There’s this three-year itch about the idea of having our own version of the Silicon Valley in the Philippines. Migs started the discussion just over 2 years ago and has been revived by Marie of Pinoy Web StartUp.
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.
Twitter: SavingisSexy
says:
I’d be thrilled to see a Silicon Valley or at least a collaboration of talented tech geeks in the Philippines. Amidst all the “buts” and limitations, it could still be possible through proper collaboration
The costs of starting up are now very much lower that many would think, Using Amazon EC2 services you can bring up a complete multi server hosting system, with CDN and data backup for less than $500 a month.
Whilst this is still high relatively, you can bring up a single server system for about $70, collaboration tools such as google apps for domains, google docs and project hosting services like unfuddle, base-camp etc all mean that for virtually nothing you can put the collaborative infrastructure for a project together for almost nothing, having engineers and product folks spread around the globe is now pretty common, skype and email takes the sting out of the cost of keeping co-ordinated.
magbigay muna kayo ng magandang idea, then pakita nyo theories ng ideas nyo, then magbigay kayo ng prototype. pag meron na kayo nun, sigurado maraming VCs or even big companies ang lalapit sa inyo. example of a good idea: a rechargeable battery charger using ambient sound as power source; or an IP core for fast data encryption and decryption using AES. ganyan ang mga ideas na dapat ibigay.
You know, there’s a lifetime of difference between an idea and its implementation.
Puro kayo problema.problema. Kaia nga matatalino kayo para magisip at gumawa ng paraan. Hindi lang puro salita. Puro Negative pa mga sinasabi niyo. E kung ganyan pala e. talagang wala na tayong pag-asa niyan.
I hope that it will change the filipino perception of having a job. Making a business is always at risk, at least they should try.
silicon valley – not a good company to desl with. they get awards for being good to customers, thats bull s***t. i bought a emachines and its still in the shop for manufactures defect. it was only after my wife went there to silicon valley sm that they decided to follow up.
lousy company and lousy acer
Twitter: viclogic
says:
Yes, we should have our own silicon valley in the Philippines to boost the IT and technology industry here. But of course it would be better if we can come up with our own Pinoy term for Silicon Valley, like … any idea?