Interview with Donato De Ieso About the Dilium Project

April 19, 2021

By Alex Balaniuc

Interview with Donato De Ieso, aka “Il Prof”, co-founder and CEO of Dilium, a company that specializes in the development of projects based on Frontier Technology, aimed at the digital evolution of channels B2B and B2C.

Today we have the pleasure of meeting Donato De Ieso, co-founder and CEO of Dilium, a highly innovative start-up company based in Milan that designated technological ideas as its daily mantra.

In 2017, Dilium came into being thanks to the experience of its founder Donato De Ieso, a Web and Mobile Programming Languages teacher and, many times, agency consultant. Donato “Il Prof” had the idea of gathering a team of young talented individuals around him, people who have now become Dilium’s main exponents. They’ve joined forces for a single goal: finding progressively new and different technological solutions, and by doing so contributing to a digital transformation.

Dilium’s strength lies in the heterogeneous mix of people who work on it. These are young talented individuals with many creative ideas, and each of them brings to the table their own skills and personality for the sake of innovation.

Thanks to this diversity in specializations, Dilium can manage all-encompassing projects: from software development to that of native applications based on Augmented Reality and virtual reality, the true company’s highlight.

Let’s take a closer look!

Hello, Prof. We can call you that, right? It’s a pleasure meeting you, and we thank you for your time. Let’s start with an easy question: where does the name “Dilium” come from?

In the IT field, after hours and hours of work spent coding, the act of coming up with bizarre ideas and talking weirdly by imitating words and sounds is an usual occurrence. These sounds inspired us to search for a unique term for our company, therefore we focused on “titillium”, a font from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Urbino. From there we came up with a short, immediate and, most importantly, available word: dilium. Over the next days, we did some research to see if something called dilium already existed on Earth. The result? Our entry in the register of companies and the registration of the brand worldwide. Oh, I almost forgot: titillium became our official font.

We had a look at your portfolio, and we noticed a certain disposition for selecting projects that include Augmented Reality technology. Is this the red thread connecting your creative ideas as a whole?

Augmented Reality is one of the 4 “core technologies” on which the research and innovative digital solutions development conducted by Dilium is based. Over the last two years, we decided to focus a major portion of our resources in the development of AR digital solutions. But we also wanted to incite the growth of knowledge and skills that are yet to be discovered in this field. Being able to study this technology and also the market and the industry’s demands allowed us to develop customized solutions for some of the companies involved with retail, arts and museums. Most importantly, it made us come up with two solutions – one of which has been patented – that placed us on the market as a company specialized in Marketing & Customer Relationship Management services. Thanks to our product “Augmented Reality Studio” (https://arstud.com), we could develop a very accessible solution for anyone who wanted to start creating content by using augmented reality. It’s a valuable service for companies, businesses and freelancers that aspire to give their customers a truly innovative and immersive experience.

Your ongoing relationship with Italian universities is quite an interesting aspect of your company. After all, Dilium was “incubated” in University laboratories. What is Dilium Academy? How does it work?

We’re convinced that a solid University education is the key to developing innovative products and services. Since the first year, Dilium was subjected to a strong contamination from the world of Academics. This is due to the fact that Dilium has been a guest of innovative laboratories in Milan and also because it’s comprised mainly of teachers and students. We aways stressed about the ability of building an institutional network made of universities, national and European research facilities and experimental labs. This led us to build solid relationships where our company, favoring first and foremost universities, started an internship plan aimed at research and development activities for the students. There’s also a functional side to it, since interns are involved in Dilium portfolio projects that are currently in development.

Again, by looking at your portfolio, we also noticed that you’ve been busy with some work-from-home stuff. In this regard, and independently from these times of forced social distancing, how is your start-up company organized? What do you think about Smart Working?

The pandemic is changing the way we organize work. Smart Working has forcefully entered the common vocabulary, even if a little late, and the term gets confused with Telecommuting a lot. Before the Covid-19 pandemic slowed down the economy and made many companies take the necessary measures to implement Smart Working, Dilium already guaranteed its employees a work-from-home day to meet their needs. At this moment, we’re engaged in a strategic partnership with a Canadian corporation – Stantec S.p.A. – for the development of an innovative digital platform, Smafely (https://smafely.it). Smafely can help companies manage the Smart Working processes, but it’s also the first platform to monitor the environmental and economic effects of this way of working on the company by integrating algorithms and scientific patterns.

Here’s a question we ask all of our guests: you created lots of projects, is there a “favorite” one you have? If there is, which one is it and why?

ARWin (https://www.dilium.com/notizie/dilium-bando-si40), most definitely. This patented project is the result of a technological partnership in the field involved with the development of Augmented Reality solutions directed at Instant Win and Marketing for Fun. It’s our favorite project because, apart from being patented, I also think it’s an important asset to Dilium that will place us in the innovative technological companies landscape in a few years.

Do you have any other project for the future?

The smart mirror “Leyer“, presented at the 2021 CES in Las Vegas, is out next project. It’s a mirror that can monitor the health of the user thanks to the Apple Healthkit incorporation. All of the data coming from the devices connected to the Cupertino platform can be organized and viewed on the mirror’s surface. A crowdfunding campaign will be launched soon, so that people can subscribe to our newsletter on the Leyer (https://leyer.it) official website. We’re aware that it’s a very ambitious project, but it’s a challenge that we accepted, no matter what. Creating a product while studying all of its processes, managing external providers and keeping the costs in check is a great deal, but at Dilium we constantly take challenges: we love finding innovative solutions for older and newer problems, and Leyer showcases the natural progression of our approach.