Camera bag and kids in tote, we were enjoying the rides and games using the free pre-paid cards the organizers gave us. It was after a bumpy bumper car ride when I got a call from my dad. Apparently someone contacted him using my mobile phone (my alternate mobile phone, which I usually use only for mobile Internet browsing), telling him that it was at the mall’s security office.

I checked my bag and to my surprise, the phone was no longer there. So I called my mobile, and someone answered. True enough it was at the mall’s security office. We were told to ask for assistance from mall security personnel in getting there.

Dropped or Stolen?

My wife and I initially thought I had dropped the phone or left it at the restaurant where we had lunch. But when we arrived at the security office, we were informed that my phone had been recovered from a pickpocket. That group of pickpockets had already stolen a handful of other mobile phones, wallets and purses, when they were spotted by some of their victims. Good thing the other victims were able to alert security personnel, and tailed the culprits until they were apprehended (outside of Timezone).

There were three suspects: one male and two female. One of them was pregnant, seemingly near full-term. The guards say they had been victimizing people at Timezone. Figures, since the place was packed, and stories of thugs taking stuff at arcades and other crowded places are quite familiar to me.

I asked the suspects why they took our stuff. They said they didn’t have money. I asked how they got the phone. The lady said they took it while we were busy enjoying ourselves. I happily informed her that I was on the job, covering an event. And I told her other people have bigger problems than just money. So poverty shouldn’t have been a motivation to steal.

Some thoughts

In hindsight, here are some observations I have about this incident:

• When I asked the Timezone security guard for directions to the mall’s security office he seemed reluctant. And I didn’t even mention anything about lost phones! Perhaps he was aware of the incident, and probably felt culpable for the lax security in the area. The place was swarming with security guards, and yet they failed to apprehend the thieves early.


• Trinoma, like other Ayala malls, doesn’t seem to have high-tech surveillance gadgetry to monitor ongoings at the premises. The security office was very sparse—it was an empty store area at the far end of the mall (right next to the MRT gates). They did have communications equipment like radios, but no other monitoring devices. No wonder they still don’t know what exactly the cause of the Glorietta 2 explosion was!

The security chief told me it was their responsibility to convince us to press charges with the police. But they said that even without the charges, the suspects would be brought to the nearby station and would stay in jail for 36 hours to await formal charges. If none are filed, then they are free to go, but they will have police records.

While I really felt it was my responsibility to file a formal complaint to keep the suspects from being at large (and committing crime over and over again), I took the advice of those close to me who suggested otherwise. Trinoma Mall wouldn’t file the complaint on my behalf, so that I would have to do as an individual. That means I’ll be involved in lengthy legal proceedings, which would probably be more difficult and cost more in terms of money, time and effort than the PhP 6k my phone was worth!

And for some reason I felt that the cure for crime like this is to address it at its roots—poverty and a poor educational system.

Still, I was advised that I could file a formal complaint even after the suspects have been released from police custody.

Timezone Trinoma Launch

At any rate, here’s the Timezone press release, and some photos I took.

At the carousel

At the carousel

View from the top

Balloon ride

Balloon ride

Rides and robotic muppets

Bumper cars

And finally …

Mugshots! (Notice the state of the security office)

Timezone’s Biggest Store Opens at Trinoma Mall

All residents of Northern Metro Manila now have a great, new spot to flock to inside the recently opened largest branch of Timezone in Trinoma Mall. At about 1,300 square meters, this is by far LAI Philippines’ biggest Timezone outlet and is almost 50% larger than the country’s largest outlet at Glorietta 4 in Makati City.

Kids, teens and young adults are guaranteed to have a lot of fun as they experience Timezone Trinoma’s newest, exciting rides like the 6-meter high Ferris Wheel and the 24-Horse Carousel; test their knowledge with the 8-player SuperTrivia mind game; exercise their vocal chords and singing prowess via the Music Zone videoke booths; you can also try their newest games like Dino Duel Masters, Deal or No Deal, Paradise Lost, Tekken 6, Maximum Tune III, Initial D4 and a whole lot more of games and machines from racing, arcade and redemption games that Timezone has long been known for. With the latest machines and games soon to be allocated, things can only get better in Timezone Trinoma.

Timezone is located at the 4th floor near the cinema lobby and the must-see Trinoma rooftop Park. Indeed, this highly accessible and refreshing location creates for a new and wholesome entertainment destination for the entire family.

So here’s a hat tip to Janette and sponsor Yes Payments.

The details are here, the list of sponsors is here. I’m actually part of—or was once part of—some of the groups and companies sponsoring the event (namely the Blog Herald, Enthropia and the PinoyTechBlog team).

The parteeh (Why can’t we just spell it as “party”? SEO reasons? Or was the blogparty.com domain already taken? Heheh!) will be this coming Saturday, the 27th of January from 2:00 to 8:00 p.m. Venue is 6th Floor (Poolside Area), Classica Tower 2 Condominium, HV dela Costa St., Salcedo Village, Makati City. Why, oh why, can’t blogger meet-ups be organized in Quezon City or somewhere near my place?!?

See you there!

Update: Sponsor list is included below.

This event is sponsored by: Sheero Media Solutions, MyJournal Philippines, FeedText, Inc., Migs Paraz, A Bugged Life, The Blog Herald, b5media blog network, About My Recovery, Pinoy.Tech.Blog, Enthropia, Inc., Krispy Kreme Philippines, GMA New Media, Awesome Philippines, Codamon.com, Boracay.com.ph, Recipes.com.ph, WebMaster.com.ph, Bouncing Red Ball, Bo Sanchez, Microwarehouse Inc.

BlogParteeh07 Donors:



Marc Javellana, Bubba Gump, e-YellowPages, Adobe User Group – Philippines, Weddings @ Work, Google Philippines, Hinge Inquirer Publications

Oh, the instructions say I should include my email address. Well, it’s in th e sidebar, or I can be reached here.

The concept

Upcoming.org is yet another Web 2.0 application. It’s collaborative and it’s user-generated. People who are based in a certain location can post about events to be held in their localities (whether they are running it or know about it), and users can discuss. Users can even indicate whether they’re attending, or if they’re just watching discussions online.

What’s great is that this web app lets people learn about upcoming events in their own city or locality, and see whom among their contacts are coming. It’s a great way to organize get-togethers and meet-ups.

Unfortunately, the list for Metro Manila (or the Philippines, for that matter) is quite bare. So it’s quite disappointing since the application can be a really useful tool, especially since it gives the users power to add content, and to exchange information based on content. However, without anything meaningful, then the app would be worthless.

There are a handful of sites around that cater to local events (like clickthecity.com ). However, content is still mostly centraliezed or at least editorialized, and there is no true collaboration. I’m of the feeling that being listed is also a premium service (meaning companies have to pay to get listed), so there is no freedom to just add relevant events or listings if you’re not part of their circle.

Let’s populate the list!

So let’s see if we can make use of upcoming as a tool for highlighting events in Metro Manila (and also other metropolitan areas in the country). Maybe this can better facilitate parties and other gatherings. The important thing is that we set up an initial list of events we’re each personally interested in. From there, I’m hoping things would grow and become sustainable.

Note: Toronto has 200+ upcoming events in the succeeding couple of weeks (as of this posting). Metro Manila has 2. Let’s make it more exciting!

Another note: Upcoming.org was the brainchild of a single developer—Andy Baio of waxy.org—and the site was done in his spare time. Late 2005, Yahoo! acquired the service (for millions?). Isn’t that a good business model for Web 2.0 apps?

See you on upcoming.org !

So how did your Christmas celebrations go? We spent the past two weeks attending simbang gabi or dawn masses. We couldn’t get up at dawn, though, so we made sure to attend the anticipated masses in the preceding evening. The kids started to get sick a couple of weeks ago, though, so we weren’t able to go out much. We actually only got to go out buy presents on the 24th, so everything was a rush.

The holidays are a bad time to get sick!

Anyway, we spent the evening attending Christmas eve mass and had noche buena (Christmas eve dinner) with the family.

Speaking of getting sick during the holidays, my family was supposed to go out of town this week, and my parents have been planning the trip since the start of the month. My wife and I were having second thoughts, though, because of the distance (a six to eight hour drive). And with the kids catching the bug, we decided against joining. Midnight of the 25th (after the Christmas celebrations), my sister was admitted to the hospital for abdominal pains. And guess what—she had to undergo surgery this Christmas morning for appendicitis. Now the entire trip had been cancelled.

Everyone’s still happy, though, especially the kids. Now if I can only say the same for my wallet and bank account.

Merry Christmas everyone!

• Mr. SEO Philippines Marc Macalua talked on the mission of SEO Philippines as an organization, and as well its plans (and hopes) for the foreseeable future. We want to help professionalize the SEO and search engine marketing industry in the country.
• New Google country consultant Aileen Apolo gave her keynote about Google’s strategies and how the Philippines fits in. She also said (reiterated, actually) that she’s Google’s eyes and ears here in the Philippines. She’s out to feel the market and the environment, particularly on what we need and how Google can best serve (and earn from) us.
• Marc also explained the mechanics of the second SEO Philippines keyword ranking contest. This time, it’s a triple jackpot system—we’ll be fighting for top positions in Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
• Second contest keywords: ituloy angsulong
• First monthly raffle of an 80GB iPod was held.
• Buffet dinner, finger-foods and free-flowing beer!
• Great band: Peppermint Jam. We had a great serving of ‘80s music rendered in acoustic fashion.

Some of whom I met tonight: Anton, Migs, Abe, Jozzua, Erwin, Jayvee, and of course Marc. (Who else?)

Thanks to the sponsors for another great techie meet-up event! In this case, Lakeside SQL was there. Did I miss anyone?

Caren and I generally had a good time, save for some not-so-pleasant observations of some people (don’t ask). The food and refreshments were okay (Jason treated me to a pre-event beer. Thanks Jason!), but the venue was a bit cramped. I think Marc wanted people to have more intimate space to interact, so he chose not to set the event up at a larger place.

One big hitch was that the WiFi signal at the upstairs location was so weak people had a difficult time connecting. And we were supposed to have been able to do a live Google search to see the rankings by 8:00 p.m.! But I had no qualms about not having access, even if I had been out of the grid for several days already.

Of course, the best part was having to meet all the interesting people, and the interseting—and potentially profitable—conversations that ensued. There were the old faces, like my colleague Jason, fellow pro- and non-pro bloggers Abe Olandres, Anton Diaz, Jayvee Fernandez, Marc Macalua, Noel Bautista, Markku Seguerra, and Mike Abundo, among others. And there were also new faces, like Wilson Chua of Bitstop, Arnold Alvarez, Benj Arriola of YDS, Mike Lopez of Transinnova, Boris Kerbikov of Lakeside and Michael Turner of Harvest SEO.

Mingling With the Crowd

Again, I would like to highlight that in events like this, it’s best to keep your laptop in your bag and get to meet and greet with the people, instead. Talk now, blog later, as I told Wilson Chua. It’s in the conferences where it’s generally okay to live-blog or to go online for something else. But the Isulong SEOPH was a social event. And by social events, I mean those things you go to to both meet-and-greet both for pleasure and business.

The night saw a mixed crowd gather for one event. It was unlike the blogger conference held a few days prior to the Isulong SEOPH awarding (Monday last week) since the SEO-PH members were not all bloggers. I’d say only about 50% of the attendees were bloggers or ran blogs, but most were into SEO one way or another, whether as their business, profession, passion, or hobby. When you’re in the business of earning from your online activities, after all, you would have to do some amount of SEO.

So what did we learn about SEO?

Michael Turner blogs that linkbuilding is still king. Marc provides a recap here, with a list of winners and links to some photos.

It was good enough for our Go-Ogle! team to get the fifth place win For SEO n00bs like us, any frontpage finish would’ve been satisfactory. Thing is, the first placer Gio Castro was admittedly even a more inexperienced SEO.

So what does this tell us about the contest and SEO in general? IMHO, while SEO has been brought to the limelight lately, SEO is still not an exact science. And it can be an iffy business, too. And this is especially so, with the search engines featuring ever-so-secret and ever-evolving algorithms for ranking websites.

I gotta hand it to the SEO pros, though, for being innovative and forward-thinking enough to still be successful in this field even with the uncertainties.

Controversy!

And here’s something else I learned. Some people are still so old school when it comes to SEO and search engine marketing. JNB Web Promotion, which signed on as a sponsor, suddenly backed out at the last minute, citing that it was disappointed that 9 out of the 10 frontpage placers were blogs, and that the company would rather not hire blog “spammers n jammers” as SEO pros. Such a derogatory stand, in my opinion. I tend to think blogs are an excellent way to drive traffic and improve search engine rankings as a compliment to a regular website. Maybe JNB Web Promotion was afraid it would be driven out of business if companies discovered how to optimize for the search engines themselves.

I hear WordPress does such a good job at optimizing, with its semantic markup and the automatic pinging to notification services. Maybe this is another good reason for using WP as a CMS.

Photos

And here are the photos, at last. My batteries were running out of juice that evening, so I didn’t take much flash photography. A little increase in ISO rating and a steady hand hopefully helped in capturing steady, albeit noisy, images.

Bitstop’s Wilson Chua with his daughter/”chaperone”

Abel and Jason

Photographing the photographers. Anton Diaz (2nd from left), Benj Arriola (3rd), Michael Turner (right). I’m sorry I wasn’t able to catch the others’ names.

Marc Macalua giving an impassioned speech about the wonders of SEO

Jason and Abel, again. Hey, is that a PowerShot S1 I See?

Boris Kerbikov of Lakesides Technologies, the event’s major sponsor

Noel Bautista, 9th placer

Randy Lorenzano, 8th placer

Elymar Apao, 7th placer

That’s me, feeling smug about our 5th place win

Zaldy Dalisay, 4th placer

Rostum Hernandez, 3rd placer

Whin Clores, 2nd placer

Gio Castro, first place winner. “Magaling akong spammer.” Really?

Mike Abundo, wearing his PICS hat, and talking about Internet Marketing

Lucky guy Arnold Alvarez, who won the iPod Nano raffled off during the event

Group picture of the winners, with organizer Marc and major sponsor Boris of Lakeside

But it was worth it. I got to meet up with old friends and former colleagues from dotPH (you know who you are), the usual suspects (the bloggers and probloggers I always get to meet during blogging events), the sponsors (the Globe Innove people from the last Globe-sponsored blogger meetup) and new faces.

I wasn’t able to listen much to the presentations since I came in a bit late, and my group was holed up in this corner table, hence the low visibility, and—yes—higher propensity for side-discussions. My mother actually asked me, earlier this evening when I picked up the calling cards I asked her to print (more about this later), why I wasn’t speaking this time. I told her that in events like these, it’s usually best to stay in the sidelines and get to meet the people. That’s where the real stuff happens.

Networking

The primary reason for my attendance is to network with people, and possibly look out for new business prospects, and I consider this blogger meet-and-greet to be successful in that regard. This time around, I got several inquiries on the problogging/writing jobs I had written about. I met with some very capable game writers, and I’m hoping we can get to talk soon, and that our discussions turn out to be fruitful. I also had inquiries on whether I had other requirements that weren’t game-related, and for this I would have to refer them to my other contacts in need of bloggers for other niches.

Of course, people asked me about the PayPal for the Philippines campaign and we got to exchange ideas about the need for payment gateways in the country. I also got wind that PayPal is actually on its way to setting up here. Of course, those are still unconfirmed info tidbits, but it’s good to hear something is happening, whether influenced by the campaign or not.

One Big Community

What’s great about meet-and-greet events like these is that the people seem to be familiar with almost everyone else, even if it’s usually their first time to meet. Here’s where the virtual community extends to the real world. In the blogsphere, we usually know people by the ideas they communicate and the opinions they make on their blogs. In the real world, you see a new face or hear a familiar name, and you get to connect that face with the person’s online persona.

You see your online correspondents in the flesh, and it feels great!

Handing Out Calling Cards

I wrote before (a long time ago) that blogs are the new digital handshake, that one doesn’t usually need calling cards anymore these days. It turns out that calling cards are important, after all. No matter how digital we get, and even if most—or even all—of our clients are online, one still needs something tangible to hand out to people one meets.

And here’s where the calling card comes in. Weeks, months, and even years after, when emails get archived, blog links get buried deep in blogrolls, and text messages get deleted, calling cards will be there to stay. Even if the contact details, companies (or businesses) and interests change, physical cards are likely to remind the recpient of the person who gave it, and the circumstances of their meeting. That’s why it’s a good idea to note down on the business/calling card the date, venue, and event where you met the giver.

Speaking of calling cards, here’s my latest one, designed and expertly cut by myself (concept blatantly stolen borrowed from Abe’s “kickass Web2.0 calling card” idea).

The card says problogger / tech evangelist / new media consultant. Wow, what does that mean?

Photos

I wasn’t able to get many shots, since I was busy with my primary objective—that is, getting to talk to people. But here are a few photos I was able to squeeze in.

Pinoy Big Blogger Retz, in the flesh!

Fellow man-blogger, Noisy Noisy Man Ade Magnaye

i.ph webmaster Randy (right)

Dash-Media and fellow Man Bloggers people Marco “The Site Guy” and Peter

Abe Olandres, thinking of his blog-derived millions

Jayvee of b5media/m|ph and Peter

Check out my Flickr photoset for larger versions.

Linklove!

Here are a few of the people I got to meet. Sorry if I can’t post a complete list of names and links for now (I tend to be forgetful). Please do post a comment so I can add you.

• Abe Olandres
• Peter Juan
• Randy Nivales
• Kevin Codamon
• Jayvee Fernandez
• Juned Sonido
• Noemi Lardizabal-Dado
• Sonnie Santos
• Jennifer Velasco (Globe Innove)
• Retz Ruiz
• Marco “The Site Guy” Palinar
• Ade Magnaye
• Noel Bautista
• Mike Abundo
• Jun Asis

‘Til next year, or next time. Now, back to work …

In this case, the key phrase is Isulong SEOPH, in which “isulong” means to forward a cause and SEOPH stands for SEO Philippines, the local SEO organization started by my fellow PTB blogger Marc Macalua.

I joined the contest with my colleagues Ia and Phillip. We were late entrants, having started a month into the game. And we’re not even in the league of most SEO Philippines members who are more experienced SEO practicioners. So you can imagine our surprise when we eventually made it to page 1, and even reaching top position at one time.

Of course, as SEO contests go, the results aren’t always stable. And you can expect drastic changes at times. But it’s good that we’ve held on with a steady position somewhere in the middle of page one. Hopefully this week we can work it well enough to breach—again—the third place, and even get to #2 or #1 (bigger prizes starting from #3 position, heheh).

So we have a week to keep our fingers crossed. I’ll be attending the awarding on the 30th, and it won’t be because of any prizes (attendance is a requirement to qualify for prizes), but it would be great to get to meet-and-greet with fellow SEOPH members and Isulong SEOPH contestants (and there’s free food!).

• E-Commerce for National Competitiveness
• Data Privacy and E-Commerce
• Building Buzz with Blogs
• Panel: State of E-Payment in the Philippines
• Panel: New E-Commerce Opportunities
• Panel: Making E-Commerce Work

I’ll try to post photos and updates as things happen. Good thing there’s free WiFi here.

Bloggers spotted so far: Noemi Dado and of course, Janette. Atty. JJ Disini is also here (he’s a speaker) but I haven’t seen him around yet.

You can check out this photoset on my Flickr for some snapshots:

Me, liveblogging!

DTI Dir. Ludy Yaptinchay, keynote speaker

DTI Dir. Domingo Bagaporo

Awarding of the drafters of the E-Commerc Act by-laws

Maoi Arroyo talks about blogging for buzz

Unfortunately, I had to leave the event early. So I’ll just refer you to Janette’s blog and the Digital Filipino website for recaps of the event.