Our Misson
We are an interdisciplinary team of interaction designers, developers and innovators. We are designing and developing a new PC, called ITSME based on a new metaphor, “Stories and venues” (*.pdf, 47 Kb). The design of the PC started in April 2008 and the first prototype will be ready in 2010. We aim to be really innovative in the field of Personal computers. Please read the following section to discover more about our business idea.
Market scenario
In the last twenty years personal computers have known a large planetary diffusion reaching more than one billion individuals. In the same time, their computing power has dramatically increased in terms of speed and memory size, while the Web has emerged as a new space for commercial and social experiences creating what is also called the cyberspace. Despite these disruptive facts, personal computers have not changed except for little details and today almost all of personal computers appear to be based on the well known desktop metaphor, invented in the seventies at Xerox Parc by the research group lead by Alan Kay. As our personal experience tells us, and several studies confirm that the desktop metaphor as it appears today is unable to cope with the information overload and the information dispersion provoked by email clients and Web browsers. Personal computers are becoming difficult to use and are unable to help users in managing the complexity of their social interactions. The market of personal computers is becoming a multi-product market, offering different machines for more exigent users having different needs, together with the personal computers based on the desktop metaphor. From the operating system viewpoint we have some weak but clear signals of movement with vendors offering machines with an installed Linux distribution: Linux is already the third player of the market, behind Windows and MacOS.
Milestones
The design and development of a new workstation with a radically new front-end is a complex endeavor requiring clear plans and adequate resources. We have defined a two years and a half work-plan that will bring itsme from the birth of the company with the name (April 2008) to the delivery of a working prototype of the new workstation (end of Summer 2010). Up till now we have developed the concept of the new workstation (its final release describing in full detail the interaction supported by itsme is expected for March 2009) and we have almost completed a document describing the software constituting the front-end. Moreover, spring 2009 we will move from the current static website to an interactive web-site where the community will find the possibility to interact with the design and development team. Let us underline few facts: users will have the possibility of interacting in an itsme-like way with the emulator on our web-site (Spring 2009); the software will have a first working prototype in Spring 2010 and the hardware will be ready together with the release 1.0 of the software before the end of Summer 2010. All deadlines are subject to change due to unexpected breakdowns, however our plans are robust and we should be able to absorb them. The plan does not extend beyond summer 2010 since to launch itsme in the market we would like to open a partnership with a global player in the ICT market.
