IT rantings from the Philippines.
Melvin G. Calimag is currently the executive editor of an IT news website in the Philippines. Melvin has been covering the local IT beat for the last 13 years. He is currently a board member at the IT Journalists Association of the Philippines (CyberPress), and also serves as a charter member with the Philippine Science Journalists Association.
The other week, I had the opportunity to travel to India upon the invitation of tech company HP. It was my first time to the world's IT outsourcing capital, and I was eager to find out how it was able to discover its niche in the world market, and how the Philippines--which is also marketing itself as an outsourcing hub--can learn from India's success story.
Since the Philippines put an end to the oppressive regime of former President Ferdinand Marcos through a "people power" revolution--probably the first televised popular uprising in the world--in 1986, Filipinos seemed to have perfected the art of mobilization through the use of mass media.The recent uproar regarding the "insulting" remark of actress Teri Hatcher in the American TV show "Desperate Housewives" is a case in point.
The decision last April by Verisign -- due to become effective this October -- to raise the fee for both .com and .
Since I started writing this blog, I've noticed that I've written mostly about negative topics about my country, the Philippines. Not that I regret discussing them, but I feel rather guilty in that readers from the region may get the impression that nothing is virtually working in this country.
The Philippines, which reached its economic peak in the 1960s but gradually went on a decline in the decades that followed, had hoped that ICT would be the vehicle that would bring back the country to its glory days when it was one of the most progressive nations in Asia.After all, ICT has made tremendous contributions to the local economy through the multi-billion BPO sector made up of call center, medical transcription, and animation industries, among others.
I had intended to write about the controversial National Broadband Network (NBN) deal, an issue that has been in the front-pages of newspapers here in the Philippines for a few months now--but the word "shutdown" was all around me today that I just had to give in to the temptation.First order of the day is the announcement of CA's decision to dissolve its Philippine operations, effective Oct.
Journalists have often sneered at bloggers (I, for one, am guilty of this) for the simple fact that bloggers have increasingly expanded their power to the point it has encroached on the domain of journalists.I don't know if it's nature's way of rebuking the journalists (at least in the Philippines) but what transpired just a few days ago was an unprecedented way of bloggers demonstrating their growing influence.
The Philippines prides itself as a prime IT destination where outsourced work and electronics manufacturing can be done efficiently at a very cheap price.But the country is in danger of putting all that into waste.