Archives for 11/2007:

EDIT: P16,000 for the ASUS eee

* There has been a price drop in the ASUS eee. It now costs P16,000.00.

Hello ASUS eee. You’re finally here in the Philippines. Your proud owner allowed me to fiddle around with your real estate for the better part of the evening and here are some of the notes I took down:

• P17,000.00 flat for the mini laptop. The eee runs on a 533MHz processor with 4GB of hard disk space and 512MB of RAM. If you add P1,200.00, you get the RAM bumped up to 1GB
• Available colors are in white, black, pink and light blue
• Mouse buttons are a bit hard to press and the mouse pad is a little small
• Ultra light and ultra small

The best thing about the eee is that it doesn’t feel cheap for P17,000.00. The elegant exterior reminds me of my black MacBook and it comes packed with everything that makes a laptop a great blogging machine. For less than P20,000.00 you get a portable computer with a mic, webcam (with recording capability), WiFi, three USB ports and a SD/MMC card reader. It comes built in with Google Docs, Open Office, Mozilla Firefox 2 and a bunch of other open source applications like the game Mr. Potato Head.
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Boracay is the new Batanes: An Interview with Iza Calzado and Ignite Media

Wednesday morning
Went to airport for the press preview of Batanes the Movie starring Iza Calzado and F4’s Ken Zhu. Movie preview of Batanes will be at Batanes. Cool, ain’t it. Exciting for me as the last time I was in Batanes was more than 10 years ago for a student seminar. It was a memorable experience making friends with the Koro Ivatan and playing on the grassy cliffs that resembles much of the scenery you see in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. I’m hyped.

Markku sports a new hair style.
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 Interview with Iza Calzado and Adolf Alix: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Samsung’s PHP 2.5 Million Pesos 1080p 70 inch High Def Television

I just witnessed the launch of the largest consumer available LCD television with 1080p high definition resolution. Very affordable for only PHP 2,500,000.00. What makes this LCD unique is that it is available to consumers as an actual product. There are bigger LCD centerpieces out there, but are all prototypes.

During the Q&A portion, I just had to ask … “So, err … when are you sending us the demo units?”

The product manager answered that as long as I could lift it, I could take it home.

“Introspection of Viral Marketing Using Lechon Kawali Pizza as Test Subject”

This morning, I shot the new lechon pizza of Greenwich, a new offering for the holidays among many other things that I was tasked to shoot. Client has already launched the product to the public so I am allowed to talk about it. But that’s not what I came to express in this blog post.

The pizza is deliciously and sinfully good. The base of the dough is drowned in lechon sauce and topped with cheese. On top of the cheese are several pieces of lechon kawali – pig meat and skin combined to give you that chewy and crunchy texture. The crust itself is baked with garlic. Red bell pepper strips to garnish.

I gobbled up three slices of this wonderful dish during the event. Twenty minutes later I wind up at a friend’s office across the street from Greenwich Ayala Avenue for a meeting. I tell him about the ever so sinful “lechon kawali” pizza and they order two boxes for the staff. The verdict? Winner. (yeah yeah I finished three more slices. I’m such a lechon.)

That night I drop by an event for Samsung at the Manila Peninsula. Over dinner with other members of media, I start a nonchalant conversation of “guess what I had for lunch a while ago?” The already famous lechon pizza conversation made its way through the 5 Star Buffet meal at the presidential suite. It was absurdly funny and incited curiosity.

Viral marketing works for products when the item in scrutiny has a tinge of peculiarity to it. Sometimes, peculiarity is bred by what is known as the invisible obvious, if I were to borrow the term from Andrian Lee. The lechon pizza is really nothing more than the FIlipino version of an all meat pizza. Pecuiar. But obvious.

Curious to try the lechon pizza? Dial 55555 for deliveries anywhere around the country.

For foreign readers, here is the definition of lechon:

Lechón (Tagalog: Litson and Cebuano: Inasal) is the Spanish word for suckling pig. In the Philippines, it connotes a whole roasted pig, lechón baboy. Chicken and beef, are also popular. The process of lechón involves the whole pig/piglet, chicken, or cattle/calf being slowly roasted over charcoal. [Wikipedia]

Neil Gaiman Weekend

I have always argued that Neil Gaiman is more than just a writer. He’s a story teller. There are some writers, who, when you listen to them speak, sound as if they are speaking in prose. The sentences they construct are uttered with a cadence that makes you stop to listen to every word as he effortlessly highlights his point with stops, intonation and the perfect choice of words.

Mr. Gaiman tells how Philippine literature is rich in realism, yet not so in unrealism as, according to him, we have the richest culture in the world. He didn’t say one of the richest. He said we are the richest. Don’t you wonder?

P.S. Perhaps you’ve already heard about it, but during the 2007 Ad Congress, Neil Gaiman served as pastor to two bronze award winners. The tale is recounted here for the guy and here for the girl. Neil writes about it here. Sadly, I was not able to make it to the ad congress, but I did catch him at Fully Booked, where he recounted the tale.