Fabrizio Lapiello is an Intel® Software Innovator from Caserta, Italy. Fabrizio has taken his technology skills and used them to create a learning academy to help entrepreneurs in Italy as well as to develop business solutions for complex IT problems, and he also has a special focus to improve the lives of others, especially with his research project helping blind people to see.
Tell us about your background.
I specialize in analyzing, designing and developing IT solutions with particular attention to business intelligence solutions; desktop, web, and mobile solutions based on cloud computing; and, finally, enterprise solutions with interoperability between IT systems. In the last few years I dedicated myself into making IT and electronics solutions that could help people to improve their life or that could improve repetitive processes or systems connected to industrial machines.
I’ve always been involved in software engineering and architecture, with particular concern in the analysis of design specifications. I design plans with the architecture in mind and follow development processes along with plans for the cost and maintenance of very complex IT systems such as high real-time, distributed architectures, including cloud and middleware.
Finally, for the last 3 years I’ve been concerned about all themes connected with the innovative entrepreneur world as a core business for my first activity: 012Factory.
What got you into technology?
Like everybody of my age the first approach to the technology world was thanks to a Commodore, mine in particular was an Amiga 600 received as a gift from my father in 1992. I started by playing games and around 1999, after various computers and some editions of Microsoft* Windows, I became passionate with the world of programming, and in particular, web design.
I owe my initial passion with technology today to my parents that always pushed me and helped to keep up with technology. The second thing that I am thankful for giving me a strong imprinting and the possibility to grow as a professional in this world was the experience of being a Microsoft* Student Partner during my first university years.
Tell us about 012Factory.
012Factory is the company I founded 3 years ago, is an innovation center based in the south of Italy with headquarters in Caserta right in front of Caserta Royal Palace. At 012 I hold the role of Chief Technology and Information Officer.
To date we offer several programs. One of the principal assets is the Academy program, currently in its fourth edition, is a 6-months course in which 30 aspiring entrepreneurs are selected by us to face 12 training modules. Hence, the name 0 1 2 – every module expects the student to reach a very precise objective that, for us, is a fundamental step to succeed in doing business. At the end of the 12 modules we organize a final inside the Caserta Royal Palace where we invite the Italian investment scene in order to evaluate our finalists and to the best candidates we grant 20K €. My role inside the Academy program is to be a mentor to the aspiring entrepreneurs and an IT advisor.
An example of my IT advising is the Sentetic company, born in 012Factory, whose product/project is also loaded on Intel’s® Developer Mesh “H-LSTM distributed neural network with Intel Edison”. Under my suggestion and insistence, the project migrated to Intel® technologies and even now is used as a case study inside a course of Data Science for the Internet of Things at Oxford University.
Tell us about Lapiello Solutions.
Lapiello Solutions™ is my property trademark in Italy, it’s a container for my projects and innovative ideas from my ICT experience. The brand born with the purpose of giving formation, mentoring, advising, architectural and implementation consultancy for high quality IT services for companies, for using the high quality solutions given to improve the life of people, and finally, to work on technologies starting from the first versions as to obtain the needed skills to satisfy and predict well in advance the market needs.
Tell us about Ultrasonic Sight.
Considering these are research projects, they’re going well. In particular, Ultrasonic Sight, apart from being a research project I consider it a “make for good” project. In fact I often receive requests from blind people that would like to use the device.
Ultrasonic Sight is an industrialized product in every part. It’s ready to be sold but I prefer that the device be ordered by the customers, because studying the market, the request would have been low. As I’m always studying the market I understood that Ultrasonic Sight could be a product for emerging markets and I hope to find the way to help people in those markets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZp0CDsg0eo
What are you working on now?
Currently I’m working on several things that will soon become at least 2 projects on Intel’s® Developer Mesh. The first project I prepared for a conference, it is a demo in which I show step-by-step how to control and monitor vital parameters of an Aloe plant using the Intel® Edison board and Google* Cloud Platform to control the color and thickness of the leaves, terrain humidity, external temperature, and lightning. I became so passionate about this project that at this point I’m now developing a system for monitoring the roots status of a plant using ultrasonic sensors. I hope to complete this research and develop into project in the next few months.
The second project will be about fashion and made in Italy. I'm making a smart object that women use everyday, but I'm not ready to talk about it more yet.
Lastly, I noticed that nobody wrote articles or books about how to create electronic devices with Intel® technologies. I'm talking about how to get past the prototype phase and reach industrialization. So I'm writing some material where I explain how to do it step-by-step through selling your own product and making it a business.
Want to learn more about the Intel® Software Innovator Program?
You can read about our innovator updates, get the full program overview, meet the innovators and learn more about innovator benefits. We also encourage you to check out Developer Mesh to learn more about the various projects that our community of innovators are working on.
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