Exactly ten years ago, on Feb 9th 1998, Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond began the Open Source movement. It was just a different way to explain what had been already happening for quite a few years, and make it understandable for the business world. And it worked very well.

Building on the ground-breaking work of great leaders like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, we laid out the software technology that leads many markets of today’s world, entering the mainstream. When I say we it’s because I have been an active contributor of this community and an advocate of the open source concept since the beginning. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a great tool, thank you Joel!  Basically you enter an address and Walk Score looks it up in Google map automatically collecting a list of interesting places you can reach on foot and finally computing a walkability score.  How easy it is to move on foot in your neighborhood?  Do you need a car?  The place where I work got 80 out of 100 which is defined as “Very Walkable: It’s possible to get by without owning a car”.  In fact I own a car by I never use it to go to work.  I usually ride a bicycle and believe me, it’s great.  I can’t stand the stress of traffic jams.

Google led the creation of Open Handset Alliance, a consortium involving a number of telco and manufacturers . As its first act the Alliance released Android, an open source operating system for mobiles complete of SDK and API. The SDK includes a working emulator and half a dozen example applications. The idea to establish an open platform for mobile developers is very good but not particularly new: project Openmoko has been working to a similar concept for several months and went as far as to release a developer version of the handset. Read the rest of this entry »

It looks like we are again at a turning point in the Value Added Services space. Apparently this market undergoes at least one paradigm shift every three years. Read the rest of this entry »

Is there anybody out there who doesn’t know who Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are? Everybody and his brother know that they are the leaders of Apple and Microsoft and have been dominating the personal computer industry for the last 30 years. In all of this time, they’ve been very careful to appear together very rarely, but last Wednesday they shared the stage at the D: All things Digital conference. They chatted about how the industry evolved during their kingdom and talked about how they think our digital future is going to be. A warm and friendly chat, like a get together for long-standing friends who finally relax and nostalgically recall the common past. But wait, look at the picture, is that a real smile? Read the rest of this entry »

Last summer in Haarlem (The Netherlands) I attended a concert of a group that back then was named Mayday. Since I loved their music I even bought their CD and now I believe I have the one and only copy in the whole Italy! Recently I visited their website and discovered they changed their name in Fifth Lane, apparently because they had a trademark conflict. Read the rest of this entry »

Say you are a journalist, one working in a famous and heralded newspaper. You have been assigned to write an interview about an hostess who enjoys selling her body as a second job. Now, your article would surely attract more attention if you add a nice picture, wouldn’t it? Too bad you forgot to take a photo of your interviewee and to ask her permission for publishing. Read the rest of this entry »

So here I am again, bashing Apple. In the last few days everybody and his brother was talking about how cool the iPhone is and how they can’t wait to buy one because it’s sooo hi-tech and yadda yadda yadda. Actually, you just have to look at the specs to be deluded:

• Cingular only
• no UMTS
• battery life just 5 hours talk
• 135 grams
• no camera zoom

Ok, there are nice sensors, a multi-touch screen and a neat user interface, but at the end of the day who cares? Since I have a phone in my pocket 16hours a day the most important features are small size, light weight, battery life, audio quality. I’m sorry I can’t trade my own comfort for any UI, however cool it is.

This device is going to be sub-optimal both as a phone and as a computer (no QWERTY, 3.5″ screen). It’s like a tablet: that useless mid-size that makes everybody unhappy.

Of all the spam I received in my life, this is definitely the nicest. A mere few hours after I posted Caipirinha, a cachaça producer posted a comment with their recipe and a link to their web site. They have to have a robot connected to gogle alert and automatically scanning blog posts. Since this site is mostly useless, I decided to approve that comment even if it was spam, just removing the URL to avoid google bombing. At least this blog can be useful to somebody to promote their product.

UPDATE: there was no robot, there’s real people scanning the internet and posting comments! OMG, this is a lesson on marketing 2.0!

Microsoft finally figured it out: Vista could be their last operating system, at least in the way they meant it so far. From Times Online:

Yet already the knives are out for Vista, a system that Microsoft executives admit will be the last of its kind, as their company finally gets to grips with the internet age. Vista is meant to be slicker and safer than its predecessors, but even after a two-year delay it is “not really ready”, Michael Silver, an analyst at Gartner, said.

Now, this is a big step for them and for everybody (partners, customers) who accepted to be locked into their products. A very bitter medicine, but they eventually figured out there’s no choice:

The fear is that rivals will use the web to kill Windows. Google, a child of the online era, is the No 1 threat.

“Microsoft is way behind Google when it comes to the internet,” Rupert Godwins, the technology editor at ZDNet, the industry website, said. “Building Vista, Microsoft is still doing things the old way at the same time as it undergoes a big shift to catch up.”

[...]

Crucially, the Google word processor and spreadsheet package does not need Vista.

Well, it was about time they noticed. Welcome to the Internet.