Keeping it brief – Pietro Polsinelli’s blog

At http://www.bettersoftware.it/ I have learned something real which can help me working – and shipping. I got inspiration for new ideas.

Here I give some quick impressions and links.

The organizers: a word of praise to the organizers, Develer (http://develer.com). I lived the event as speaker, student and (satirical) “journalist”. In all three roles, I appreciated their efficiency, practical sense and also sense of humor, bearing my postings as “Fake Simone Zinanni”.

Twitter coverage: Maybe in USA conferences this is just normal, but I was amazed by the real time reactions which we got during the speeches through reading tweets: #bsw2010. It was great fun. Also proving a good wireless coverage for 300 PCs – kudos to Develer.

Cirillo’s talk: what has been impressive of his talk is the sense of concreteness. Of interpreting methodology as something minimal, that has to have a deep impact. And the ease with which he can connect habits to problems, never leaving any space for rhetoric.

Actually just before the conference I had studied the “Pomodoro technique”: to learn more about Cirillo see this beautiful site here:

http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

Alberto Mucignat: I really liked his talk: “Social design: progettare applicazioni che funzionano”

http://www.bettersoftware.it/conference/talks/social-design-progettare-applicazioni-che-funziona

because (given the strict time limits) he has tried to give us “new product / web site creators” some tools to analyze the flow of social interaction of our sites with visitors and communities. I will try to apply his schemes to our (5!) new products and web sites coming out in 2010. Waiting for the slides!

Alberto Falossi: Alberto made a neat and compact talk about crowd funding – see his  kapipalist manifesto. After that I asked him a couple of questions, which for time reasons I couldn’t ask during the class. I reproduce one here:

“Alberto, why did you build a service which serves all kinds of crowd funding, and not one specific for a certain activity (like one for musicians…). Posting your question on a specialized crowd funding site isn’t it more likely that you will get funded?”

His answer (freely re-interpreted – Alberto correct me if I reporting you wrongly): “You should not delude yourself that you will get funded because a casual visitor funds projects of certain category. Searching for funders is an effort that has to be done entirely by you, building a community. The crowd funding service has just to ease the transactions.”

Second question: “You hinted that your idea is not to get a % on the money, as other crowd funding sites do. Where then will you get paid?”

Alberto: “My service is free. I have not decided definitively, but I am thinking of pro versions of the service, instead of taking a %”.

Peldi: I missed Peldi’s talk, only because mine was at the same time. My friends from Open Lab that were there told me that it was great. We had already contacted Balsamiq people for a plugin for Patapage (here). I actually met him afterward at a coffee break through Silvia, who was hunting interviews for Devineu and has “trapped” the fellow.

He is a great fellow, and gave us some interesting advice on our products even in a 2 minutes encounter. Silvia will soon interview him for devineu.eu.

My talk: “Una home page memorabile” –  actually “Get visitors to read and remember your home page” . I am an inexperienced talker. I had 35 minutes for my talk, and that could cover only half of what I wanted to say – so that is what happened: I hope I made the point that copy-writing is neither a secondary nor a trivial skill for any web startup, but I had to skim through the example applications – sorry. You can find the examples presented in detail here:

Part 1: http://pietro.open-lab.com/2009/10/19/get-visitors-to-read-and-remember-your-home-page-the-principles/

Part 2: http://pietro.open-lab.com/2009/10/19/get-visitors-to-read-and-remember-your-home-page-applications/

Thanks to all – see you there next year.