Archive for the ‘Business’ Category
MIKAMAI, most innovative Italian company in 2009?
Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Business, mikamai
I don’t usually like to post out of pride, but it’s always a nice feeling when your hard work is recognized by other people.
In this case Buongiorno’s David Casalini, in an interview with nextinnovation.it when asked
If you could give the 2009 Prize for Most Innovative Italian Company, you would give it to …? And why?
he replied
[...] I really like a Milano based company, Mikamai, a small team but very good, with lots of ideas, focused on people and they have a tech know-how that is frighteningly good.
Thanks, David!
The importance of being up-to-date
Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Business, Rails, Ruby on Rails, mikamai
Since I started working in the web development business the release of Rails 3 has been the first time I really felt I had to understand what was going on because otherwise I would be left behind.
There were simpler times where just reading the feeds of the most important blogs allowed me to be up-to-date, but either I’m getting old or the information has become too fractioned, because this time the only reason for me (and everyone in MIKAMAI) to get started with Rails 3 was to resume a practice that unfortunately we left behind in the past year: the internal presentations.
Starting last thursday, and hopefully never stopping, thursday afternoons aren’t about working for others, but are about everyone sharing his knoweledge with the others.
Last thursday was obviously all about Rails 3, so a couple of us connected their macs to the big screen and demoed new features of Rails 3.
It was nice, interesting questions were asked during the demos, and the overall mood was pretty good. I look forward to the next session.
Interviewed!
Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Business, Fun, Geeks at Work
A couple of weeks ago the nice guys at Vodafone Lab interviewed me and my friend Lorenzo for the work we did for Montalbano.tv.
This is not the first time I write about Montalbano (as you can see from my previous drupal centered post), but last time I wrote because I wanted to show a clever approach to deploying Drupal, this time I just wanted to share with you a happy moment.
Joining Mikamai has proved itself to be one of the wisest decisions of my adult life, it gave me the opportunity to work with smart people on interesting projects.
If you’re a developer and are interested in working with us drop us a line, maybe we’ll find a way to do something fun together 
The day after TechTalk Italia
Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Business, Fun, Italy, Nimboo
On monday I came back from Techtalk Italia and it was such a wonderful experience that I had to wait a day before posting. It was relaxing, inspiring and fun.
We had four sessions where we talked about our projects and the problems Italian enterpreneus encounter during their work, and between these sessions we had great food and great fun.
I met cool people I didn’t know and met with people I now consider friends. Luca Conti, Federico Feroldi, Gioxx and Martin Varsavsky have posted about the event (but Martin didn’t attend).
There is also a flickr set about the talk.
Techtalk Italia
Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Business, Italy, Nimboo
Good friend, fellow nimbooer, wikio engineer and all around cool guy Lorenzo Viscanti organized a meeting that will take place next weekend (the day after tomorrow) in the beatiful Tuscany.
Some of the most brilliant Italian people in the web business will attend to exchange ideas, relax, show each other their work, and to have fun.
Among the others there will be Marco Palazzo (Duespaghi), Davide Lombardi (zooppa), Daniel Ruzzini (domainsbot), Stefano Vitta (bloggers.it and fon), Guido Bellomo (Babelgum), Gioxx (Mozilla.it), Kiaroscuro and Federico Feroldi (nimboo), Lele Dainesi (cisco) and Luca Conti (Pandemia).
If you’re interested in attending the meeting you can contact Lorenzo. There will also be some video posted soon after the event.
Why we need to stop designing and start delivering
Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Business, Nimboo, Productivity, Programming, Ruby on Rails
Lately I’ve been very unproductive. Lost in business discussions and dreaming about the next big thing, I couldn’t finish two paid projects, and that sucks™.
The invisible shackles that didn’t allow me to finish those jobs have been holding me back so that I wasn’t able to do any real work even on personal projects.
I’ve tried finding the cause for this, blaming my lack of self discipline or the fact that I was not doing GTD as strictly as I was six months ago, but I knew there had to be something else, and the whole situation was getting on my nerves.
Last week I bought a game for the Nintendo Wii, Mario Strikers Charged, and while playing I remembered a pet project I started more than an year ago and never completed.
The project name was ICCFriends, a repository of Nintendo Friend Codes for the usenet it.comp.console community.
This time I had to finish it, so I went and looked through my code: awful. There was as much BDUF in there as in Windows Vista, and while wandering through the models and controllers, suddenly I got it!
I knew why I wasn’t delivering: I was designing things that were not useful. I lost so much time preparing for refactoring, or moving code around or laying the ground for future extractions or features that when the time came to implement the real thing I grew tired or got bored.
I then did the only thing I could possibly do to complete ICCFriends:
$ rm -rf ~/src/iccfriends $ rails ~/src/iccfriends
I then focused on the simplest and shortest set of features I could imagine and in a couple of hours ICCFriends.net was up and running, and with more interesting features than those I was bduffing.
It looks rushed out because it is, but once again I was able to think and deliver and the rush of energies that came with it is a nice feeling I really missed.
Yesterday I learnt an important lesson, and from now on I will always strip my feature list before even start thinking about the implementation.
Guy Kawasaki is a Wise Man
Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Business
It may sound obvious, but he truly is. I was reading this response he made to a post that criticised his newest product, truemors, and the last paragraph really struck me:
Here’s what I truly don’t understand. Sure, shoot me and Truemors down. It’s okay. I’m a big boy and a juicy target. Such is life. But if I were an entrepreneur, I would be thinking: “Life is good. Guy has shown that with $12,000 and seven weeks of work you can launch a company today. Open source has changed the world. Now I don’t need to spend 6-9 months sucking up to clueless VCs in between their golf games and trips to the south of France and 6-9 months duking it out with a compiler. By tapping the blogosphere I can get PR without spending $10,000/month on a PR firm and $40,000 at Demo. I can come up with an idea, launch it, and see if it works.”
Boy, is he right.
OpenCoffee and Italy. Part 2 and good news.
Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Business, Italy, OpenCoffee
I was quite happy when I read this post on Marco Barulli’s blog. As he said on his comment to is italy ready for opencoffee? he went to an OpenCoffee meeting in London, where he demoed the wonderful Clipperz, and the response has been quite favorable.
This is just a small piece of evidence that adds to all the evidence I have about a simple but true statement: “Italy is ready for venture capital yet no one does anything”.
Will we ever be able to solve this problem? Live and see.
Shortage of coders?
Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Business, Italy
I read this interesing post on the 37signals blog a few moments ago, and I couldn’t avoid thinking we almost have the same problems here.
I have been criticizing the lack of capital in Italy since I began blogging on tempe.st, but capital isn’t the only resource we lack. There’s also a shortage of good heads. The hundreds of talented coders are working around the clock and have to say no to interesting ideas all the time, and obviously can’t find the energies to work on their big projects.
Anyone has a solution to this contradiction?
Netwo, Italian web initiatives join forces.
Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Business, Italy, Netwo
In the last couple of posts I told you I had the luck of being at Yahoo Italy HQ on friday, and I told you I was going to post more info about that.
Unfortunately (or luckily) I am a programmer at heart, thus lazy, and I found a post from Emanuele Quintarelli that sums it all up. This post is so correct and exhaustive that I couldn’t write anything better than that.
I also suggest that you keep having an eye on this page because it will grow big in the near future.