Yehey! Corp has slowing been veering away from the internet advertising model and gone into web development/web design, e-commerce (Kaban) and digital marketing, among others. Yehey’s biggest clients include San Miguel Corp., Isuzu, Ateneo De Manila and Procter and Gamble.

Apparently, the business model hasn’t really panned out for the team of about 90+ people at Yehey! and the current revenue isn’t anywhere near the earlier target of Php140 Million for 2009 {via GMANews}. They made Php71 Million in revenues last year.

Yehey! has also abandoned earlier plans of going public (first reported about the IPO last February 2007 as well as the comment from CEO Donald Lim).

At least one key executive has been “let go” and there’s big possibility more heads will roll. Unless the team can do some magic trick and hit the targets, Yehey’s biggest chance of survival is when it gets sold and infused with fresh capital.

Updates:

• In the first quarter of 2009, the firm reported a net loss of P7.4 million, from a net income of P2.4 million in the comparative period last year. In its 2008 annual filing, the firm reported a Php7 million net loss {Business Mirror}.
• In a July 7, 2009 story on Business Mirror, iVantage corporate secretary Bayani K. Tan said the company is “trying its best” to list by way of introduction in the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE). In the comments, Nix Nolledo says Yehey has since been listed already. That might have only happened in the last 3 weeks.
• Yehey had a net loss of Php10.9 million in 2006. Revenues in 2007 was Php23.3 million and tripled it to Php71 Million in 2008 {via GMANews} but was still in the red by Php7 Million. Yehey has adjusted 2009 initial revenue projections from Php140 million in January to just Php80 to Php90 Million by July.

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1. T3 magazine Philippines is not shutting down. Summit Media will be publishing the magazine three times in a year, every year. The three issues are yet to be determined, but will happen in summer, mid-year, and Christmas.

2. The magazine will be bigger with significantly different content.

3. The website (www.t3online.com.ph) is the new core of T3. Please stand by for the grand re-launching.

Vince Sales will still be the Editor-in-Chief while Elijah Mendoza is the Deputy Managing Editor. Looks like T3 will be focusing more on their online content rather than print. It remains to be seen if the 3-issues-a-year model will work in the Philippines but T3 has some hard-core followers that will be glad to get a dose of their favorite tech mag.

T3 Magazine is one of the many titles under the Summit Media Publishing Group. Earlier rumors in the PhilMug forums indicate that Summit was dropping T3, Marie Claire and SevenTeen from its roster.

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Again, I’ll refer you to the points I highlighted in my previous entry — location. If you believe that you have the right location then you’ll have a higher probability to succeed or even just getting back your investment in a short time.

Your goal here is to be able to recover enough of the initial capital in order to re-invest in upgrading your workstations in 2 or 3 years. Otherwise, you get left behind with older and slower PCs that you’ll lose customers (esp. gamers) to nearby competitors that offer better ones for the same rates.

The major driving force with my decision to going into the internet cafe business is different though. What I am looking into are parallel businesses that I can put on top of the net cafe business without incurring additional or too much overhead.

That way, all I need is for the revenues of the net cafe to at least cover rent, bills and wages. Whatever profits I am expecting will come from other side businesses.

What are possible side businesses that one can add on top of an internet cafe? Well, some of them are already being offered in most shops:

• Gaming cards for pay-for-play games (Level-Up, e-Games).
• Cellphone reloading for Smart, Globe and Sun Cellular.
• Photocopying, printing, scanning and CD/DVD burning services.
• Food and drinks.
• Photo-ID and photo printing.
• Custom cellphone uploads (ringtones, wallpapers, games, apps).

You can also offer outsourced services:

• Computer sales and repair services.
• Encoding/typing services.
• Digital Photo services (better than webcam quality Friendster photos).
• Card Design/Printing (calling cards, invites, certificates, custom greeting cards, etc.)
• Video conversion/authoring.
• Cellphone and electronics repair services.

If you add revenues from all these sources, they could be a significant amount on the returns. Of course, you only select the ones that your manpower can handle and your location. The rest can be outsourced. The ideas here are more applicable if you’re located in subdivisions or villages. You can look into totally unrelated combinations too — like a laundry shop and a net cafe, a video rental, a used book store, a car wash service or a 24-hour grocery.

The idea is to share the burden on the rent and bills which usually takes up majority of the operational costs.

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The team, composed of graduates from Ateneo, UP and La Salle, conceptualized then created the prototype in a span of four months — an LCD TV that’s powered by a personal computer produced from spare parts and locally available electronic devices.

The current prototype runs on a stripped-down Ubuntu powered by an old Celeron processor. The team plans to further enhance the UI and hopefully include an Intel Atom processor once it goes into final design and full production. As it is, the iTV should be able to play music, movies, photos and surf the internet.

In a way, you can say that Inovent, the company behind this iTV, wants to redesign your living room and re-invent the regular media center set up — no more Apple TVs, SlingBox or Popcorn Hour. Since the Ilumina will have a built-in hard drive, you can download all the media you want and store it on the TV for playback later.

They didn’t say how much this will be priced but they promise it will be in the 5 digits (below 100k) for a 32-inch Ilumina (32″ LCD TVs right now cost around Php50k).

The final product should look like this once it goes out into the market by 2009.

Since the platform is open source, the team can develop and release an API so third-party developers can contribute and extend the Ilumina’s feature and functionalities.

For now, the team is seeking some venture capitalist to partner and push the development and manufacturing stage as soon as possible.

You can Digg this Story to help promote them.

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The big giants in the tech industry are seeing their stock prices plummet to record lows in the last 30 days. That, despite the fact that most of them are actually doing good in the market with positive sales growth.

For those who are into this for the long haul, buying of stocks at this time would be like going to a factory sale. Here’s my top 5 pick for tech stocks.

• Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) at $104. It had a 52-week high of just under $203 and has been hanging around $175+ in the last 3 months. That’s at least a 40% discount for a very successful company with a lot of spare cash from sales of their new iPhone 3G.
• Nokia (NYSE:NOK) at $18. This is one of the lowest share prices Nokia has ever been in the last year and it has seen its value close to $38 this year. You may be looking at a 36% discount for the #1 handset company in the world.
• Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) at $406. Google stocks saw a high of $747 in the last 52 weeks but has been hovering over $550 three months ago. At $406, buyers could get a nice discount of at least 26%.
• Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) at $16.50. Plunging from a high of $25.50 to a just over $16 in the last 45 days is a huge drop. It’s still a strong company with solid market share for desktop PC in the US plus a server line that’s still growing. The current stock value gets you about 35% discount.
• Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) at $17.80. Like Dell, Intel was hovering around $24.50 just 45 days ago. At $17.80, you’re looking at a 35% discount too.

Once all these crisis pans out, most of the stock prices will go back to their normal levels. If I could, I’d be buying me some NOK, APPL and INTC stocks and wait it out. GOOG may still be too price though but my best bet is on NOK and INTC.

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One of the more useful features of Paypal is the subscription or recurring payments which automatically bill people on a regular basis. This feature wasn’t available for Philippine Paypal accounts until recently.

As the Philippines is an emerging market, there’s huge potential here that’s why Paypal have been diligently pushing their services in the country. Below is a quick run down of the issues we talked about:

• Size of the market. Only about 1 million Filipinos have credit cards in the Philippines. That’s less than 2% of the total population. There’s a huge gap that Paypal wants to fill in. Their primary goal is to tap the merchants to offer Paypal payments as an alternative to credit cards.
• The Subscription & Recurring Payments. A month or two ago, this feature wasn’t available for Philippine Paypal users (my US Paypal account had it). It was a feature I really wanted so I don’t have to send billing requests for my advertisers every end of the month. This can be access via the Merchant Tools tab inside your Paypal account.
• Paypal Plus Credit Card by Mastercard. I was told this is only available if you have a Paypal account in the US, Australia or UK. This is only offered to highly saturated markets where credit card penetration and total market volume is very high.
• Withdrawal Limits. There are no withdrawal limits when you withdraw thru your bank but there’s a $500 maximum limit when you withdraw via credit card. The credit card limit is a security measure against potential credit card fraud.
• Additional Bank Fees. We’re already familiar on how much Paypal charges for withdrawal transactions (EFT). That’s $5 for each credit card withdrawal and Php50 for bank withdrawals less than Php7,000. Beyond that, Paypal has no control whatsoever and it looks like banks also add charges for these EFTs which is usually Php200. We’re not sure if these are clearing charges or bank wire charges.
• Effective Foreign Exchange Rates. It’s pretty obvious that when doing withdrawals the existing FOREX rates are below the current rates. That’s actually a 2% exchange rate fee — this is where the banks make money off of dealing with Paypal.
• Local Currency. I’ve heard some people were interested to have a Peso Paypal currency in their account. Philippine Paypal accounts are still in US Dollars. There are a ton of paperworks and requirements that are needed to be done in order to do this.
• Philippine Paypal Office. They have people working off of their Hong Kong office. A Philippine office is still nowhere in sight as there’s no immediate need for it now.

The number of Paypal users in the Philippines has grown a lot since Paypal offered bank withdrawals but they cannot comment on the exact number as corporate policy. We talked about several other things that I can’t share publicly though. Still, it’s nice to learn Paypal has its eyes focused on the Philippine market.

Update: I have two Paypal accounts. One 5-year old US Paypal and a 2-year old Philippine account. Comments below indicate that the Subscription fetaure has been there for months already though mine did not show it until recently (I compared the Philippine account and the US account).

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Yes, people coming in to work in a 24/7 service company just to type in CATPCHAs. And to those who are unfamiliar with CAPTCHA’s — they are those images with twisted alpha-numeric characters you need to figure out to complete a registration or open an account on sites like MySpace, GMail, Yahoo! Mail, YouTube, Facebook and even ordinary forums, message boards, blogs and comment systems.

In the world of Business Process Outsourcing, the one that can deliver the fastest, most efficient and cheapest service gets the deal.

In India, they have small to medium businesses that service international clients with their CAPTCHA-solving needs. Each worker/employee can solve up to 800 CAPTCHAs per hour. Clients pay between $1 to $4 per 1,000 successful CAPTCHAs solve.

So, when are we going to have something like this in the Philippines? *heh*

Read more about the story at ZDNet.

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I said I can bring my laptop and use the built-in webcam to do a YM video conference. I hooked up my phone to Smart 3G and connect it to my laptop via bluetooth and started.

So there we were, moving the laptop around to broadcast the video taken from the webcam while other relatives huddle around to talk to the other party in the US.

I thought this was cool and wondered why chapels haven’t thought of this yet.

Apparently, there’s already one doing this — the St. Peter Life Plan and Chapels have been offering live webcam broadcasts on most of their chapels nationwide.

The e-Burial Online Viewing service provides multiple webcams to St. Peter Memorial Chapels from Quezon City to Bacolod, Cebu, Iloilo, Ormoc, Tacloban, Tagbilaran, down to Butuan, Digos, and General Santos.

Clients are given an account so they can login to the site and view the webcams online.

{hat tip: tech soulja}

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Five years ago, the prospects were better; way better. I myself was thinking of opening up one back then. My excitement was immediately doused after doing the math.

Just like any other brick and mortar businesses, there are so many extraneous factors that’ll affect your likelihood of success in the internet cafe industry:

• Location. Pick a good spot and you’ll hit a gold mine. Pick the wrong one and kiss your money goodbye.
• Competition. Most business-minded people think of competition as a race to charge the lowest prices in order to win customers. While it’s good for the customers, exceeding the lower boundaries can drive you and your competitors to bankruptcy. One cannot expect to recover a Php500,000 investment if hourly rentals go down to as low as Php10. It goes without saying that in this industry, there are no customer loyalty; just cheaper rentals.
• Quality/Consistency of Broadband Connectivity. For places that don’t have many options for bandwidth providers, this could spell trouble if your only source of connectivity conks out more frequently than you get brown-outs in your area. A backup DSL might be a good solution but many consider the extra cost to be not worth it.
• Software Licensing. Many people who go into the net cafe business don’t factor in the cost of software licensing in their capital. Either they think they can get away with a few pirated copies or go open-source full-time. Still, there’s the class of ever-popular network games like Starcraft, WoW and CS which cost an arm and a leg to get a per-PC license. Maybe that’s why MMPORG pay-to-play model is more popular in this side of the globe.
• Expected ROI. While previous half-decade old records saw a return-of-investment in just over a year, lower rentals due to fierce competition and over-saturation of net cafes have driven the ROI further back to as long as 3 years (that’s if you’re lucky enough). To sustain a business that long and derive your income from that sole business could easily drain you of energy and personal savings.

There’s also the question of how many PC units should a net cafe operate in order to realize profit. A friend, who runs a net cafe for about 3 years now, says you need at least 15 units to survive and get decent income. Does that mean others operating below that number are doomed to fail in the long run?

However, the growth and expansion of Netopia’s franchise around the country says there’s still good money to be made from the internet cafe business. Does that mean people wanting to venture into that industry should look into franchising? What do you think — given the opportunity and capital, do you feel a net cafe business in the Philippines is still a lucrative one?

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The lecturer shared with me how he came up with the idea after attending MIT and thought it would be great to have the same in the state university. If I were still in college, I would have taken up this elective in a heart beat.

First, it exposes the students to the basics of entrepreneurship especially that the class is offered to engineering and computer science students. A scientific mind coupled with good business acumen can prepare graduates to explore the possibility of venturing in a tech start-up right after college.

Second, students are presented with real-world challenges that are up to date and listen from various resource persons in the industry to get a clearer picture of the market.

Technology and the internet helps level the playing field and if that is inculcated to the students earlier on, they are better equipped to face the real world after graduation. Did you ever had that realization that you spent 4 years in college but only used 10% of what you actually learned after leaving school? I think most university curriculum are outdated. (maybe it’s just me since my course then was still experimental stage…) Before I forget, the last time I stepped inside a classroom as a student was 8 years ago.

We need to have more of these kind of electives in school. It’s one way to nurture future technopreneurs make the Silicon Valley in the Philippines a reality.

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I made two 500-dollar withdrawals direct to my HSBC credit card on January 24 and February 12, 2008. The bank exchange rates for those dates are Php41.16 and Php40.77, respectively. The exchange rate that appeared on my CC bill were Php40.42 and Php39.88, respectively. That’s an average of Php0.815 difference for the two transactions.

Note: When withdrawing Paypal funds to a credit card, it will not appear as Paypal Withdrawal in the merchant description as Paypal says it should. Instead, you will see your complete name with ID Code 4029357733 coming from country code LU (Luxemburg).

So, we can now compare both transactions via direct bank deposit or credit card:

Paypal to Bank Deposit: Php0.90 difference + Php200 (Bank Remittance Fee*)

Paypal to Credit Card: Php0.815 difference + $5 (Paypal Withdrawal Fee)

My guess is that the difference in the exchange rates between the bank and the credit card companies are mostly attributed to the fact that they are separate banking entities. Another test to the same bank and credit card company will prove this.

In essence, the only valid comparison between the two is the Paypal Fee and the Bank Remittance Fee which is almost the same amount also. Looks like there’s no significant difference between the two after all (unless you’re withdrawing thousands of dollars at a time).

On a related note, the lower exchange rates and additional banks fees doesn’t really make a big difference when receiving funds via Xoom, as I previously outlined before here.

*The bank remittance fee seems variable and depends on your bank. However, various feedback pegs the amount to Php200, at least for BDO, BPI, Chinabank and Metrobank.

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This reminds me of my discussions with the guys who ran Pinoy Web 2.0 about a couple of years ago and the ensuing discussions on whether ad-driven local Web 2.0 sites will actually work.

The idea of having a Silicon Valley in the Philippines may have been dreamt way longer than that I think. I even thought that in the early 2000’s, we had it going — Andersen Consulting became Accenture and grew rapidly (with most of the consultants are based in the Philippines), Canon Philippines has tons of hard-core Filipino hardware programmers (still is until now), Trend Micro and its pool of geeky Filipino anti-virus engineers and Intel Philippines doing research on flash technology locally.

Instead, the Philippine Government focused on a related but more lucrative, higher job hiring industry — the call centers. And true enough, Bangalore aside, Makati City can be called the BPO Silicon Valley of the Philippines.

But why did we really lost track of the more nerdy industry? Intel moving its plant to China and selling its Flash Plant, Accenture employees being constantly hawked by its foreign clients, and top Filipino SAP and .NET developers flying off to Singapore in droves. Oh yes, we’ve practically exhausted most of the real-world reasons in our discussion over Google going for a Malaysian Data Center and totally ignoring the Philippines on their list.

On the other hand, the other end of the spectrum for a Silicon Valley mindset is an independent entrepreneurial inspiration. These are the people who have great ideas needing VC support. If there’s a minuscule chance we can revive that enthusiasm among Filipinos then that’s the ticket.

• Get the right people who have the bright ideas and the necessary skills and match them with a VC or an Angel.
• Change people’s mind-set on the existing business models — the Advertising Model is already diluted and the local market is still small to even accommodate more players (not to mention Friendster and Multiply inventories alone can eat up all CPM budgets).
• Avoid the usual pitfalls — leveraging your business model from someone else’s business. Sometimes it’s ok, especially if you can grab a multi-year lock-in deal. This is what happened to over half of the content providers (CPs) during the upstart of the SMS boom. Now, most of them have closed shop (after exclusive contracts have expired) or the telcos themselves got too greedy and bought out the players.
• Get them started at school. The younger crowd are more ambitious, have fresh skills and are not that too excited to join the corporate world. The idea of a start-up is more enticing to them.
• Avoid the “me-too” mentality. Not all hip and hot stuff that the real Silicon Valley spits out will be as hot in our own climate. Let’s play on our own strengths and creativity but bear in mind the culture-factor. Ideas need not be “eureka moments”, oftentimes these are simple ideas that meet an undiscovered market demands.

Need to get my ass back and revive that “What happened to …” series of mine.

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Here are some of the things you’ll need to know about Ikobo Money Transfer service:

• The Visa Debit card is for electronic use only. It may be used on any merchant that accepts Visa.
• You get the Ikobo Visa prepaid card the first time you receive money. Subsequent remittances goes thru there. You can withdraw money form any ATM machine that has the Cirrus logo.
• Your 4-digit PIN will be sent to you separately, in an email. You will then need to call their toll-free number to activate your card before you can withdraw money from your ATM.
• You can check your balance and transaction history online at www.ikobo.com.
• Transaction charges are as follows — ATM Balance Inquiry: Free; POS Purchase: Free; Monthly Maintenance Fee: $0.99; ATM Withdrawal: $1.99 and Declined ATM Withdrawal: $0.99

The only other service I know that used a debit card tied up to your account is Paypal. And though Ikobo’s ATM prepaid card has some attached charges, it sure is very convenient to be able to gain access to your account anywhere there’s a Visa/Cirrus ATM around.

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This feature was only previously available with US-based bank accounts. This is now possible for Paypal members in Indonesia and the Philippines on top of the existing methods (credit card, debit card or prepaid cards).

For Indonesian users, withdrawals of IDR1.5 Million (Indonesian Rupiah) or more are free. For withdrawal amounts of less than IDR1.5 Million, there will be a fee of IDR16,000. For Philippine users, withdrawals of Php7,000 or more are free. For withdrawal amounts less than Php7,000 there will be a fee of Php50. If you still have a US-based Paypal account, withdrawals to a US-based bank will incur a $5 fee.

The “almost complete” feature was delivered by the eBay subsidiary in the Philippines (including neighboring ASEAN countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia) in just a span of 4 months after it originally made the news last September 2007. The only other lacking feature is being able to fund your Paypal account with your local bank account. Otherwise, this development has finally concluded the expansion of Paypal in these parts of the region.

I’ve dispatched an email to the reps of eBay/Paypal for South East Asia with additional questions. I am actually more interested in how this speedy development has got to do with eBay Philippines and its apparent migration to the subscription model.

Update: Here’s a copy of the official Paypal Press Release sent to me today:

Philippines, 28 Jan 2008 – PayPal, an eBay company, announced today a new bank withdrawal feature that enables registered PayPal users in the Philippines to withdraw money from their PayPal account directly to a Philippines bank account.
This new feature allows Philippine sellers to gain fast and convenient access to their funds and makes doing business on eBay and globally even easier.

“We are constantly looking for ways to improve the user experience for PayPal members and are excited to offer this new bank withdrawal feature which we believe will provide greater convenience for Philippine sellers,” said Sandeep Lal, Vice President of PayPal International.

The new withdrawal method is in addition to the existing withdrawal options to a Visa® debit card, credit card, prepaid card, or US bank account. A complete list of withdrawal options can be viewed here.

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Here are some early signs:

• Yahoo! has been rumored to lay off hundreds of employees in order to increase profitability, prop up its deflated stock price and narrow the focus of its sprawling Internet portal to a smaller number of crucial areas, according to the New York Times.
• Motorola had a 33% decrease at the end of 2007 compared to 2006, and the segment incurred an operating loss of $1.2 billion. They axed their CEO Ed Zander late November last year.
• Apple’s stocks turned sour after reporting the holiday quarter earnings. Analysts say they didn’t sell as much iPods in the US compared to the same quarter the year before. International sales helped the numbers up to a plateau. They must have overshot the hype. The big question — can the iTouch revive iPod sales?
• There’s the eBay Shuffle too. Long-time eBay CEO Meg Whitman will be replaced by John Donahoe. The Skype purchase didn’t pan out well.
• The big shocker of all is Silicon Valley Superstar Google showing a drop of over 160 points since January 1 this year. That’s from a 52-week high of $747.24 to a low of $561.20 this month alone. John Battelle wonders how this huge drop could affect the Google culture. John Chow speculates part of the trouble happened when Google shrinked their ad clickable areas. Huge publishers like Markus Frind (Plenty of Fish) saw up to 60% drop in CTR.

How does this relate to us small time publishers? Well, since majority of bloggers/publishers rely on Google AdSense, this could bring in more shift in the policy of the program. Remember the belt-tightening with AdSense Referrals?

John adds that if bigtime publishers like Markus Frind are losing money from AdSense, Google itself is also losing ad money since it gets a cut from the publishers. Likewise, since Google does not reveal the percentage of that split to publishers they can change that percentage to their favor and not tell anyone about it.

Analysts are waiting for Microsoft and Nokia to reveal their last quarterly earnings this week to see if it all adds up.

Update: Nokia earnings report are positive. There’s still hope for Apple to sell more iPhones worldwide. Another question is — will iPhone sales growth just offset the iPod’s decline?

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Check out the November 2007 issue of the Entrepreneur.

An old friend bought a copy the other day when he saw my name in it. And no, it’s not about the web hosting business we entered into (separately) almost 5 years ago. Still, that’s an article away. *heh*

The article, entitled “Blogging your way to the Bank” is on page 44-45 and features me, Jayvee and Kevin. Nothing new. Just the same usual questions.

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The OMB Raiding Group has really created a strong impression of the agency since the installation of Edu Manzano, its erstwhile head.

In 2006 alone, they’ve done close to 1,000 inspections, over 1.5 Million pirated optical disks with an estimated worth of Php202,569,400. They’ve also confiscated over 258 Million worth of pirated CDs in the first 4 months of 2007. Vigilance of regular citizens reporting stalls and shops peddling pirated CDs also helped the agency do their job more effectively.

With such accomplishments comes criticisms. The unfair confiscations of DVD or CD Writers in Internet Cafe shops is one of them. The reason behind it is that the presence of these recording devices in the shops potentially opens it to illegal copying of copyrighted materials.

According to my friend “a Level Up delivery guy (of game posters) told him to hide DVD Writers and other recording devices”. This tip came from one of the managers from Netopia. Although, there have been no incident that directly verifies this, my friend and all other net cafe owners in his area are now careful than ever.

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When I opened up my first dollar savings account about 3 years ago, I bought a sizable amount of the green bucks at Php56.40. Today, the peso-dollar exchange rate stands at Php43.27. That’s a net loss of Php13.13 for every dollar that I have in the bank. That loss closely amounts to a brand new car or a down payment for a house and lot. And I thought going with a dollar savings was the best fiscal move I made in years.

Other int’l probloggers like Darren Rowse and John Chow were also affected since the Australian and Canadian dollars were much stronger against the US green bucks. I reckon this is also true with the rest around the globe.

As expected friends and relatives remitting dollars from the US are also having the same sentiments over the weak dollar. And it will continue to roll down as December approaches.

So the question stands, is it time to dump the dollar? or should we wait it out until after the 2008 US Presidential Elections? Your guess is as good as mine.

My fiscal strategy – stick it out with the dollar. Make do with whatever peso-denominated earnings and pay int’l bills in dollars.

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