The first thing I looked at is the shape and size of Baja California, where I spent some lovely time a couple of years ago. Then I focused on the colour of the coastal waters in Central America and the Caribbean: definitely on my wish list!

Finally I started wondering what our planet would look like to an external observer (say, an alien creature): beautiful I guess, until they zoomed in and realized how intent humans are on destroying it, like an anthill gone crazy.

They would see Chinese people burning coal to produce products of every sort in cities where the air is increasingly hard to breathe. Then they would track those products as they’re shipped to the other end of the world and bought by unhappy and indebted consumers, only to be trashed after quite a short time.

With a resolution of 8000 x 8000 pixel there are few limits to where we can print that picture. I suggest we all do it somewhere visible as a reminder, and then pledge to treat our planet better. It doesn’t take that much to make a difference.

To “nourish the planet” is the slogan adopted by Expo 2015 in Milan, Italy. Too bad that thousands of square meters of soil have been turned into building land to host the event, which will end up nourishing nothing else than the powerful real estate lobby. Furthermore, the regional governor promoting the Expo is in his third consecutive term (fourth overall) in spite of the law that only allows two. At least the leaders of the aforementioned Central America, supposedly far back along the route to democracy, bother to change the constitution when they want to allow themselves a longer time in office!

The bottom line: as usual, we’d better count on initiatives from the bottom to do the right thing. And the Internet is the perfect tool to support them. Here’s the link to Kitchen Gardeners, a group that promotes the creation of private vegetable gardens that would provide us with tastier and cheaper food and a much lower CO2 impact.

That’s the essence of it: end-of-the-year lists give you a chance to appreciate the good things you got and to catch up with what you missed.

However, I believe it’s also important to look back at the lessons one has learnt the hard way. Perhaps 2011 will be remembered as the year when people started truly realizing the unsustainability of an economic system where Asia buys the debt of Western countries to keep them consuming beyond their means and purchasing products made in Asia, in a meaningless race that is trashing the world and making us feel increasingly unfulfilled.

I don’t know if we’ll still have a Euro currency in one year’s time, but either way I hope we’ll be able to start tossing out the unhealthy excesses that globalization has brought to us.

I’ve written about The Story of Stuff before. Today I’d like to follow up by pre-embedding The Story of Technology, focused on the market I love and where so much could be done to protect our only world… without missing any of the great fun we’re having!

That’s why the assessment of my last five years of Master Swimming (2006 – 2011) goes beyond any expectation: I haven’t simply broken all my previous personal records and swum 100 freestyle in 56 seconds. More importantly, I’ve found the experience of being a late achiever incredibly rewarding and motivating.

Triathlon is the next challenge I want to take up.

It’s a far tougher one, with two disciplines (especially cycling) sitting completely out of my comfort zone. The fact that I’d like to progressively move all the way up to long distance events doesn’t help either, because even in swimming my best performances have always been in the area of 100 / 200 meters. I need to completely reset myself as an athlete… or perhaps to turn into an actual one. I can’t help myself though: I’ve got the bug!

A brand-new Tumblr blog called “The Tri Bug” will be my online mirror of this new path. Its latest posts are shown in the right column of this web site, some more are hosted on this page of my web site and the complete archive is accessible at TriBug.tumblr.com.

A few weeks ago I subscribed to Fetch.io, a cloud-based downloader whose purpose is to speed up file fetching jobs from a number of online sources. Although still young and not exactly flawless, the service is quite effective and ultimately proved to go far beyond my expectations, thanks to a relatively hidden feature: media transcoding.

Let’s see then how to get a perfectly optimized video for your iPad out of a common Torrent feed, without using other device than your beloved tablet.

1. Find the video you’re interested in, for example through Torrentz.eu, and copy the Torrent file address. Please be mindful of intellectual property rights.

2. Create a premium profile on Fetch.io for just $4.95 and login. Then press the ‘Fetch’ button and paste the URL of your Torrent as copied before.

3. Once the video file has been entirely downloaded (you can check the progress in ‘Transfers’), go to ‘Files’ and tap on the file name. A new page will open and try to play it for you, but that requires Flash and won’t work on an iPad. However, on the right hand side you will see a small menu.

4. Tap on ‘Encode this video’ and select the iPad format. This will go into a queue and take a few hours, so plan it in advance if you’re planning to carry some movies with you on the iPad for that long flight across the ocean…

5. Once the job is done, Fetch.io will contain an optimized version of your video in ‘Files’, with the same title as the original and a final suffix such as _iPad. Just download it from the browser of an app like Downloads HD (Safari won’t allow it) and you’re ready to go! Oh… I was almost forgetting: in the age of the cloud, of course Downloads HD will use iCloud by Apple to make the same video seamlessly available on other iOS devices. Your iPhone will easily play the iPad-optimized format, making your life just that easy… if you belong to the growing army of Apple’s loyal customers!

However, no one can argue that the Internet is just a trend for geeks any more.

As brilliant start-ups are founded every day, the gang of four (Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google) keeps crunching every growth forecast and changing our lives in unprecedented ways. Yes, final users are still at the very centre of this revolution.

The numbers below, beautifully rendered by the guys at Go Gulf, talk by themselves…

I immediately installed it, thus the home page has been constantly updated with my latest tweets ever since. Unlike other plugins, this one doesn’t simply show a feed somewhere in a widget, but creates a constantly updated WordPress post.

However a couple of minor bugs, in an otherwise excellent piece of free software, felt like the proverbial “pebble in the shoe”:

- a weird text such as O:16:”SimpleXMLElement”:1:{i:0;s:6:”picker”;} shown as author name rather than just my nickname “picker”

- non-working permalink in the generated post (also when clicking on the title)

I tried to fix them a couple of times, but my PHP skills are honestly amateurish: web sites were still static when I worked as freelance web designer years ago! So I resolved to give a try to Elance, an online marketplace for digital professionals which I first heard about when reading a great book: The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss.

For the cost of a dinner in London, I hired a young PHP developer from Bangladesh and he managed to fix the plugin in a couple of days. It’s the magic of currency exchange, so I even felt good by supporting a bold entrepreneur in the developing world.

Of course the outcome is available to any interested blogger: click here to download the fixed plugin.

I’ll try to inform the original author, whom I’ve not been able to talk to so far, so hopefully this fix will help him publish an officially updated version of the plugin on WordPress Extend.

In the meantime, I hope this helps!

A 20 minute video by the author will be a better introduction than any further word.

Among the many interesting stories the book brought me through, I was especially impressed by one about Coltan, a mineral essential for the production of most consumer electronics devices. Around 80% of its world supplies happen to be in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Well, in 2000 the price of Coltan started dramatically soaring, mostly because of the huge success of Sony’s PS2 game console, causing in the order:

- thousands of Congolese to rush into the area to get at the metal, destroying national parks and killing gorillas and other wildlife in the process;

- both official and rebel armies to follow suit, kill or enslave the Congolese above and exploit children and women’s work with the most brutal methods of coercion (the UN reckons that about 45,000 local women were raped in 2005 only).

All of this ultimately happened to let other children play with their game consoles. But how could be blame them? They’re just at the opposite end of the perverse production-consumption-disposal chain that we’re letting screw the world. And although those kids’ quality of life is arguably better than their Congolese counterparts, they’re victims as well to a certain extent: it is proved that our consumerist lifestyle is not making us happy at all. The United States is the richest country in the world, but ranked 150th out of the 178 countries considered in the last Happy Planet Index. Want to know which country is constantly in the top positions year after year? Costa Rica in Central America, which:

- no longer has an army since 1949, when the government shifted the previous military budget to fund worthy internal projects;

- has combined its ministries of Energy and Environment and achieved an astonishing 99% of energy production from renewable sources;

- has assigned all the money gained from a carbon tax to fund the local communities effort to protect forests, triggering an impressive reversal in deforestation.

I use to read and write about information technology and I feel constantly amazed by the way it’s changing our lives for the better. As both a passionate product manager and an enthusiastic consumer, I’m proud to be a small part of this revolution, but as a citizen I’m increasingly worried about its impact over our planet and the people who live on it.

It doesn’t look impossible to make the whole cycle more sustainable though.

Let’s consider for instance Apple, one of the world’s most admired companies. Thanks to a disruptive entrance in the handset market a few years ago, they are currently gaining around half of the industry profits with less than 5% of market share! I’m as impressed by these results and hooked to their amazing products as most other people, but I’ve got a question: given those remarkable margins, why do Apple need to produce its electronic gadgets through some of the Asian manufacturers least known for their respect of either human rights or the environment? The corporations’ relentless and blind race towards unlimited growth and (apparent) wealth is actually turning this world, slowly but irreversibly, into a miserable and unfair place.

Seth Godin has recently wrote about a huge opportunity called peace dividend, that we all wasted around 20 years ago when the Cold War was suddenly over: we could have re-purposed military spending and technology to improve our quality of life, just as Costa Rica had done long before. We didn’t. Seth’s provocation therefore is: are we going to do the same with the technological dividend coming from the digitalization of so many processes and the resulting increase in efficiency and opportunities?

There is good news here: as citizens and consumers, this time we have the means to influence such an outcome in an unprecedented way, thanks to a former piece of military technology escaped to the sad destiny mentioned above: the Internet.

That’s how we can write a happy ending to The Story of Stuff: by triggering a new generation of direct democratic participation, thanks to the amazing reach of the Internet. The big organisations responsible for most of the aberrations the book talks about can lobby and corrupt governments around the world, but how will they be able to do the same with each of us?

Annie Leonard is the perfect example. She didn’t need any big budget to start a web project called The Story of Stuff, to film clips like the one above and publish them on YouTube, to write and publish a great book with the same name. Yet she’s influencing many people like me, who are actively recommending her work and planning to make their part to change things.

Do you believe you don’t have enough time? You can still make a difference with your choices as a consumer, by preferring and encouraging the most responsible products and companies. A first step is to avoid any product made of toxic PVC or packaged in hard-to-recycle hybrid materials. A further one is to use handy applications such as GoodGuide, available on the Internet and in form of iPhone / Android app, to check the impact of products on your health and the environment as you shop. These trends are already influencing the policies of many companies around the world.

And, last but not least… spread the word!

Unfortunately we are still very far from that. Today I happened to watch the news on TV (something I had got used to absolutely avoid as I lived in Italy, where the few remaining independent journalists can only write on the Internet), and I found a very personal connection among the following facts:

Internet and the mobile phones have been shut down in Egypt to curb the on-going protests, because most rioting demonstrators had used the social networks as primary means of organization;

British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has defended the austerity measures of his government and urged the whole Europe to follow;

between 18,000 and 30,000 liters of petroleum are polluting one of the most beautiful shores of Sardinia, but most Italian newspapers are not reporting the fact at all. Meanwhile the “usual mighty” are planning to build new nuclear plants and keep pushing the consumption of fossil fuels, in agreement with the government led by a man whose life has been a relentless journey across the Italian Penal Code (the latest allegation being exploitation of child prostitution).

I felt so sad. Internet is the only remaining hope of a young generation which was expected to live in silence and ignorance, to be entertained and misinformed, to pay for the privileges of those who literally burned every possible resource and loaded the public balance sheets with unbelievable debts in the last fifty years or so, and now either enjoy fat and unsustainable pensions or keep leading supposedly democratic countries.

Of course this is true with different gradations across the world. Nonetheless, it’s increasingly clear that even the most enlightened democracies are pursuing interests far from the real needs of their people, because no one dares either touching the so-called vested rights (even when they’re clearly unfair) or leading a real change of course over the way our productive systems are run. The protection of jobs is the usual excuse to safeguard the economical status quo and turn us all into the proverbial boiling frog.

For example, it turns out that within 6 hours the world’s deserts receive more energy from the sun than humanity consumes in a year (source), and that we don’t need new technologies to exploit it (source) but only the political will.

Does anyone believe that the huge required investment wouldn’t be worth it, considered the increasing devastation that fossil fuels and global warming are spreading across the planet?

If you’re reading this article, you probably don’t… But you’re a young person who surfs the Web, which means you’re not part of any majority able to elect governments and run the world.

A lot of thoughts (and resolutions) were blending inside my mind after turning the last page over… well, in a metaphysical sense, for I was using an e-book reader! What I want to briefly share here is the outcome of an interview with Jeff Bonforte, an experienced executive at Yahoo!, that the author includes in the book.

Mr Bonforte basically adds a layer of analysis to the famous technology adoption curve, based on which emotions drive the users of each group. This leads to interesting results, which I think can have a role in helping product managers develop “valuable, usable and feasible” products (to quote Marty Cagan)… or, in more traditional words, to avoid Moore’s “chasm” after the early adopters phase.

Of course these definitions are not innovative and revolutionary by themselves. But we’ll never be careful enough at studying the frustrations, emotions and expectations of common people as we develop new products…

This is among the lessons Marty Cagan reinforced with his great book.

One especially impressed me for his relentless spirit of enterpreneurship.

Amadeo Giannini was a young independent banker, used to offer small loans mainly to a small community of people with his same Italian heritage. When a disastrous earthquake hit San Francisco in 1906, he started building his success story (and helped rebuilding the city) by making substantial loans to many hard-working people, as opposed to the usual bankers’ policy of servicing wealthy customers only.

This way, Mr Giannini basically invented what we currently call venture capital.

A few years later he was among the main financers of an obscure movie titled The Kid, then helped his creator Charlie Chaplin found a brand-new studio named United Artists.

He kept financing risky projects through his entire life, meeting success and failure… and – I guess – treating these two impostors just the same.

It is told that when Amadeo Giannini died in 1949 at age 79, his personal fortune was relatively modest, but hundreds of ordinary people showed up at his funeral. Meanwhile his bank had become a giant, and is today the largest in the United States: have you ever seen Bank of America‘s logo around?

History says that Silicon Valley has experienced such a rapid growth, from agricultural land south of San Francisco to the world’s center of innovation, thanks to people like Amadeo Giannini: able to spread a sense of urgency for progress and risk-taking. Other examples include Stanford graduates like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who started a long tradition of successful tech companies founded in garages.

So, which is the answer to this post title? At the end of his second mandate, Tony Blair flew to Silicon Valley and asked the same question to company executives such as Apple’s Steve Jobs and Cisco’s John Chambers. They made him observe the strict relationship between university campuses and the corporate world, and emphasized their relentless pursuit of meritocracy.

So sad that Amadeo Giannini’s country of origin is still light-years far from that…

It shows how the Web has enabled a brand-new class of business models, and thus become such a Wonder Land of free, high-quality applications and services.

I really loved reading the book. And I got positively impressed even by a speech Anderson recently delivered in Milan, about the disruptive effect of the Internet over so many brick-and-mortar businesses.

So what the hell crossed his mind when he recently wrote and published an article titled The Web is Dead?…

Ok: he wanted to remark the rising power of the Apps, which is undoubtedly a fact. Granted: as editor in chief at Wired, he needs to push the magazine sales even by purposely triggering some buzz and squabble.

But I believe that statement is far too much.

A lot of reasons have already been pointed out by critics across the Web.

In a nutshell, my own can be described as follows:

- yes, the Apps are a big success for their ability to drive dedicated experiences, ideal for handling specific tasks… so no wonder that many companies and organizations are betting on them to attract customers into their own walled gardens, out of the Web…

- but the Web is alive and in very good shape indeed, because it gives its best just where the Apps struggle: universal compatibility. Today I can handle most of my online activities on nearly every devices… regardless of their operating system (and even by borrowing someone else’s laptop for a few minutes or getting in a cyber cafe)… AS LONG AS THEY HAVE A WEB BROWSER.

Although I consider myself a techno-fan and I’m often among first adopters of consumer technologies, this time I’m sticking with my 3-years-old Nokia E71 for a little while.

After all I guess we can still call it a smartphone, even though its screen is non-touch and quite small on current standards. In fact the following points still make it a very good companion:

- comfortable QWERTY keyboard (say what you want, touch-screen-addicted readers, but I bet I can text faster than you!)

- still up-to-date hardware equipment, including wi-fi, 3G, bluetooth and GPS

- embedded Mail-for-Exchange client

- availability of free applications for those features most of us use the most: Gmail, Google Maps, Ovi Maps, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Nimbuzz (a multi-service chat client)…

Not enough? You’re right.

The final, critical ingredient is Joikuspot. This smart program connects to the Internet in 3G and shares that connection via wi-fi, turning the E71 (and many other phones) into a wi-fi hotspot in a snap.

Only recently added in some smartphones natively, this feature is usually defined “wi-fi tethering”.

Think about the possibilities. I mainly enjoy the latest apps on my iPod Touch and download new content from everywhere on my e-book reader… but one could even surf the Internet with two notebooks at the same time from a beach…

Just get a 3G flat data tariff before!

Let me explain why. During a couple of business trips I’ve been reading Inside Steve’s Brain, a smart book about a guy who definitely knows how to make a difference: Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs. I already knew how troubled Apple Inc was in the late 1990s, when Jobs took its role back after many years out of the company. Thanks to that book, I discovered some serious similarities between today’s Blockbuster and 15 years ago’s Apple Inc. For instance:

- Apple had a huge set of different products and versions, without anything close to a precise focus or strategy -> Blockbuster has started losing money from its hundreds of shops, and now is acting as a confused late follower in those adjacent markets responsible for its crisis (from online rentals to automated kiosks)

- Jobs immediately identified Apple’s brand as the most valuable asset to start a relaunch from -> Blockbuster’s blue and yellow logo is still synonym of “cinema” across most of the Western countries

Not enough? Sure, it’s hard for everyone to be compared with the cool and innovative Apple we all know. But let’s go back to 1997, when Apple’s logo had rainbow stripes and the Power Macintosh had the appearance you can see here on the left.

Yes, a different era. But Jobs started his unbelievable series of best seller products with the iMac (here on the right) one year later only.
Big step forward, uh?

Blockbuster could start a new course as well, leveraging one of its supposed weaknesses: the shops. I believe an effective recipe should be based on the so-called “Internet of the Things”.

Movies are not common products. Hollywood’s “dream factory” is not just a claim.

One could enter a Blockbuster store, be recognized by a RFID loyalty card without pulling it out of the wallet… and get amazed by HD trailers, profiled offers and recommendations… with every movie ready to be downloaded on a digital memory in a snap.

A whole new approach, capable of suddenly shifting the company image from the 1980s to 2010 and beyond. Who said customers always want to stay home while choosing a movie? They could be eager to go out, if the shops were able to amuse and entertain them!

As far as I remember, a brick-&-mortar content distributor such as Blockbuster has broadcast a Super Bowl ad only once. Well, this year Vizio has shown how its latest TVs can bring both premium video content and web services to the living room. Through the Internet. In a snap.

The rules of the game are definitely changing…

I’d rather love finding out ways in which consumer oriented technology can help developing a cleaner world, by making what the Internet can do best: eliminate barriers.

Here you go with A Real Tree. Just a few taps on your iPhone screen, and for $0.99 a real tree will be planted on your behalf in a developing country facing deforestation. Then the application will give you a real-time (estimated) glimpse on how your tree is doing. Check it out!

By applying all of this to consumer electronics, I think Apple’s iPhone has determined the most relevant market trend across 2009, being much more than the excellent niche product someone had initially considered it. While touch screens and widgets/applications have swiftly become a must for everyone out there, I’m asking myself: what’s going to play a similar role in 2010?

My bet is on ebook readers.

On the way to explain this statement, let’s make one step back. Gartner, a market research firm, believes every technologies go through a hype cycle before gaining a widespread diffusion: after a peak of inflated expectations, there’s a “trough of disillusionment” before the technology reaches the “slope of enlightment”.

In Gartner’s 2009 Hype Cycle Report, issued in July 2009, ebook readers were placed at the maximum level of expectations, just before the disillusionment phase.

Six months later, I believe this phase could be almost over. Using the chart below as an instruction manual, ebook readers are in my opinion where competition increases and second generation products reach the market.

Time (the horizontal axis) is running so fast that ebook readers could be climbing the slope in six months, when Gartner’s next report is expected to be issued.

This technology has the potential to eventually change the way we’ve been reading for centuries. The Internet is already doing it for news and every other short/medium length text. Ebook readers could finish the job.

The huge retailer Amazon, originally born just as a bookshop, is leading the ebook readers market not by accident with its Kindle, whose DX version has gained worldwide 3G coverage just today (the more popular Kindle 2 already had it).

Moreover, the potentially most brilliant competitor happens to be the Nook from Barnes & Noble, a US-based bookseller. The Nook is still young but adds a small LCD touch screen for navigation and is powered by Android operating system, which could support interesting features like (back to the 2009 must-haves) widgets.

This means one thing: content eventually rules over features.

No matter what Sony or others are going to launch in technical terms. A seamless access to books and magazines is definitely the key aspect.

While BBC iPlayer is increasingly available on multiple devices in the UK, though not yet in form of mobile network enabled iPhone/Android app, Hulu and its minor competitors appear essentially stuck in the PC world.

Yes, one could connect its computer to the TV screen. Of course it’s not the same thing. I wish I could just receive a feed like the one below onto a widget-enabled STB, press OK on the remote control and play the latest Heroes episode seamlessly…

In 1995 Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen, two researchers at Harvard Business School, felt the need to invent a new term for defining the most radical of those markets’ innovations: disruptive technology.

Of course change isn’t loved by everyone. As Wikipedia states: “Disruptive technologies are particularly threatening to the leaders of an existing market, because they are competition coming from an unexpected direction.” The risk for incumbent companies is that of the proverbial boiling frog: they often can’t guess the right moment to switch to the new technology, until it’s too late.

Now, which is the market heading to the next disruptive change?

My bet is on TV, where some old-fashioned broadcasters seem very unlikely to keep their leadership over the next decade. Yes, of course they’re moving some content to the cloud and granting some sort of on-demand access to their customers. But real competition can reveal tough to deal with… especially when it comes from copyright owners, suddenly able to speak directly to their viewers.

Nonetheless, I believe a couple of interesting alternatives have a good chance to gradually increase competition.

1. Napster Music Store

I’ve got a special bond with the Napster brand: it wasn’t only the first peer-to-peer service I bumped into years ago, but also the main topic of my graduation thesis. Everyone probably agrees that it changed forever the way we mean music…

A few months ago, Napster has been relaunched as a legal music store backed by Best Buy. I couldn’t resist: I had to check it out!

Well, for just $5 per month I’ve got not only five DRM-free legal downloads… but also unlimited listening of every song from the catalogue! It’s like merging a traditional store (say Amazon) into the concept of online radio services such as Last.fm or Pandora. Respect to those, Napster has much progress to do in terms of recommendation engine, but grants its users far deeper control: you can select songs or entire albums, put them in a playlist and just listen with no limits.

It’s easy to reckon that the “listening” part comes almost for free, since most songs cost $0.99 on traditional stores.

2. DoubleTwist

I believe part of Apple’s success in the digital music market comes from iTunes, which most iPod users wouldn’t ever replace (well, not even if they could). Of course iTunes works with its own Music Store only, is based on DRMs and doesn’t manage any devices but the iPods.

Well, now imagine a comparable software which relies on the DRM-free Amazon music store and allows synchronization with nearly every device.

Currently available for Macs only, this all-devices-welcome player (definition borrowed from a Gizmodo article containing also a short video) might be headed to a promising evolution.

As Rick Falkvinge points out, that was possible thanks to a substantial monopoly over information. Mr Falkvinge, founder and leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, reckons that power has always been consequence of an information advantage. Of course new technologies, such as printing press, threatened those advantages and were thus hardly fought… until the United Kingdom, on May 4th 1557, took a different approach and created a monopoly called copyright.

It’s interesting to find similar reactions across history with the subsequent big innovations: TV and radio have always been monopolies until relatively recent times. And even in wealthy countries such as Italy, member of the G8 but ranked only 65th in the 2008 Freedom of the Press chart, they’ve just turned into controlled systems with very poor competition.

Of course there’s a notable exception: everybody can be user of unlimited information and even editor of original content through the Internet. No revolution has ever had the potential of the world-wide-web. And the effects are already starting to become clear in the most advanced and free countries.

Yes, the surprising election of Mr Falkvinge to the European Parliament is a very good example, but not the greatest…

Reading advice: Yes We Did! An inside look at how social media built the Obama brand.

The movie is indeed based on a true story: Erin Brockovic, a formerly unemployed single mother of three children working in a law firm, found out evidence that PG&E had been dumping (over a few years) 370 million gallons of cancer-causing chemicals into a series of ponds located in Hinkley, CA. The civil class-action managed by Erin brought to the largest settlement of its kind in the history of the United States: PG&E was requested to compensate the plaintiffs with $333 million! Further details about the trial are available here.

What I want to point out here is that perhaps something has changed, or at least history has been a good teacher… since today the same PG&E is one of the champions in the US race towards clean energy production.

Based on an agreement signed one year ago with two subsidiaries of OptiSolar and SunPower, PG&E will soon manage one of the world’s largest photovoltaic farm, for a total of 800 Mw. The farm will be located in San Luis Obispo County, about 100 miles north of Santa Barbara, CA.

Those 800 Mw are just a nominal figure, which approximately indicates the solar panels “peak power” (the production achieved in ideal conditions). The efficiency of a solar installation is often indicated by measuring its total daily production in terms of equivalent peak hours. PG&E forecasts a production of 1.65 billion kilowatt-hours of renewable energy annually, which would be a daily average of 4520 megawatt-hours… as though the plant worked for about 5 hours and half per day at its peak power. Definitely not bad! About 240,000 residential homes can be completely served with that amount of energy, without any emission into the atmosphere.

Nobody’s so naive to believe PG&E has not considered its return on such an investment. But this is probably the best news at all! Making photovoltaic energy remunerative even before it reaches the grid parity, through proper incentives, is essential if we want to start building a cleaner future for our planet.

The main contribution I picked out from the book is the importance of being “focused and consistent”, in order to cover a niche and develop a loyal group of readers. This sounds fair.

Thus I’m going to make technology and sustainability the mood all my posts will be written around. Far from a small niche, I know… but it fits quite well my current span of interest.

Moreover, the links between information technology and the long awaited clean energy revolution might be more relevant than expected. This is something I believe since I read another book, several years ago: The Hydrogen Economy by Jeremy Rifkin.

In 2008, about 24% of netbooks were shipped with a Linux operating system. That percentage is expected to plunge to a poor 4% this year, according to the market research company IDC. One could imagine that a revolutionary new OS has entered the market and caused such a change! Completely wrong: the netbook market is currently led by the 8-years-old Windows XP.

Why?

Win XP is neither more complete nor faster than Linux, especially on these low-power devices.

The point is that users look for compatibility with the constantly growing number of electronic devices they own: mp3 players, portable hard drives, smartphones… and of course with a series of well-known software products they’re already used to…

I’m a loyal user of Linux Ubuntu, which I installed on a couple of computers including my Dell Mini (some tips about it here). But I’ve never felt indifferent to the issues described above: I wish I could have on my netbook at least iTunes, Slingbox Player and a full compatibility with every external memory. Anyway, I didn’t consider Win XP as an option.

Then I bumped into this article from Uneasy Silence, describing a simple method to install Apple OS X “Leopard” on the little guy. Of course I spent a few hours surfing the web about this, so I found out that different methods have been built and are very well explained by the smart guys at the Dell Mini forum. This post from Gizmodo has been an interesting reading too.

Well… I couldn’t resist from tryin’ it out. And it worked!

I’ve been testing this solution for a few days now. Needless to say, having some of the Apple incomparable experience on my netbook has been amazing. But on a deeper analysis I believe it’s just not worth it.

Let’s highlight three main reasons.

1) A netbook is primarily meant to surf the web. While Ubuntu’s Firefox lets me scroll every page just smoothly, by sliding the touchpad edge with my right finger, I couldn’t replicate the same behavior on Mac OS… nor, least of all, have the famous two-finger Mac experience: that’s not supported by Dell’s hardware.

2) Yes, I could successfully install Slingbox Player and iTunes on the hackintoshed Dell Mini. But the latter couldn’t manage my Win-formatted iPod Nano.

3) Ethernet was not recognized on Leopard, which wasn’t so bad at first, because the wi-fi connection worked perfectly instead. Then I went out for a week-end and I realized that this somehow prevented my HSPA dongle from working.

Therefore, I peacefully switched back to the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix version.

Now I know that I would definitely buy a possible Apple Netbook. But I also learned why in Cupertino they’re so obsessed with selling the Mac OS coupled with their own hardware only: full control of the user experience, resulting in a cutting-edge product line.

While during winter I’m especially focused on the short distances, because that’s where I gain my highest scores, now I’m having the chance to experience a distance training for three months. That’s still the situation I enjoy the most: long strokes, full awareness of your body and control over your energies…

Besides swimming for miles and miles, I’m going to watch this fantastic performance by Alessia Filippi regularly, as a source of tips and inspiration.

Needless to say, though she’s a woman, Alessia swims the 800 freestyle in about two minutes less than me! But let’s assume I’ve got wider margins of improvement… 

My irreplaceable coach Enrico will surely lead me across these next three months, but meanwhile I couldn’t resist to snoop around for some training programs online. Here’s the core part of the most interesting I’ve found so far:

- 10×100, descending 1-8 from 75% effort to 90% effort, recover/easy swim on 9 and 10;

- 1×800, negative split second 400;

- 6×100, descending 1-4 from 75% effort to 90% effort, recover/easy swim on 5 and 6;

- 1×400, negative split second 200.

The complete workout is available here, together with other challenging ones you can find through this engine (my settings: Masters Level 3, Distance Freestyle).

People who works in technology would be a better-than-average lover, because more focused on pleasing the partner and far less selfish. Great and distinctive features, folks, especially for men!

The explanation of this result might be easy to find, if you consider the supposedly methodical nature of tech-minded individuals. More naughty interpreters could think about the manual skills gained by hours of console playing…

Either way, even though I’m not a 100% geek but rather a marketing professional with a deep passion for technology, I must admit a certain sense of identification and amusement.

My girlfriend lately belongs to the latter category, also thanks to an amazing on-line platform which is definitely contributing to her commitment: Nikeplus.

Nikeplus allows to keep track of how many miles you run, through a smart (and unexpectedly cheap) iPod Nano accessory, then to upload those information to the cloud via iTunes. What makes Nikeplus unique is the compelling and attractive way it presents and manages your data, building a community of runners who challenge each other and share their passion for sport and healthy lifestyle.

My master swimming season is still in its topic period, which is even longer this year because of the European Championship in Spain. But I must confess a strong temptation to get my running shoes out of the closet, sooner or later. Maybe this time I wouldn’t miss the fascinating target of running a marathon, thanks to this new breed of training tools…

Unfortunately such a scenario is not completely unrealistic, despite every effort to switch towards clean energy sources and sustainable lifestyles. In fact this change will possibly decrease future emissions, but the carbon dioxide we’ve already produced will keep warming the Earth for centuries (and it’s doing it faster than expected).

That’s why science might eventually be our last resource.

Let’s go back to June 15th 1991, when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted with such a violence that the ejected gas penetrated into the stratosphere. Besides killing hundreds of people in one of the world’s most populous areas, this cataclysmic eruption allowed scientists and engineers to establish a huge and unexpected tryout: Pinatubo injected about 15 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it reacted with water and formed a layer of particles, able to absorb part of the sunlight.

This caused a relevant cooling effect over the entire planet.

Well, a human-driven injection of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere is possible, and would cost less than many other methods for stopping the global warming. This is what Paul Crutzen, winner of a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on the ozone hole, has proposed since an article he published in 2006.

Here’s the definition of Mr. Crutzen’s area of interest: Stratospheric and tropospheric chemistry, and their role in the biogeochemical cycles and climate. So let’s say he definitely appears qualified. I just hope these guys are going to be very careful, since the possible collateral effects of releasing SO2 into the stratosphere include the enlargement of the existing ozone hole over the South Pole (see the picture beside) and even the origination of a second hole above the North Pole.

Back to the Hollywood movies I mentioned before… what I hope above all, in case the human race will face such a threatening situation, is that we’ll fight all together just like usually imagined by those talented filmmakers…

The process is quite simple and doesn’t require any additional hardware or software, but it can reveal very powerful by allowing multiple use cases.

I’m wondering for instance if someone could use a VPN connection, set on the PC, to make a (wi-fi enabled) set-top-box access video rental services with geographical restrictions.

Any other idea?

Nevertheless, even if your device doesn’t belong the the “supported sources” category, you’ll still be able to stream its video flow through a Slingbox. You’ll only miss the chance to remotely control it via a virtual remote control… which can represent a significant limitation!

Before giving up with an italian MySky HD receiver, I made some googling and visited a few forums. It worked.

Here’s a simple recipe in two steps…

1) After installing Slingbox Player on your computer, locate the folder which contains the included files for IR configuration. It should be:

C:\Program Files\Slingmedia\SlingPlayer\SBAV\ in Windows;
/Applications/SlingPlayer/Contents/Slingbox Setup Assistant/Contents/Resources/SBAV/ on a Mac.

2) Then search the Internet for a binary file built-up for your device, copy it into the folder above and insert the code included within the filename (e.g. 2012 for MySky HD) into the Slingplayer wizard when asked. The MySky HD file is available right here, within a large directory that will make you reach many others.

That’s it. Just warn any people you share the TV set with, because now you’re able to switch channel from everywhere in the world!

Of course my arms have not remained steady. But today I’d rather be in front of a modern and technological dashboard like the following, with much more comfort and safety.

I could still feel the old-fashioned fashion of a VW micro-bus though… because I would be driving the beautiful silver bullet below!

Powered by a hybrid (bio-diesel + electric) engine and provided with a photovoltaic rooftop, this amazing vehicle should be ready in form of prototype by next summer and available for purchase a short time later. Its creator, Canadian designer Alexandre Verdier, has recently stated: “I wanted to build a car that’s low impact and makes the most out of nature”.

Well done, Alexandre! Once you’ve stopped and turned your Verdier into the mobile house below, you’ll definitely enjoy the environment you’ve contributed to protect.

More details and pictures can be found here, or by googling Verdier.

A fully equipped Verdier will cost the crazy amount of $129,000, but a more affordable $69,000 version should be in the pipeline too. While wondering about a time in which I’ll be able to purchase and intensively use such a vehicle, I can’t wait to spot one of them around!

I’m talking about three years ago only. And I clearly remember that I picked out ImTOO Mpeg Encoder as my preferred software for clips conversion. Yes, I know: it’s unacceptable for an average user to deal with this kind of geek stuff. And it wasn’t so convenient for me either.

Of course most of today’s devices, including mobile phones, are far more flexible in playing various formats and resolutions. But you’re still required to make at least some syncing. Meanwhile, a few on-line services promise to do even better: your favourite videos are brought into a cloud, ready to be delivered onto your devices in the most suitable format.

Reeplay.it belongs to the latter category. Just select a video from the Internet (through a bookmarklet or a small application) and you’ll be able to download or view it with many different devices: mobile phone, iPod, Wii, PlayStation… and of course personal computer, as a common podcast.

A social aspect couldn’t be missing. So you’re allowed to create and share playlists and single videos with your friends.

The service works pretty well with most of the on-line video portals, including YouTube and the aggregator Blinkx. Check it out!

That might appear trivial. But the huge investments he’s planning on renewable energies are quite tangible instead.

By the way, settled to write a post about this topic, I searched the web for an Earth Day logo. And I found dozens of different ones! Of course this might mean nothing. Or maybe it’s a signal of how fragmented the world’s commitment against global warming still is.

Unfortunately my feeling is not based on this isolated episode only. Yes, every day I read about new amazing projects, like (in the last couple of days only) an entirely solar-powered city in Florida or the first low-cost small electric car. But I also see that most of the bad behaviors which took us to the current situation are unchanged.

The Italian government is planning to build several new garbage incinerators, through a procedure which adds insult to injury: they’re partly financed with those funds (CIP6) supposed to support the investments in clean energy!

The citizens’ health is completely ignored. Look at the following picture. Based on recent data from the World Health Organization, it clearly shows the decrease in life expectancy within Western Europe caused by air pollution.

People who live in Northern Italy like me, or in other industrial areas of Europe, are shortening their own life by 36 months on average. But who lives in the large red coloured areas can’t consider himself lucky either.

Less fascinating than the map of solar irradiation I showed in a recent post, isn’t it?

The real question is: what are we waiting for? Which other signal should Mother Earth send us before we stop killing her and ourselves?

Happy Earth Day…

What follows is instead a series of subsequent improvements I gradually brought in. Although they’re not a must-have, they helped me obtain the best from my netbook.

1) Following an advice from the Ubuntu Mini blog, I installed Medibuntu: a repository of packages which allows quite important multimedia operations, from mpeg encoding to Skype calls. I also installed the unfailing VLC Media Player. Of course you know that getting a new program in Ubuntu is as easy as going to Programs -> Add/Remove, looking for it and clicking Install… right?

2) Since Netbook Remix hides the topbar of maximized windows, I found it very useful to set up a few keyboard shortcuts. Ubuntu makes it really easy, through a tool you can find in System -> Preferences. My convenient choices have been: Alt-Z to maximize the selected window, Alt-X to unmaximize and Alt-C to close.

3) A few settings, suggested by an Ubuntu Mini article again, have allowed me to customize Firefox. Their purpose is to keep in consideration the limited screen size and CPU speed of a netbook. That’s why I preferred not to install most of the add-ons suggested in the same article.

4) One more technical touch up: since the Dell Mini comes with a SSD memory, I wanted to lenghten its life by disabling the Tracker from loading at start-up (just uncheck it from the list you find in System -> Preferences -> Sessions) and stopping content indexing on my netbook (step-by-step guide here).

5) Last but not least, something more recreational. These guys at System 76 offer free Ubuntu stickers if you send them a self addressed stamped envelope! Their goal is just to let people show their pride for being powered by Ubuntu. Give it a try!

A few months later, though it’s been surpassed by more performant and same-priced netbooks, my small Dell is still an outstanding device: some supposed limits, like the 8Gb only built-in memory, turn into valuable features when you notice how silent this computer is.

To be honest, I somehow influenced the way this present has been picked out, because it brings two significant benefits respect to some similar products: embedded Bluetooth 2.0, and Linux Ubuntu operating system. I knew Dell had involved Canonical for the second point, so I expected my Dell Mini to come with the just-released Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Instead, when I switched it on for the first time, I saw something similar to this screenshot.

Yes, pretty nice. But strongly managed by Dell, starting from the strictly selected updates; and based on Ubuntu 8.04, which misses the very good Connection Manager released within the 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. I resisted for one week, because worried about warranty issues, then I decided to pimp my Dell Mini.

The open-source community provided good support as usual, but I especially leveraged the advices from a very good blog named Ubuntu Mini. Here’s the few steps I followed.

1) First, I downloaded the latest Ubuntu release from the official site, and I created a live USB key. It was Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex in my case, but at the moment I’m writing Ubuntu 9.04 is about to be released.

2) Installation on the Dell Mini was quite easy, thanks to an excellent wizard. The only tricky part is perhaps the partition management, whose settings should depend on the way you’re going to use your netbook. You can find here a very detailed step-by-step guide, which includes an important advice to fix a common sound problem with the Dell Mini.

3) Ubuntu Linux is an amazing operating system, but I think the Netbook Remix makes it even more enjoyable, particularly on a 9 inches screen. Installing the Netbook Remix over Ubuntu 9.04 promises to be as easy as typing sudo apt-get install ubuntu-netbook-remix, but for its 8.10 version I needed a couple of additional expedients from this guide.

Here’s how my Dell Mini desktop looked at the end of this process, which I could perform in about one hour.

These were the must-have steps to get a Netbook-Remix-powered Dell Mini. In my experience, it’s really worth it. One example? The already mentioned built-in Connection Manager not only manages wireline and wi-fi connections seamlessly, but also allowed me to plug-&-play multiple devices: HSDPA dongles from different manufacturers, shared connection from a Windows Mobile smartphone…

The next part of this article (post 2 of 2) will include a few optional settings and tools for further improving your installation and subsequent experience.

I’ve been an early adopter of personal tools like iGoogle and Google Reader, but I never stuck to the social aspect of it: Digg, Delicious and so forth…

Well, today I eventually found a nice and different way to share selected content from my favorite on-line sources. You can enjoy my selection in the News page of my site, and find out how to do the same within your own WordPress blog right here…

1) First of all, of course you need to regularly browse the content Google Reader aggregates for you. I also take for granted that you’ll progressively increase the number of feeds you get content from. Anyway, every time you find something interesting and relevant for your audience, just click on either the Share or Share with note link at the bottom of the article.

Your picks will be shown in your WordPress page, as soon as you’ll have completed the following two steps.

2) Now, look at the URL in your web browser. Google Reader identifies you by a unique ID, inserted between user%2F and %2F, like in the picture below.

3) Final step. Download the Google Reader Shared tool from WordPress Extend and install it into your blog (by unzipping the file and copying the resulting folder into the wp-content/plugins folder of your web server). Activate it from your WordPress back-end, then go to Settings -> Rec. Reading and insert your Google Reader ID into the proper field.

That’s it. Now you can choose whether to show your selected content within a page, by writing the word recreading between two square parenthesis in your editor, or to use the dedicated widget you’ll find in Appearance -> Widgets. Further options allow to influence the aspect of your outcome, including some CSS editing for the most advanced users.

Happy publishing!

Of course the big players had large stands and released powerful features. But a back-to-the-basics mood spread out from many presentations. Moreover, maybe because of the current recession, much more interest than expected has developed around the Open IPTV association, whose aim is to develop end-to-end specifications for IPTV, based upon existing technologies and open standards, for either managed or unmanaged networks.

Let’s say it: most of the current IPTV deployments really fit the definition of Cable TV in Telco’s clothes. They support everything with huge investments, but still don’t know which business they really want to be in. Thus the adoption of standard technologies might be a winning strategy: not only for cost reduction, but even in order to deliver new services and get the market response in a very short time. Essentially a perpetual beta approach.

Would this drive us to eventually enjoy the Internet potential within a television box, like the oncoming IPTV technology has promised years ago?

Of course I don’t have this answer. I just believe that indirect competition is highlighting the urgency of a route change. I’m especially referring to those services which rely on the open Internet, delivering quality content through an outstanding experience: the multi-platform BBC iPlayer is the european best-practice by now, while devices such as Roku and TiVo make the US video-rental offers handier every day.

Of course Joomla is not a ready-to-use tool (like, let’s say, WordPress for blogging), but needs to be customized for the kind of site you’re going to deliver. The open-source community never leaves you alone in this, starting from the thousands of extensions available and fully supported on the official Joomla.org site. There are plenty of features for almost any purpose, including even the launch of a full e-commerce solution.

What I’m going to do here is simply to list the few extensions I strongly suggest, regardless of which is your Joomla-based project.

- Xmap: a very effective component, which builds and keeps updated both an HTML and an XML site map, useful for your visitors and necessary for search engines friendliness.

- J15html: it allows to create basic modules containing the html code you wrote or pasted in. Essential for publishing every tool or badge from external sites in the blink of an eye.

- JX Wysiwyg: an advanced what-you-see-is-what-you-get publishing tool, which gives you more options respect to the built-in Tiny MCE editor.

- Flickr Slideshow: whether you want to show a few simple images or a large photoalbum from Flickr, this smart component makes it simple and generates attractive layouts.

- YV Comment: yes, this is not exactly a must-have for every site. But today comments are often allowed even in environments quite different from blogs. Alternatively, a good option for comments might be also Disqus, a complete platform which is easy to embed within Joomla through a dedicated extension.

Every software product I mentioned is distributed for free under the GPL license. You can search and download any of them from the Joomla Extensions web site, which also provides an outstanding support through its community.

Among his records, I think the sum of these two really shows this rider’s greatness: youngest World Champion ever (in 1990, at his debut) and rider with the longest time between the first and last GP won in his career (for a total of 29 victories and 99 podiums in 282 GP).

Loris has been World Champion three times, and they could have been at least a couple more. So yes, he’s definitely a great champion with an amazing career. But there’s much more underneath: he’s met both triumph and defeats, learning to treat these two impostors just the same (reference), thus here’s the main reason I’m his fan for: I think Loris is a great person.

His bravery and obstinacy have always been inspirational for me. And the informality he proved when we met is as noteworthy: it was June 2000 and I had built my first web site as a tribute to him, with plenty of information and updates about his career. A friend of his, responsible for the Capirex Fan Club, noticed the site and invited me to join them at the Mugello circuit for the Italian GP. Well, the first thing Loris said was “congratulations for the amazing job you’ve done for me!” Not bad from a world champion. A couple of hours later, he won one of the most spectacular Italian GP ever, after an amazing battle with fellow Italians Max Biaggi and Valentino Rossi.

Next week Loris will start his 20th championship, in the shining environment of the Qatar night-time GP.

The latest motorbike Suzuki has developed, following Capirossi’s requirements, has shown massive improvements. Hope he’s gonna play a main role, dragging his #65 motorbike to the first positions once again. Go Loris, go!!

Decades of studies have allowed the definition of detailed maps, whose visual result I find as fascinating as interesting. They report the yearly sum of electricity generated by each single KWp (KiloWatt-peak) in every area: an amount that can even double if you move from Central Europe to Southern Italy or Spain.

I’m publishing a map of the whole Europe, but many local maps are available here and some googling will definitely cover any other world area.

Solar irradiation is an essential parameter indeed: on equal terms, it could even halve the break-even period of your investment. But many other parameters are relevant, starting from compelling public incentives. This explains why Germany, even though its territory appears quite sad in the map above, has rapidly become one of the world main hosts and producers of photovoltaic systems.

Ernst & Young has developed a research named Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Index, whose aim is to give a complete picture of the renewable energy market. Many interesting details, including the ambitious targets set by the world’s main countries, are reported in this excellent article published in 2007. More recent and really complete data can be found in the EPIA (European Photovoltaic Industry Association) latest Solar Generation Report, developed in collaboration with Greenpeace.

Are we really going to build a clean planet for our children? Recent developments, like soaring oil prices and President Obama’s ambitious plans, give us hope.

I really love these funny original testimonials, even because I had the chance to work on them with my friend Nicolas a few years ago, delivering an amazing interactive home-page and some cute banners for Blockbuster Italy.

Voiced respectively by Jim Belushi and James Woods, Ray the guinea pig and Carl the rabbit observe life from their pet shop window, just in front of a shining Blockbuster videostore.

Conceived and computer-generated by the talented guys at Tippett Studios, Carl and Ray have soared at the acme of their TV stars career in 2002, when one of their funniest commercial was broadcast during the Super Bowl.

Here follows a selection of their performances…

On the other side of the coin, WordPress can be less supportive when you look for advanced features and settings.

I initially couldn’t view the true html code of my posts, and the built-in editor used to cut tags like <br/>. So I installed the plugin TinyMCE Advanced Editor, which gave me more flexibility and control. But I still couldn’t have a custom space between paragraphs…

Unsatisfied with some work-around solutions found out on the web, I started trying with my (improvable) CSS skills and I eventually succeeded.

Well, let’s go straight to the point. You just need to put the following lines into your WordPress theme style.css file:

p{
padding-bottom:7px;
}

This simple instruction puts a padding of 7 pixels every time you close a paragraph with the tag </p> (which is exactly what happens when you press the enter button in the visual view). Of course 7 pixels have been my choice, but you can change this value until satisfied.

Hope this helps!

My favorite character is the man who, after four minutes waiting for the preceding car to be parked, simply gets off his car and literally pulls the woman out, in order to park her car himself. Perhaps this can be considered a rude behavior, but it’s so funny if you wonder about his growing anger during the waiting time…

Moreover, the young chick who gets dragged by the gasoline nozzle is simply great. Enjoy!

Meanwhile I’m translating and publishing, with their original date and time, a few selected posts from my old Italian blog.

And of course I’m working on the blog appearance, delivering a good number of updates to the original Blue Uzor WordPress theme: every suggestion is very welcome!

They’re an injection of confidence and bravery, because life is too short and shaky for wasting time in hesitancy.

A recent Forbes article clearly shows us the effectiveness of the long-term perspective.

I eventually found a two-step method I’m quite satisfied with.

1. Microsoft Outlook to Google Calendar. Developers have released some interesting software products for this kind of synchronization, including the very good SyncMyCal. Then BigG itself launched Google Calendar Sync, which is completely free and includes traditionally-premium features like scheduled periodic syncs. Whatever your choice, be careful not to use more than one of them at a time, or you’ll get duplicated events and other trouble.

2. Google Calendar to mobile phone. This step has an unquestioned winner: GooSync, a shareware software with support for almost every cellphone. It works pretty well and offers good support. The interesting part is that calendar features are fully included in the free version, so you’ll need to purchase the premium one only if you’re interested in syncing contacts and tasks. And for contacts sync I’d rather suggest products such as Zyb.

Just one final advice: before running one of these programs on your mobile phone, verify your operator tariffs for mobile data!

Joining us is totally free and depends on two requirements:

- having a LinkedIn profile

- mentioning “swimming” within it

Membership allows you to show the “swimmer inside” logo on your profile and to interact with the other members through dedicated LinkedIn tools.

Do you want to apply? Just click here.

Once stricly linked to the physical theatre, today movies are distributed through dozens of media and devices, allowing many different use cases. Everything started in the 80s with a successful company named Blockbuster: couch, pop-corns and VHS cassettes have been the ingredients of a great concept.

Then DVDs, promptly decrypted by the norvegian student Jon Johansen, have represented the first sparkle of a massive revolution: digital support, unlimited copies with no quality loss…

Today broadcasters and ISPs deliver digital content onto our televisions in real time, new formats like mpeg4 and DivX have disclosed commercial opportunities and also set up a fertile ground for piracy, video content can be easily watched through the Internet Protocol with many different devices… while high definition and home-theatre systems turn our living rooms into an amazing environment.

At least the Hollywood Studios, perhaps adviced by the discographic disastrous experience, have exploited rather than fought this revolution. So Steve Jobs’ latest announcement is what we’ve been waiting for: besides songs, iTunes is going to sell thousands of movies. What’s next?

Yes, he already was a fast guy.

But the confidence he’s showing in this season, well… is more than unexpected! Casey Stoner is dominating the championship, driving crazy one of the best riders of all times: does anybody recognize that #46 motorbike?

The newest Ducati Desmosedici is a lightning and perfectly fits this young rider, just while Loris Capirossi, used to be the greatest interpreter of this amazing crabby motorbike, strives to obtain feeling with its 2007 version. Consequence of the large use of electronical equipments in these 800cc engines?

Anyway, Ducati still beats the shit out of the japanese huge producers!

The aim of my speech, titled like this post and based on my experience with Bulldog Broadband in the UK, was showing how user-centered design can effectively lead an IPTV interface development, in order to bring some of the Internet potential into the television box.

The starting point is necessarily the Internet. A medium? A technology? Every definition would be reductive. Instead, let’s give a look at the sketch Tim Berners-Lee conceived the hypertext with. It’s displayed at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and appears so ingenious in its (relative) simplicity.

Doesn’t it look somehow like Doc Brown’s flux capacitor chart, the one he draws in 1955 after clashing against the toilet? Unforgettable!   But let’s remain focused…

The Internet has changed our lives because it allows users to customize, interact, build relationships. Everybody is the main character in the world-wide-web, because can build up his personal way of collecting, managing and enjoying unlimited content and amazing tools.

On the other hand, television is the typical passive medium. In front of the small screen we’re all spectators, ads viewers, recipients of a programme schedule that somebody else has defined for all of us.

The great advantage of traditional TV? Being prompt, immediate, outrageously easy-to-use. The real challenge for IPTV? Delivering the unlimited Internet potential onto the TV screen, without losing that easiness. Interactivity would be eventually available for everyone!

Consider the basic customer, threatened by these computers that send information throughout the world. Then give him a remote control. He’ll suddenly feel confident, and will gradually get ready to discover new amazing possibilities, as long as you provide them through a great user-experience.

Very soon he’ll play a movie whenever he wants, check the weather forecasts, share photographs and thoughts… And he’ll build his own TV schedule, as easily as I manage my iGoogle personal page.