Today, 7:00am I attended the Philippine Ventures Capital or Philvencap forum at AIM. I arrived a bit late and I have to no excuses. :)

This is a recurring event that happens every last Thursday of the month. The format of this forum is very much unique. The forum is all about meeting someone who has capital but has no business ideas and with people who has project but no capital. It is somehow like an elevator pitch thing. Presenter are given 4 minutes to discuss his presentation providing the following, What's the project? How much do you need? and ROI.


However, this forum does not stops there, it also looks at the current trends and try to spot business opportunities to those trends. Some ideas are wild to think about and the others are already in mainstream. If you are venturing to became an entrepreneur, you can attend this forum and check it out. Lighter side of the monthly meeting was hearing jokes from the host and the audience themselves. Attendees varies, from old time members and plenty of guests. No membership fees, you just have to be present for 4 consecutive meetings to become certified members, to resign? just be absent for 4 consecutive meetings also. :)

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SONA sonamagun!

What an insult to middle income family like me, here we are taking all the heat and hit of high oil prices and commodities and our government is so proud of making SMS price to P0.50.

To add to that, it was the most applauded portion of the SONA. Stupid! Aargh, boohoo no one's caring for the middle income families.

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Cuil, more than meets the Eye?

Every so often every 5 to 7 years, the Internet as we know it is disrupted by great idea and by great invention. Today, several bloggers, pro or not are discussing Cuil, the latest Search Engine in town. It boost that it is three times as many than Google and ten times as many than Microsoft.

It proud itself of not peeking on users viewing history, thus making your searching always private.

So how will this new search engine company going to dislodge the current king of searches?

Checking their website, www.cuil.com I checked the features and they are as follows;

Drilldowns
Roll-over definitions
Tabs
Navigation Suggestions

Their philosopy;

"The Internet is getting bigger and more disorganized every day. Cuil’s goal is to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results."

So there you go, they will index the whole Internet.

For me, I will just have to wait and see.

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My Weekend Cooking

I love Gindara with Teriyaki Sauce. Last Saturday we bought Gindara fish in South Supermarket. It's been a while since I cooked my favorite fish and weekend is the perfect day to cook it. Check out my Gindara Recipe. :)

I wasn't able to get the best Gindara slice but for me any part of the fish will do. Maybe next time I will get lucky. My first taste of this delicious fish is from a Japanese Restaurant in Makati and the cost was very expensive for a small piece of fish. I said to myself, I'll cook this one for me and my family. My first try is not bad at all although my ingredients are not complete but just the same my love ones ate my Gindara with gusto. The second try was great! So for those who like to cook fish, here's how I cook my Gindara.

Ingredients:

Gindara Fish Slice
Teriyaki Sauce

How to make Teriyaki sauce

Ingredients

1/3 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 cup beef broth
1/3 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 cup white wine

Mixing the ingredients here is my way:

1. Dissolve the sugar and ginger in the broth and soy sauce.
2. Bring to a boil.
3. Blend the cornstarch in the wine. Add to the broth.
4. Simmer until thickened.

The recipe of Teriyaki Sauce was pulled from the Internet, I can no longer remember where.

Enjoy! :)

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3D Authoring Tool TrueSpace

I received an email from Caligari that their flagship product TrueSpace 7.6, a high-end 3D Authoring Tool is now available at no cost. Wow! Last year I bought their 5.2 version and now they are giving away the latest version!

I have a new toy, yay!

I can't believe it, this is first and let me borrow the founder's own message from Caligari's forum.

===
At a time when other companies are removing their low cost products to make it even tougher to get started in 3D, it gives us great pleasure to enable all artists regardless of age or income to create 3D in whatever field they dream of. We hope you enjoy your copy of trueSpace7.6.

Roman Ormandy
Founder
Caligari Corp
===

Sample images of TrueSpace 7.6

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Online Interment

When we were starting my previous company in 1999, we had thought of putting a digital tombstone. A service for hosting dead people's information. Creepy to think in those days, however it was a good idea and can serve also for those people that are too far to attend and pay last respect to his/her love ones.

People just have to pay a service subscription or a time frame so the they can store the images, eulogy, and videos of the deceased. Bottom line of the service is just renting disk space. Unfortunately we didn't pursue it due to many reasons.

So seeing this ad last Sunday brings back our crazy idea to mind. So it wasn't crazy after all. Read more!

It's PSP! No! It's PS3! No! It's VIAO.

Sony FW VIAO sports the Xross Media Bar UI. From PSP, PS3, Bravia LCD TV to new Sony Viao FW series. Sony is standardizing their menu system to this UI.

If you have played PSP or PS3, you'll find Xross Media Bar UI a very intuitive interface. Kudos for Sony for that. However for a notebook with mouse and keyboard? Hmmm will same user experience holds true in Notebook? I can't tell, I think Sony FW Viao is not yet available in the Philippines.



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Create a better Creature!

I like to play computer games, this one really caught my fancy. SPORE from EA. Great idea, surely the little ones back home will love this one. I already made my own creature and uploaded it in their server.

Check my creature, its name is RORK :P


Here are some snapshots ;


This is just a preview of their game, I hope one of my creatures get selected.

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Go Fly a Kite!

Last weekend, I had done something old and new to me. I made a kite for my little tyke. It brought me back to memory ville, when I was young I used to make different types of kite and flew successfully some of them. I can not ask my father to build me one, he was a busy man so I have to be resourceful that I have to build my own to the envy of seeing beautiful and expensive kites I see flown by my other kids.


My little boy was asking me to buy him a kite, I said no need to buy I will build your own. He was amazed that I can build one. He's familiar of already ready made kites available in toy stores and hearing that I will build his kite excites him.

There so many types of kite, and one kind of kite that I wasn't able to build and make it fly is the "Filipino Kite" a tail-less one. Yes, it is named after us Pinoys. This type of kite in colloquial word is "borador" its big cousin is called "guryon". I am not a Kite expert so correct me if I am wrong.




This type of kite really fascinated me because when I was a kid I see how graceful this kite flies, it has commanding presence as compared to diamond shape kite with long tail. It resembles like fighter plane in the sky.

So it was a challenge to build this one for the kiddo and of course for me. This type of kite is very difficult to build as a kid, it requires good perspective and getting the right materials. From the frame to building it, string is attached to both end of the bows, this string controls the shape of the wings.

It was still a challenge for me, even I thought that I have grown and my artistic faculty is greater than when I was a kid. This stage was the hardest part of building this kite.

Skinning the kite was much easier (I thought it was, not!) but I noticed that the paper that I used to use to make a kite is very much gone thinned these days. This "papel de hapon" was so fragile that just a small amount of paste applied to it will basically ruin it. So I have to apply the paste very carefully.

By this time, the kid was so amazed and keeps on saying "kite" every 5 minutes or so. After 20 minutes of skinning the kite, time for it to get dry.

My big reward, a big smile from the little guy. :)

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Applying for the new SSS ID for the first time

I tried to apply for my new SSS ID in Makati but unfortunately what they only have is just an application form, there's a sign stating "ID Capture not available" so anyone would like to apply for SSS ID you have to go their main branch in East Avenue Quezon City.

This institution is so big, with almost 12 billion Pesos(?) of revenue but can not get their ID system working in a "major" location the Makati CIty Business District, the business capital of the Philippines.

Rainy days and Mondays.....
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Another offer from Microsoft to Yahoo!

Microsoft and Icahn on new offer to Yahoo! buying the search business. Yahoo board rejected the offer. The score 0-2. :P

http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2008/07/13/microsoft-msft-makes-another-offer-for-yahoo-with-icahn/
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The movie "Untraceable"

I saw the movie 'Untraceable", a serial killer movie starred by Diane Lane. Diane is cybercrime specialist FBI. The serial killer is a very talented criminal, knows programming, electronics, DNS hacking and other stuffs that is so hard to believe he can do it himself. While killing his victim, he video stream it over the Internet.

What really catch my attention is the DNS exploits he done, the movie was release January 25,2008 and while in real life there was a security advisory about DNS cache poisoning just early this month. It means that any cracker/hacker out there can basically alter the legit traffic of a server to a bogus one. Imagine a ecommerce server, payment system and credit cards.


While in the movie, the hacker was able to "owned" thousands of machine running DNS and dynamically changing his machine IP address (warning: geek speak). This made the FBI impossible to track the killer down. The killer only allow US viewers only, blocking foreign IP addresses. The FBI doesn't even know what to do on tracking this serial killer. They didn't even talk to ISPs or NAPs, or the CERTs and CSIRTs, Domain Registrars.

DNS records needs to be propagated before it become the new IP address gets reflected, the killer video streaming change IP address automatically and gets it working after FBI blocked the current IP address. Can it be done? hmmm

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GSMA 3rd Party Access Project

From time to time, I try to see what's cooking in the GSM Association (www.gsmworld.com) and recently I found this interesting news or initiative - GSMA 3rd Party Access Project. I got curious about this initiative and click right away the registration link, skipping to read the entire post.

I register and was told that an email with username/password will be sent to my email address. I waited......nothing.


I forgot about it and then out of nowhere I received an email containing my account and password to the portal after a month(?). Well the email contains the reason of the delay and I shrugged and tried out the portal.

It's barely populated yet with information or entries, (what do you expect for portal just started?) However, it made me think about it, will this initiative fly? I can imagine what this project can do and how it will make a big difference to service providers and content providers.

Working with multiple Mobile Operators is big pain and cost a lot of resources, with the promise of standard API, the Mobile Operator can expose what's needed and useful information to a 3rd Party.

I don't know if this has to do with Globe's opening up through their new Globelabs initiative because it is somewhat similar.

Anyway, hope this help the industry.

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My blog Title

Wondering where did I get my blog "Forever Startup" Title? Well, the words was coined when I and my dear friend Abet started another IT startup. This was after the first one that we did not see the fruits of our labor.

The experience was exhilarating, tiring and exciting at the same time. If you have experienced setting up a startup company or either have worked in a startup company you know what I mean. Long day, work, long nights,work, pizza and coke, and more work.

However, the term Forever Startup has a different meaning for us. It became our "mantra", a call that we should be on that stage. The burning passion to succeed whatever it takes.

That was 9 years ago, and I want to believe that passion of Startup is still in me. We have parted ways with my buddy and I believe we will again to start a great company once more.


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A New Beginning

My new home. I will be spending more in this blog than my older blogsite. Hope to post better topics and attract readers in my blog.
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