I was invited to a pretty unique media/blog tech event in May. This was the Manila launch of Acer’s Aspire Timeline series which was held last May 25 while cruising on board the M/V Spirit of Manila in Manila Bay. Well, it’s not often that you get a chance to ride a boat and see Metro Manila from the sea so I grabbed this opportunity (taking a half-day leave from the office in the process). The pips from Acer joked that they did the cruise idea so that they’re guaranteed a “captive” audience. Heh.

The Aspire Timeline series

For this post, I want to focus more on the event rather than the product that was launched. If you really want to learn more about the Aspire Timeline series, there’s tons of information on the Web so there’s no need for me to parrot the specs and all. But one thing I will mention is that I really like this series of laptops!

Before going to the event itself, I researched a bit about the laptops and found that the reviews were generally quite positive with the 8-hour battery life being the most touted feature. During the event itself, I got more acquainted with these babies and learned that the 14.0″ (4810T) and 13.3″ (3810T) models in particular both cost less than 50k pesos. Since my current laptop set me back about 47.5k back in 2006, I think that Acer has a winner. My laptop was on the lower end of the specs spectrum in 2006 while Acer’s laptops seem to be on the higher end, so at that price point, my objective assessment is that the Timeline laptops are definitely drool-worthy.

A sunset cruise down Manila Bay

Compared to the ASUS media event I attended the year before, Acer definitely knows how to wow its audience. The launch happened in the late afternoon so we got to have pretty nice snaps of famed Manila Bay sunset. One thing I was surprised to discover is that cross of the Mt. Samat Shrine is quite visible from Manila. Who would’ve thought?

Shown to the right is the map of the path the M/V Spirit of Manila took along Manila Bay. Being the map geek that I am I used my GPS-enabled phone to record the movement of the boat. The trip started at Harbour Centre/Manila Yacht Club at the CCP Complex, went down south all the way to SM Mall of Asia then went back north. Since the event wasn’t finished when the boat got within the vicinity of the Yacht Club, we took a loop northwards towards the American Embassy.

Before the presentations began, we were regaled with songs from the hired band. Unsurprisingly, somebody requested “Careless Whisper”. I recorded the second half of the song on video, but thought that it was too corny to upload it on YouTube. Just holler if you want me to upload it anyway.

After the songs and some dinner, Acer gave short presentations about their products. Intel Philippines was also there to talk about their CULV (ultra-low-voltage) processors which powers the Acer machines and which is the main reason why they have long battery lives. (I wanted to ask the reps from Intel about the closure of their Philippine manufacturing operations but I chickened out.) So in a sense, this launch was a joint Acer-Intel affair. Some reporter coyly asked Intel what other laptops—Acer or otherwise—will be launched with their CULV processors but they evaded the question. Hehehe.

Articles elsewhere

I’ve collected below all of the links to other articles on the Web that I can find that were directly related to this blog/media event should you wish to get more varied perspectives.

• “ACER Timeline Launch: The Ultrathin Battle is Joined”, blog post by Jayvee Fernandez.

• “Acer Aspire Timeline Is Part of My Wish List”, blog post by Sharlyne Ang

• “Acer Aspire Timeline”, blog post by Karla Redor

• “At the Acer Timeline Cruise event…”, photoblog entry by Markku Seguerra

• “Acer Timeline laptops unveiled in Manila”, actual article by Markku

• “Let me play on an Acer Aspire Timeline!”, blog post by Joel Tan, who couldn’t make it to the event

• “Acer launches Aspire Timeline laptops in the Philippines with Intel’s CULV processor”, blog article by David Gonzales

• “Acer Aspire Timeline revolutionizes laptop landscape”, PC World Philippine feature article

Crappy cellphone photos

Below are some pictures I took that day. The rest can be found in Flickr.

Inspired by the success of the Tagaytay Mapping Party last May, OpenStreetMappers from Davao City decided to have their own mapping party this coming Saturday, July 4. This event is being spearheaded by George Tujan and Marloue Pidor, both of Neuraltech Innovations, an IT startup in Davao focusing on GPS and geospatial technologies.

Unlike the Tagaytay event which we Manila OpenStreetMappers organized in a very ad hoc manner, the Davao guys went ahead and carefully planned their mapping party. First, they put up a blog called Mapping Mindanao to drum up publicity for the event. Second, they had an OSM Workshop last June 20 to invite and orient interested mappers on OSM and the upcoming mapping party. A third item in their extensive planning is widespread publicity. They got the support of the Davao Tourism Office and they were also invited to speak at the Club 888 Media Forum that happened last June 17. There they evangelized about OSM and this landed them a nifty press release from the Philippine Information Agency. Woot!

If you’re interested in joining but you missed the workshop, don’t worry, just contact the organizers at their blog and I’m sure they’ll help you get up to speed. Help make the Davao OpenStreetMap the best online map there is!

Here are a couple of other blog posts about the Davao Mapping Party:

• “osm-ph davao mapping party” by Emmanuel Sambale

• “GPS Mapping Party In Davao City”

It’s been exactly five years since I wrote the first post here in vaes9. This also means that I’ve been a blogger for five years now. I’ve written anniversary posts for the first year and the second but I neglected to write posts for the third- and fourth-year anniversaries since the occasion was eclipsed by Lakbayan, which I launched on June 12, 2007. (That means that Lakbayan is now two years old!) So let me indulge myself as I write a fifth-year-anniversary post to celebrate this milestone.

These past five years has been pretty great for me as a blogger. I’ve started my blog back in 2004 to join the bandwagon, but it apparently seems that I was one of the early bloggers here in the Philippines back during the time when blogging events (and controversies) were unheard of. The Philippine blogosphere has become pretty big and mainstream since then and I’ve seen how it grew from simple personal journals and diaries in LiveJournal and Blogger into this industry it is now. (Whether that is a good or a bad thing is a discussion for another post.)

I attended my first ever blog event in September 2006 called the Philippine BlogCon, and there I met people, like Markku, who would become among the best online friends I have up till now. The next event I attended, the Blog Parteeh ’07, would prove even better since I met lots more friends, like Benj, Juned, Jonas, Marcelle, Mae, Rico, and Jeff among many others.

Blogging was originally just to be a minor hobby of mine. But after seeing all the possibilities and opportunities, blogging has become a real passion and I’ve even started branching out, launching my second blog, Tanawing Pinoy, on February 23, 2006, and rebranding it as Vista Pinas in 2007. That blog had actually become my most popular and successful blog in terms of traffic, subscribers, and revenue.

Speaking of revenue, blogging has brought me a pretty good source of side income. While the earnings are not much compared to more successful probloggers out there, it’s still good especially since it is mostly passive income. I actually am in the process of expanding my “online empire” to other areas besides blogging. Diversity is the key and while other people create their own personal blog networks (like having a personal, a travel, a food, and a tech blog), my skill set is such that I can create more than just blogs.

Besides the income, the recognition is also great. I won the Best Single Technology Blog Post Award in last year’s Philippine Blog Awards for my “The Making of Lakbayan (Part 2)” article. I don’t expect to win more awards since there are plenty of bloggers who deserve the recognition more. Getting one official award, with a funky-looking trophy to boot, is good enough for me. But I won’t stop you from nominating me in whatever award you think I deserve. Hehehe.

Here’s to five more years!

Cake photo (CC-licensed) by Daniel Catt.

We Filipinos (should) all know that the Philippine flag is unique in that it flies its flag upside down (with the red on top) when the country is in a state of war. Well, to celebrate the 111th declaration of Philippine Independence, listed below are a few other bits of trivia about our Three Stars and a Sun watawat that you probably don’t know.

• The Philippine flag, according to Republic Act No. 8491 (the Flag and Heraldic Code of the Philippines), is supposed to have its length to be twice as its width. I’ve seen flags where the dimensions are in the ratio 1:√3 (which, while I personally find more aesthetic, is illegal) such that the diagonals of the equilateral white triangle lie on the lines connecting the opposite corners of the flag.

• While we generally know that the three yellow stars represent the island groups of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao, did you know that one of the stars originally represented only the island of Panay according to the Acta de la proclamación de la independencia del pueblo Filipino (i.e., the Philippine Declaration of Independence)? I guess the concept of island groups was not yet known then since Panay was included as one of the “three principal islands” of the Philippines.

• The same declaration states that the red, white, and blue colors of the flag was inspired by the American flag. This bit of fact would probably drive anti–U.S. imperialists into conniptions.

• The shade of blue used in the original flag was supposed to be the same as the Cuban flag. Over the years the blue took on various shades from sky blue to navy blue. RA 8491 now prescribes it to be “royal blue”.

• The first ever Philippine flag was made in Hong Kong by Marcela Agoncillo, wife of Felipe, who is the first Filipino diplomat.

• The flag was banned during the American occupation starting from 1907 until 1919 when the law that banned its display was repealed.

More information about the Philippine national flag can be found at its Wikipedia article or in this article by Manolo Quezon.

Happy Independence Day!

It’s amusing that about a week after I derided Google’s Mapping Party concept, I was invited to attend one by Aileen Apolo, the Philippine country representative of Google, in behalf of Dante Varias and Leonel Foronda, who are apparently the two most productive Filipino Google Map Maker contributors. The event happened last June 3 at the Bubba Gump restaurant in Greenbelt 3 and it was attended by local bloggers and developers. (I guess I was invited because I am a blogger, a developer, and a Map Maker contributor all at the same time!)

While the event was marketed as a “mapping party”, I hesitate to call it that since there was no actual mapping or even demos involved, unlike what is suggested by Google’s Mapping Party Kit. I would actually say that this party is simply the community edition of the media event that Google held last March 12. I guess it was a reunion of sorts for the Map Maker contributors, which includes physician Leonel Foronda, civil engineer Dante Varias, Chemical Engineering graduate Wayne Dell Manuel, call-center agent Bernardo Arellano III, and businessman Rally de Leon, who actually shifted to OpenStreetMap primarily since he can’t get back the data he contributed to Google Map Maker, unlike in OSM where you can even get a Garmin (a brand of GPS devices) routable map of the Philippines. I actually met Bernardo before at iBlog5 and Rally at the Tagaytay OSM Mapping Party.

The event’s agenda basically had Leonel, Dante, and Wayne discuss their activities in contributing to Google Map Maker and sharing their experiences at the first ever Google Map Maker Conference held last April 20–21 in Bangalore, India (the birthplace of Map Maker). They also fielded questions from the audience regarding the details of contributing to Google Map maker. I’m not sure if actual mapping was on the agenda (Aileen adapted the Mapping Party Kit’s presentation for that night’s audience) but if it were, it was definitely scrapped since the restaurant’s Wi-Fi connection was crappy.

Pictures follow!

I announced last month that there would be an OpenStreetMap Mapping Party in Tagaytay last May 16. Well, this post is quite late but I’m pleased to report that the mapping party was pretty much a success! I actually already blogged about it at my OSM diary, but that is for the OSM audience and not for general readers. This blog post would be for the latter’s consumption (i.e., you!).

The idea for a mapping party (a “real” one with GPS units and actual surveying—none of that sit-together-in-one-place nonsense ) was first brought up at the Philippine OSM mailing list last February and a date was set for March 14. Unfortunately due to scheduling circumstances, many could not come at the last minute and so the plan was postponed. In April, the idea was revived again and May 16 was the agreed upon date. Fortunately we had eight mappers who were able to come on that day.

Since Tagaytay is such a nice place to go to, many of the mappers brought their family to enjoy the place. One dropped his family off to relax at Sonya’s Garden, while another brought his family to spend time in Tagaytay itself, while other family members joined along for the ride.

Our meeting place was at Starbucks at that popular restaurant complex overlooking Taal Lake. The planning was quite ad hoc and we decided just then to split ourselves into 4 groups. One tackled the western peripheries of Tagaytay, another is in charge of the area around the City Hall, between the Indang and the Mendez roads. A third team was assigned to the region between the Sta. Rosa-Tagaytay Road and the Aguinaldo Highway, while my team was assigned to the eastern portion of the city after the Sta. Rosa Tagaytay Road. I paired myself with Ian, a fellow Wikipedian, and he is accompanied by his mother since he’s still a minor. (You know how mothers are.)

I personally like the eastern part since this is where many of the interesting Tagaytay sights are located. This area is where the touristy People’s Park in the Sky and Picnic Grove are located. The eastern part is also where the high-end exclusive residential developments like Crosswinds and Tagaytay Highlands are found. Shown below are the results of our efforts to map the two aforementioned tourist spots. I’m willing to bet that you won’t find such detailed maps of these two places anywhere else online.

We tried entering Tagaytay Highlands but we were barred entry at the gate. We had better luck at Crosswinds where we posed as potential real estate buyers. Well, I was long interested in taking a peek at Crosswinds and now that I’ve seen it, I can definitely say that the real estate there is a pretty good investment (Tagaytay is a favorite retirement location and Crosswinds fits the bill), except that I don’t have money to invest. We weren’t able to map as much of Crosswinds as we would have liked since we were accompanied by an agent and so we only have the main road going to the information center mapped.

Ian and I also went to as many side streets as we can. We actually overshot the area and ended up outside of Tagaytay in a couple of instances: once into Cabuyao, Laguna, and another into Silang, Cavite. I also managed to practice my mane obra (in-place U-turn) enough to last me the rest of the year. Hehehe.

Shown below are the before and after OpenStreetMap Cycle Maps of Tagaytay (see the normal map). We definitely weren’t able to map all streets (it would take much more than a single day to do that) but what we have now is much, much better than what was available before anywhere online. We also managed to collect possibly hundreds of POIs (points of interest) such as restaurants, churches, and retreat houses.

In the tradition of other OSM mapping parties elsewhere in the world, fellow mapper Maning Sambale created the mapping party render animation showing the progress of mapping. It’s a pretty cool video.

The official documentation of the Tagaytay Mapping Party can be found at the OSM Wiki (it’s still incomplete) if you want to learn some more. In addition, Maning and Ian have blogged about the event:

• “post-party report: Tagaytay OSM-PH Mapping” by Maning

• “The streets are open in Tagaytay” by Ian

I think that there will be one or two more local mapping parties this year (one will be held in Davao soon). Just holler if you want to join one. It’s fun!

If you’ve seen the TV commercials and the billboards (and maybe even the blog posts from your favorite local blogger), then you should know by now that Smart has finally launched their sorta Web 2.0 portal attempt called Sandbox. The slogan for this website is “Now everything’s in one box” and it tries to do just that. Sandbox aims to be a content download site, a social network site, a mobile blogging site, a marketplace (e.g. Digisoria), and what else have you.

I’m one of the hundreds of people that got included in Smart’s closed beta testing program starting early this year and I’ve had the chance to try out the social networking and mobile blogging aspects of it. Well, I must say that I’m not quite impressed with it at all. I usually have this gut feeling at whether an endeavor will succeed or not (like the time that I predicted that ümobile would not succeed) and Smart’s Sandbox somehow gives me the fail vibe.

The problem is, Smart is trying to cram too much into its Sandbox offering (everything in one box, right?). It’s like one big Frankenstein: bits and pieces of stuff mashed together into an incoherent whole. This aim to be a jack-of-all-trades is quite a big contrast to the recently announced Google Wave which also tries to be many things (e-mail, IM, wiki, chat, blog, forum, etc.). Despite being a limited developer release, Google Wave actually makes a lot of sense and seems to do all of the things it purports to be in a very slick manner. Sandbox on the other hand is a mess. (I guess it’s the halo-halo Filipino culture coming into play.)

Smart is aiming to have a mobile-based social network (and what they have right now is a retrofitted Mostyle engine). They hope to earn money from people using the Smart network to interact with other people on the Sandbox network. (Well, the content downloading is another revenue stream but I’m not interested in that at all.) This social networking includes mobile blogging, mobile status updates (à la Twitter or Plurk), and mobile messaging (of sorts). Well, I used to be able to upload pics to the Sandbox site straight from my cellphone, but that only puts the photo into a staging area and the photo is not published. Now, I can’t even upload photos at all (or I was not updated on how to do it). I’d be pretty sold with the Sandbox concept if I could update a small blog by just sending an MMS with a photo or a video attached (à la Tumblr) but I can’t even do that.

I laud Smart for betting big on the mobile web. I certainly see a growing market for mobile Internet services but Smart’s Sandbox is pretty far off the mark. They spent a ton of marketing money to promote Sandbox. I wished they spent that money instead in developing a homegrown solution; I can certainly see Filipino developers creating something better and more tailored to the Filipino psyche. What disappoints me is that these points for improvement have already been given to Smart as feedback during the beta testing period. Apparently, the upper management didn’t listen. What’s even more telling is the fact that Ka Edong, a Smart employee, did not mention Sandbox at all during his iBlog5 talk on mobile blogging despite Sandbox having a booth during the blogging summit. Update (June 16): Ka Edong emailed me to say that he deliberately avoided mentioning anything about Smart and their services in order to avoid revealing anything he is not supposed to say.

Shown below are some choice snippets from other blog posts about Sandbox. I’m actually quite surprised that I’m not alone in many of my observations about Sandbox.

• Ely: “Smart’s attempt at social networking—fail.”

• Juned: “So sure join Sandbox but make sure to blog and send them feedback so that Smart can improve on this. Otherwise there is a Tagalog for this and the word is sayang/what a waste.“

• Regnard: “I’ve already given some recommendations in improving the navigation, particularly in the mobile platform. I’ve gone as far as recommending the delay of the launch unless these issues were solved. The site went live with most of the issues still there.”

• Noemi: “As a blogger and mobile worker, Sandbox does not meet my expectations as a blogging platform […]. Ditch the current platform, hire our local Filipino programmers to develop a truly-Filipino Sandbox.”

• Ferdz: “A sandbox has many possibilities, but like a castle made of sand, if you’re not careful it could easily crumble.”

• Cedric: “I’m pretty sure several millions of pesos have been spent on advertising this site alone. But that money could have been well spent on producing a more unique website with a more unique service that doesn’t try to ape everything that’s already there.”

• Jayvee: “So really, the most exciting thing about Sandbox is that it is continuously being improved based on the feedback from the community.”

• Arbet: “It is imperative for Smart to present a social network that is different from the existing ones. Otherwise, people will say Sandbox is just another social network site. Some acerbic people would add the phrase ‘that failed.’”

• Marck: “"I like the idea of SandBox. I like the idea of mobile blogging […]. I like the idea of making blogging available to the people. Yet my problem with SandBox—for the while that I’ve been using it, anyway—is that it’s just too much of a jack-of-all-trades, and a master of none.”

I’ve been a Globe user since 1999 and while I won’t give up my Globe postpaid line, I certainly would entertain the idea of having a secondary Smart number just to be able to use Sandbox, were it the ultimate mobile blogging platform it should have been. For now, I’m adopting a wait-and-see attitude.

I love Google and all, but allow me to be snarky yet again at Google for introducing their Mapping Party Kit late last month. A Google Mapping Party is an event where you invite people to a venue, give them a presentation on Google Map Maker, and them let them try their hand at mapping their locality. The Mapping Party Kit is a simple reference website for anyone who wants to throw a Mapping Party. The site contains sample invitation letters, an agenda example, a presentation, and links to other resources such as Google blog posts about Map Maker.

What’s funny is that Google obviously ripped off the concept of a “mapping party” from OpenStreetMap (OSM) without any sort of attribution. OSM has had such events since at least 2006. What’s different is that since the classic mapping methodology in OSM is to go out and collect data using GPS devices, an OpenStreetMap Mapping Party incorporates actually going out and recording data on the ground. Google’s Mapping Party has no such walking or driving or cycling since their main mapping methodology is tracing over satellite imagery.

What’s even funnier is the fact that Google Map Maker has built-in moderation. Google’s Mapping Parties are targeted to mapping newbies and thus practically every edit these novices make will need moderation. I’ve used Google Map Maker and I can tell you how frustrating the moderating process is. (One particularly irritating thing about the moderation is that you can’t edit a connecting element to a feature that you’ve just edited and needing moderation.) I can imagine that the moderation will put a huge damper on the joy of mapping during the party unless you have a high “trusted”-moderator-to-newbie ratio.

Google’s Mapping Party concept is so laughable that it has actually been satirized in the blog of Fake Ed Parsons. The real Ed Parsons is the Geospatial Technologist of Google.

Anyway, I do like to point you to the sample presentation included in the Mapping Party Kit. The third part (Live demo of Google Map Maker) uses the Philippines activity in Map Maker as examples. The fourth part even prominently highlights Wayne del Dell Manuel, a former Wikipedian and possibly one of the most prolific Filipino Map Maker user users.

Wow! The Philippine Blogging Summit, popularly known as iBlog, is now on its fifth year. This is a wonderful milestone and I would like to congratulate Ms. Janette Toral and the UP College of Law through its Internet and Society Program. I have been attending since iBlog3 and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I consider the Philippine Blogging Summit is the mother of all blog events in the country and iBlog has become a national event with the attendance of Davao (Mindanao) bloggers in iBlog4 and the Cebu bloggers this year. So if you’re a Pinoy blogger and you’ve never been to one, then you should go next year to iBlog6!

Like last year, iBlog5 was held at the Malcolm Theater in UP Diliman and was similarly a whole day affair that occurred last May 9, Saturday. And like last year, I arrived late, but this time I managed to arrive before lunch. I basically barged into the middle of Ka Edong’s talk on mobile blogging.

The most interesting talks for me this year were all the presentations regarding blogging vis-a-vis next year’s elections and that of Anton Diaz’ idea of blogger evolution. 2010 is an election year and it’s quite certain that the Internet and the Web, and blogs in particular, will get a larger piece of the action come campaign season. Thus, two presentations were about the upcoming elections. The first was by James Jimenez, director of the Education and Information Department of COMELEC. He shared their experiences with using a blog for educating the Filipino voting population. The second talk was by Janette (standing in for Blogie). Some issues that were discussed will be the nature of political ad spending online and the possibility of politicians buying influential bloggers to promote them.

As for Anton Diaz’ talk about how bloggers tend to evolve from being an artist, to an advocate, to an entrepreneur, until finally reaching maven status, I found it to be pretty sensible. Most bloggers start out writing on blogs to express themselves (i.e., being an “artist”) before advocating for their blogs, then earning a living from several of them, and finally making blogging a life passion by giving back to the community. After all of the recent brouhaha regarding classifying bloggers and answering the question, “what kind of blogger are you?”, Anton tries to transcend the discussion by asking, “are you evolving as a blogger?”

While Anton’s talk resonated with me, I don’t think the evolution talk completely avoids the controversy regarding pigeon-holing bloggers. For one thing, it seems to say that bloggers should evolve when I think that most bloggers don’t give a damn. As Juned mentions a few times in his blog (e.g., this one and that one), trying to categorize bloggers into distinct types or even levels is simply an imperfect way of looking at the vast spectrum that is the blogosphere. It’s like trying to define where red ends and orange begins in a rainbow. I don’t think classifying blogs and bloggers is wrong per se (after all, there’s nothing wrong with saying that an apple is red), but anyone doing the classifying and anyone looking at the classification needs to remember that there are limitations.

Anyway, here are some choice pictures taken using a crappy cellphone camera. The rest can be found on Flickr.

In OpenStreeMap, a mapping party is “where a group of OpenStreetMappers and novices descend on an area to map it exhaustively, usually over a weekend.” Well, the OSM Philippines community will be having its very first mapping party and the area we chose is the picturesque City of Tagaytay. Shown below is how Tagaytay currently looks like in OpenStreetMap (the data is overlaid on top of SRTM3 terrain data).

Several people have already committed to going and we certainly would welcome OSM newbies to join the fun! The party will be on May 16 (that’s this coming Saturday) and planning is currently underway. If you’re interested, just join the OSM talk-ph mailing list and send an e-mail to the group indicating your interest to join. More information can be found at the OSM Wiki.