Last year Netwo organized a whole weekend with the most interesting experiences on the web Italian arena. This year we’re back to announce Techtalk Italia 2008!
Techtalk is an event originally organized by Martin Varsavsky for the best european/world web2.0 entrepreneurs. The whole weekend spent together, during a few sessions everyone participating will give a short presentation of her/his activity. Our families will be with us and we will take the time to have fun all together.
We think this is a really good formula, so with a few friends we decided to bring it to Italy.
For the second year in a row we will spend a whole weekend (from july 4th to july 6th) with the top Italian web entrepreneurs, discussing our projects but also having a great time together in a wonderful villa in Tuscany.
We will post more info shortly on the netwo blog, if you want to come, please write me.
Here are a few photos from the last edition.
Firenzuola, the wonderful Tuscan town there the Techtalk is held
The swimming pool is surrounded by a forest
Saturday morning session
Saturday night dinner
The NYT posted an interesting article about what seems to be the fading point of municipal wireless projects: many cities are rolling back their projects, as it seems there are no more hopes of revenues that can help sustain the infrastructure.
The problem was in the original approach that many cities had towards the creation of such projects:
“The entire for-profit model is the reason for the collapse in all these projects” says Sascha Meinrath on the NYT’s article. Many companies have seen those projects as a new way to enter the ISPs market. Obviously that market is pretty crowded, revenues are already fading away for traditional ISPs, and newcomers are having bad days.
Wireless technologies (both wifi and wimax) raise many infrastructure problems (radio signal issues, compatibility problems, small coverage range, ..) and many networks aren’t profitable at all (in most cases they represent a big loss for both companies and cities).
As a result of this situation many companies are pulling out from projects they were involved in (as Earthlink did in Philadelphia and other cities). This is a problem for cities who need solid partners to build such services. Residents are also concerned, especially low-income families who were expecting municipal networks as a way to get cheaper connections. This is particularly important for children, as Internet connection is tightly tied to their education.
Fortunately a new approach could be the solution to those issues.
Meraki jumped in the market with a different strategy: they are selling cheap devices that plugs into existing home connections
extending them with public wifi signal. Additionally they sell cheap devices to be used outside (mainly on light poles). As you probably know Fon has a very simlar approach since almost two years: they are offering cities free (or almost free) wifi routers for residents, that would allow the inhabitants to build their own networks. Routers installed on DSL connections at home team up to create a public network that could cover the entire city.
This grassroot approach could be a way to overcome failures. The fon city project is already active in five cities across Europe, while many others are interested in such projects.
Many ISPs do not allow their customers to share DSL connections, so this kind of networks could face a new problem in the near future.
While cities are still trying to find the right approach someone is already thinking about giving free wifi routers to homeless people, who can then sell connections to people who are around them for a small tip.
So, here we are…during the last months I had to work hard (overnight obviously) to create a new platform I was dreaming about since last spring. It is a platform for video discussions, some kind of asynchronous video chat.
I started thinking about it when I first saw replies on Youtube. Don’t know what replies are on YT? When you watch a video you can reply quickly, directly on Youtube’s site by writing a text comment or by recording a short video directly with your webcam on your browser.
This feature is great, it allows users to quickly participate in discussions, by using an engaging platform like videos.
I decided to work on an application where video discussions wouldn’t be only a feature, but rather video discussions were the core of my idea. At the time I wasn’t aware of other similar projects.
After a few months of hard work altomic.com was born. Users can record their own videos and reply to videos sent by their contacts. The mos difficult part of this application is the video streaming technology, I had no previous experience with Flash and I had to learn a bit of it. It took me a few months, but finally I got it working.
This is just an alpha version of the application, there is still a lot of work to do on the technology side and on the community side, as I want to build a tiny and engaged community of users.
So, let’s give it a try, visit altomic.com and go to the sign-up page. To get you in please use this invite code, NOOSFACTORY. And let me know what you think of this early preview! I will talk about it, the technology, the concept and many other things on the next upcoming posts.
Lately I’m trying to learn a bit of Flash/actionscript programming.
The project I’m involved in requires the use of a webcam, but unfortunately webcam selection in flash ain’t easy.
You have to enter the settings window, go to the webcam tab and select the right input source. If you have Flash 9 player you’re done, otherwise you have to allow webcam access to the application everytime you want to use it:-(
So I created this simple object that helps you selecting your webcam. And saving the right settings (again, only if you have flash player 9)
I’f you find it useful or just want to take a look at the code please write me.
Update: I removed the Flash object from this page because of rendering problems on some browsers (problem it’s not mine, please blame wordpress!)
Click here to view the SWF object.
This is just a little preview of an analysis pages we are about to publish for the 2008 elections here in Italy.
For every political leader (presidential candidate) or party you will find the number of citations during the last month or today. Further, you will find a tag could for every major political party.
I really like this technology, hope we’re goind to use it more on the coming months.
So, here’s the link.
Contact me
