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Momentum
By Michael Alan Hamlin
November 26, 2002
Last week was a heavy travel week,
and this column was written between flights in the Cathay Pacific
lounge in Hong Kong. That's to let you know that this is not going
to be my standard column for the Philippine News. When I was first
asked to do this column, Danny Gozo asked me to focus on the good
news coming out of the Philippines. Outside of my work for the Philippine
News, this is not what I usually do. If you've seen some of my other
stuff, you know this.
Not that I don't regularly draw attention
to the things that are good and positive about my adopted country,
where I've resided for close to 20 years, following a near 10-year
stint in Japan as a student, and later, a businessman and educator.
I do. But I also complain regularly that with so much talent, it
is simply absurd that the Philippines can't somehow get its act
together. I regularly take that frustration out on whatever current
administration happens to be - for better but mostly worse - in
power.
Despite my appreciation for the significant
talent bank that the Philippines is, I wasn't quite sure that I
could sustain a weekly column celebrating good news coming out of
the Philippines. Having done this for close to three months, however,
I'm now happily convinced that there are plenty of good stories
here to tell. And I'll continue doing that in the following weeks.
I'm doing something sort of different today because I have been
in a series of full-day meetings outside the Philippines and haven't
had time to do the research or the interviews that are the necessary
precursors to writing a "good news" column.
I do have some good news, however.
In fact, the week has sort of proceeded in an orgy of good news
that was entirely unanticipated. It started on Tuesday afternoon,
when I found Juan Chua sitting next to me on a flight to Hong Kong.
I've known Chua casually for several years. He runs Nexus Technologies,
which is a successful systems integrator and part of the WSi Group
of Companies. WSi is closely associated with venture capital firm
iVantage, which as you know from last week owns a big slice of Jupiter
Systems. And that's what made our meeting up not just pleasant,
but a neat coincidence.
Chua is excited about Jupiter, but
that came as no surprise. What did surprise me was what he had to
say about another group company, yehey!. yehey! is a Yahoo!-type
portal that was originally founded by a bunch of long-haired students.
WSi, I believe the story goes, became associated with the company
during the yeheyday (excuse the pun) of Internet excess. Like most
dot-coms, I figured the company was a façade, and expected
it to quickly disappear like so much Internet litter.
But it hasn't. And despite some tough
times, Chua says the portal is actually showing some real signs
of life. That sort of validates, in an anecdotal way, the findings
of Janette Toral's Digital Filipino surveys that more Filipinos
are buying goods and services online (yehey! is supposed to be the
second-most popular portal). Chua says the secret of their success
is the development of an ATM payment gateway, that makes paying
for goods and services a snap for visitors.
The ATM gateway is important because
few Filipinos use credit cards, but everyone who has a legitimate
job gets an ATM because his or her salary is typically paid directly
into a personal bank account. The ATM gateway debits the account
and transfers real cash (not the virtual kind) into yehey!'s account.
The bottom line effect is that the ATM gateway has made the Internet
accessible in a business way to more Filipinos.
But the really neat aspect of this
development is that the increased traffic has attracted more advertisers.
Chua looked a bit wide-eyed when he told me this, apparently not
quite over the surprise himself. What makes this significant is
that despite the apparent respectable economic growth the Philippines
is experiencing, Philippine enterprises have pretty much stopped
spending on anything but the bare necessities - like their American
counterparts - until they figure out whether the global economy
is going to improve.
So while business in general is depressed,
the Internet lives. In a way, I'm not surprised. Despite the deadbeat
reputation of the Internet, I consistently come across some pretty
interesting stories. In fact, this week I've been leading a case
discussion in a series of seminars that involves an extremely successful
case of Internet branding. But that's another story. The story here
is that despite that hard data, the Philippines boasts an Internet
portal that's doing at least pretty well.
Is that the orgy of good news? Well,
part of it. You know where, and when, to get more of it.
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