Coraggio Massimo!

I am compelled to express my solidarity to Massimo Marchiori in his recent resignment as CTO of Volunia.

With a open letter, Massimo Marchiori announced and explained the reasons of his resignation from CTO role at Volunia.

First of all, I would like to stress that Volunia has been launched as a private beta and therefore nobody should say that it has failed.

Second, the CTO should not considered directly responsible of a flawed marketing campaign. Although Marchiori was in first line in the launching event, this might have been decided by other people because of his visibility and reputation.

Third, if it is true that Marchiori has been excluded from the decision process in the Board and thus forced to follow a strategy he did not support, not only he has the right to tell about it to everybody, but he also has the obligation to disclose it to Volunia's investors. Probably, investors have suppported Volunia because of his reputation and therefore if the company no longer endorses his vision, they must be informed about this.

I believe that Marchiori has learned the lesson that only who has the vision and the core idea of the business has the right to become CEO. At the startup stage, only who has the vision and possess the IP should be entitled to hold control of the whole business, no one else. 

I need also to express my opinion to the reaction of Italian media and entrepreneurial community who stigmatized Marchiori's decision as being determined by a poor teamwork or by not wanting to accept the failure of his project. I don't think it is fair and correct. I believe that Marchiori, had the right to express his disappointment against people who failed in aligning the business objectives to his vision. He clearly explained that what Volunia became was not what he intended and it was mainly the results of other's decisions. 

I wish all the best to Massimo Marchiori and most of all that he could recover from this situation as fast as possible and be ready to undertake another venture with better team mates.

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The future of Italy is in its past.

Where are the economic opportunities for Italy? They are mostly in its past!

Where exactly? In its culture heritage, in its wonderful resorts, in its beautiful lifestyle full of art, music and fine food.

If you were about to choose a place where to install a R&D center for a big company, would you chose a place where living is easy? Yes of course!

But why this does not happened in Italy, which fulfills this requirement? The answer is simple: all the rest is missing!

What is basically missing is infrastructure for business, lightweight bureaucracy, an international environment (Italians who live in Italy barely speak their own language), business and technical skills of local people (here I mean not just managers, but ordinary people), competitive universities and research centers.

So what? Maybe our last chance to survive an economical disaster is to capitalize on our past: history, art, fine food, music, ...  Somebody already calls Italy the "World's Disneyland". Why not? Entertainment is big business and we possess the necessary "know-..." What is missing now is the "how"!

Multi-touch input: when is it really needed?

Multi-touch input is an emerging input modality where several point of pressure can be detected on a surface.

To a great extent the success of graphical user interface was that it was possible to perform direct manipulation of graphical objects with minimal effort, namely pointing and clicking. The mouse lies on the table and does not need to be continuously held by the user. Then, switching from mouse to keyboard is very easy (even better with touchpads in laptops).

Now with multi-touch screens the user has to make the additional effort of point on the screen with two hands. I see it comfortable only in the situation where the screen is a tablet. But still in this case the multi-touch feature is not really needed because the user hold the tablet with one hand and interact with the other.

If the multi-touch screen is a tabletop as in the case of the Diamond Touch or the Microsoft Surface, then I see a possible comfortable use, especially for multiple users.

Then there is the case of multi-touch input on portable device such as the iPhone. In this case I believe that the multi touch feature is not really necessary. Users of mobile devices use only one hand and one finger.

A strong case for multi-touch input is touch pads in laptops. As in the case of the new Asus EEPC and the new Apple MacBooks, the possibility of making gestures with two touch points is very useful. This is true because when the hands are on the keyboards the two thumbs are naturally located on the touch pad affording for combined movements.

My conclusion is that multi-touch input is not applicable everywhere and one shoud be careful to not force the user in making unnatural physical movements for interactions that can be made effortlessly with simpler input devices.

FaceBook will kick me out...

Yeah,

it's true... I've been warned to stop "spamming"!

Well I don't consider myself a spammer... I was just exchanging a few messages with a colleague... maybe too fast for the FaceBook standars and that's what poped up on the screen:



I don't know what to think, actually... I will tell you, later! I don't want to spam you too much!

The role of computers...

In his blog, Luca Chittaro explains the paradox of automation in critical systems by elaborating the Lisanne Banbridge's paper on "Ironies of Automation". Basically, nowadays computers take care of automation of complex control tasks (e.g. in aircrafts), while human are requested to monitor the correct behavior of the system, and switch (when possible) to manual control in case of detected failures. Monitoring is even a more boring task than controlling instrumentation. Moreover, intervention in case of failure is more difficult and critical than controlling the system in normal conditions.

I believe that the role of computer is exactly the opposite than the current practices. Computers should "silently" monitor the interaction between users and the physical devices and take care that everything is done safely and correctly. When something wrong is detected, they should first warn the user and ultimately take control of the devices in order to re-establish a safe state.

I advocated this perspective in human-computer interfaces in my recent work on Kinetic User Interfaces where I propose an interaction pattern called "continuous tracking". In this pattern, the user performs some motion activity within a given context (e.g. in a place). The system's interface continuously monitors the activity and pops up providing relevant feedback (e.g. warnings, alerts, information) when something unusual happens (e.g. anomalous, danger, new). In the normal case, the interface stays in the background providing only minimal feedback in order to tell the user that the monitoring is done correctly.

This pattern has been implemented by Pascal Bruegger in a test scenario for paragliding assistance: the UbiGlide project and showcased at UbiComp 2007.

The UbiGlide FlyNav Simulator