About the Team
Abe Olandres (Yuga) is a netrepreneur in his mid-twenties and hails from the island-province of Guimaras. As one of the owners of Philippine web hosting start-up company plogHost, Abe has built his blogging success story as the chronicler of the Filipino blogosphere with his “The Philippines According to Blogs” and the Pinoy Top Blogs Project.
More famously known as “Yuga” in the local blogosphere, he has become a valuable resource person doing advocacy talks and trainings on blogging and podcasting both locally and on various Asian countries such as Taiwan, Pakistan and Indonesia.
As a professional blogger, Abe Olandres has successfully established several niche group blogs such as Pinoy Tech Blog, Pinoy Travel Blog and Pinoy Urban Blog. He is also one of the co-founders of the recently launched blog network, the Bayanihan Blog Network.
AnP works for the mother company of one of the world’s top 5 providers of servers and PCs. Since her expatriation in Germany, she has been on the look-out for the best (and cheapest) VoIP provider hoping that one day the “beam me up, Scottie!” technology would go beyond the drawing board of Gene Roddenberry. Her other online involvement reflects her passion in life. She is the founder of PINOYexpats, an ezine for Filipino Expatriates. She is also a professional blogger for Creative Weblogging’s Travel and Parenting sites. When everyone else is asleep and her eyes are still wide awake, she blogs over at Aboutweblogs’ Budget Travel Europe & SnowboardingMOM and at her personal site, Pinayexpat in Deutschland.
Migs Paraz founded one of the first Internet Providers back in 1995. Since then, he has been involved in the development of the Philippine Internet and telecoms, Linux and open source, and Enterprise Java Programming. His blog for Pinoy Tech Blog will be on the lighter side of consumer computing, Internet and telecoms services. Ironically, he is a gadget hater. Migs is the author behind Migz.Paraz.com.
Rain Contreras is based in Bulacan and holds a degree in Communication Research from UP Diliman. He started working in the IT field in 2001, the same year he set up his first weblog. Since then, his curiosity for news and updates on fringe web technologies for the end-user hasn’t stopped. Having recently taken up photography, he has also given eager attention to the latest in digital cameras. His other personal interests include vintage and toy cameras, indie music, and art-house cinema.
Jolo Santos is the voice behind avlack’s aesthetic exploration. He’s a serious coffee drinker, an art and design fog who likes the notion of approach & process but contradicts the stereotype. Jolo loves Lomo’s, iPod, Music and pizzas. After having his freelance side job track from an Avant-garde’s group and reading Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto, he’s now pursuing his passion as a Graphic / UI Designer at Eskwela and Xackup.
Karla Redor is a 20-something corporate slave living in hills of Paranaque. Usually seen in Glorietta drooling over the newest gadgets. Can also be spotted at TimeZone shooting hoops, playing Time Crisis or Daytona Racing. A former PS One addict. Certified caffeine junkie and trigger-happy (with the shutter of my digicam of course). Karla is the author behind RockersWorld.com.
Clair Ching, a 25 year old geekette. Clair has her own ThinkPad and literally uses it as a, well, thinkpad where she notes down her musings, short stories, poems and plans. Blog entry drafts are also very abundant in that thinkpad of hers. She has been using GNU/Linux since August last year and always has a penguin shaped CD case with various GNU/Linux distros (just in case someone would want to try them). She is hooked onto tagging and other such services online.
Marc Hil Macalua is Director of Development for one of the leading outsourced call center companies in the Philippines. When not busy with enterprise IT project management duties, he’s out there trying to help people earn a decent income online through his Internet marketing-focused blog, Macalua.com. Marc holds a B.S. in Communications Technology and a Minor in Marketing, both from the Ateneo de Manila University.
J. Angelo Racoma is a full-time professional blogger, freelance writer, tech evangelist and new media consultant. In his previous life, had served a lackey for the Philippine government (an economist) and thereafter a corporate drone for a leading Philippine IT firm. Angelo has also worked on several independent web development projects for government and private enterprises, and provided web content on a freelance basis.
One of Angelo’s latest advocacies is the PayPal for the Philippines campaign, which he envisions would help uplift the Philippine economy by helping open up and improve earning opportunities for netrepreneurs and online professionals like himself.
Angelo is married to educator Caren Marie Guevara, with whom he has two daughters, Sofia Bernice and Agatha Clarisse.
Oversimplistic will best describe Kates Gasis as a person. He dreams of hitting it bigtime on the web. He started his love affair with computers during his high school days using GW Basic for programming and Design CAD for 3D designs. He overstayed in De La Salle University before graduating AB Economics. He is now a freelance web designer/developer. His favorite pet is a python and is
now flushing caffeine out of his system.
Ka Edong is the person behind Technobiography, a blog about technology in daily life which garnered the award for “Most Informative Blog” at the Philippine Blog Awards. Sometimes known as “Edwin S. Soriano”, Ka Edong is an Electrical Engineer who seeks to develop technologies for the Filipino. He has done work in the fields of e-Learning and e-Governance. Some of his publications include the first definitive study of e-Government in the Philippines and an e-Primer on Information Infrastructure cirulcated in developing countries in the Asia-Pacific. By some twist of fate, his name was recently seen twice on Inq7.net Infotech: first as a featured blogger and second for his study on m-Commerce for microfinance. He is currently an ICT for Development consultant specializing in mobile commerce and other mobile applications and services. Ka Edong is … the Pinoy technologysiyosero!
Anton Diaz. His day job is an IT Manager for 10 years in a multinational consumer goods company. An aspiring photo-blogger and blogging for a year now in “Our Awesome Planet” (anton.blogs.com). He is passionate about discovering secret places in the Philippines, and his travel philosophy is to explore your own country first before exploring others.
Mike Abundo serves as Vice-President for Emerging Technologies of the Philippine Internet Commerce Society, identifying and analyzing nascent IT trends of potential benefit to the Filipino people. Mike’s personal blog is at mikeabundo.com.
Atty. Noel Oliver E. Punzalan (“Atty. Punzi” in the blogosphere) is a 10-year practicing lawyer and single father to two kids from Quezon City, Philippines. His Punzi’s Corner Blog first started out in December 2004 as a personal journal, his means of release and expression and as a means to practice his writing. Pretty soon, he discovered that he could not separate his professional life and his passion for gadgets and technology from his blog personality. Hence, these two facets have not only seeped into his Corner Blog, through his Blog-Lecture Series, but also in his contributions in Pinoy.Tech.Blog. His experience provides insights to technology in the context of the Philippine legal system.
Ian Dexter R. Marquez (iandexter) is a network janitor for the Philippine Rice Research Institute. He currently handles web plumbing for the Pinoy Farmers Internet, which provides web-based agricultural information, extension and elearning services to farmers and extension workers as part of the Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture. His main interest is in brewing ways of enabling agricultural extension through ICT. He also pimps open source and Linux to colleagues, friends, and just about anyone who’d care to listen. His rants and raves are over at Coredump.
Marc Javellana has worked as a Sr. Engineer/Developer in two leading multinational semiconductor companies. He is also the developer behind Davao City’s Free Online Classifieds , it’s sister site Davao Online Telephone Directory and just recently, the One Dog World Forums. He did this for the sheer “impulse of delight” that he experiences whilst coding.
