Unconventional Everything (Mikamai)

This is so amazing I can’t stop watching it. Really wonderful art.

I had the pleasure of working with 30 brilliant techies for the launch of Stacktrace, an Italian website about technology in its various forms.

Stacktrace was and idea of Antonio Cangiano. He felt that Italy missed an authoritative and original technology reference, and contacted about thirty of the best Italy has to offer, people I am very proud I could work with, to prepare the lightning quick launch of a wonderful site full of original, well written and interesting content.

If you can understand some Italian you should check Stacktrace. You’ll be glad you did.

So, here we are…during the past few months I had to work hard (overnight obviously) to create a new platform I was dreaming about since last spring. It is a platform for video discussions, some kind of asynchronous video chat.

I started thinking about it when I first saw replies on Youtube. Don’t know what replies are on YT? When you watch a video you can reply quickly, directly on Youtube’s site by writing a text comment or by recording a short video directly with your webcam on your browser.

This feature is great, it allows users to quickly participate in discussions, by using an engaging platform like videos.
I decided to work on an application where video discussions wouldn’t be only a feature, but rather video discussions were the core of my idea. At the time I wasn’t aware of other similar projects.

After a few months of hard work altomic.com was born. Users can record their own videos and reply to videos sent by their contacts. The mos difficult part of this application is the video streaming technology, I had no previous experience with Flash and I had to learn a bit of it. It took me a few months, but finally I got it working.
This is just an alpha version of the application, there is still a lot of work to do on the technology side and on the community side, as I want to build a tiny and engaged community of users.

So, give it a try, visit altomic.com and go to the sign-up page. To get you in please use this invite code, NOOSFACTORY. And let me know what you think of this early preview! I will talk about it, the technology, the concept and many other things on the next upcoming posts.

Some weeks ago Casper Fabricius sent me a patch for the Radiant Newsletter extension.  He added a statistics system to track how many times sent emails are opened. I have finally found the time to apply it and commit it to the repository. Thank you very very much for your work Casper! I’ll write an article about this extension as soon as possible.