Giugiaro has already been busy this year and at the 79th Geneva Motor Show in March it unveiled the Namir is a new concept sports car born of the collaboration between Italian designer Italdesign Giugiaro and Frazer-Nash, a company that specialises in the design, construction, and marketing of hybrid systems.

Italian design studio Italdesign-Giugiaro has issued the following short statement: "Today, June 26, Italdesign Giugiaro, leading provider of automotive creativity and engineering services and industrial design, and Microsoft, world leader in the design and development of information technology solutions, have sealed a cooperation agreement for the design of new generation information systems. The project, which will comprise various phases, envisages the setting up of a new IT platform for unified communications and management of highly confidential information in resident and mobile environments and also co-branding and co-marketing operations," the statement concluded.

No further detail has been released about this co-operation, however last year Giugiaro and Microsoft worked together when they were two of fifteen of Europe’s leading companies and research establishments in mobile and home networking, software development, consumer electronics and domestic appliances, that joined together in Amigo—an integrated project that aimed to realise the full potential of home networking to improve people’s lives. The Amigo project was created in order to research and develop open middleware and intelligent user services for the networked home environment, which offers users intuitive, personalized, and unobtrusive interaction by providing seamless interoperability of services and applications. Traditionally, home automation, consumer electronics, mobile communications, and personal computing were strictly separate domains—with their own industrial players, with their own business plans, standardization efforts, and form factors. The Amigo consortium combined partners and researchers from all of these areas with the goal of utilising the strengths of the different areas to use context and user information to create ambient services that use all devices in the home.

As well as Giugiaro's input, the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC), which is responsible for the design and implementation of the security and privacy, programming framework, and content distribution components, took part in Amigo. EMIC's design focuses on interoperability with legacy, state-of-the art, and upcoming technologies, as well as on ease of use from an application developer point of view. The components are built on top of the .Net and .Net Compact Framework and, as such, are usable on a wide range of devices. The European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) is also work-package leader for standardization, exploitation, and dissemination.