Last week I was invited to the “Trackability” event in Fiera Milano City. I had really high hopes for the RFID sessions and I attended two of them to gather additional information for my project. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of substance in what was presented. A lot of good intentions, some sales pitches, little info on pilots, no info on actual deployments nor value delivered in Italy…

The only interesting stuff I saw was presented on the StoLPan project introducing some business applications on an NFC-enabled mobile device (Alice Moroni, RFIDlab - Università Sapienza di Roma). Think of acquiring information, accessing services and paying in real time through your cellphone.

I took a walk in the various booths to find that only one vendor was actually showcasing some  RFID hardware…

Better luck next time.

A new advertising channel is coming to town with Yahoo and Adobe teaming up to provide dynamically generated (and, hopefully, relevant) ads on PDFs (Portable Document Format) either via the Internet or email. I think this news is welcome if you are into producing documents and looking for new ways to monetize your efforts (pay-per-click model). My concern for Adobe is that, given the current size and speed of Reader, people would opt for more agile readers such as Foxit which would eventually catch up.

Source: PCWorld

Just read that Google is estimated to lose approximately $110 million of
revenue each year due to searches done through the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button and bypassing all the ads. In other words, around 1 percent of visitors expect Google to place the actual best result on top of others and are willing to go there directly without any browsing. Despite being a huge fan of Google, I personally never use that button and prefer to go through the results myself.

You may ask why the button is still there? Because, after all, Google was born from a couple of grad students sharing a dream and doesn’t want to look too much like the corporate (and sometimes scary) giant it has become.

Italy has not been allowed to participate in the Google Android Developer Challenge due to “local restrictions“. I found many Italian blogs rightfully complaining  about this and wonder if anyone in our government is going to take action… ehm, ok I know nothing is gonna happen… Another good occasion for Italy to show the rest of the world its incapacity in the high technology business environment.