Philippines bags first Cannes Mobile Grand Prix for Smart TXTBKS campaign
Dubbed the Smart TXTBKS campaign, condensed textbooks and workbooks used by students into 160-character messages that were then inserted in Smart SIM cards and distributed to several public schools in the Philippines.
Are Filipino online consumers protected?
With the Internet becoming the modern marketplace for an increasing number of Filipinos, do our existing laws provide enough protection for the growing online consumers? This crossed my mind after sifting through the latest European Union (EU) directive for one …
Swimming in the Swarm: Big Brother in the 21st Century
Last Sunday my wife Chako and I were at the birthday party of Mel Dominguez, the partner of InterAksyon’s Infotek editor Jing Garcia. We were seated at the journalists’ table with Jing; Chako and I were talking to Lifestyle editor …
The anatomy of a punk album
Or should I say the anatomy of a low-budget, independently produced, do-it-yourself, Pinoy punk album? Anyway, it’s that time again when my band Throw has to set everything aside and focus on coming up with a new album. It’s been …
Kung Fu Lizards versus the Monks of the Boneyard: A Meditation on Science and its Presentation
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been laying down the soundtrack for Butch Perez’ Birthplace, a film that compresses 4 and a half billion years of terrestrial history into 12 minutes of stereoscopic 3D animation (ie 3D, the kind …
The call of digitization, regulating the Internet and human rights online in Geneva
I wrote this column with my recently-concluded internship in Geneva still fresh in my mind. The title of this piece was inspired by Joëlle Kuntz’ book Geneva and the Call of Internationalism, a short but informative work on the small …
Steel, fire and magic: Thoughts on a filmmaker’s love letter to indigenous Filipino culture
Saw Sakay Sa Hangin, (Wind-Blown) Regiben Romana’s latest film last Wednesday. Regi is an old friend. I recently figured out that Regi and I each witnessed the other’s first meeting with the woman he married, a relationship that seems like …
E-cigarettes: boon or bane?
Electronic cigarettes, sometimes called e-cigarettes or e-cigs for short, have risen in popularity in recent times. Many smokers have taken to using e-cigs to help them curb the smoking habit. And because e-cigs produce vapor that looks and feels very …
Subflex: Manila’s best kept musical secret
Wednesday is the week’s dead night in the world of bars and clubs. Music joints and drinking holes: the favored haunts of Lautrec and Hokusai. What they called the ukiyo, the floating world, in old Tokyo. Ukiyo the raucous party …
When is imitation acceptable?
Mention imitation and most likely there is a technology example, either a copy of a certain technology or a technology-facilitated copying. At the 13th European Intellectual Property Institutes Network (EIPIN) Congress, which I attended over the weekend, technology examples peppered …
Revisiting an escapist’s reality
The past two weeks have been really hectic for me, with the demands of a new job description, a new team of writers to manage, and new responsibilities. The events of the past fortnight have been so stress-inducing that I …
Internet, news and data protection
Philippines, in more ways than one, is an interesting case. Take the paradoxical area of intellectual property protection for news as a case in point. News in the Philippines is copyright protected, an intellectual property right that is unheard of …
Wo®ds Incorporated
On my Facebook status, I recently wondered out loud on the fate of the word “kodakan” (a noun and verb-stem in street Filipino meaning “the act of taking photographs”) now that Eastman Kodak has filed for bankruptcy. While it’s true …
Lens.ph: An online image gallery for Pinoys
What do you do when you have hundreds of digital photos stored in your hard drive and you have nothing better to do with them? Okay, I know your first, and most obvious, option would be to post some of …
The cyborg in the river: A meditation on the art of Lirio Salvador
Slowly, the news is hitting the mainstream press: Lirio Salvador, the sound artist, was a tragic victim of a hit and run by a motorcycle outside his gallery, the Espasyo Siningdikato, in Dasmarinas Cavite, two days short of the new …
The Olympus PENs: small DSLRs or just P&S cameras on steroids?
I must clarify that this is not a review. I have yet to handle an Olympus PEN camera at length aside from one instance when I was able to briefly play around with a working display unit in one camera …
Shooting from the hip: rediscovering film through lomography
Back in the day, I did quite a bit of lomography in between my stints as a hobbyist and semi-pro digital photographer (and everything else I used to do). I considered lomography as my playful break from the stifling seriousness …
