The get-together of DigitalFilipino.com Club members and Davao’s IT professionals last 14 May 2008 at Casa Leticia was an eye-opener for many first-timers. There were more than 30 Dabawenyos who attended, most of whom were, before then, uninitiated into this different sort of organization. Janette Toral, initiator and representative of the Club, was delighted to see so many attend the event.

The DigitalFilipino.com Club is a nationwide association of e-commerce practitioners and enthusiasts, IT professionals and companies. It is a business organization, in that its focus is on how to maximize Filipino talent in bringing success to members’ businesses. I have been a member for several years now, and I have directly benefited from my membership. Twice already I have closed business deals with other members, thanks to the networking activities that the Club constantly conducts.

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I agree with one of my favorite tech news sources (TechCrunch.com) that the next technology war will be fought in the realm of mobile platforms. In the dawn of OS-agnostic and Web-deployed applications, the old operating-systems war seems to be finally fizzling out. (A rather anticlimactic denouement, if you ask me.)

Microsoft and Apple have both had their mobile platforms out in the market for the longest time now: Windows Mobile (which had its earlier manifestation as Windows CE) and Apple’s "i" series (iPod, iPhone). But it’s only now that the market has grown to a considerable — and lucrative — scale. This time, there are other aggressive players out in the battlefield: BlackBerry and Google’s Android (which has yet to make a clear showing), among others. Let’s not forget Symbian, by the way.

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The Nokia N81 8GB is a smartphone with a mix of impressive features… and rather disappointing disadvantages. There’s the obvious advantage of having built-in 8 gigabytes of memory space for applications, games, music, videos, photos, what have you. Some mobile-phone critics have complained about the lack of an expansion slot for more memory, but 8 gigs should be pretty spacious for most people’s needs.

The N81 is a dual-camera 3G phone, but does not have support for HSDPA, which has been available for sometime now. It does, however, let you access the Internet via wifi, so that probably makes up for it. Accessing via wifi in various hotspots -– whether open networks or WEP-enabled secure networks -– didn’t give me any problems, except that websites loaded rather slowly at first. The built-in Web browser is user friendly, though, and looks nice on the 2.4” 16-million-color QVGA display.

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As avid WordPress bloggers and developers know very well, WordCamp is the event when it comes to this “state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform”. And we are bringing it to the Philippines!

I normally write about blogging stuff over at Blogie Blog, but this post isn’t about blogging. WordCamp, you see, isn’t like the Mindanao Bloggers Summit or the iBlog Summit. WordCamp’s content is usually more technical in nature. As are many open-source software, this powerful CMS is written in PHP, and so this event will cover plenty of ground on this language, as well as XHTML and other similar topics.

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After a long spell of being away from Davao, leading e-commerce advocate Janette Toral will be back in town for a long-awaited “eyeball” of DigitalFilipino Club members. In particular, the upcoming event will be the Davao E-Commerce and E-Business Owners Meet-Up, on 14 May 2008 (Wednesday).

Here’s the official press release:

The DigitalFilipino.com Club is organizing a networking event where e-business and e-commerce industry players can catch up and exchange updates in the industry. •••Read on»

Ostensibly in retaliation to Western media’s coverage of anti-Chinese demonstrations in Europe, the Sports Network website was hacked last Sunday. The site was defaced with the image that you see here (captured by ChristineLu.com). Repeated attacks, most probably serious denial-of-service assaults, have caused the site to be taken down. After a few days, the site was still inaccessible.

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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.

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This 20 & 21 May 2008, a significant event geared towards the Filipino technopreneur is going to happen in Makati City — how I wish it were here in Davao instead! Janette Toral’s DigitalFilipino.com Club, collaborating with Fiera de Manila Inc, is spearheading the conduct of the much-anticipated Social Networking and eBusiness Conference Philipines 2008.

Heavily involved in community-building myself (e.g., MindanaoBloggers.com and the erstwhile IT Society of Davao), I believe I would benefit greatly from the meaty presentations and vigorous discussions that will certainly take place during the Conference.

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What’s on the horizon for Davao’s IT industry? We’re seeing more software development companies being put up (by locals and by immigrants), and we’re seeing newfangled products and services being offered locally.

This post is only about a couple of teasers. The real deal will follow as soon as I have more details to blog about.

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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.

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