Tag: Italy

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?

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.

Italian Government: open-source funds vanished

I’m re-blogging a post by Roberto Galoppini, a huge advocate of open-source. Apparently the Italian government has cancelled the funds for open-source. It’s disappointing that to save money they cancel this type of fund, but they keep paying millions for all the license of MS Windows, Office and so on. There are alternatives today and they would be so much cheaper only in licenses.

Anyway, you can see the full article here.

Milano, Malpensa and Alitalia

Alitalia is short of money and this is no surprise since their flights are expensive and the quality is low. To give you an example, I flew to Miami in May and my luggage was broken during the flight. I immediately filed a complaint in Miami, as suggested in Miami I kept my copy and waited to be back in Milan. Once in back in Malpensa 2 weeks after I went to the “lost and found” desk to seek for some extra support. They gave me a fax number and told me to send me boarding card a copy of the filed complaint and a copy of my ID. I did so on Wed, June 6th (5 days later). On Sept, 18 I received a letter from Alitalia’s attorneys saying that unfortunately they may not accept my request because more than 7 days had gone from when I filed the complaint and when I sent them a copy via FAX. I obviously did not think of taking the trouble of faxing them while on holiday and did it as soon as I got back home. I had 7 days to let them know. They took 3 months to answer to me. Sounds a bit unbalanced. I fly quite often these days and Alitalia’s airplanes are the oldest and dirtiest.

Nevertheless they are short of money and this is probably because the company is led by corporations and politicians and not people who know about business.
They think Malpensa is a source of costs more than of revenues. They are now planning to cancel about 150 routes.

The industry has a reply to this move: EasyJet has doubled the flights to and from Malpensa, RyanAir wants to spend 850M Euro over 5 years to expand their routes adding *80* new to the existing ones.
I wonder if EasyJet and RyanAir would invest money on an airport that would not assure them to fill every single flight.

Slave of the globalization

August the 6th was a bank holiday in Ireland, since I was in Milan, I worked.
August the 15th was national holiday in Italy, since I was in Dublin, I worked.

The result is that I have basically lost 1 day of holiday.

I am a slave of the globalization, I move from one country to another and skip holidays. 😉

Open Source Events: Bruce Perens and Richard Stallman in Rome

From Roberto Galoppini: “The Innovation Festival, that will be held in Rome from the 6th till the 10th of June [2007], will guest people from all around the world to talk about traditional and also unconventional routes to innovation. Richard Stallman and Bruce Perens will attend.”

To know more check out Roberto’s post, Open Source Events: Bruce Perens and Richard Stallman in Rome