The GIACOMO VACCA blog

This blog is closed

2009-04-20T11:13:00.002+02:00

I won't be writing here anymore, but feel free to browse the blog history.
I'll post a reference here when I'll have a new blog.

Cheers,
Giacomo

UPDATE: Please give a look to my new blog and subscribe to its RSS if you want.

A piano genius in Cagliari

2008-05-04T22:00:00.003+02:00

Saturday evening, almost sunset. My wife an I are in a rush to get to the Lyric Theatre in Cagliari before 7, when a concert of Giovanni Allevi is going to begin. It's the first time that I listen to his music (well, I'll discover that actually isn't, but this is what I believed when I was searching our seats).

I admit that probably I didn't get the concert in all its power - maybe the next time I will - for several reasons, but I've been hit by Allevi's genius. "L'orologio degli dei" (the watch of gods) definitely impressed me.

Update: I've just found "L'orologio degli dei" on Youtube - good quality:

Mobile BB with 3... easy and cheap. Maybe.

2008-04-29T01:24:00.003+02:00

Today I badly needed Internet connection from home in London (as I'm going to badly need a mains to recharge my laptop battery now), so I decided to buy a mobile BB contract.

The 3 offering seemed to be interesting... Just 10 pounds/month.

BUT

24 months contract (! I don't know what I'll be doing in 24 hours, let alone 24 months...)
150 pounds deposit (This tiny detail appeared well after the beginning of the purchase...)
1G limit (which seems so... limiting)

AND

all this to discover that at home I got no 3G signal at all... funny enough.

By the way, now I'm connected from Stansted airport, the connection is OK (2Mbps), and in an hour of routine office activity (no downloads) I've already consumed almost 15MB.

This means less than 65 hours/month, just 2 hours/day, but at the same time I'm going to cut my phone calls bill by about 10-15 pounds, so - if the lack of connectivity from home was just temporary - I think I'm not going to return the modem within the 14 days term.

SIP call flows explained

2008-02-29T20:18:00.004+01:00

Ok, my blogging activity is reaching 0...

But this is interesting: the guys at TechInvite provide a detailed set of SIP call flows, with nice-to-see diagrams and message details.

IMS call flows are also included.

Check it out.

Anno nuovo, vita nuova

2008-01-05T18:10:00.000+01:00

"Anno nuovo, vita nuova" is an old Italian proverb which literally means "A new year, a new life". In this case it is appropriate for me and my wife, since I'm going to relocate from Cagliari, Italy to London.

I met my friends and former colleagues last Thursday, for a "Goodbye party", and I want to thank them for the warm hug they gave me. I'll never forget each of them, and I hope to find the chance to meet them in London in the next months.

Looking at the future, I'm very excited and motivated to start a new working experience, with new colleagues friendly welcoming me.

For all of you, my best wishes for a great 2008!

Merry Christmas from... the Moon

2007-12-25T11:59:00.000+01:00

In December, 1968 NASA sent for the first time a manned spacecraft into Lunar orbit: Apollo 8.

In my opinion, this was one of the most important Apollo Missions, followed by Apollo 11 and Apollo 10 (obviously only Apollo 11, with the actual landing on the Moon became famous).

The three-man crew (Borman, Lovell, Anders - Lovell will be the commander of Apollo 13) surprised the world with a very special Merry Christmas, reading the Book Of Genesis and wishing peace for the Earth. Watch this fantastic footage!

The Unexpected winter

2007-12-18T12:40:00.000+01:00

It's funny to note that yesterday Alec posted "Winter in Ottawa", pointing out what a real winter is. It's funny because yesterday, while crossing my beautiful and usually-sunny Sardinia, I've been stuck for 7 (seven - yes, seven) hours inside my car while outside there was a sn ow storm!

Thanks to my two phones, an iPod, a good book and a pack of biscuits, I can't say it has been such a bad experience... except the lack of a toilette of course.

See these photos:

Microblogging and RSS feeds: watch out for privacy flaws

2007-10-24T15:24:00.000+02:00

If you know what microblogging is (Twitter, Jaiku, Hictu... never heard of?), you've probably noticed that each message flow has a RSS feed associated.

For example, you can go in my personal page on Hictu: see the "subscribe rss" button? Well, in this case the subscription means that you'll read in your feed reader every post I'll publish.

But if you go in your personal page, you can read (or watch, with Hictu) posts from your friends only. Some of your friends could have chose to share their thoughts just with friends, that is maintain the messages private. That's OK, but in this case be careful to don't export the RSS feeds of your friends as one of your favorite feed flow in another platform... or your friend's private posts will be visible by everyone!

What Jaiku will represent for Google

2007-10-11T17:45:00.000+02:00

After I watched two interviews by Phil Wolf to Jyri Engestrom, founder of Jaiku, I've found another really insightful article by Phil Wolf about how Jaiku will fit into Google.

More than just talking about microblogging, Phil emphasizes the presence and real-time communication aspects.

This article is very mind-opening for those who follow Google moves (I mean, everybody), and it's surely worth a read.

Google People to be launched

2007-10-10T17:29:00.000+02:00

Google People is going to be launched in the Q1 of 2008.

If you are searching for someone, or trying to retrieve information about the life and personal story of someone you know or want to know, with Google People you'll find all you need.

You could also search for something that person wrote in an article, blog or book, or said inside a video or podcast available on the Internet. Pretty cool!

Another outstanding idea from Google Labs!

*Disclaimer: this is not true. Just a joke :) I wanted to be the first to talk about people search tools provided by Google...

Google ______ Jaiku

2007-10-09T18:59:00.000+02:00

I'm sure you can fill in the missing word in the title...

So microblogging+presence isn't such a bad service to provide in Google's mind...

The question is: how many dollars/user are they going to pay? In my opinion Jaiku has about 0,5M users... would the total be more or less than $50M?

We'll see. In the meanwhile, congratulations to Jaiku's guys: well done!*

*Any analogy with the "An Officer and a Gentleman" ending is purely accidental.

How to compare two Web2.0 services, and be wrong

2007-10-09T14:35:00.000+02:00

As you may have noticed reading my blog, I'm involved with Hictu. Indeed, as Enrico realized, I consider myself its Dad.

As any other dad, I desired Hictu, I planned it, I attended its birth, presented it to my friends and relatives, and I'm notifying all these people each time there are news: new features, new comments, something unexpected...

Jokes apart, we decided to provide a free, public beta version as soon as possible. We launched Hictu on December 2006, gathering critics and suggestions that made it possible for us to grow and refine our identity: a community for video microbloggers. Mashable wrote about it, and again in September.

Microblogging was a quite mature tool for marketing and building social networks, but we added a simple yet differentiating feature: video posts (recorded directly from the browser).

Yesterday Techcrunch presented Seesmic, a new startup:

The service can be described as a video based Twitter, although it is also much more than that. The grand vision behind Seesmic is for it to become a very open online video/television service where people are constantly interacting around both user generated and professional content.

As Luca commented, this seems to be describing Hictu, but Techcrunch has never wrote a line about it... quite odd.

Yesterday I've read why Seesmic is interesting and Hictu is not: we didn't move to San Francisco (note: we are based in a wonderful island in the Mediterranea sea, Sardinia). I'm referring to a blog post by Robert Scoble, in which he compares Seesmic and Hictu and presents the launch of the former as an example.

There are three points:
1. The founder, Loic Le Meur, visited many bloggers and filmed their meeting
2. The founder, Loic Le Meur, moved to San Francisco
3. Seesmic uses Twitter APIs (my note: this means that Seesmic in the future will depend on Twitter).

Maybe it's because I don't live in California but I've always thought, even in a buzz-centric industry as Web 2.0 is, that facts matter.

Robert, did you try Hictu? Did you send me your suggestions through the "Hictu as you like it" section? Did you invite your friends? Did you ask me what we are going to provide in the future? Did you create and embed a videopost? Did you notice that Hictu in itself is a mashup of many different IM and VoIP services?

In the meanwhile, since Seesmic is still in a private alpha, I subscribed to try it and I'm waiting to check it out and write down my view, after I've been using it for a while.

Daily wrapup from Hictu, 25/9

2007-09-25T17:08:00.000+02:00

It's been a while that I'm using Hictu to satisfy my need to share contents I read.

Today I present a review of my activity. I hope you'll enjoy that reading and be willing to go deeper for some points.

You can see the entire list of my posts here.

1. Are Comparison Search Engines threatened by Google? Read David Hawk's view. (Jeremy Liew reprises the same point)

2. So, maybe Hictu is not about microblogging rather than Tumblelogging? (I do not like this word...)

3. Hictu in the Top 100 Search Engines? Odd enough...

4. Keyword search on Twitter? Something I look forward to use...

5. Jaiku's guru interviewed by Michael Moser.

6. Relevant Mind helps consumer in choosing the best product: useful tool (and I'm waiting for the windsurf section...)

Most influential bloggers... I'm missing something

2007-09-25T09:35:00.000+02:00

Leo Babauta, in his NorthxEast, publishes the list of 50 most influential bloggers.

I don't have clear in mind what is the method to evaluate this influence (but I suspect it's based on technorati ranks), but I admit I don't know anyone belonging to the first 10 positions... The first I know (but I don't read on a regular basis and I'm not subscribed to) it's Seth Godin's.

I'm going to check them out in the next days, and maybe post some comment about them here or on Hictu, but what I would ask to Leo Babauta is: "Where's Beppe Grillo blog?" It's the first in Italy and it's literally moving hundred of thousands of people with his opinions... I'll investigate further.

Update: as I thought, Beppe Grillo is very high on Technorati ranking as well: 8th!

Puppets rule

2007-09-20T15:18:00.000+02:00

Why are puppets so popular among videoposts on Hictu? I can't say... anyway they're funny.

View this:

Online journals: is AD going to replace subscriptions revenues?

2007-09-20T11:25:00.000+02:00

This morning I've read the article by Jeremy Liew, commenting the Wall Street Journal analysis on ad revenues for online journals. I've been a little bit surprised to see that Jeremy caught the negative aspect: "News can't be an online only business"...

The picture showing the ratio between ad revenues from print newspaper and online journals, indeed, is a clear indicator that ad revenues are still a minimum part of the overall ad revenues (see below).

But reading the WSJ article, an aspect is definitely interesting: making the online journals free can increase the ad revenues and hence compensate the loss in subscription fees...

So, this for me is a good news.

Nokia e51: the new solution for the office life

2007-09-20T10:38:00.000+02:00

Nokia has presented its new model, the e51, specifically designed for business functionalities: telephony, email and messaging in mobility.

The aspect I'm more interesting to is the availability of VoIP calls. In one of my previous posts I've described the setup procedure to configure a e61 (and N80 as well) to place and receive VoIP calls (SIP) while in WLAN connectivity.

A feature-by-feature comparison between e51 and e61 can be found here.

I look forward to test it, as soon as it will be available before the end of the year (price being approximatively euros 350). My goal is to publish another user guide for the SIP configuration ;)

Firefox extensions: useful examples

2007-09-17T10:06:00.000+02:00

Browsersphere reports a list of useful extensions for Internet browsers, citing among others one of my latest posts.

The Firefox extension I was presenting is the Abbeyphone VoIP Extension, which transforms Firefox in a VoIP client, able to place and receive free IP calls and place cheap calls to landlines and mobiles. If you read the article by Browsersphere, you may perhaps agree with me when I say that this VoIP extension is far more useful than the others presented...

Anyway, talking about Firefox extensions, one that I've found interesting is the Windfinder's. I can see in realtime the latest wind and weather reports (and decide whether or not windsurfing in the afternoon ;) ).

Microblogging: a concrete way of promotion

2007-09-17T10:03:00.000+02:00

Last July Stephanie Kang and Suzanne Vranica wrote an interesting article on the Wall Street Journal online, about the new frontiers of marketing through microblogging:

Marketing through Twitter -- as with any new technology -- isn't a slam dunk. Sending marketing messages on the service could alienate users who see Twitter as a way to talk to their friends, marketing executives say. And Twitter is still a tiny Web community, drawing only 370,000 unique visitors in June in the U.S., according to comScore Media Metrix.

Now add audio-video posts (as Hictu allows to create. See also Zannel, recently reviewed by Mashable.com) and you can see the power of marketing and advertising on microblogging platforms!

The convergence of Social Networks and microblogging

2007-09-14T14:53:00.000+02:00

As I wrote before in this blog I work for Hictu, so consider this as a full disclaimer :)

However, last week I've found this post by TMS Republic, comparing 10 microblogging platforms (Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, MySay, Hictu, MoodMill, Frazr, IRateMyDay, Emotionr).

Today Hictu has been released with a new version. The first published review is signed by Mashable:

Of all the Twitter competitors, Hictu is one of the most determined for adding features that will differentiate it from the crowd. It’s typically done so by supporting particular actions and other network tools that some sites wouldn’t do or haven’t yet added. This is still evident with this newest version, giving users more networking options and several more ways to control their content from within their account.

The truth is that Hictu (with its new features described in more detail here) is an example of convergence between Social Networks and microblogging platforms, with the additional value offered by videoposts.

Technorati Tags: Giacomo Vacca, Hictu, microblogging, Mashable

Looking for new business models applied to voice services

2007-09-13T15:54:00.000+02:00

Alec Saunders, commenting a post by Gary Kim, discusses how the availability of voice inside many applications is actually changing the business model applied to more traditional voice services:

The challenge for the voice service provider is in delivering value that can be monetized for more than a few tenths of a cent per minute. The service provider must become a pipe for delivering huge volumes of communications, and/or an applications provider that leverages that volume.

The new Iotum's application for conference calls inside Facebook is a great example, indeed. Another case that I'd like to mention is the Abbeyphone's VoIP extension for Firefox: always available while browsing, you can place a call wherever you find a telephone number.

And what about you? What's the most useful voice application integrated into another?

Technorati Tags: Giacomo Vacca, Facebook, Alec Saunders, Iotum, VoIP

Content related blog reading, with BlogRovR

2007-09-11T14:15:00.000+02:00

I've discovered this interesting Firefox Extension, BlogRovR, which allows me to read posts from my favorite blogs, but selecting them accordingly with the content provided by the pages I'm browsing.

For example, while writing this post the extension has selected for me posts which contains the tags: blogger, google, internet, search, technology.

I wonder how random could appear to me this list, and how I could actually read blog posts with this criteria, but at the moment BlogRovR seems to be useful and proposing a new way to read news and articles on the Internet.

Good idea.

Technorati Tags: Giacomo Vacca, blogrovr, Firefox extension, Brough Turner

Searches in Google Reader

2007-09-06T09:29:00.000+02:00

I read this morning I'm not the only one surprised for the lack of a Search box in Google Reader. Fortunately, this has been "fixed" by Google, as Pete Cashmore reports.

I think I'll use Google Reader more frequently now :)

Technorati Tags: Giacomo Vacca, Google, Google Reader, Pete Cashmore

Why online friends rarely are also real friends?

2007-07-30T12:12:00.000+02:00

This morning I was thinking about my difficulties in staying in touch with my friends during the working hours.

SMSs are an efficient way to receive an update or make a short communication, but if I need to talk about something in particular a call at the cell phone is needed. Rarely I can chat with them, nor I can see their status or retrieve up to date online information.

Well, you could say: "Your friends just don't use the Internet to handle their social network...". This is probably true, but now the question is "How can engage them? What's the best way?".

In the meanwhile I've found this post from GigaOm, "Why do we have Facebook fatigue?":

We are not using the privacy settings of Facebook, and are too polite to say no to invitations from people who want to friend us. No wonder, the social environment is starting to resemble a crowded nightclub.
However, if you treat Facebook more like a dinner gathering, inviting only the closest friends and family, it can be a rather efficient way of staying in touch.
What we need is something more intimate, more private. It’s not about the number of friends, but it’s about connection.

My next goal is to fill my Facebook friends list with at least 4 or 5 real friends :)

Technorati Tags: Giacomo Vacca, Facebook, social networking

Hybrid Media Publisher Model

2007-07-06T10:59:00.000+02:00

Jeremy Liew writes a brief description about

new breed of publisher combining topical reader submitted text and images, information about audience activity, and profile and reputational information about individual audience members to synthecitally develop media content.

Three examples are Yelp, TeamSugar and StyleHive.

This kind of sites provide a different, more involving experience, compared with classic publisher sites and even with social media site UGC (User Generated Content), since content can be commented and classified and final top lists are a representation of the so-called "audience community".

Yesterday I wrote about the speech by Engestrom, founder of Jaiku, and his concept of Social Object. Which are the social objects in these sites? Let me know your view.

Technorati Tags:Giacomo Vacca, audience community, Jeremy Liew, StyleHive, UGC, TeamSugar, Yelp