Month: April 2011

Categories
Mostly Everything

A look into Plancast or what’s about to be called “Social Scheduling”


Nobody wants to watch Kenny Loggins with me 🙁

There’s a new web app I’m loving and it’s called Plancast. People who don a social media marketer hat call this thing “social scheduling” where users can share events they’re attending based on location and category. So I decided to try it out and I must say that it has its uses: (1) you don’t need to be a member per se to see events as you can get invites via Facebook and Twitter. (2) Unlike Facebook that’s very much promotes friend-centric events, Plancast pushes events around your area. Yes the app asks for your geo-location.

The screen grab above is me inviting two friends whom I think would highly appreciate watching Kenny Loggins Live in Manila on the 22nd of May. I can invite them, send them an automated Twitter DM and I can even add Plancast to my Google Calendar (or Outlook or Yahoo! Calendar) so any event I approve automatically gets scheduled and synced. Just like Facebook Events for some devices. Right now it only seems to work for the web and on the iPhone.

Of course, the business application here is quite obvious. If I search for “Makati” and your establishment has a happy hour event listed, that’s how I’m going to discover it. So the difference here is that unlike Facebook where you’re most likely going to get passive event invites from people who were tagged by friends, Plancast is a more pro-active events finder as it’s more targeted by location and interest.

As of today’s writing, there’s only one event listed under Makati: the Android April 2011 Community Meetup organized by Charo. I can share this event to friends outside Plancast as well. If your friends are on Twitter and Facebook you have the option of auto-subscribing to them when they go on board.

I suggest you give Plancast a try. And then we can schedule our own Zombie Apocalypse!!!

Categories
Mostly Everything

Earning from your blog: The Realities

As more and more people are taking on the role as bloggers to make money, a lot become misinformed about how EXACTLY you earn and what degree of commitment it takes on your end. How relevant is Adsense today? What are the consequences of paid posts and sponsorships? Does SEO still matter? What are the real reasons why companies hold blog events?

When: April 30 2011 2:30pm – 4:00pm
Where: Asian Institute of Management
Admission is free. Bring your friends.

FACEBOOK SIGN UP

The Blog & Soul is holding another session on April 30 to discuss what monetizing your blog really means. Included in the panel are veteran bloggers who earn from their blogs and representatives from advertising networks. We’re also trying to get business owners who have dealt with bloggers before (or are thinking of inviting bloggers) to attend, so we can discuss the expectations and responsibilities of each party.

Come. It will be epic. This is a series of seminars we are organizing for free to help the blogging community understand what they’re really getting into when they decide to make money from blogging. We are composed of volunteer bloggers and representatives from digital agencies.

Categories
Mostly Everything

Giant Manta in Tubbataha

A giant manta ray “flying” past our dive group from one of the walls in Tubbataha.

Video by Chie Clemente. Taken with the JVC FM1.

Categories
Mostly Everything

The No Bullsh*t Speed Test of SMART’s LTE (Warning: Video is 25 minutes long)

There is a satellite station for the LTE booth located near my hotel. I heard that they degraded the signal to “divert all power” to the central booths where Rico Blanco performed. I got a bright idea. I decided to do a real speed test. What would happen if we had a degraded LTE signal (without shifting to HSPA) trying to go through several layers of concrete? I was at the Real Maris Hotel. The center stage is located near Aria in D’Mall fronting the beach. That’s relatively far PLUS the fact that my hotel room is located near the road. At the booth I am guaranteed over 50Mbps — that’s about 6 MEGABYTES per second. But in the real world, I don’t think this will hold true given location of you in conjunction to the cell sites and the number of users accessing the signal.

Also, what if we were pinging servers from the USA? Here’s a screenshot of what kind of speeds you are getting if your server is located in Washington and the sites you are accessing from the PH are not cached OR not being downloaded from a dedicated server.

So I ran back to my room, skipped a massage (haynaku), fired up my ScreenFlow and spent the next 30 minutes making this actual speed test. I promised myself that I would post whatever findings I had here — good or bad.

You be the judge!

Categories
Mostly Everything

Mbps is not Megabytes per second but “megabits” per second

N.B. If you’re knowledgeable about this subject, please leave a comment to refute or add to this post as we’re all trying to understand what makes good or crappy Internet.

One of the biggest confusions of consumers when purchasing Internet plan subscriptions is that they think Mbps means megabytes per second when in fact it means “megabits per second” and there’s a huge difference. It’s partly the telcos’ fault as they aren’t very gung-ho about these educational campaigns for consumers. I think they should start helping consumers understand what exactly “2Mbps” means in the real world application. Also they should start including a value called CIR or Committed Information Rate or the average bandwidth per x number of households in a given area. Now that’s useful!

Here’s a tool to help you calculate ideally how many kbps you should be getting with your Internet provider commitment.

http://www.easycalculation.com/bandwidth-calculator.php

In other words, if your telco is selling you a 2Mbps connection, your ideal burst speed (say you’re downloading a torrent) should peak at around 250KBps (that’s kilobytes per second not kilobits per second — remember that kbps is kilobits and KBps or KB/s is kilobytes). But that’s the best speeds. I don’t think it takes into account CIR. So if I’m using my Android phone on HSPA to tether Internet to my laptop and I’m getting 60-120KBps (which I got in Palawan since I’m probably not exceeding the CIR, but not in Manila which is definitely more dense), then it really could mean that my telco is delivering actual average speeds. Please, telcos, I think we should level up the way we communicate our Internet-related products as we move on to 4G technology! 🙂