Lately, the Philippine Senate led by its Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile conducted a series of “hearings” or inquiries regarding the state of the Philippines’ telecoms industry. Finally, some government body is suddenly interested in looking at how badly the consumers are treated and “cheated” by the country’s telecommunication providers.

And this was not due to hundreds of thousands of people crying out loud about the “injustices” of this oligopoly in the country’s telecoms business, but was purely “accidental.”

Senator Enrile just uncovered this when he noticed that his prepaid mobile phone’s account load value mysteriously vanished, or diminished.

I have written some articles in the past about my (bad) experiences with these telecoms service providers. Which will probably remain a “rant” since our government turned a deaf ear to the cries of its people.

Now that election season is coming - some “politicos” will instantly become consumer advocates and will spend time delivering privilege speeches in the hollowed, err, hallowed hall of Congress. Perhaps its time for us to take advantage of this as well.

Read the rest of this article »

One of the many things many Filipino SEO enthusiasts love to do is to publish board exam results. Its not just about getting hits from people searching for specific board exam results but more importantly, its about the joy of seeing a particular post topping the search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Board exam results are one of the most effective ways to generate traffics to a blog or website, especially when you flavor it with some search engine optimization strategies (SEO). One of the top 3 most popular board exam results is the Nursing Licensure Examinations (NLE).

This one can bring thousands of hits. It can even easily bring down a site - especially when a site is hosted on shared servers. My first attempt proved to be succesful way back in June 2008 Nursing board exam results. My other site, Bloggista.org amassed some 50,000 pageviews the day the results were released, and reached to more than 100,000 pageviews in just 3 days. Not as good as what the others (who are SEO masters) get, but good enough for a newbie in SEO like me.

The succeeding Nursing Board exam results got my Bloggista.org site suspended by Bluehost - which irritated me since its the only website running on that hosting account. It sucks, and yes, Bluehost sucks, but what can I do? I’m on a cheap hosting account, and I cannot afford a dedicated server to host my site.

Read the rest of this article »

This is what’s keeping me busy lately. On June 18, 2009, the first complete SaaS ERP (Software as a Service Enterprise Resource Planning) and locally developed in the Philippines will be officially launched with a grand event at the Renaissance Hotel in Makati.

Impart Solutions, Inc., the company behind the revolutionary LAMP Enterprise ERP business software, together with Computer World Philippines and Media G8way, the event organizer, will formally introduce LAMP Enterprise ERP in the Philippines (though it has been developed and implemented in several companies in the last 5 years).

Dubbed as “IT-enabling Philippine Businesses at a Time of Crisis: LAMP - the Light at the End of the Tunnel“, the event aims to gather business leaders in various industries of the country and present to them an efficient, feature-rich and complete Enterprise business solutions alternative to traditional ERP softwares (Oracle, SAP). LAMP Enterprise ERP can significantly cut the costs of implementing and maintaining a reliable ERP system of up to 60%.

LAMP Enterprise ERP is a complete suite of Financials, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Human Resources, Payroll, Services, Web Ordering and many other modules all for a low monthly subscription - even less than what you pay for a programmer’s monthly salary.

Clients don’t need to buy costly servers, or maintain a large group of IT personnel. There is no need to spend money on software licenses, and pay more on annual maintenance and software upgrades.

Read the rest of this article »

Software as a Service, or SaaS is a model where software is rented instead of buying it. Applications are delivered via the internet, accessed using a pc with internet connection and a browser.

The model has been implemented for quite some time now, but its popularity was exponential lately when businesses started to look for better yet cheaper alternatives to traditional, often costly and hard to implement business softwares.

However, in my almost 3 years of actively advocating for SaaS and Open Source technologies, I found that many business owners are still not aware of this model.

Most companies don’t see the “hidden” costs associated with investing in traditional business softwares. Thus, in most cases, implementing and maintaining these softwares are always costly - especially when costs are extended over a period of 5 years.

Here are the top 10 reasons why businesses should seriously consider SaaS today:

1. SaaS software is on a subscription basis, usually monthly. There are no license investment requirements at the start, which may cost as much as 5000USD per user in traditional softwares. Expending the subscription fees monthly is easier to manage than requiring big amount of capital investment in acquiring a software.

Read the rest of this article »

There are a lot of things bloggers and non-bloggers alike (including so called PGB’s like me, err, better stop the labeling and just say, human beings) learn from every Pacquiao fight, aside from letting us experience for a few hours a peaceful Philippines and some few hundred dollars in adsense.

First on the list is determination. You always see a smiling Manny Pacquiao when he goes up to the ring. Last Sunday’s fight with Hatton was no different - in fact, anyone could feel his calmness, his confidence and peaceful state of mind especially when he showed his trademark “Manny Grin” to millions of people who were watching the fight.

Well others might say Manny was seeing “Green Money” and lots of them as he walked towards the ring, so he couldn’t help but display lots of Manny Grin that day. Nevertheless, he showed so much determination the bout was like won already even before the first slug was thrown. And it was very infectious.

Read the rest of this article »