In Support for a Partner

As our way of supporting one of our Institutional Partners, the Philippine-Sino Center for Agricultural Technology (PhilSCAT) in particular, we would like to share with you that they will be having their 5th Anniversary tomorrow, March 25.

At their headquarters in CLSU campus, Science City of Muñoz, Nueva Ecija, this year's celebration shall be graced by Agriculture Asst. Secretary Dr. Josyline Chio-Javelosa as the Guest of Honor.

This year's program highlights the awarding of Plaque of Recognition to PhilSCAT Director Dr. Romeo B. Gavino and his Chinese counterpart co-Director Mr. Cheng Liangji for their excellent and continuous services rendered to PhilSCAT and their contributions in alleviating the condition of Filipino farmers through research, development and extension activities on hybrid rice and agricultural mechanization technologies.

With the theme, "Paving the Way to a Modern Agriculture thru Mechanized Hybrid Rice Farming System", the opening ceremonies shall be composed of a morning Mass, a Motorcade, Field visit and a short program. During the opening program, 16 PhilSCAT staff who rendered 5 years or above of service to the project will also be accorded a Service Award.

In the afternoon, there will be a technical symposium where results of selected recent PhilSCAT R & D studies will be presented. This symposium aims to bring awareness to various PhilSCAT clientele the new undertakings of the Center including technologies developed and research studies completed.

A demonstration of PhilSCAT technologies at the Center's demo-farm such as the actual operation of the PhilSCAT Rice Combine where participants will be encouraged to personally operate the machine.

On the following day (March 26), there will be an Employees Day featuring sports festival among PhilSCAT staff. The celebration shall be capped by a retreat cum workshop which shall be held in San Fernando, La Union.

Overview of the Center

The Philippine-Sino Center for Agricultural Technology (PhilSCAT) is a special R and D agency under the Department of Agriculture. It implements the collaborative program in agriculture and related fields between the Philippines and the People's Republic of China, with Central Luzon State University (CLSU) as the lead implementor and the Bureau of Postharvest Research and Extension (BPRE), Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) and Agricultural Training Institute (ATI) as partners.

PhilSCAT's current technology scope under Phase I (2003-2008) is Hybrid Rice and Agri-mechanization.


reference:

Josue S. Falla, Ph.D, CESO V, Director II, BPRE, & Concurrent Chief, TPPD, Philippine-Sino Center for Agricultural Technology (PhilSCAT), Department of Agriculture CLSU, Munoz Science City 3120 Nueva Ecija, Philippines.

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On Global Tech Ranking

After "The Power of 2", I will continue with presenting 15 of the American's richest personalities in the field of technology by Forbes.com last March 5 (by company, global rank, name, age and worth in US $ billion):

• Microsoft. 3 - William Gates III, 52, 58.0
• Microsoft. 41 - Paul Allen, 55, 16.0
• Microsoft. 43 - Steve Ballmer, 52, 15.0
• Oracle. 14 - Larry Ellison, 63, 25.0
• Google. 32 - Sergey Brin, 34, 18.7
• Google. 33 - Larry Page, 35, 18.6
• Google. 142 - Eric Schmidt, 52, 6.6
• Dell. 40 - Michael Dell, 43, 16.4
• Ebay. 120 - Pierre Omidyar, 40, 7.7
• Apple. 189 - Steve Jobs, 53, 5.4
• Intel. 288 - Gordon Moore, 79, 3.7
• Yahoo. 462 - David Filo, 41, 2.5
• Yahoo. 524 - Jerry Yang, 39, 2.3
• Siebel Systems. 652 - Thomas Siebel, 55, 1.9
• Facebook. 785 - Mark Zuckerberg, 23, 1.5

It's worth to note that the youngest in the Billionaire's Club now is the 23-year old Mark Zuckerberg who founded Facebook.com.

Another interesting fact is that all of them are self-made.

Other things that we can learn from them:

• 7 are more than 50 years of age
• 7 have more than US $ 10 billion in worth
• 7 are in the top 100 richest people
• 3 companies have 2 or more billionaires

How I wish we will have a Filipino company who will make it in the list...

Excerpt from March 5, 2008, "The World's Billionaires" issue of Forbes.com.

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"The Road Ahead"

When we launched this initiative in November, 2007, it was our dream to slowly make it mainstream within the year 2008.

Now, in less than 5 months of the blog's existence, we're happy to share our progress in terms of (as of March 13):

• Ads Impressions has 834 in March while February has 764
• Visitors Per Day in March is 6.58 while February has 1.24
• Pageviews in March is 207 while February has 81
• Pages/Visit in March is 2.62 while February has 2.25
• Bounce Rate in March is 60% while February has 53%
• Ave Time on Site (mins) in March is 7:32 while February has 6:09
• Absolute Unique Visitors in March is 13 while February has 4
• Loyalty of Visitors in March is 10.13% while February has 2.78%
• Visitors from different countries is 6 in March while 3 in February

And out of the hundreds of millions of websites globally, Alexa.com now ranks us at 9.3M in March, compared to 12.4M when we started. That's an increase of almost 25% in just within a month.

These very encouraging developments will give us more motivation to feature more topics for our readers and partners this year.

Especially the big leap that we have experienced with Alexa.com is an indication that the road ahead for an Innovative Collaboration Ecosystem in the Philippines is still wide and open for all of us.

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The Power of 2

Using the ranking made by Alexa.com, I'd like to share with you some interesting bits of information on the world's most popular Internet and technology companies of today.

This is listed by global rank, company name, founder/s and the year their companies were founded/established:

• 1 Yahoo - David Filo and Jerry Yang, 1994
• 2 Youtube - Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, 2005
• 4 Google - Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 1995
• 5 Myspace - Brad Greenspan and Chris DeWolfe, 1999
• 7 Facebook - Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew McCollum, 2004
• 8 Hi5 - Ramu Yalamanchi and Akash Garg, 2003
• 9 Wikipedia - Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, 2000
• 17 Friendster - Jonathan Abrams, 2002
• 18 Microsoft - Bill Gates and Paul Allen, 1975
• 23 Ebay - Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll, 1995
• 39 Amazon - Jeff Bezos, 1994
• 51 Wordpress - Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, 2003
• 89 Apple - Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, 1974
• 162 Digg - Kevin Rose, 2004
• 196 Dell - Michael Dell, 1984
• 217 Linkedin - Reid Hoffman, 2002
• 233 HP - William Hewlett and David Packard, 1939
• 240 DoubleClick - Kevin O'Connor and Dwight Merriman, 1996
• 348 StumbleUpon - Gary Camp et. al, 2001
• 436 Skype - Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, 2003

Out of the list that I have compiled, we can see the following:

• 70% were founded by 2 persons
• 25% were founded by an individual
• 5% were founded by more than 3 persons
• 50% were established only from the year 2000 until 2005
• 30% were established from 1990 until 1999
• 5% were established in the 1980's
• 15% were established earlier than 1980
• 80% are Internet companies
• 40% are in the Global Top 20 Companies

Other interesting facts are:

• a handful of them started their companies in their early 20s
• a handful of them either started their companies in their garage or school dorm
• Youtube is one of the most successful startups in just less than 5 years of its existence
• Google is now the most dominant Internet company having more than 50% of the internet advertising market
• Myspace is the leading social networking site in the US, while Friendster is for the Filipinos
• Microsoft recently offered US $40B to buy Yahoo in its bid to compete with Google
• Apple made another wave because of its iPod line of products

How about our local technology companies? When can we see that we have some Filipino technology companies who will make it to the Global Top 500?

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Search > Google

In case you may be wondering how in the world did Google started, how it became one of the most success stories on the Internet and how will it continue to dominate the search technology, then check this brief history on how search technology evolved since the 1950s and the role Google played in it.

The history of document search dates back to the 1950s.

Search engines existed in those ancient times, but their primary use was to search a static collection of documents. In the early 60s, the research community gathered new data by digitizing abstracts of articles, enabling rapid progress in the field in the 60s and 70s. But by the late 80s, progress in this area had slowed down considerably.

In order to stimulate research in information retrieval, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) in 1992. TREC introduced new data in the form of full-text documents and used human judges to classify whether or not particular documents were relevant to a set of queries. They released a sample of this data to researchers, who used it to train and improve their systems to find the documents relevant to a new set of queries and compare their results to TREC's human judgments and other researchers' algorithms.

The TREC data revitalized research on information retrieval. Having a standard, widely available, and carefully constructed set of data laid the groundwork for further innovation in this field. The yearly TREC conference fostered collaboration, innovation, and a measured dose of competition (and bragging rights) that led to better information retrieval.

New ideas spread rapidly, and the algorithms improved. But with each new improvement, it became harder and harder to improve on last year's techniques, and progress eventually slowed down again.

And then came the web.

In its beginning stages, researchers used industry-standard algorithms based on the TREC research to find documents on the web. But the need for better search was apparent - now not just for researchers, but also for everyday users - and the web gave us lots of new data in the form of links that offered the possibility of new advances. There were developments on two fronts. On the commercial side, a few companies started offering web search engines, but no one was quite sure what business models would work. On the academic side, the National Science Foundation started a "Digital Library Project" which made grants to several universities.

Two Stanford grad students in computer science named Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked on this project. Their insight was to recognize that existing search algorithms could be dramatically improved by using the special linking structure of web documents. Thus PageRank was born.

Larry and Sergey initially tried to license their algorithm to some of the newly formed web search engines, but none were interested. Since they couldn't sell their algorithm, they decided to start a search engine themselves. The rest of the story is well-known.

This is an excerpt from "Why Data Matters" by Hal Varian, Chief Economist of Google.

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Innovation in the Philippines

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." Steve Jobs, Apple Inc.

When we decided to focus on promoting our local innovations through the web last year, we believed that this will allow us to reach more people and share that there are so many things that our researchers, inventors and innovators have already created or developed.

Personally, in the many technology-focused events that we have initiated since 2000, I have observed that many of our partners such as research institutions and universities can do compete internationally, despite their limited funds.

Institutions and organizations have the following:

• DOST - Advanced Science and Technology Institute has Bayanihan Linux
• Philippine Carabao Center has started cloning researches on our buffalos
• CLIERDEC has research collaborations among its member-institutions
• DLSU - College of Computing Studies has some advanced researches like robotics
• Technological University of the Philippines has outputs ready for patents

Other developments that can push innovation to a new level:

• The national government, along with some partners, have launched the fist National Innovation Summit last November, 2007
• Cebu, for one, will stage the Cebu Business Month ICT Conference this June and will include the first Cebu International Open Source Summit with the objective of catapulting Cebu as an “Innovation Island”

In the coming months, we will feature our local innovators from different sectors such as academe, ICT, agriculture, government research, energy, telecommunications, etc.

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Carefully and Promptly

This is just the start of the year, yet, the atmosphere is already heating up.

In the online advertising market, in particular, it is growing at a very fast pace from over $40 billion in 2007 to a projected $80 billion by 2010. Expectedly, advertisers around the world will double their spending on the Internet during the next three years as more people get their news and entertainment on the Web and mobile devices instead of television, radio, newspapers and magazine.

But there is another recent story which can probably change the technology landscape of the future - Microsoft and Yahoo! versus Google.

With the recent $44.6 billion unsolicited takeover bid of Yahoo! by Microsoft, both icons in the technology world but are losing much in the arena of online search, it is indeed a bold step to challenge Google in the Internet universe with more than 50% global leadership and market share.

As stated by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in his letter to Yahoo! last January 31, "We believe this proposal represents a unique opportunity to create significant value for Yahoo!'s shareholders and employees, and the combined company will be better positioned to provide an enhanced value proposition to users and advertisers".

Sure, they can maximize all the benefits of this merger or I would rather say an acquisition, but this sort of urgency on the part of Microsoft seems to indicate that the once-puny online search engine called Google, is still unbeatable and taking more profits than what they both can generate from Internet search and advertising.

In terms of figures, Microsoft had online revenue of $863 million, compared with $4.8 billion at Google. Yahoo and Microsoft together had more than $2.6 billion in revenue, still trailing well behind Google but in a far stronger competitive position.

On the part of Yahoo, "it has been struggling to attract more advertising for quite some time eventhough its Web site attracts one of the biggest audiences, and will have to cut 1,000 jobs early this year." A clear development that co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang really needs to do more and not just to catch up with Google, especially with the reported 23 percent drop in its fourth-quarter profit and a tepid outlook for 2008.

Their reply last February 1 was that they will evaluate this proposal carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo!'s strategic plans and pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders. It did not specify, however, how long the review process would take and vaguely said “it can take quite a bit of time.”

If this deal will be consummated, it would be by far the largest acquisition in Microsoft's history, eclipsing last year's $6 billion purchase of online ad service aQuantive.

Whether Microsoft with Yahoo! will be successful or not, only time can tell. In the meantime, many believe that Google will continue to dominate the Internet and possibly even in the mobile world with the introduction of their OpenSocial and Android technologies last year.

For me, this will still be an exciting development especially if this will push through. It will also be one of the biggest stories for 2008.

But what's more important is if it will be achieve the following:

• something that will create more innovation and not limiting the competition
• provide better service and competitive to what the others are offering
• lower their costs and integrating their processes, and
• if it will greatly benefit their respective shareholders, employees, partners and clients

So like what an old adage would say, "if you can't beat them, join them."

Expect more developments of this story in the coming weeks...

Sources: Yahoo!, Associated Press, Information Week and NY Times.

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