Off to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress 2011
Posted by Jayvee Fernandez at February 11th, 2011
Dear readers,
I leave tomorrow night for Barcelona, Spain to attend Mobile World Congress 2011. For the unfamiliar and non-geeks, let’s just say that if the fashion industry has Fashion Week, us nerds have Mobile World Congress (formerly known as GSM Conference).
In the same way that fashion week is a gathering of designers and brands to dictate what’s in and what’s not, MWC ’11 is a gathering of all the telcos and phone manufacturers around the world to unveil everything that will be launched in 2011. If it’s got a SIM card or a data plan, it’s in MWC.
Conferences and product launches in the morning, cocktails and parties in the evening. I’ll be covering the floor together with Andi Manzano of Magic 89.9. So apart from daily summaries which you can read here, I’ll also be Tweeting (follow @jayvee on Twitter) and updating Facebook from the floor. You can also view global updates using the hashtag #MWC2011
On Wednesday late afternoon (exact time to be confirmed) I will also be on live video via Flippish to do a mid-week wrap up of the events thus far. Since it will be live, feel free to join the Flippish chatroom so we can discuss the new products and services that are being unveiled.
Wish me luck! In my next post, I’m going to show you the gadgets I’m packing to cover the floor live.
And the National Artist Award for Blogging goes to …
Posted by Jayvee Fernandez at August 3rd, 2009Based on the recent unfolding of events, the saying “everyone’s a critic” can also apparently apply to being an artist. On one end, Bencab thought that adding new categories was silly while Lourd de Veyra proposed his set of nominees which included Bayani Fernando for visual arts, Kuya Germs for Fashion, Ma Mon Luk for culinary arts, GMA for dance, among others:
Now everybody can be a National Artist. They keep adding categories: Landscape Art, Fashion Design, what’s next, hairdressers? They should stick to the seven arts: Music, Dance, Theater, Visual Arts, Literature, Film and Broadcast Arts, and Architecture and Allied Arts. [source]
So in the spirit of adding new categories, I’m proposing the National Artist Award for Blogging. To be eligible for this award, you need to have made significant contributions to the art and science (hindi science, because artists are not scientists) of blogs either through design, development, technique, industry or the very act of blogging itself.
I have the following nominees:
Gail de la Cruz-Villanueva – for being the first Filipina to have her WordPress design template become part of the default templates available with Dreamhost Hosting.
Kring Elenzano – for being the first Filipina to consistently produce, write, and act in her own online video shows.
Mike Abundo – for being the first Filipino to have a phenomenon (known as the “Mike Abundo Effect”) named after him c/o PR specialist Steve Rubel.
Markku Seguerra – for developing the famous iPAP plugin used by many photographers in their blogs globally.
Andrew de la Serna – for developing Ratified.org a blog ranking system.
Who are your choices?
Sims 3 Retails in Datablitz Today!
Posted by Jayvee Fernandez at June 2nd, 2009
This is me reading, wearing my signature pink shirt, shorts and Sanuks.
Overall a good break from pwnage in Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2. The original version of Sims 3 was released today and Datablitz had them on stock.
Although I haven’t started it yet, every account comes linked to a personal social networking page on the Sims 3 site, allowing you to showcase your screenshots and videos. You can find my social page thus far empty as, alas, there just had to be a blogging component in it and I sure would want to stay away from blogging in everything that I do!
My initial impression of the gameplay doesn’t stray from the experience of playing the first two Sims titles. This version improves on the former by bringing the whole neighborhood together (you can invite the paperboy in to chit chat for instance). Sims also have stronger bladder control and don’t find the need to go to the bathroom every 5 minutes. A welcome change!
Sims 3 is not without flaws – my initial registration that supposedly garnered USD $10.00 worth of credits to buy stuff got lost in cyberspace. I think my connection timed out when I was in the process of reclaiming my lost simolean currency so I sent a support ticket and well, let’s see what happens.
If you by chance do decide to pick this title up … well, it’s a good replacement to Restaurant City, MyBrute and Pet Society all together. The deluxe edition retails at P1350.00 in Datablitz while the limited edition goes for above P2,000.00. The box set gives you a 2GB USB drive shaped like the green diamond icon and a bunch of freebies for in-game play.
Sur! Sur!
From seaweed vendor to global usability expert
Posted by Jayvee Fernandez at November 13th, 2008“I was determined to break the cycle of poverty.”
- Ms. Myrna Padilla, Founder MYND Consulting
As this is an odd hour to blog for me, I leave you with bits of a very beautiful experience when I conducted the first of many workshops for Microsoft Tulay, a technology empowering series of seminars run by the Blas Ople Foundation and OWWA for OFW’s and their families. Last week, I conducted a “training the trainers” series for 17 instructors from different regions of the Philippines.
Although I’d rather write about my experience at another time, I leave you with an inspirational message from Ms. Myrna Padilla who was brought up pounding rice and diving for seaweed. Today she owns a global outsourcing software company called Mynd Consulting based in Davao that specializes in web development, usability, Web 2.0 solutions and many more. Her latest product is a Facebook application called OFW Watch, a news aggregator fine tuned for OFW’s.
Her inspirational opening remarks after the break.
