What about winning an Apple Mac Pro? An iPod touch, a collaboration with us?

Ok, so now you have the chance. Test your creativity and create the new characters who will give a face to Dixero’s voices.

What is this about?

We want to discover new possibilities about avatar’s drawing asking you to collaborare in creating new characters. By joining this contest you could create the characters’ concept that could be part of Dixero’s product. So, if you are you an american citizen at least 18 years old, create a panel of 3 avatars suitable for the summer time and redraw them for the winter time (for a total amount of 6 characters). Send your project before 14.11.2008 to avatarcontest@dixero.com. It’s up to you to decide the winning project: within 11/28/2008, Dixero’s creative team will choose 10 projects between all the ones received before the deadline and publish them on Digg. The one that receives more votes will be our winner!

How about being contracted by Dixero?

Dixero will also choose one of the incoming project and ask its author to get involved in a collaboration to create the characters that will represent voices in the new release. So, anyone who send his project has the chance to collaborate with us!

Don’t like to draw?
Help us to find our winner, let your friends know about the contest and take part!
Generate as much traffic as you can to the URL www.dixero.com/avatarcontest/yourusername (replace “yourusername” with your Dixero’s username) until 28/11/2008. Dixero will publish the username that generated more traffic on 12/19/2008. If you are the owner, we will contact you for details and send you brand new Ipod Touch 32G (worth $399).

If you want to learn more and apply, please visit our contest page

Great news from our last trip to US. We met some of you, chat a little, did some presentation and even if exhibiting at the Web 2.0 is a bit tiring, each time we hear about you talking about your Dixero and your experience rewards us to the effort we do all the day long. (want to see us at the Expo? Check our latest pics :) )

As at Javits Center were taking place 3 expos at the same time, we met visitors came from a different expo and interested in a lot of different contents. For this reason, we had the chance to talk a lot with non-heavy users and we deeped into the needs of non skilled users, talking about what is a RSS feed or what is a podcast. This situation has been very useful, because we understood what to show and explain on our website and what are the frequently questions a user have in mind when reading Dixero’s website.

We presented a new selection of public channels we added to the service (Business and Politics, Lifestyle, News, Sport, the New York Times) in addition to the two public channel you already know (Entertainment, Internet and technology). We also anticipated our first contest, but I probably need a separated blog post to write a little about it ;)

After New York, we flow to San Francisco and worked a little in our office in Sunnyvale waiting for the Plug&Play Tech Center Expo. We had a space to talk about Dixero and we heard about other experiences. We met amazing people, asked for feedbacks and exchanged views with professionals and businessmen.

Waiting for the next news, we wave at you with an interview blogtalkradio did to Luca…

If you are planning to be in New York in the next days and attending at the Web 2.0 Expo, don’t miss to say hello to Dixero Team!

Dixero is a sponsor the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo NY, one of the largest web application expos in the world. So, come and say hello, look for booth 1308,  the team will be happy to shake your hand and chat with you ;)

As we wrote here, we’ve got new plans for september. The activity is growing, we’ve some issues to work on and we’d like to start the autumn with new energies and resources. In order to do this, we’ve started a new round of investments and we can now announce that we just received a new investment of 1.5 ml of dollars that leads up founds to a total amount of 3 ml. This will let us have the opportunity of increasing quality and focusing on the mobile versions of the application.

As we told you in the last blog posts, we are working hard on quality to offer you a better experience with Dixero. We are now implementing new voices that will read your feeds, you’ll start hear changes in a few days with new channels you create and then we count working again on pronunciation during the next weeks. As the changes will need improvements day by day, all your feedbacks are welcome.

Well, here we are. As we’d like to have more than a glance into american culture, we decided to open a new office in Silicon Valley. It’s not only a matter of market, even if it being on site will help us to understand it better and keep tighter contacts with our actual and future business partners. What we’d like to do in our new office is to improve Dixero on site, observing behaviours and listening to your needs. We want to understand deeply how you are using the service to create something closer to what you really want. It will probably lead us up to start introducing local talented people in the team. We have huge projects in mind.

The office is located in Plug and Play Tech Center, Sunnyvale, CA. Here’s a picture Luca took there.

Yesterday we went to the Zürich’s date of  TechCrunch Euro tour, one of the events organized by TechCrunch UK. 40 swiss startups (si sono passate il testimone) on the stage to present what is their product in… 20 seconds. Never have had so a little time to present Dixero! We are very satisfied both about talks and interesting people we met.

As we discussed yesterday about future plans, we are now refilling ourselves with new energies. Right now is time to planning and reorganization of the company, investing almost all our resources in quality improvements.

We are, first of all, human like you. We like to share, enjoy our work and get in touch with you. So, maybe, you’d like to see us at work, or read what we’ve doing, or even have a loot at our faves, our faces, our voices, as we care to know yours. If you want to find it out, you can visit our profile on plurk or digg, or even join our group on Facebook… Sounds good? :)

Last week Dafne and I went to Reboot 10, a wonderful conference in Copenhagen (DK). 500 people from all over the world met to discuss about the theme of “free”, ranging from social media to biology to hardware. It was wonderful meeting and hearing from people like David Weinberger, Chris Messina, Dan Gillmor, Stowe Boyd. We was impressed by talks about user experience and guerrilla usability and had a chance to chat around about Dixero. We also had the chance to get some feedbacks and new ideas about the features, let’s see…

Now we are planning some others trips in the summer time, getting around to see new faces and discover new possibilities. Stay tuned and come to say hello to us!

Luca

Supernova 2008 has been a great place to be in the past days. It was characterized by the focus on people and interaction between speakers and attendees. More than 400 people from 15 countries were in San Francisco to discuss about the 4 bases of innovation: technology, business, society and policies.

What impressed me most was:

• Bob Iannucci (Nokia) showing phones with sensors able to create an ambiental intelligence to provide benefits for the users
• Jordan Hoffner (Youtube) focusing on contents that enable social connections
• Jonathan Schwartz (Sun) talking how new IT open models are a business driver really simple but effective
• Joe Kraus (Google) explaining trends that are changing the net: individual to social research of contents, active to passive act of sharing, open social.
  

Some other discussion that impressed me were about social network and how we can now observe patterns and behaviours but every time someone try to bring the whole social networks known back to rules, the net evolves and theories are no longer valid… So, we actually can’t predict behaviours accurately.

A personal good story that happened the second day I was there: the day started with a coffee poured on my trousers and a pen that, after some minutes, broke in my pocket :(

I also have to say thank you to Nokia, because I won in a sort of lottery a Nokia N95, and many thanks to Deborah from Los Angeles too, she seemed to be very impressed about Dixero ;)

Luca