This is very timely especially since the Philippines is re-launching its new tourism campaign. I am not against mining per se, but mining in an archipelago — one of the centers of the world’s biodiversity — is like taking away our core competence when in fact eco-tourism is so scarce nowadays we’re one of the few countries that the world is willing to spend $$$ on to get here. And when I say “here” it’s not Manila. It’s the islands.
What happens to the signatures? It will be sent to PNOY as they finalize the deliberations for the future of the economy. If you’re pro-tourism, then the Philippines has a special type of tourism tied to its environment.
Ages ago there was a little service called Animoto that offered to make magic out of your photos turning them into ready-made professional videos. “Professional” was the operative word and they delivered. And then Apple ruined the fun by making iMovie (and yes even iPhoto) more interesting with new effects, taking something that was cloud based and turning it into a desktop app. When you’re dealing with a lot of photos, we can forget the cloud for a while.
And Microsoft’s in it too. Ever tried their new versions of Movie Maker? It’s mind blowing as well.
There’s nothing wrong with services like Animoto. In fact, startups like these make the Internet awesome. But what happens when the big boys copy these amazing ideas and incorporate them into their already existing services? For one, they scale better. I used to have a one year free service at Animoto and now my account has been severely crippled into a 30 second teaser. Not with iMovie on the Mac. They both have drag + drop functionality and they both can end up on YouTube. One is just, free. Forever.
And it is things like these that make me wish services like YouSendIt or Dropbox continue to offer amazing services for free (no payment tiers) because they don’t need to scale. But they do and that, I guess, is the road to startup perdition.
Photos used are from the 2012 AXE Cream Ball to celebrate the Final Edition. It’s the new gold one you can find in stores. It smells epic.
I have two old acoustic guitars at home. They’re pretty smashed up. You could almost peel the body apart if enough force was exerted. In effect I keep it glued together with a lot of electric tape. Aesthetically it’s horrendous, but it does give off that artistic vibe, which truth to be told isn’t my aim. My aim is simply to hold the instrument together because you can’t replicate that sound anywhere else. More than 10 years worth of playing. The sound grows with you and, somehow, evolves into what you make it.
Wow what a year. Just being at the cusp of a new year makes me realize how short time is, yet the irony of also realizing how you’ve actually done a lot in the past 365 days. To my friends and family, thank you for everything and may the new year greet us with one big bro-fist!
Bad news for the relatively huge blogging community of i.PH. Straight from Joel Disini’s mouth, i.PH is closing its blogging service. He’s giving bloggers 6 months to export their blog posts to other services.
Unfortunately, he said that he will be closing down i.ph soon so it would be best for me to start copy pasting all my posts and blog files. I couldn’t believe it. He said i.ph is no longer making profit and he’s giving us bloggers around 6 months before it fully shuts down.
Well, it was bound to happen. I’ve talked to many friends working for this company, (the mother organization owns the rights to the .ph registrar) and I’ve observed that while there were so many great ideas in the boiler room (i.e. mirroring services like SquareSpace, premium services, etc) none of these ever shipped. And in this industry, shipping is really important.
And it’s really not just about i.PH itself but the presence of so many other great blogging platforms — Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, SquareSpace.. competition is fast improving services while domain registration and hosting is getting cheaper by the day.
Thus far there is no official word on the i.PH blog. This piece of information comes from an encounter with Disini. If the news is 100% true (and it looks like it is), sad to see it go. Here’s a way to go out with a bang: have the community do one huge “transfer” party where everyone exports their blogs at the same time to other services.
