Tag Archives: work

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 long tail of helpdesk tickets

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I should have had lunch with Leeander today to discuss the 2008 edition of The Interaction Frontiers, the innovation related seminar we co-produce each year. Just a few minutes before our appointment he SMSed me cancelling the lunch. After a while, while at lunch with my boss, I received a call from Leeander where he told me he was in a mess managing the calls after an article on Virtual Assistants (he’s an Interaction Design Director at Kallideas, and they actually produce VAs) on a major Italian magazine.

A Virtual Assistant is basically a 3D human-like interface that processes natural language (both spoken and typed) and is ahead of an artificial intelligence engine which takes information from a knowledge base.

I’m gaining more and more knowledge on this subject since we’re developing a VA – named Gabi – at Gabetti (see here a video interview with some interaction with the VA, in Italian) , together with the Kallideas team, to manage the basic support at our IT helpdesk. And – since the pilot phase launch early on July 2007 – we started training Gabi.

We choose the training arguments by taking a look at the most frequent items on our online helpdesk: we released Gabi with basic knowledge on PC, printers and network problems and then moved to email and password management.

During a meeting, early this week, with our Helpdesk manager and the IA expert from Kallideas I was taking a look at the tickets data to understand which arguments need to be teached to Gabi next and then BOOM I “saw” the long tail in these data.

The long tailg of helpdesk tickets

It’s not long ago that I finished reading the inspiring The Long Tail book by Chris Andreson: looking at the ticket statistics I saw how the higher number of tickets was concentrated in less then 10 different arguments and, from there, the number of tickets decreased rapidly while the problems our users were declaring raised impressively.

It was pretty interesting finding my first tail, but now problems arise: VA are very good at managing a small amount of know-how helping with this large numbers of users; but we’re now going to face a nice task: managing a large amount of information to help a relatively small number of users… uhm… need to go deeper into this to better understand the most effective solution.