscribers) of a cool fair about home automation and home security which had my whole attention; and it was held in Milan down town: a bunch of kilometers from my house.

I’ve spent half this week convincing my wife to visit the expo together so we can start to get accustomed to the cream of the crop in home innovation.

[Note: I'm used - mostly at work - to reach any information very quickly; that's why I fastly become dissappointed when I cannot easily reach what I need to know... this is usefoul to properly understand what follows]

This morning, while my daughter was swallowing biscuits all around the kitchen, I was on the sofa trying to remember more details on the fair: was it in Milan City Fair? Or at the new expo? Wasn’t it at the Datch Forum?

I perfectly knew where I first read the info (MyGabetti News) and I remember where the mail was laying. But had not mood for opening Entourage, looking for the email and then following the link; so I (poor me) chose to google for more info on the fair.

Google, uh? Yes: the result was the “Casa Sicura Expo” (secure home Expo), “The first fair on home automation and home security”.

I don’t actually know how you, my friend read it, but once having paid 5 euros for parking and 16 euros for the entrance ticket I faced a whole plaetora of solar systems, energy saver systems, fuell cells prototype… it wasn’t about home automation! There were no home secutiry experts.

It was a damn save the damn world fair!!!

I admitted with my wife of being wrong: I probably mistyped the site or something this morning and wrote down the wrong address on our TomTom.

So, back at home I re-checked the (damn) site and… I was right! Today is 14, the month is October, we were at the Datch Forum… so: where have all you domotic systems hidden?

This is the power of the web: keeping a wrong information and making it appear correct; even when I personaly verified it was, actually,wrong.

P.S. We came home plenty with energy savings lamp, they were for free.

Update: I’m puzzled. The link I found on Google was actually the same that was laying in MyGabetti News… so the Conference organizers were kidding when designing the websites content? Or were they just trying to gain a couple of thousands more visitors?