ISY

ISY

Oct 22, 2023 | TROUBLES AND BLOWS

Isy probably in someone’s mind represented a way of making the word easy, which by now needs no explanation, even more pop.

Three letters then, to sum up the English pronunciation and to introduce the next word: bank.

Three letters for the name.

Three words for the slogan.

Digital

Essential

Open

It probably seemed natural in someone’s mind to shorten customer acquisition for this bank as well.

Why wasting time.

The bank is open.

Shouldn’t that be enough?

Essential.

So thousands of account holders, One none one hundred thousand … by three again, have been transferred from what is considered the largest Italian banking group to this bank.

A digital and essential bank, where digital and essential means no more possibility of having a physical counter anywhere.

But also where digital and essential apparently means alerting unsuspecting account holders through a notification on the app.

Registered mail is extinct, and no more letters either, because in some papyrus of a thousand thousand lines written in small print the customer has signed that he “doesn’t want” any more paper communications.

No more phone calls, despite the fact that it is absolutely essential to have the phone for the infamous app and despite the fact that it is absolutely mandatory to communicate the number.

No more hassle or waste of time trying to contact the customer in one of a variety of ways, including email, texting, but also a trivial campaign of any nature.

No: it is an essential bank, in someone’s mind it seemed enough to send a simple notification within the app.

A notification of the kind that those who are Boomers, and lived through the days when the same people worked in the bank for years, people who could be trusted, do not tend to consider vital.

A notification that could have been missed by anyone.

A notification that constituted the only last resort, moreover with a deadline, to express not consent, but DISSENT to being transferred to the new Isy.

Find a “small” overview of reviews here. 

A parliamentary question was also asked about this forced transfer. 

Do you perhaps have direct experience to testify?

Among the fanciful narratives, it would seem that the choice of the lucky drawers fell on those who did not attend their reference branch.

I would really like to be able to see the selection mechanism … and in my heart I want to hope that older people are not involved … because maybe even they haven’t gone to the branch, an operation that has long since turned out to be almost as complicated as making an appointment with Chiara Ferragni.

But the new bank is OPEN …

STYLISTIC SKIN

STYLISTIC SKIN

Oct 1, 2021 | FASHION, TECHNOLOGY, WHO CARES

A few days ago, Antonio was talking about skin on his blog pointing out rightly how in the dialogues of the movie Free Guy skin was literally translated in Italian to the detriment of the real meaning of the term.

The Skins I would like to talk to you about are Costumes Fit for the Battle Royale mode of the Fornite video game signed by Demna Gvsalia  creative director of Balenciaga.

Digital fashion.

It is the first time that haute-couture colonizes a video game with its own brand, in this case it is a partnership between Balenciaga and Epic Games. 

Ramirez and Doggo among the iconic characters in the version of the luxury brand.

However, a real capsule is also associated with the digital outfits, available on the Balenciaga e-commerce site. 

The campaign for the presentation of the fruit of this unprecedented collaboration is called Strange times and also includes a photographic contest, or, better said, Fortographic.

 

The best photos posted on Twitter under #Fortography and #StrangeTimes or under the Strange Times post on Reddit will be included in the game.

Between reality and virtual, I throw a dream there: who knows that one day someone will post coffee photos for KCDC …

GAIA X

GAIA X

Jun 6, 2021 | ECONOMY, ENVIRONMENT, INTERNET, ITALY, WORLD

Gaia derives from Greek mythology and represents the mother goddess of all gods, personification of the earth, but in this case she becomes the engine of digital innovation in Europe.

In September 2020, 22 companies and organizations (11 from Germany and 11 from France) have taken an important milestone and finally transferred the joint project into solid structures: The 22 founding members signed the notarial founding documents in order to establish an international non-profit association (French: association internationale sans but lucratif, in short: AISBL) under Belgian law, the GAIA-X,  European Association for Data and Cloud, AISBL.

From reading these words the first thing that emerges, for me, is the absence …

But in November our Ministry also attended the summit and on May 28 Confindustria kicked off the Italian hub by defining it as the moment of starting a shared path, aimed at aggregating and coordinating all the subjects interested in the development of projects that aim to enhance data, and an opportunity to get to know the European project and the methods of implementation in Italy.

What exactly are we talking about?
Gaia X is a federated data infrastructure for Europe.

Talking about:

Energy
Health
Smart living
Industry 4.0
Portability
Interoperability
Interconnectivity
Identity & Trust
Federated catalogue
Sovereing data exchange
Compliance

The main objectives are to develop ecosystems, to bundle national initiatives, and to provide a central point of contact to interested parties on their respective countries.

In fact, it is evident that the amount of data on a digital level is increasing day by day, and it is no coincidence that a whole series of new figures are emerging, among which the demiurge of big data particularly fascinates me.

Not to mention the parallel growth of IoT: Internet of things which involves a further exponential increase in connected devices.

But how important can a European Data Cloud be? How is the data handled now?

It is clear that this is an ongoing situation, and as it happens in a fiscal way for the giants of the web, armed with fragmentary, incomplete, if not non-existent regulations, the companies that manage the server farms act in an almost undisturbed pseudo-monopoly regime.

The need that is underlined is to achieve an autonomy that allows one to no longer have to make use of American or Chinese structures.

For example, I found huge data centers that China has built in a semi-desert area of Mongolia, previously dedicated to the breeding of the famous horses: The Mongolian National Data Center, established by a government resolution issued on June 24, 2009.

Or the Data Foundry in Texas founded in 1994 as one of the top 50 ISPs in the United States.

The aspect that in my opinion is not sufficiently taken into account is that “not everything that glitters is green” …

Servers need to be cooled, and this operation, although it is presented as a continuous search for innovation, consumes large amounts of energy.

Google presents its renewable energy project with a photo gallery, while admitting the following:

the 100% renewable energy milestone means we buy enough renewable energy over the course of a year to cover our entire annual electricity consumption, however it doesn’t mean that all of our facilities are powered by clean energy every hour of every day. To compensate for times and places where the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine, we buy a surplus of renewable energy at other times and in other places. Our ultimate goal is to achieve CO2-neutral energy supply for our operations in all locations, at all times. We are actively exploring strategies to achieve 24/7 CO2-neutral power supply to all of our data centers, closely monitoring our progress towards achieving this goal.

I conclude with the thing that scares me the most: the more we move forward, the more the main operations we carry out, from bank transactions to public certificates, from tax returns, to the signing of contracts, depend on applications and on telematic accesses, without which we would be practically paralyzed.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not calm. Am I wrong?

MILAN FASHION WEEK

MILAN FASHION WEEK

Sep 29, 2020 | FASHION, FASHION

The 2020 edition of the fashion week in Milan has ended, an important and iconic event that this year had a particular role: the watchword is phygital.

As for Micam, PHYGITAL indicates the interconnection between the real world and the digital world: a new dimension in which the words physical and digital merge, giving rise to an overlap between communication and interaction allowing an offer both online and offline.

These days I have already published on social media some videos of the events that have struck me most, even if the range of events and fashion shows is so large that it is a challenge to try to “summarize”.

I try to do as the serious blogs that manage to outline in points: would you like to retrace Milan Fashion Week in 5 steps?

  1. I was struck by Missoni’s idea of telling the new collection through a real postcard from the Sacro Monte of Varese, the video begins like this: “Varese is like a dream …” and this tribute to the roots moved me which for me are very important “to fall in love with a place …“

  1. The event. I have already widely declared my highest esteem for King George and therefore I let you imagine with how much trepidation I followed the docufilm and the parade on TV. At the first trouser suit in a variation of green I was already stretched … forget about it …

    TIMELESS THOUGTS

  2. Salvatore Ferragamo presented an amazing fashion film that I hope you didn’t miss the other day (when I shared on Twitter and Facebook) because unfortunately the video is no longer available.

    In a deserted Milan during the days of the lockdown, the presentation of the collection inspired by Hitchcock’s masterpieces, directed by Luca Guadagnino, took on an absolutely magical flavor, the quotations from The birds, Vertigo and Marnie chase each other. The garments that even have colors such as Hedren green, Vertigo mauve or Bodega Bay sky, are real tributes, not to mention Mariacarla Boscono‘s interpretation. 

  3. 4. Valentino transforms the former Macchi foundry at Bovisa with plants and flowers from 8 different countries and chooses to show ordinary people: street casting instead of professional models. The message is romance and the key word is re-meaning, which I like. and you?

  4. Final theme

TV YIN OR TV YANG?

TV YIN OR TV YANG?

Feb 3, 2020 | ITALY, TECHNOLOGY, TROUBLES AND BLOWS

According to the idea that we always should separate into two opposing factions, in Italy it seems to be back to the times of Guelfi and Ghibellini. If you are not on one side, it must mean that you are on the other, (and I wonder WHY), also TV’s are apparently dividing the roles … yes, I know, I’m talking about “dated” devices for the current average duration, even if in reality they aren’t that old.
So at home for example on a TV Mediaset channels are still visible but no longer La7 and others, and vice versa.
From 1st January 2020 DTT channels (digital terrestrial) are going to abandon the current MPEG-2 encoding standard to switch to MPEG-4 which is currently provided by HD channels i.e. in high definition.
But this will only be the first phase: the final transition will end by 2022 and involves the passage to new transmission technologies such as HEVC “High efficiency video coding” which offers better data compression, or DVB-T2 “Digital Video Broadcasting Terrestrial Second Generation ”or regulated to bring the HDTV signal on digital terrestrial.
Why all this?
Because the frequencies which we are using at present must be left free for the 5G network, therefore for mobile communication, ensuring a high connection speed for mobile phones.
What about disabled TVs? We will need a decoder. Again
At this point the question: does television still offer a useful and adequate service?
The programs that do not take sides neither with the Guelphs nor with the Ghibellines to be clear, the serious programs, the programs that make culture or even entertainment that is not the famous “copy of a thousand summaries” are perhaps used on the fingers of one hand .
Considering we already have to pay a tenancy tax by continuing to call it a fee, which is stuck in electricity bills, is it really worth spending more money?
The way we are used to advertise, and I’m not just talking about advertising, honestly, doesn’t it have to be them paying us?

Pin It on Pinterest