Let me show off a cool schwag that I won a few days ago. It’s a Google USB Stick in the form of a nerdy looking lego dude.

Poor guy. I need to remove its head every time I need to connect it to my laptop.

Now it looks like my laptop is trying to eat him!

Here’s another one I found online (source):

IMO, mine’s cuter.

Did you know that it’s possible to have Google Wave for your own domain? Simply sign up here. This would come in handy if your organization is already on Google Apps and would like to have Google Wave amongst your current suite of apps. I’m not sure when I could get one for my domain as I signed up literally 10 minutes ago. But it’s worth a shot, right?

In light of that I have 8 invites up for grabs. First eight to leave a comment here get dibs.

Google, in partnership with STI, are offering a unique opportunity for businesses to promote their products and services online through the Philippine Business Stimulus Package. During these trying times, businesses may find it difficult to attract potential clients, be it offline or online. Online, Google takes care of that by offering a hefty P2,000 credit on Google Adwords. I’ve only seen P1,000 Adword credits being given away before and I was quite pleased to see them up the ante to P2,000. For businesses who have no online presence, STI can do the job for them for only P3,000. But for the first 200 businesses to sign up here, they can get the website of their dreams for free, plus a P2,000 Adwords credit!
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Google is giving away business card sets to 10,000 users. It’s a cool way to show off your Google profile and moreover, it’s free! All you need to do is login to your Google profile and make it public if you already haven’t done so. Shortly after you’ll see the sign up link above. The downside is they ship only to U.S. addresses. Bummer for us. But I used my aunt’s New York address to snag myself a set of 25 cards. Sweet.

I apologize for the long absence! Busy, busy month! Anyway, I wanted to share with you that an auto-suggest feature has launched for Google Philippines, as well as for Google Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam. Go Southeast Asia!

Here’s a sampling:

Whoa, people are actually searching for my name! (hehe)

My friend RJ asked me a while ago if I knew of a restaurant in Manila that delivers and accepts payments through Paypal. He said Max’s Restaurant did, but him and his friend didn’t feel like eating chicken tonight. I asked my friends on Plurk if they knew of any. Gail pointed out something odd about Max’s online delivery. In their Conditions of Use page, it states that you must make your order 3 days in advance. But notice the banner on top where it says “We Deliver the Max’s Experience in 30 mins”. Hmmm. Isn’t that strange? Read Full Entry

Back at Ratified.org, I noticed a handful of blogs whose Feedburner statistics have stopped updating. I looked into it and saw that all of their feeds have switched to a somewhat peculiar URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/xxxxxxx. Because of that, their Awareness API, the place where Ratified.org grabs all the feed statistics, are no longer working. For a while that forced me to manually update their subscriber numbers, which is a bit frustrating on my end, because I try to keep Ratified.org as fresh as possible. Doing this everyday is simply not going to be feasible.
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Google now features metadata crawled from forums and discussion sites in its search results. These include the number of posts from the target page, the number of authors, and the date of last post.

Here’s a sample result I get when searching for Windows Vista Problems:

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Google introduces stylin’ new themes for iGoogle done by famous artistic icons such as:
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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.

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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I couldn’t resist it. I’m a bit vain that I google my name every once in a while. If you’re like me, you can check the Google toolbar if it includes your name in its query suggestions. If you don’t have the toolbar installed, get it from toolbar.google.com. The trick is to slowly type your name and wait for the toolbar to give you suggestions.

See your name in it? Kinda cool right?

I noticed a lack of localized gadgets for us Filipinos using iGoogle, so I came up with a few Google Gadgets that deliver the freshest headlines from our top online newspapers.

Click on each image to add them to your iGoogle page. Enjoy!

The Google blog revealed that they are currently beta testing a new Google service — Google Knol, which appears to be a direct competitor to Wikipedia, About.com and the much-hyped Mahalo:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

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