PEDES3ANTECH

So it looks like my previous post was kind of prophetic- my flight from Vancouver was delayed causing me to miss my connecting flight from Hong Kong to Manila. I now have a 5 hr lay over and a massive headache due to the turbulence during my flight and lack of sleep. I am not a happy camper right now, but my mood has been lightened by the great accommodation provided by Cathay Pacific's Business Class Lounge. I took a shot of Jack Daniels to shake off the headache and ate a plate full of dumplings. I sort of regained consciousness after the shot and the decent food in my stomach, then I realized I still have 4 hrs to kill. Good thing I had my tech travel kit with me. I pulled out my iPad mini, checked my emails, sent emails to family that I am alive and ok and even shared my location thru foursquare :-) Now I am writing this post. I am still struggling to come up with a topic to write about. It has been a fairly quite news day for tech so far save for the bad news that HTC One ...

The days leading up to todays announcement about Facebook’s graph search feature was filled with rumours about the company building a “Facebook phone”. All that excitement was shattered when the announcement came that facebook was not launching a phone but a “search” feature. Now while some people were disappointed that no phone came out, I myself was actually very excited about the new feature. Ever since last year, I have reached a point where I felt that Facebook was slowly becoming irrelevant. I started to spend less time on the website and I started posting less and less “stuff” on it. Most of the updates on my timeline since the last year have been about posts I have been tagged in. I felt like Facebook was slowly becoming less engaging and felt like it was just a big graffiti wall filled with my friends rants about the smallest of things. My news feed became a steady stream of irrelevant “daily quotes”, game invites (I do not want to play Diamond Dash) and narcissistic pho...

An Ominous Question – what is free? If I were to ask this question 10 years ago (even 5 years ago), it would be passed off as a rhetorical question that has no real meaning, however today, it is a question we should all seriously consider. In the advent of all these free web services (social networking/ photosharing/ blogging/ etc) and the rapid growth of companies like  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram  one has to start wondering- how do these companies grow so big in Market Valuation when they are offering a free service? What products are they selling and to who? I am certainly not buying anything from them as 100% of the services I get from them is free. So what is their business model? The product is you (or your personal information shared through these webservices) and their customers are the big Advertising companies (they match the advertising content w/ your personal information). What do you mean I am the product?   I mean everythi...

As the number of people in the world gain access to smartphones and tablets, more and more people are also moving to digital media as their primary source of content and information. In the recent years, we have seen the rise in popularity of ebooks/ereader which has caused a tremendous amount of strain on the traditional publishing business. Recently we have seen major news organizations move to providing digital content accessible through smartphones or tablets. This trend is not showing any signs of slowing down in the near future and big media organizations know this- that is why we are seeing a trend towards monetization. Currently most big names ( Wall Street Journal ,  New York Times ,  The Economist,  etc) run on a very straight forward model- you download their free app, get access to a limited number of articles and if you want full access you pay for subscription. This is their business model and this is how they make their money. In fact some analysts say ...