New on Blog De La Musique: Ely, Rico, Raimund, and Barbie’s 21st Century redux of a 70s classic

My new music blog, “Blog de la Musique” (at http://blogdelamusique.com) has just kicked off with a post on a cool new TV Commercial that debuted this Feb 2. This tv ad debuted on YouTube and featured 90′s Pinoyrock icons Rico Blanco, Raimund Marasigan, Barbie Almabis, and Ely Buendia. Yes, it is a Smart commercial – but I had nothing to do with it, I swear!  

All disclaimers aside, the ad is an interesting collaboration of four now-mature artists (who all emerged during the 90′s Pinoy band boom), covering a 70s folk song (Heber Bartlome’s “Tayo’y Mga Pinoy”) using 21st century mobile technologies, like LTE broadband, tablets, video conferencing, all for the sake of some remote harmonizing.

Sounds like science-fiction? This is actually how a lot of music is made today, with musicians collaborating over the Internet. Maybe having record their vocals on a Nexus 7 while joy riding on a pickup in Bicol might still be far fetched – but the possibilities are all there.

Full review and blog post on the site here: http://blogdelamusique.com/2013/02/03/a-21st-century-makeover-for-tayoy-mga-pinoy-featuring-ely-buendia-raimund-marasigan-rico-blando-and-barbie-almalbis/

Barcelona Diary: Blogging from MWC 2012

It’s Mobile World Congress time again, and as it has done for the past few years, the GSMA sponsored World Congress is being held in Barcelona, Spain from February 27 to March 1. (There is a smaller Asia themed GSMA congress held in Hong Kong usually in November). The World Congress is the biggest mobile tech show of the year, eclipsing events like the American-themed CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas. At least 60,000 attendees are expected this year, so this is one major mobile gig indeed.

Starting with this post, I’ll be posting a  daily “Barcelona Diary” chronicling the events of Mobile World Congress 2012 aka “#MWC“. My reasons for doing so are simple. I think the events of this week will have a profound effect on the mobile industry for the rest of the year – and doing a journal will be an effective way of forcing me to take note and remember. Because an announcement on Monday just change the whole landscape for 2012.

For sure there are going to be major announcements from Google – the search and mobile OS behemoth was a non presence at CES. But my sources there have informed me that they intend to “complete dominate” #MWC 2012.

The name of the game is Android, and it is going to be hard to miss the green droid character all over MWC.

Expect a gargantuan Google booth area,  some major Android announcements (after Ice Cream Sandwich,  enter JellyBean), and people trying to collect Android pins from the booths,

Android devices from the major South Korea (Samsung and LG), Taiwan (HTC and Asus), and Chinese manufacturers (notably Huawei and ZTE) will be all over the place. The Chinese companies are very aggressive this year – Huawei has an entire hall all to itself.

Other Mobile operating systems will be jostling for the spotlight as well. Ubuntu for Android will be debuting, and there’s talk of a Mozilla Mobile OS as well. Hence the Firefox booth I spied being setup in Hall 7.

And what about Microsoft, the erstwhile behemoth of the 90s? Windows 8 “Consumer Preview” will manage to make its Feb deadline and will launch on Feb 29 (the last day of February).

I’m here as part of a team manning the WAC (Wholesale Applications Community) booth at Hall 7 (7C82 to be exact). WAC is a global community of operators who have banded together to develop operator-friendly app development standards (embodies in SDFs and APIs) Situated inside the “App Planet” area, the WAC presence at #MWC will herald the first “WAC 2.0″ HTML5 based apps out of Korea and apps developed using Network APIs for in-app charging from Korea and the Philippines.

And if all that is whizzing past over your head, here is a WAC primer I found this may explain this better:

The Philippine Internet Turns 18: Is Anyone Still Counting?

Since the 25th Anniversary of Philippine Cyberspace went by mainly unnoticed last August, I thought I’d get a head start on next month’s anniversary of the coming of the Internet to the Philippines by calling it early. Yes, the Internet turns 18 in the Philippines on March 29, 2012. It was way back in March 29, 1994 that the switch was turned on.

The events of the that day are more clearly defined than other tech milestones. So there’s no need to scramble to put it all together. Among others, I wrote about the events of the day in a newspaper feature ten years ago, and I’ve been luckily able to piece it back together and put the story online last August. The story was “The Day The Philippines Hooked Up to the Net” and I serialized it in 6 parts on this blog. The original sidebar article was the untold story of network engineer Benjie Tan’s role, and that is included here as well.

Check out these links:

The Night Benjie Tan Hooked Up the Philippines to the Internet

The Day the Philippines Hooked Up to the Net (Parts 1-6): 

• Part 1: Philnet Phase One
• Part 2: Enter The Doctor
• Part 3: The Cisco Kids
• Part 4: Showdown at the PH Corral
• Part 5: Off to Cebu – The First Contact
• Part 6: Aftermath

The question is, is anyone still counting? Today’s internet is as much a necessary a household utility as power and water that we have taken it for granted. I don’t see anyone whooping up with joy at the anniversary of Meralco’s powering up the first light bulb in Manila. So maybe it’s just as well.

But the passing of Steve Jobs in late 2011 fueled an interest in tech nostalgia – the chronicles of the late 70s hacker culture that spawned the duo of Jobs and Wozniak has been happily re-admitted into the tech zeigeist. No doubt this look at the past was also spurred by the runaway success of Walter Isaacson‘s best selling biography of Steve Jobs. 

I’ve always thought the Philippine Internet pioneeers that sweated out the details deserved as much adulation as the pirates of Silicon Valley. Every hashtag that gets tweeted and retweeted today on an iPhone or Blackberry is thanks to the early foundations laid by those guys. They went off and built the ISPs that brought the online culture into the country that has slowly wormed its way into the mainstream.

Just think about that the next time you shoot that umpteenth picture of your lunch and post it on Instagram.

2011: The Year I Plunged Into Streaming

2011 was the year  I finally experienced the Internet as a head-on replacement for traditional broadcasting. Not just for words (the net already replaced print media in my life) but for music and “tv” broadcasts. My personal access to bandwidth had reached the tipping point where it had finally become possible to use the net as the full fledged replacement for radio and television.

This might be genuinely frightening for a few people out there in the business of broadcasting: in TV and radio. It might even be a concern for the advertising industry and the advertisers who rely on the medium to deliver the eyeballs to experience their message.

It will probably take quite a few more years in the Philippines, but the path is clear that given enough bandwidth, the Internet can fill in our addiction to audio and video content. And we may not even miss traditional TV –  but we may end up wondering how did we do without the Internet to deliver content.

The tipping point in my case was bandwidth. My TV was already the “third screen” for internet consumption, after computers, and mobile devices (phones and tablets) after I had plugged it into a couple of set top boxes – a Boxee Box, and a Logitech Revue (running the Google TV platform). But the best these devices could do was act as media streamers for downloaded video files, streaming was not ideal given my sluggish bandwidth.

As for “radio“, podcasts, downloaded music, and playlists on iTunes had long replaced radio programming. But new apps like Stitcher and Tune In (available for both iOS and Android) now allow you to stream podcasts and overseas radio stations – eliminating the need to download audio files.

But back to the tipping point: This year my home DSL connection moved up from a miserly 1.8 Mbps to a fairly respectable 3 Mbps. And improvements in mobile broadband networks now meant my mobile devices could reliably expect at least a 1 Mbps signal (on a very good day and location the mobile bandwidth available even exceeds my home DSL speeds, hitting 4 Mbps and better).

An increase to 3 Mbps meant I could now watch YouTube clips without buffering regularly at 480p resolution (roughly DVD quality) – and since I could access YouTube on my TV, I now had access to the biggest repository of video content on the planet. On good days I could watch 720p (near high-def) videos with some buffering. (It turns out that PLDT caches accesses to YouTube – I verified this through the Mac app Little Snitch – so YouTube videos run smoothly on their network.)

As for mobile, improvements in 3G networks (particularly the rollout of HSPA+) meant getting reliably getting from 1-2 Mbps in Makati. At this point it allowed me to stop feeding my iPod with songs from iTunes and stream audio content directly from the cloud instead.

Here were the apps that got me hooked on streaming in 2011:

For video: The inescapable YouTube remained my go-to channel for video of all types, from viral memes to professionally produced content – and even full length features. Only now, YouTube was omnipresent – from my Mac laptop, iPad, iPod, Galaxy Tab, phones (Android and iOS), right up to my TV.

There was also Flixster and iMDB on the web and on apps for my movie trailer feed, and Boxee apps for the New York Times video feeds and Leo Laporte’s TWIT podcast network. For streaming US TV content via a Slingbox connection, I have Slingplayer on the iPad and on the web. Through the magic of proxies, I also access Hulu and Amazon Instant Video (movies and TV specials) on my laptop. I’m considering adding Netflix for 2012.

With all this going on, who has time for local cable?

For audio, I rely on two free go-to internet radio apps on my mobile devices – Sticher and Tune-In (available for both iOS and Android). These allow me to stream hundreds of podcasts and foreign radio stations. NPR also has a number of apps that provide access to the programs for free.

For music, there is Spotify, a commercial service that alows you to create playlists out of a selection of thousands of tracks already in the cloud. Spotify’s music service is so comprehensive, I have given up on stuffing my iPod with new content. Also through the magic of proxies, I have taken to using Pandora, another cloud-based music service with pre-defined playlists of different music genres. I sometimes use Google Music for accessing my own music collection through the cloud.

These are all early days. For 2012 I hope to see my home bandwidth options increase and prices kept reasonable – I’m looking at hitting 10-12 Mbps this year. At some point I might also just chuck away my internet tv set top boxes and plug in a real computer to the TV – maybe a Mac mini via an HDMI cable. And increasingly the concept of TV itself is becoming decentralized since you can use a laptop or tablet to view the same content anywhere at home.

I also see streaming replacing my car entertainment, through content streamed into my smartphone and hooked into the car stereo system via bluetooth. The Philippines never got satellite radio stations like XM, but that point might now be irrelevant when digital audio content already comes to you via mobile internet.

I don’t see any of these technologies become mainstream soon. For the forseeable future these will be the playground of crazed early adopters like myself and some like-minded geeks who might find each other on some Facebook group. This is all still too complicated for the masses. But you never know when the next tipping point will arrive to make this all explode into the mainstream. I give it three years.

Skycable has already seen the signs through its Iwanttv.com.ph site that allows you to view video content on demand on your laptop or tablet. In a few more years I see Skycable becoming less like Comcast and more like Netflix. This is the inevitable future.

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Here’s a recent article in the Wall Street Journal that backs me up here: Cutting the Cord on Cable

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Google TV’s CES 2012 presentation gives us a glimpse of what’s possible now on Internet TV:

SMART Evolution LTE open for beta testing: Fastest 4G network in the Philippines goes online

This is hot off the digital presses – in fact it’s so hot you’ll need flame resistant gloves to handle.

We just got the word that SMART’s LTE network – SMART Evolution – is now open for beta testing by a select group of power users who will be willing to try out the setup and give the operator their impressions.

Potential speed demon guinea pigs can check out the best test sign up form here: http://www1.smart.com.ph/bro/lte/sign-up

How fast is this baby? Judging from the initial roll out in Boracay held Holy Week 2011, expect speeds of up to 42 Mbps in areas covered by the LTE rollout.

Lucky beta testers will be given an LTE modem (which plugs into a USB port) to try out the network on bandwidth intensive applications such as High Def video streaming and downloads. It’s a taste of the ultra-fast bandwidth found in other countries – and this is now in the PH.

Actual details for the beta test are yet to be revealed. But if I were you, I’d sign up for the program first and ask questions later.

Ka-Ching: In-App Mobile Charging is Now in the Philippines – and the World

This PR just in from Smart – the first Android mobile apps using the WAC NAPI (Network API) are out – and they are all coming out first from the Philippines. 

What’s the significance? Well apart from the Philippines being a development hub for these WAC (Wholesale Applications Community) apps – the Network API enables what mobile developers in this part of the world have been clamoring for some time: In-App Operator Charging.

What this means is that mobile developers who sign up to use the API can now charge customers for use of the app from inside the application itself. And instead of requiring some form of credit card registration for online payments, the payment (purchase, or whatever) will be charged to your cellphone. For prepaid users this means it can deduct from your load, and for postpaid users it means this amount gets added to your bill.

For a society where the lack of widespread use of credit cards has hampered online purchasing, this is a pretty big deal. It opens up the floodgates for all sorts of transactions via mobile.

And just as importantly, it opens up a new method of monetization for mobile developers in the Philippines and the rest of the world.

A WAC app with charging APIs doesn’t just work in the Philippines, it will work in any country with a WAC operator partner.

Available first for Android devices, the API will eventually be available to other platforms and the mobile web. Apple permitting, maybe even on iOS apps (well if Apple relaxes its policies on in-app purchasing that is…)

More on this development in subsequent blog posts, but in the meantime, the full global PR announcement is below:

SMART Always ON + Operamini present “Win a Mini”

SMART’s “Always On” volume-based data plans combined with the Operamini browser have always been a good match. The Volume-based plans provide mobile internet at an affordable price, and the Operamini browser (available for Java, Symbian, Android, and iOS) utilize caching and up to 90% data compression for a highly optimized mobile web surfing experience – even on a poor data connection. 

The Operamini browser also stretches your data volume allocation. The data compression ensures that you can do more with your data plan. We’ve seen users on a Volume plan switch to Operamini for web browsing and only use as little as 40MB of data for an entire month.

So it’s not such a big surprise that the two have teamed up – SMART is the exclusive sponsor of Operamini in the Philippines, and one of the fruits of this team up is a joint promotion – the “Win a Mini” promo kicking off today.

Downloading and using OperaMini and signing up for a SMART “Always On” data package gives you raffle points that can enable you to win an “Opera Red” Mini Cooper.

Operamini users on SMART will see a special button on the default speedbutton screen that allows users to view a page (available only to Operamini users) with all the promo mechanics.

Here’s a diagram of the contest procedures:

This isn’t the first time Operamini used a MINI Cooper in a promotion. Here’s a video of a promotion that took place in Barcelona, Spain in 2003:

Remember that SIRI is American, so use your best Call Center Accent

If you were Willie Revillame and you spent a tiny portion of your millions to buy an unlocked iPhone 4s and brought it to the Philippines to use, would that much hyped up voice recognition assistant Siri understand you?

Probably not. Also expect tough going if you talked like Mikey Bustos. Or Jimmy Santos for that matter.

“Siri, plis tex my iswithart hokey?”

“I’m sorry Jimmy, I don’t understand, but I can look it up on Google for you.”

In this case, Siri is more like “Sirit na.”

Siri is American. At least according to its default settings. So it expects to be talked to like an American. Or according to the settings, in “U.S. English”.

I saw this amusing video on CNET Asia passed on by +Jonas Reyes on Google+ that shows how an iPhone 4 with its default settings (US English) can be totally flummoxed by Asian accents. They used native Asian speakers with four English accent variants, Filipino, Malay, Singaporean-Chinese, and Indian. The results, as you can expect, were less than stellar. Click here to see that video. 

On the other hand, this YouTube video by Appchat shows how Siri can adapt to specific accents like UK English, Australian English, and even German, by modifying the accent settings. However, it appears there is no option for Singlish, lah. Or Taglish.

So if you’re serious about using Siri, go off and practice your best wersh-wersh spokening dollar arreneow accent as if you were applying for a call center job.

This shouldn’t be too much of a problem for some Filipinos. I notice when traveling abroad that Filipinos tend to be somewhat of a chameleon when it comes to accents. In an attempt to be better understood, we can adapt to the accent of a speaker. This can mean going totally wersh-wersh in the US, adopting a more halting barok style when haggling in Hong Kong, switching back to a native Noypi accent when conversing with other Filipinos, and so forth.

So if you’re lucky to be able to unbox an iPhone 4S this early in the game, remember, she’s American.

Jejemon and Bekimon variants of Siri are unfortunately not in the cards for those native speakers out there.

From Tonino to Torino?

This is a spoof design for a "Tocino Longganisa" T-shirt

I heard the craziest story the other day that may explain whatever did happen to that “Tonino Lamborghini” trademark kerfuffle that Globe found itself embroiled in. 

Now I have to put a giant disclaimer here – I am in no way saying this is confirmed, and in fact I did think it was a pretty wild story to begin with – but there’s some flimsy circumstantial evidence. Throw in some logic and this might still be a probable conclusion – or I might be wrong.

So the story was that the Tonino Lamborghini branded Globe modems are now called “Torino”. This assumes they weren’t able to get the trademark from Tonino Lamborghini in the first place, who had announced it was going to serve some legal papers on their ass for the unlicensed use of the trademark.

After I heard the story I did a quick Twitter search, and it did turn up a couple of citations.

SMART Extends its Facebook Mobile App for Java Trial All the Way Till October 31

They said it was going to be free. And they were right. They said the free trial was going to last until October 14. But in that case, they were absolutely wrong. Because in a dramatic turn of events, tantamount to a mobile internet product manager momentarily taking leave of his senses, SMART’s Facebook for Java Mobile App free trial has been extended all the way till the end of the month, to October 31.

That’s right, Facebook nation. If you belong to the smartphone-deprived 95% of the nation’s mobile phone population, why let the upper 5% have all the fun – the fun of using mobile apps for social networking that is.

Facebook’s Mobile App for Java allows the previously lowly feature phone – who just happens to have mobile internet, a web browser, and the ability to run java apps – to run a full featured app from Facebook itself. Thus giving feature phone users a taste of the convenient app-driven mobile lifestyle enjoyed by the upper crust with their iPhones, Androids, Blackberries and other tools of the capitalist class.

Forget those graphics-challenged Facebook Zeroes. The Facebook Mobile app for Java is a full fledged Facebook client. Users can manage status updates, leave comments, reply to comments, check notifications, read and respond to private inbox messages, “Like”, upload photos, view photo albums, and all the accoutrements  of a Facebook app, using the phone you already own – which based on studies is most likely to be the feature phone you already use for texting and calling. Facebook claims 2,500 Java capable handsets are supported. A partial listing of compatible phones compiled by Facebook is posted on SMART’s Facebook app FAQ page here.

And best of all it’s FREE – free to download, free to use by SMART customers, until October 31. Thanks to a close partnership with Facebook, SMART has decided to offer this for free for a limited period. No internet charges to pay, just download, install, and Facebook away. Greet your friends, leave a funny comment, take a photo, spread a meme. You can absolutely go to town with this – right till October 31.

Complete details of the offer are posted here.

In a nutshell, let’s assumed you checked out your phone, established that it has a web browser (and can thus access the internet). Just to be on the safe side you can test it by accessing the Smart mobile portal at m.smart.com.ph – go on try it, that’s free (no internet charges).

Having established that, you can get the Facebook mobile app download link by texting FB to 211. This sends a free SMS to the phone with the link to http://fbapp.smart.com.ph (well the SMS does save you the trouble of typing that).

And here’s a video that explains what its all about if, like me, you happen to like videos.