Now, this whole EduPunk phenomenon is an entirely different conversation in itself. But what I really want to focus on is my experience of fulfilling instant gratification by buying the ebook.

My transition from physical books to eBooks has been brewing for the past couple of years.

Of course, I started by improvising with my Mac  – reading vertical PDF’s awkwardly on a horizontally-oriented screen. Then came the iPhone – and it kickstarted the reading experience on a handheld. After getting a sense of the numerous ebook readers that came out last year, I eventually bet on Barnes & Noble’s Nook and got one last November when it came out. And more recently, I got an iPad – which – intriguingly enough – has the Amazon Kindle App, iBooks, and (just awaiting release) Barnes & Noble’s eBook Reader App.

But here’s the rub. I’m beginning to feel The Rise of the Splinternet.

This new vocabulary was introduced by Groundswell author Josh Bernoff in this article.

Simply put – with the onslaught of these multiple devices, platforms, and software standards – competing companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble – have created walled gardens, as opposed to the open playground the internet was supposed to be.

Josh shares this summary table :

Now, i felt this first-hand when I tried to buy my ebook.

The reason I bought the Nook before international release is because I bet on the fact that it would would eventually have international presence – meaning I could buy online from their storefront all the way from the Philippines – a feature that the Amazon Kindle already has. Unfortunately, this hasn’t happened yet.

Now, I could have bought the Kindle, but at that time it didn’t provide PDF support. More importantly, Amazon created their own proprietary ebook format, and shunned the cross-hardware-platform ePub – which the Nook embraced with open arms.

So it really is kind of a tangled mess. Because the Nook could read the ePub format, i was able to buy ebooks from different sources outside of B&N and load it in, while waiting their international presence. But along came the iPad, which made my decision-making process ever more complicated.

My ideal situation is that I could buy an ePub book which I can then read on my Nook, on my Mac, on my iPhone, and on my iPad. I really don’t have that option right now.

B&N doesn’t have international sales yet; The iPad has iBooks which can read ePub, but it’s not yet available in the Philippines. Amazon Kindle is on the iPad/iPhone, but it’s not in ePub format and hence I can’t load it on my Nook.

I eventually bought the Amazon Kindle ebook, because it was the only avenue I could buy this book from, as it wasn’t available in the ePub online bookstores yet.

Whatever happened to Openness? Can’t we all just get along?

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Before anything else, let go of your easily-prickable Pinoy pride for 15 minutes and read (or re-read) Nick Joaquin’s A Heritage of Smallness.

In this influential essay, the one-time National Artist for Literature holds up a mirror to the Filipino Soul and eschews our love affair with all things small :

“Society for the Filipino is a small rowboat: the barangay. Geography for the Filipino is a small locality: the barrio. History for the Filipino is a small vague saying: matanda pa kay mahoma, noong peacetime. Enterprise for the Filipino is a small stall: the sari-sari. Industry and production for the Filipino are the small immediate searchings of each day: isang kahig, isang tuka. And commerce for the Filipino is the smallest degree of retail: the tingi.”

He further builds his case, noting the Philippine aversion of going for big, bold risks.

Whereas other countries have the grandeur of millenia-old pyramids, colloseums, or castles, our landscape reveals … invisible traces of the nipa hut, obliterated in months and years, not centuries.

This seeming absence of ambition in our DNA is a reinforcement of Joaquin’s three theories :

“First: that the Filipino works best on small scale–tiny figurines, small pots, filigree work in gold or silver, decorative arabesques. The deduction here is that we feel adequate to the challenge of the small, but are cowed by the challenge of the big.

Second: that the Filipino chooses to work in soft easy materials–clay, molten metal, tree searching has failed to turn up anything really monumental in hardstone. Even carabao horn, an obvious material for native craftsmen, has not been used to any extent remotely comparable to the use of ivory in the ivory countries. The deduction here is that we feel equal to the materials that yield but evade the challenge of materials that resist.

Third: that having mastered a material, craft or product, we tend to rut in it and don’t move on to a next phase, a larger development, based on what we have learned. In fact, we instantly lay down even what mastery we already posses when confronted by a challenge from outside of something more masterly, instead of being provoked to develop by the threat of competition.”

While there’s most certainly truth in this – denial would only be delusional and unproductive – it’s time to reframe Joaquin’s thoughts and put them in a new historical perspective; Most especially since this so-called heritage of smallness is a jiu-jitsu move whose time, I believe, has finally come.

The transformation spurred by the Industrial Revolution saw unprecedented growth and scale driven by cookie-cutter replication;  This great leap forward was facilitated by large-scale organizations and systems : huge industrial factories and their assembly lines, massive one-size-fits-all educational systems, sprawling country-wide infrastructure – all supported by financial institutions that both oiled and churned the giant wheels of commerce.

Just consider the following examples :

The tri-media attack of Television, Radio, and Print became national – even global – platforms, easily influencing and swaying popular opinion at a massive scale.

Big Business got bigger, while the small guys got smaller. The latter would eventually became roadkill for the ever-burgeoning class of multinational corporations : Wal-Mart dries up the Neighborhood Mom & Pops, Starbucks engulfs the local coffee shops, Barnes and Noble kills the community-based bookstores.

The so-called First World Countries’ GDP’s would balloon and dwarf those in the Third World at mind-boggling ratios. These countries even formed an Industrialized Nations’ Club called the G8 – with their collective financial institutions pretty-much dictating the pace of the World Economy.

But something peculiar happened at the turn of the century.

The large institutions started teetering, and are now on their way into becoming dinosaur-obsolete – their 20th century innards simply being torn apart by 21st Century Realities.

The seemingly impenetrable consolidation of media became oh-so-vulnerable. Professionally produced shows on Television compete with amateurish two-minute antics on YouTube; Internet radio is replacing the radio station as we know it; And every week we extol eulogies on yet another magazine and/or newspaper’s death, as they become replaced by blogs, websites, and online forums.

Even Big Businesses are in quite a disarray. Wal-Mart survives through its ongoing reinvention; Starbucks is now buckling under its own weight – in fact, its new experiments are going community-based as unbranded local shops; Amazon.com and a myriad of niche online booksellers continues to threaten the very economics of brick-and-mortar stores. And don’t get me started on the really easy pickings, The Banks That Were Too Big To Fail, But Did.

On that note, the Global Financial Crisis of ’08-’09 swept across the industrialized nations – their financial institutions becoming a worldwide domino of economic disaster. Tackling this dangerous web was no longer something that the G8 could address in isolation, and so to deal with it they had to involve an expanded group, the G20.

The most-developed, largest countries which just a decade ago seemed invulnerable flirted with disaster and economic depression.

This breakdown in large 20th century institutions certainly has me thinking : maybe Being Big isn’t that – pun intended – big a deal anymore.

From 2010 onwards, maybe it’s time to revisit the other side of the spatial spectrum and get reaquainted with the virtues of smallness.

—

It’s no secret that The Rise of Smallness is being fueled by the Internet’s overarching disruptive shadow. Call it what you will – Wikinomics, The Groundswell, The Long Tail, an Army of Davids – the fact is that no other time in history has power been so democratized and redistributed – from multinational companies into a mosaic of startups; from large institutions into the hands of collective individuals.

Indulge me now by sharing with you Exhibits A & B  (both hailing from the same source : uber-brain-food magazine, Wired’s Issue 17.06 – a major, major influence on my thinking with regards to this matter).

Exhibit A is the article, The New New Economy : More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity -  which showcases the decline in number of the Megacorporations and the viral proliferation of an Ecosystem of Startups.

Exhibit B is more a mindbend, if you will.  Kevin Kelly talks about The New Socialism : Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online – and this is where it makes the leap from mildly interesting to extremely interesting.

Because the secret sauce isn’t really in The Small per se; it’s the aggregation of what I can only call as ‘The Many-Small’ into an almost sentient-network, mimicking swarm intelligence.  And so it’s not just the empowered individual which is the focus of the matter, but rather the groups of individuals bound together, moving from Web 2.0 Guru Clay Shirky‘s hierarchy of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collective action.

What does this all have to do with the Philippines?

Because for better or for worse, Nick Joaquin is absolutely right. We are indeed a nation of smallness, divided across a myriad of 7,107 islands.

From sari-sari stores to barangays, from nipa huts to sachets, from farming small plots of land to microfinancing – it is the small that dominates the Filipino landscape.

But if we mirror the Internet model, then we can arrive at the logical conclusion that we’re sitting on a goldmine. And it’s not in The Small. It’s in harnessing The Many-Small.

Our work in Hapinoy is an extremely relevant example to the thinking here. The smallest, minutest unit of retail – the humble sari-sari store – by far dominates the number of retail outlets in the country. While there may be a few thousand supermarkets and groceries nationwide, there are almost 700,000 sari-sari stores sprawling every nook and cranny of the archipelago. 700,000! Numerically, that’s more than 90% of all retail.

So individually, the sari-sari store is too micro to make a dent in the universe. But as a Hapinoy network, the aggregation and alignment of hundreds of thousands of sari-sari stores represents a massively untapped economic opportunity. It’s most definitely not Wal-Mart, but it is a powerful force in its own right.

What makes this model more resilient is that its not solely reliant on a centralized nervous system. Close one Big Box Hypermarket and your business goes under; Close a couple of hundred sari-sari stores and you’ve got an equal number of stores that can willingly take its place. It’s self-healing on the fringes, with a high tolerance for fallouts.

Now extend this Hapinoy model into other Filipino Many-Small realities.

Micro-Businesses.

Barangays.

Public Schools.

Agricultural Plots of Land.

Seven. Thousand. One Hundred. Seven. Islands.

And then add layers of technology to mesh them together – wireless networks, mobile communications, the web as a platform – and the possibilities just effortlessly, exponentially grow.

Let me make it clear that this I am not proposing mere consolidation; The model is hinged on networking and connection. Every point in the mesh retains its individuality – every Hapinoy Store retains its freedom and ownership – it can link and de-link with the chain. But whenever it is plugged-in, then it benefits from the power of the unified group.

—

To end, the challenge of Nick Joaquin wasn’t only in the Filipino’s limited capacity of churning out small things; It was also very much a commentary on the smallness of our thinking – of our lack of ambition, of grandness, of boldness.

But just because we’ve got small things doesn’t mean we have to think small.

The fact of the matter is that we probably won’t be building grand pyramids anytime soon;

But the good news is that we might not even have to.

We can embrace our heritage of smallness;

We can embrace the small things this heritage has given us.

Because at this point in history, we can make enormously gigantically big things out of them.

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The SkyEye team listed above. Not in picture are : JB , Chemical Engineer from La Salle; Serge Gonzales, 2nd Year Management Student (Chief UAV pilot), and Philip Cheang 4th year BS Information Design.

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Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s) that can do aerial video/photography, SkyEye envisions itself as providing Aerial Imaging and Mapping, Interactive Mapping, and enabling Traffic Support Systems, as part of its portfolio of commercial services.

Now, an amazing factoid is that this team – Matt, Roy, Martin, Vinni, Kylo, and Happy – are still undergraduate students of the Ateneo – tinkering with technology and figuring out a commercial business model out of it.

So, never being one to miss an opportunity to try something novel – as this certainly falls into my ‘One New Thing A Week’ category – I met up with the group in the Ateneo SEC Field to check out this intriguing project :

Serge Gonzales and Matthew Cua of SkyEye, with their UAV.

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with a Lumix LX3 attached

You can view the UAV’s camera through goggle displays while the pilot mans it with a radio controller

Picture of me face-to-face with SkyEye; Pilot Serge Gonzales manning the controls.

Picture taken from SkyEye. Also in the picture are Dr. Greg Tangonan and Paul Cabacungan of the Ateneo Innovation Center (more on that later).

Here’s a video of SkyEye in action :

—

All-in-all, it was a really cool experience to have actually tried out SkyEye. It was like playing a Flight Simulator using Terminator vision goggles.

But beyond the nerdgasmic angle, my entrepreneurial mindset eventually kicked in and my mind was racing through real-world applications of this technology. And Aerial Photography is just the tip of the iceberg.

—

Now, I’d like to take a step back and look at the SkyEye Project in a larger context.

Because the SkyEye Project is the kind of student-centric innovation being cultivated at the Ateneo Innovation Center, a nexus point wherein Ateneo School of Science and Engineering undergrads can collaborate with other colleges – as well as other schools – in order to explore, tinker with, and apply new technologies to the real world.

But while it’s fraught with practical experimentation and applications – as evidenced by the SkyEye project – it also has an eye of incubating student projects, interfacing them with the industry, and bringing them to market.

In fact, I have two hats in dealing with AIC — #1 as a resource (Greg Tangonan, the Director, has invited me on board as a resource), but also #2, as a customer. And this is because Hapinoy and Rags2Riches are collaborating with AIC on a few key projects.

Ultimately, the AIC gives me hope that a new generation of tinkerers with business sense are about to set loose to the world-at-large. And maybe somehow, this will catalyze a new wave of technology-based entrepreneurs.

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Now, while i won’t hypocritically claim that I don’t get a lot of “free” stuff from – ahem – alternative sources, the flip-side is that I’m pretty much willing to fork over hard-earned dough for highly-selective content (more on that later), especially when the content meets my price-i’m-willing-to-pay-for requirements.

This, after all, has become the current fodder of discussion and debate — in the age of the internet, how do you get people to pay for content that they could otherwise just download for free?

I don’t know the absolute answer to that.

But what I do know is this – of all the new music loaded on my iPod last year, two albums came from CD’s that I actually bought from the record store –  U2′ ‘No Line on the Horizon’ as well as Sugarfree’s ‘Mornings and Airports’.

Traditional marketing will say people will pay for value. That’s inarguably true. But then again, i’ve got a lot of other valuable content that I didn’t pay a single peso for. So the answer must be something that pushes the boundary on “value”.

The truth of the matter is – and this is quite corny – what ties together content that I am willing to pay for is something quite intangible — it’s the unexplainable emotional loyalty I have to the content/artists/magazine/movies/etc.

It’s almost as if I’m telling FastCompany, as an example — “Take my money! I want to contribute in my own way to your continuing existence.” Or with Sugarfree — “I respect your music too much to just buy the P35 pirated CD.”

It’s absolutely irrational, I know.

But those who crack this irrationality – this human quirk – will, I earnestly believe, win in this new age of content.

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Woot!! Woot!! The IT Journalists Association of the Philippines (a.k.a. CyberPress) awarded Inovent as IT Startup of the Year for 2009. The other nominees in the category were Sulit.com.ph as well as ANTS.

Unfortunately, Brian Quebengco was in the US so he couldn’t join myself and our partner Henry Nguyen for the awarding.

Aside from the startup of the year, there were other awards given out :

* News Story of the Year went to Smartmatic-TIM undertaking the computerization of the 2010 Elections
* IT Product of the Year was given to Windows 7.
* IT Executive of the Year went to Ricky Banaag, Country Head of Intel Philippines.
* Company of the Year went to Acer
* A special lifetime award was also given to Bill Torres who started the Internet Service Provider Mozcom and is fondly referred to as ‘the Father of the Philippine Internet’.

It was definitely an awesome honor for Inovent, especially given the fact that we truly are a startup — composed of a ragtag team of youthful and vibrant designers, engineers, and believers who didn’t even have an office when we were starting. Because of these humble beginnings,  the Beta prototype of the Ilumina was actually built in the condo unit of our student-engineer! :p

Here’s looking to 2010 and beyond as we see how the succeeding chapters of our startup story evolves …

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I formerly blogged about the new Business Model FREE, as popularized by Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson – who eventually wrote an entire book built on the concept. Read the book here.

Now along comes the greatest rock band in the world, U2, and they play this card to the hilt — to the point of broadcasting their entire 360 Concert for FREE on a special YouTube Channel, www.youtube.com/u2.

How this will play out in terms of album sales and concert attendance is still anybody’s guess. But kudos to U2 for experimenting once again, and giving me goosebumps for remembering when I caught them live during the Vertigo Tour.

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I’m a great fan of Shift Happens, a presentation made by educator Karl Fisch that spread like wildfire around the world – seamlessly blending statistics, infographics, and social media and making it digestible for the 21st Century.

Of course, it was also largely due to the face that xplane, an information design consultancy, took on his original powerpoint, and jazzed it up with an MTV-meets-the-web vibe coupled with a hollywood-ized cinematic soundtrack.

Recently, xplane has released Did You Know? v 4.0 — this time with a special focus on the sweeping, shifting social media landscape and technology convergence. It’s a concise-enough video, considering all the info they were able to cram inside of it; Definitely ripe with statistics that will either leave you dumbfounded at the rate of change, or give you a tease of the huge waves of opportunities that are emerging in front of our very eyes …

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Here are some pictures from the Y4IT event.

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I was in the process of organizing and rationalizing my bookshelf last night.

As is the usual case, my geek-self couldn’t help but start cataloging into a database the latest iteration of my library.

And so I started typing away in a Google Docs spreadsheet so that the list would be cloud-accessible.

But then memory struck, and I recalled that I had signed up for a web-based service called Shelfari, a library manager of sorts. So I drew up the web page, and lo and behold my account was still blessedly active.

What is Shelfari? To copy-and-paste their website’s about us section :

Based in Seattle, Shelfari introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and passions with peers, friends, and total strangers (for now). Shelfari is a gathering place for authors, aspiring authors, publishers, and readers, and has many tools and features to help these groups connect with each other in a fun and engaging way. Our mission is to enhance the experience of reading by connecting readers in meaningful conversations about the published word.

Shelfari’s members:

• Build virtual bookshelves to express themselves to their friends and to the world
• Discover books that are popular in their trusted circles of friends
• Influence peers by rating and discussing books online
• Discover and learn from people with similar reading tastes
• Participate in online book groups to further explore literature and share ideas
• Interact with and learn from authors

I initially hesitated — how can this be this website be universally applicable to my library management needs?

And so I started using it.

And as I started effortlessly adding up book after book after book, intuitively adding metadata – i’ve read it, i plan to read it; 1 to 5 star-based ratings; i have it/i plan to buy; user-generated reviews; tagging – i realized just how user-friendly this service was.

But the transition from user-friendly to downright useful becomes apparent with the site’s social networking features.

Diving into friends’ and groups’ respective library shelves is a fun, time-wasting breeze. It’s a foray into a veritable treasure trove of books and titles just waiting to be discovered, as aligned to your unique and particular interests. Think of it as social bookmarking, but this time literally “book”-marking. And this process of discovery then leads to new books for future purchase and consumption. No wonder Amazon.com bought Shelfari last August 2008.

But of course, back to the initial intention that got me to rediscover Shelfari – Library Database Management.

Other people might say that this is just an obsessive-compulsive impulse being satiated, and they may be right. But the truth is I really don’t care. Shelfari is manna from heaven in maintaining an online database of my books, presented in a visual manner that is just intuitive and appealing (although I wish that I could organize the books into sections/categories).

Under the span of an hour, I was able to find my books and fill up my Shelfari library shelf and – voila! – my physical library had become represented, virtually.

Now if only they can link my shelf into Stanza and/or Zinio Reader, that would most certainly close the loop

—

Let’s connect on Shelfari here.

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Hapinoy recently presented as a finalist in iBoP-Asia‘s small grants competition. iBoP-Asia is an organization based in the Ateneo School of Government that is pushing for science and technology innovations for the base of the pyramid in Southeast Asia.

In line with developing what we call Hapinoy+ (new business models and revenue streams for our stores), we at MicroVentures have been studying the opportunities in healthcare to the BoP, as delivered through our Hapinoy network/platform. We see this as a major opportunity to deliver relevant services to the underserved people that we reach, while simultaneously bringing in a new revenue stream for our Nanays. This exploration is the content of our proposal.

It was a day full of extremely interesting people, ideas, and presentations, covering the directed themes of Healthcare and Climate Change. Individuals and organizations pushing for disaster-resilient crops, telemedicine, new microlending approaches, solar-powered micro-hatcheries, renewable energy sources, emergency food reserves, early screening systems for cancer, malaria detection, carbon filtration, closed-loop sanitation and food production, as well as community-based organizing for water and sanitation. These finalists were chosen from a submission of almost a hundred entries across the Southeast Asian region – in fact, the finalists eventually became a cross-section of groups from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand.

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All of this activity just solidified our belief that the BoP space will definitely be a very vibrant and exciting sector — ripe with innovation — in the many years, and decades, to come.

—

Update Sept 4 2009 – Hapinoy got the iBop grant to explore our Hapinoy Healthcare Hub!

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