(sioku’s picture)

Some have surely left already and others are packing their bags, while the rest of you may be thinking about how to get through a vacation-less August. That’s pretty much our story this year, but today we’re putting the finishing touches on a project you’ll hear about soon.

If you’re sticking in town, there are clever and interesting ways to savor even the most familiar places. Obviously, we’d suggest WHAIWHAI. Incidentally, yesterday’s edition of the Radio24 program August: Survival Techniques was about Milan Diamante. Paolo Roversi, the author of the stories, talks about his August in Milan. His advice is not to miss the chance to enjoy the city’s charm at a time when the crowds are thin. Listen to that August 12th interview via podcast (in Italian).

A few more days to wait … the adventure in cities on your iPhone is coming. No guide and sms: the whole experience can be lived through WHAIWHAI app. In our web site there are already all the information necessary to understand features and function. Stay tuned!

We’ve finally refurbished the webpage where you can look back at your own whaiwhai city adventure. Just type in the phone number you used to play and the code you received at the end of the game, and the map will display all the locations you hit and the titles of the stories you read. In this way, you can revisit your experience, reread the stories (since you’ll also get the codes to match the right pages together again in your guidebook) and check your time. So if you’ve played, go retrace your steps on the game log page. But before you do, post a comment on the players’ bulletin board – a huge WHAIWHAI travelers’ log is in the making!

We already told you we were selected as one of the Italian innovations that will get a spot at the World’s Fair in Shanghai, right? Well, here we are on WIRED’s page about us and the other innovative projects. There’s a contest going on right now and the project that receives the most votes will win an award — we’re well-placed so far, but we still need your stars to make it to the top. On the same site, you can also read an interview with Tomas about innovation.

Also, a few days ago the Dispenser program on Rai Radio 2 discussed WHAIWHAI. Thanks goes out to Marco Villa for his entertaining report, which you can listen to below (in Italian).

And finally, an intriguing rendezvous about games and videogames called Far Game will take place tomorrow afternoon at the Cineteca in Bologna. They’ve invited us to speak at the event, so our guy Fabio will be there to talk about the WHAIWHAI style.

A couple of days ago, Italian Valley went online. It’s a site created by Wired that collects and describes great Italian innovation stories. These are stories about the people who Wired’s Director Riccardo Luna calls “ItAliens”, that is, “heroes who invent and create in a country like Italy against the odds.” This project came about in conjunction with an Italian Ministry of Public Administration initiative: the ministry, along with Italia degli Innovatori, selected a number of companies and institutions to represent Italy at Expo 2010 (the World’s Fair) in Shanghai. WHAIWHAI is one of the companies that was selected, so we’ll have a spot at Expo 2010 along with 264 other innovative Italian projects. You can find out more about all of these Italian innovations on Wired’s website, but – most important of all! – you can vote for your favorite. The project that gets the most votes will receive an award on July 31st in Shanghai. It’s been two days since the voting started, and so far we’re well placed in the rankings. But we need your support. So without further ado, vote for WHAIWHAI (just click on the little stars) and spread the word!