Author: atrasatti

Born and raised in Italy, US resident. Innovator with a soft spot for developers. Currently director of developer advocacy @kin_foundation, previously @Samsung_IoT, @Nokia, an advocate of the open Web

Flash, Flashlite, SVG and Java

Flash is a huge success on the web. It’s been like that for a long time now.

SVG is a recommendation (read standard) by the W3C that should address some of the functionalities of Flash.

While Flash Lite has been very successful in Japan for many years (and I think simply because DoCoMo decided it would be the default on all devices), it has struggled in the rest of the world.

In the last couple of years Nokia, Sony Ericsson and other top vendors have more or less quietly implemented SVG Tiny (a subset of SVG for mobile devices). From my perspective it seemed like SVG would take over Flash (Lite) in the mobile space, but it looks Adobe is moving to make sure this does not happen.

A few news that I’ve read in the last couple of weeks, all within just a few days:

When computers are not connected in local administrations

Last year, in June, I sold my car. The guy who bought it was French, he came to Italy, we went to the local office of the car registry and made the transaction. They registered that he was exporting the car, took my old plates and threw them away.

Last week I received a letter by the local administration of Lombardy that notifies me that I did not pay the yearly tax for 2008 and that I should do so immediately. At first I thought there might be a problem with the sale I did, but calling the registry (ACI) it was confirmed that my plates have been taken and the car is registered as exported.

What I have to do now is PAY ACI to get a document the proves that I sold my car and fax it to the local administration.

Why can’t they talk to each other? Why doesn’t the local administration check if the car is still in Italy before complaining to me?

dotMobi acquires Mowser

The word is out, dotMobi has acquired IP from Mowser and will now be in charge of running the service.

There’s not much I can say that hasn’t been said already. James over Twitter, Miker, Russell.

I am mostly curious about what will the community say. It’s a bold move for a company that has been advocating “Build for mobile” for years while Mowser seems to come from the opposite direction. I think we have some strong ideas about how to use Mowser at best and you’ll see it happening quickly.

Working with Mike and Russell is going to be exciting (except Russell is not in Ireland, but I’m used to working long-distance!).

rescuetime and productivity

I’ve been using rescuetime for about three weeks now. Most of the applications I use regularly are tagged and marked as productive when appropriate.

Looking at the graph for today (midnight to midnight), it’s clear that I work much more when the sun is down.


Notice that the screenshot was taken around 23:20 so the eleventh hour is still not complete and that’s why the time spent is not up to the hour.

It seems like “Productivity” and “Efficiency” follow proportionally, although it seems I’m a bit more productive during the night (not while writing blog posts, of course).


I wonder if I should sleep during the day and work during the night. Would I get more things done?

Has Nokia run out of names?

Nokia always named their mobile devices with numbers. Most of the times 4 numbers, sometimes 3. In the last few years they started also using letters such as N and E.

Many have tried to find some reasoning behind the numbers, but no real rule was ever found (at least that I know of). Anyway, it looks like Nokia might have run out of numbers. Today, while checking on Forum Nokia I noticed a device that was advertised as new, but did not sound so, to me. A little research on the Forum itself shows that the “new” device is the 3120 classic, but there’s also an older 3120! So why is the new one called “classic”? Shouldn’t it be called “new” or something?

Well, for all of us (OK, I’m the only one) trying to remember all model names, it’s going to be harder now.

PLUG: luckily you’ll find both in DeviceAtlas (Nokia 3120 classic and Nokia 3120).

barcodes on mobile devices

Barcode readers for mobile device displays are growing and is an interesting market, I think. In short, it’s hard to read from a tiny LCD screen, but the technology is catching up and a few solutions have appeared on the market.

Here is a video of an Italian company called Gear srl.

A similar technology is already deployed by Spanair on their spanair.mobi. The service is active only in limited number of airports, but gives an idea of how useful it can be. If successful it will be extended, of course.

Did Google affect how I search on search engines?

I use Google in 99.9% of my searches on internet. I use it so often, that sometimes it’s just to the URL of a site I know very well, but I can’t spell the address or do not recall exactly (I can never spell the URL of delicious, for example).

I have to say that I’m pretty satisfied with the results and most of the times I find what I am looking for within the first 3-5 results. This could be simply because Google is good, isn’t this the reason why we all use it?

Nevertheless, from time to time I try other search engines such as Ask or Yahoo! and hardly find better results. I’d say that on an average I find worse results.
Still, I have friends who use Ask or Yahoo! and say they are much better.

Now I wonder: “Are the results on Google better just because Google is better, or is it because I am so used to it that my search terms work well with Google? What if my search syntax was optimized for Google-searches? What if Ask had a much better catalogue, but used a different categorization?”

Of course, search engines should return the best result not matter what, but if my keywords are not “natural”, but adapted to the approach Google has to content, then it’s not the search engine that is wrong (maybe). So how can I objectively judge the quality of the results? Also, won’t the quality of results always be subjective?