Expect a Yahoo! office in Manila by the second quarter of this year, says newly appointed general manager Jojo Anonuevo (of Mobius fame). Claiming to capture 85% of the 22 million-strong Filipino Internet population, Yahoo! is bent on dominating the online advertising market in the country, which it says will make up 5% of the total advertising spend here. Aside from that, the local Y! office will work on generating more content for Yahoo.com.ph through their content partners, which will most likely include Inquirer.net and Yehey. Yehey is rumored to start selling advertising for Y! since last year.

Smart business move on Y!’s part. If they really want a taste of the market, it’s a no-brainer to go to where the action is. Most definitely, Google has their work cut out for them. Will I be blogging about Google coming to the Philippines soon? Wait, they chose Malaysia right. Probably not in the near future.

Can’t access PRC, Inquirer.net and other blogs posting nursing board exam results?

Here’s another site you can start crashing: PRC Nursing Board Exam Results for December 2007

Good luck!

I’d like to let you guys in on my experiences of running a very large community site such as Dota Strategy. To be honest, it’s a stressful yet fun experience. Managing a site like this requires a ton of patience, perseverance and yes, a bit of money too. Initially, it was hosted on my shared account with Dreamhost, which I pay 20 bucks a month for to this day. But soon enough, I was forced to remove it because it was taking up too much resources and bogged down my server five times a day. Didn’t help that my users were hating me. So I moved Dota Strategy to a $90/mo. VPS plan with A Small Orange. The plan includes 512MB memory, 250GB Bandwidth, 20GB disk space and whatnot. The whole moving process was a nightmare. It took me forever to export and import my SQL database plus the domain wasn’t resolving to the new server as fast as I’d like it to. That caused some sort of a ‘time paradox’ as we lovingly call it. One set of users was accessing the old site while another set was seeing the new one. Sadly, I, the all-powerful owner and administrator ‘drew’, was seeing the old site. After one painful week I finally got things back to normal.
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I’m thinking about adding Alexa data as another factor in the Ratified.org rankings. It would seem to be a weird move on my part, after labeling Alexa as downright inaccurate and useless. What do you guys think? I might be playing around with the API’s of Bloglines and Del.icio.us too. Well, let’s see how that goes.

Oh by the way, Ratified.org now has an official blog! Nothing fancy so far though. If you have any ideas on what to feature in the blog, please do share it with me!

I’m going way off-topic on this one. My friend Janette tagged me on what issues are most important to me in the 2010 Presidential elections. Constantly watching the coverage of the US Presidential nominations has certainly opened my eyes to what types of things people look for in a President. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about the Philippines. Here, whoever has the biggest dole-outs (aka bribes) or have the most appearances in movies have the highest chances of winning the presidency. Hello Garci, have we not had enough already?

My main issues are:
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The Optical Media Board (OMB) slapped CD-R King with a P1.5 million penalty for failing to produce permits for some of its optical media disc importations.

CD-R King is a registered company allowed by the OMB to import blank, rewritable optical discs. Valenzuela (of OMB) said that the OMB is also seeking the cancellation of the license of CD-R King to sell optical media in the country.

As if things couldn’t get any worse, they were even found using pirated softwares in their business operations. Tsk tsk.

Coincidentally, OMB has recently conducted its “validation inspection” to verify a tip it received that the same company was using unlicensed software in its operations in the country.

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I conducted a quick survey called “Globe, Smart or Sun?” a week ago and got a nice number of responses from my techie/blogger friends. Here’s what I found:
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Let’s try to hypothesize a scenario wherein Google tries to outbid Microsoft for online portal Yahoo! I think Yahoo! would take Google’s offer in a heartbeat, knowing that they are more culturally similar and both, in their own seemingly quirky ways, are pushing the limits of innovation on the web. Microsoft, on the other hand, stands to lose the only chance they have of carving a chunk out of the online advertising market that Google dominates. It will continue to make big bucks out of its software business, but all of that won’t mean anything when business, advertising, entertainment and should I say word processing are quickly shifting their gears to the Internet.
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There’s buzz floating around that Google is going to build a data center in Malaysia. In a discussion I’m following on Slashdot, some commenters are posting why or why not they should consider the Philippines.

Here’s what they have to say (and comments thrown in by me):

THE YESSES:

1. Filipinos speak impeccable English. – I agree that most of us can speak decent English, but impeccable? Don’t think so. But for sure we speak way better English than Malaysians (peace, la). This is still one of our strongest points over our neighboring countries.

2. Labor is cheap in the Philippines. – Not too sure, because considering the high-caliber engineers they require, Google can also have it cheap in Malaysia and India, if not cheaper.

3. The Philippines is a very Westernized place. It would be easy for them to conduct business here. – I’ll have to disagree with this one. Look at China.

4. Filipinos love Linux. – Ok, this guy is stretching it.

THE NAYS:
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