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Davao City’s bid to become a leading ICT hub in the Philippines got a boost last week when Hewlett-Packard Philippines Corp. launched a corporate marketing strategy called “HP City”. This program is HP Philippines’ way of contributing to the growth of the technology sectors in Davao City.

“Apart from being one of our most important markets,” said Bernadette Nacario, Country General Manager of HP Philippines’ Personal Systems Group, “Davao will always be a significant market for HP here in the Philippines.”

A visible sign of our being an HP City is this technology company’s sponsorship of the upcoming Kadayawan sa Dabaw festival. Already we are seeing banners and streamers bearing the familiar HP logo all over the city. According to Bebi Reyes-Guzman, Marketing Communications, there will also be taxi cabs that will sport the HP emblem.

HP is one of the world’s leading providers of personal computers (desktops and laptops), servers, and imaging equipment. This global company has also been noted for their entry into the mobile market, especially with their iPaq line and the HP Mini-Note PC.

During the press conference hosted by HP’s team led by Nacario, an HP desktop computer and laptop were turned over to Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, ostensibly as a sign of more goodies to come. Nacario expressed an interest in the city’s unique 911 emergency response service, and has indicated that, as an HP City, Davao will be the recipient of more significant computer donations from HP Philippines.

Duterte, as he is wont to do in such situations, apprised the HP executives of the state of affairs in Davao City, especially on the peace and order situation. It was icing on the cake, however, since Nacario and her team are already apparently convinced of the potentials of Davao and her fast-growing IT industry.

To further their commitment to the city, HP Philippines is set to expand their presence in the city. Aside from strengthening ties with local channels, and beefing up their service center, the company is now on the lookout for a territory representative for Davao and Cebu.

“Building Davao as an HP City is our own way of helping the city grow and be recognized as one of the IT centers not only in the Philippines but in Asia,” Nacario said. “We see a great potential for Davao to become a major cyber city in the region. By bringing the widest IT portfolio available today to Davao City, we are already helping it anticipate and address all its needs as a major IT hub.”

Nacario estimates that HP’s market penetration stands at around 5% in Davao, with bulk of the remainder belonging to the “white box” suppliers. She was referring to the largely inexpensive computer ‘brands’ emerging and proliferating out of Taiwan.

HP’s strengths lie in what the brand stands for: quality assurance, excellent after-sales service and systems scalability. According to Grace San Juan, VSDB Lead of HP’s Personal Systems Group, her company believes that Dabawenyos are now beyond mere price consciousness. Precisely why they have decided to bring their marketing and promotions to the Philippine South: to create more awareness of the worth of HP’s technology products and services.

As this kind of technology is not yet pervasive in Davao City, not many locals are aware of the advanced developments being accomplished by a certain Davao-based software house. Cutting-edge technologies in industry-strength inventory systems, telephony services — these software applications are being designed and developed right here.

Lane Systems Inc. is a 12-year old company that has been involved in foreign projects, long before outsourcing and offshoring became buzzwords in the Philippines. Lane Systems (LSI), spearheaded by CEO Rodney Jao, is Davao’s showcase of success in the field of software development, and they are showing no signs of slowing down.

They call their best offerings “mobility solutions”. Centered mostly on inventory and related applications, LSI has developed and deployed programs for barcode- and RFID-based business requirements. For example, currently, they are building an application that will run on a handheld rugged computer. Their application will make it possible to gather data contained in two-dimensional barcodes, as well as process such data for use as decision-making business information.

This gadget LSI is working on, an Intermec CN3 Mobile Computer (shown in photo), is capable of electronic data collection and processing for entire warehouses. It’s a remarkable piece of equipment: a very durable handheld computer with Bluetooth and barcode scanner (one- and two-dimensional), WiFi-enabled, plus it has a slot for a SIM card. It runs on Windows Mobile, and LSI is currently developing an application that will run on it and take advantage of the hardware’s functionalities. The project is for a client in the United States.

In the field of telephony, LSI counts a number of call centers in Metro Manila and Cebu as clients. BPO companies, especially call centers, have very demanding requirements for contact management, and the people at Lane Systems have delivered to their customers’ satisfaction.

Lane Systems’ motto speaks of their business culture: Process Improvement Through Technology. Here’s a quotable quote from their website: “Lane Systems is unique in several aspects; among them is the unparalleled ability to examine a business challenge, apply appropriate technology solutions, and effectively articulate the solution to our own teams and the customer from start to finish. We guarantee customer satisfaction as we go the ‘extra mile’ to see that our customers know we mean business when we say we are committed to them.”

More than just their clients, LSI also takes care of their employees. Operating much like their Silicon Valley counterparts, LSI believes that the talent pool that they have is as much capital as money in the bank. That’s why their people are some of the better paid technology workers in Davao, as well as the more fulfilled in their careers.

Lane Systems is hiring! For more information, please visit their Web site, or call 221-3344. You may also submit your résumé to Davao Tech Jobs.

When TechCrunch, ZDNet and other notable online publications and blogs trash a company or an individual, techies and people who spend a lot of time on the Internet will invariably take notice. But when it’s the venerable The New York Times that does the lambasting, virtually nobody will miss it.

In a recent article in this bastion of traditional journalism, NYT’s Joe Nocera published a scathing "open letter" addressed to Yahoo! CEO, Jerry Yang. It’s entitled "Oh Jerry, It’s No Longer Your Baby" and alludes to Yang’s incomprehensible behavior during the months when Microsoft Corp. was batting for a Yahoo!-Microsoft merger.

Yang co-founded Yahoo! 14 years ago and, before the emergence of Google, it was the coolest outfit that hackers and users alike idolized. Perhaps Yang just couldn’t let go of his paternal sentiments for his company, even after it went public in 1996. Which was to his detriment, because it would seem (as NYT put it) that he never made the transition from owner to caretaker (i.e., servant to his stockholders).

Yang made two bizarre moves that were clearly predicated on his desire to avoid being merged with Microsoft. First, when Yahoo!’s board was already ‘forced’ to sit down and actually talk to the software giant, Yang put in place a generous but wacky severance package for full-time employees who would opt to leave the company in the event of a corporate takeover. Basically, it stipulated that employees who walked out after Microsoft takes over Yahoo! would be free to leave and pocket a hefty sum for their trouble.

Second: Yang got in bed with Google for a search ads deal that would surely bleed the Yahoo! search business dry. And good old Jerry publicized the deal as a means to ensure a healthy Internet. Who was he kidding? Serving Google’s ads in Yahoo! search engine results pages… and his business model was what again?

Let’s put things into perspective here.

Google revolutionized — and subsequently dominated — Internet search, Web-based email and other online services. Let’s tackle email, because I’m sure everyone can appreciate how Google became a household name because of its search engine.

When Google launched its email service, Gmail, it offered an unprecedented amount of inbox space as well as a cleaner and faster interface. As soon as I got my Gmail account, I completely abandoned my Yahoo! email address. Many of my friends did the same thing. Today, it’s much more hip to have an @gmail.com address.

It took awhile before Yahoo! and Hotmail could catch up, but history had already been made, and Google was already the biggest cahoona of them all. So, by this token alone, isn’t it extremely obvious that Yahoo! and Google are competitors?

And yet, Yang was willing — no, eager — to strike a losing bargain with the Big G, just so he could avoid being devoured by "the Evil Empire" (which was how Silicon Valley types viewed MS way back when).

He had a good run… but he botched it. Yang failed to keep his company in the lead and let Google overtake Yahoo! in the search space, not to mention in the search advertising business, among others. Yang botched it when Microsoft walked out of the merger bid, which could have given Yahoo! the chance to be competitive again.

Now his stockholders are irate and feeling betrayed. It’s not going to be long before he’s forcibly replaced or he opts to step down, preserving what little dignity he’s got left. What a waste! What a way to end one’s formerly brilliant career.

I’d like to quote Nocera, who laid it out quite succinctly when he said:

Jerry, you’re a billionaire because people all over the world bought your stock, and trusted you to do right by them. That’s the compact you make when you take a company public: you get to be really rich, but in return, you have an obligation to do everything you can to ensure that shareholders get a healthy return on their investment. It doesn’t matter that you would like Yahoo to remain independent, or that you can’t stand Microsoft. Your feelings aren’t supposed to get in the way of your fiduciary duty.

I don’t know how many of you know this, but Google has always had an unofficial corporate motto: Don’t be evil. It was pronounced in 2001 by Paul Buchheit, creator of Google’s Gmail (but who has now left to found his own Internet venture). At that time, Google was still this idealistic group of young engineers and entrepreneurs who dreamed of changing the world. In other words, they were not such a major player yet.

Today, the world’s #1 search engine (among other things) is a multibillion-dollar company with well over 16,000 employees. It has become the single biggest item on everyone’s mind when using the Internet. In other words, Google is now constantly under close scrutiny by critics and regular users alike.

Google has been branded as “evil” by many industry watchers, due to some decisions it has made that have impacted a few holy-grail-level beliefs held by Internet users. Privacy: the Google Maps service is seen by some as an intrusion to privacy. In the U.S. and soon in Australia, you can see photographed views of streets from the ground; and there have been complaints of actual faces and plate numbers being visible.

Censorship: When Google entered China in 2006, it complied with censorship restrictions imposed by the Chinese government. The censorship effectively blocks search results that displayed — in the Chinese government’s perception — politically sensitive information. Google CEO Eric Schmidt came under fire for acceding to this blatant disregard for free access to public information. Schmidt was quoted as saying, “We actually did an evil scale, and decided not to serve at all was worse evil.”

If you think about it, “Don’t be evil” is a rather impossible dictum to follow. As with any publicly listed company, the priority of a business is to provide ever-increasing returns in favor of its shareholders. This could — and often does — conflict with any company’s perceived core values.

Apparently, Google is using its shareholders as an excuse for dealing with totalitarian regimes. But more and more lately, people are holding Google to its self-imposed maxim. The corporate motto has encouraged the public to hold Google to a higher standard.

Why? Because people have not forgotten why Google became so widely accepted in such a short time: that it wanted to change the world. And it has. For example, its email product, Gmail, was the reason for Yahoo’s and Hotmail’s scampering to increase their inbox space allotment. Do you remember that Yahoo! Mail only let you have 4 megabytes to store all your emails and attachments? That’s just 2 high-quality photos and your inbox is done for.

Its flagship search product, of course, revolutionized the way people found information on the Web. In no time at all, the expression “Google it!” became a household word all over the world.

People won’t let Google forget its roots. Internet users are increasingly disappointed about the direction the search giant is taking. In fact, in many instances, it has been labeled as ‘the next Microsoft’. And this is uttered unflatteringly, mind you.

Being the new big kid on the block — nay, the whole neighborhood! — is certainly tough. It can only go either of two ways in the eyes of the public: Google becomes the hero of the Internet, or it becomes the bully.

Probably the hottest news abuzz this year is the looming merger — some say hostile takeover — between Microsoft and Yahoo. Earlier, it was about the resistance on the part of Yahoo to capitulate to the software giant. Lately, the focus has shifted to Redmond and the perceived motive behind their bid to acquire the second largest search engine.

Very recently, two analysts from Gartner, a research services firm, asserted that Microsoft is now on shaky ground due to the state of Windows Vista, which they described as “collapsing”. The analysts, Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald, practically assessed the latest version of the Windows OS as a failure due to disappointingly low market acceptance. According to a rival firm, Forrester Research, by the end of 2007, only a little more than 6% of enterprise-level PC users had migrated to Vista.

The main reason cited for the poor sales performance is the lack of understanding among general users of what makes Vista so much better than Windows XP. And for those who do know, many of them are turned off by the resource-hungriness of Vista. Also, it’s reported that most of those who have adopted the latest OS were users of the nearly-extinct Windows 2000; apparently, Windows XP users (like me) are staying put.

Gartner is now widely quoted as saying that Microsoft is in an “untenable” situation. It predicts that Microsoft Corp. could be in financial straits by 2011 due to a presumed thinning of the latter’s market base. The firm further forecasts that a large number of technology users will be shifting to “OS-agnostic applications” (computer programs not dependent on what operating system is installed), thereby adversely affecting another area that has been dominated by Microsoft: office productivity suites. A prime analogy would be Google Apps, which competes with Microsoft Office.

The Google Apps suite — documents, spreadsheets, presentations, calendar, email, and even more to come — is deployed over the Web, and so is made available to anyone for free, regardless of what’s making his or her computer run. Increased acceptance of such systems could very well erode Microsoft’s revenues from MS Office, reportedly $16 billion in 2007 (including Exchange Server, which allows Office applications to be deployed across the Internet, among other things).

Gartner then proceeded to explore the notion that this is what’s inducing Microsoft to get its hands on Yahoo: to finally capture, and capitalize on, the Internet-ads history (and potential) of the first search engine to gain worldwide attention.

True, virtually every Web venture is targeting Internet advertising as a source of huge revenue. Even Google is in the bandwagon (if it’s not, in fact, the horse). Microsoft, however, has remained staunchly a software publisher and provider, and has ruled over this landscape for a couple of generations. Therefore, isn’t it rather a stretch to assume that this particular Goliath will just keel over and die?

The points made by Gartner are worth looking over. But, in my opinion, MS Office and Windows (perhaps not Vista but the keenly-anticipated Windows 7) are here to stay for longer than anyone might care to imagine.

So, why does Microsoft want to have Yahoo!? At this point, it’s still anybody’s best guess. My take on this is: isn’t it but natural for a business to proceed into further territory?

DURING THE TIME I was organizing the 1st Mindanao Bloggers Summit late last year, I came to meet quite a number of interesting people. One of them is Ted Padova. Since I’ve never really delved very deeply into the world of creatives and graphics design, Mr. Padova was, to me then, just another blogger who had something of substance to say in his blog. Later I was made to realize by my contacts in the world of computer graphics that this fellow happens to be a heavyweight in their field.

Ted, as everyone calls him here, is an accomplished and well-respected author and lecturer. He is invited all over the globe for seminars and conferences at which he speaks. His expertise lies in the area of Adobe Creative Suite programs, particularly in Adobe Acrobat. He has published over a dozen technical books on that piece of software and on PDF (portable document format). My friend and colleague, Christopher Cubos, brought me up to speed when he informed me that Ted is in the business of producing educational content covering Adobe programs. (more…)

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DURING THE TIME I was organizing the 1st Mindanao Bloggers Summit late last year, I came to meet quite a number of interesting people. One of them is Ted Padova. Since I’ve never really delved very deeply into the world of creatives and graphics design, Mr. Padova was, to me then, just another blogger who had something of substance to say in his blog. Later I was made to realize by my contacts in the world of computer graphics that this fellow happens to be a heavyweight in their field.

Ted, as everyone calls him here, is an accomplished and well-respected author and lecturer. He is invited all over the globe for seminars and conferences at which he speaks. His expertise lies in the area of Adobe Creative Suite programs, particularly in Adobe Acrobat. He has published over a dozen technical books on that piece of software and on PDF (portable document format). My friend and colleague, Christopher Cubos, brought me up to speed when he informed me that Ted is in the business of producing educational content covering Adobe programs. (more…)

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VeriSign, the company that globally manages the two most popular top-level domains (TLDs), has announced that it will raise the wholesale rates of .com and .net domain names this 15th of October 2007. Domain names ending in .com, from $6.00, will be increased to $6.42; and .net domains, from $3.50 to $3.85.

This rather huge increase will necessarily mean that domain registrars and resellers will have to increase the retail prices of these domain names. I use ctcd.com, and they currently sell domain names for $8.94 per year. This rate is indeed a far cry from the time when Internet addresses sold for $35 per year, but — in Internet time — that was ages ago when Network Solutions held the monopoly. (more…)

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Infinit-O is a leading BPO company in the Philippines providing back office support primarily for the financial services and healthcare sectors. It is currently expanding its range of Mortgage Loan Processing Outsource services to help mortgage companies across the United States through their current turmoil.

Despite the negative news and forecasts for the U.S. mortgage industry, Infinit-O sees this period as an opportunity to build new relationships and partnerships. In the process, Infinit-O has gone full force in developing existing and defining new verticals in mortgage outsourcing. The formula is simple: provide high quality services at typically only 50% of the price in the US. It may sound simplistic and straightforward, but these are exactly what mortgage industry players need to retain their edge and remain competitive in a tumultuous market. (more…)

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In the last few years, industry watchers have seen the increased adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software systems — especially from SAP, Oracle and Microsoft — by Davao-based companies. And I’m not referring to multinational companies, but to homegrown, medium-sized corporations that software providers call their “mid-market”.

In the past, Davao companies relied on either internally-developed systems (making use of off-the-shelf software products), or systems created by third-party providers in the city. Smaller operations entrusted their internal data processing requirements to freelance programmers — even today.

But with the increasing trend of globalization, and the shrinking of the international marketplace, Filipinos have begun to realize the need for more robust and sophisticated software systems. Such systems would have to address management’s demand for up-to-the-minute information, which the latter needs for making informed decisions. (more…)

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