Introductory interface talks are boring. More importantly, by neccessity, they are the same old content recycled. And recycled uselessly, to no end.

Because if the audience members were interested in interface design, they would already know the content of the talk. Or, to put it another way, if they didn’t already know the content of the talk, they clearly didn’t care.

So when I gave a talk last week at the Italian Perl Conference, in Pisa, Italy, I didn’t give the type of introductory interface design talk that you’d expect.

Everybody knows about The Placebo Effect™.

That’s what happens when you think you’re taking a medicine that will help you, and it does help you—but it turns out that it was a sugar pill, not a medicine at all.

It was discovered by a clever, desperate nurse during World War II. She was running out of morphine to give an injured soldier, so she lied. She told him he was getting drugs, but he was really getting saltwater.

And it worked.

Ten days ago I mentioned ThinkCode.TV, my startup on the side, the aim of which will be to produce high quality screencasts about programming, both in English and Italian.

What follows is an interview with Giacomo “Peldi” Guilizzoni, founder of Balsamiq Studio LLC, a fast growing micro-ISV. This is the first of a series of interviews I will carry out with interesting figures from the micro-ISV and startup scene. If you have a compelling story to tell, own or run a tech startup, and would like to be featured, please drop me a line via email.