Have anyone of you tried to purchase tickets from ticketworld online? I was excited at first that finally we have an online ticketing web service. But when I tried it, it is not working and there are a lot of bugs when you purchase reserve seats. I tried to pay for the tickets via my visa credit card, but the payment gateway gave an error. What a shame.

Inspiring story of our beloved Yuga Check it out –> The Blogging Gospel of Yuga

Just sharing a tip to start collecting your sachets

3 Sachets for FREE P2 Smart Buddy Pasaload

30 Sachets for FREE P30 Smart Buddy Load

50 Sachets for FREE P60 Smart Buddy Load

2000 Sachets for FREE Nokia 1600 Cellphone Kit (worth P3,200)

Start collecting your sachets! The promo runs until January

Winning Haircare Promo Mechanics

1. This promotion covers all new shampoo and conditioner 10mL and 12mL sachets of all variants of Head & Shoulders, Pantene, and Rejoice with the following representative artworks:



2. Sachets must be authentic, in good condition, and whole. Only sachets that meet these criteria will be accepted and are eligible for a prize.

3. The promotion period is from October 15, 2006 to January 31, 2007 and will run nationwide. Customers can redeem their prizes up to March 31, 2007 (or 60 days after the end of the promo).

4. Customers can collect any combination of sachets (either from the same brand or a mixture of the 3 brands) from H&S, Pantene, and Rejoice and exchange them for an instant prize or discount. Choices are limited to the prize matrix below:

5. To claim their instant prize or discount, customers can go to any of these redemption centers, at their respective business hours:

a. McDonald’s food prizes – All McDonald’s stores

b. David’s salon prizes – All David’s salon branches

c. Smart Load – Participating sari-sari stores, groceries, supermarkets, and Smart Wireless Centers

d. Smart Cellphones – participating Smart Wireless Centers

6. Customers must give the sachets to an authorized representative in the redemption center to claim his/her prize. Once the sachets are validated, the customer is given the corresponding prize. No sachets, no prize.

7. There is no limit to the number of times a customer can claim for an instant prize, as long as he/she submits the equivalent number of sachets.

8. Submitted sachets are not convertible to cash.

9. Prizes are not convertible to cash.

10. Employees of Procter & Gamble Phils., Hemisphere Leo Burnett, ARC Worldwide, WSI, McDonald’s, David’s Salon, Smart Communications, and their relatives up to the 3rd degree of consanguinity or affinity are disqualified from joining the promo.

11. Per DOH-BFAD Permit # 1176 Series of 2006.

Just got back from the Microsoft CIO summit, and I plan to share with you some of my thoughts on what Microsoft has in store for us.

Microsoft Vista (due to the delays) will be launched together with Office 2007 in February in the Philippines in the month of love. Globally, they are starting to launch it in November and with some launch parties already set in January. You could say that Microsoft already had a soft launch to all the CIO’s in the Philippines. These covers companies in the consumer goods industry, telecommunication, call centers, IT companies, and even government plus the academe. They provided a demo of the “killer” features of vista and office 2007.

Microsoft Vista

Honestly, being a mac convert of October last year, Microsoft is just catching up with some of the cooler features of Mac tiger. This would include MS Gadgets vs. Mac Widgets, cool translucent features, easy user interface similar to the mac layouts, and search capability that is now working in microsoft (finally). Vista just came ahead with some minor killer features that made me “WOW” like the Alt-Tab on steriods which a 3d visual cycling of your open applications. Also, the thumbnails are dynamic. If you run a video in full screen and decided to thumbnail it, you can still see the video running in the thumbnails.

Other than this, am I missing some thing else in Vista? Oh yes, there is a much cooler speech to text and voice command functionality which only works if you are in a quiet room.

Microsoft Office 2007

One of the noticeable change is the change from the tool bars concept to the ribbon concept which is suppose to be more user friendly and context sensitive. It was suppose to minimize the number of options and to provide an easy navigation structure. I think it is more complicated (hopefully only at the start), and if the ribbon concept works, then this is a step ahead that where mac applications are now.

For word, the microsoft manager was proud to show us that there is already a WYSIWYG real time changing of fonts, and other text properties. This is very helpful when you want to change a font and you don’t have to do a trial and error. It saves a lot of user time. I would say it is finally about time that they fix this waste of time functionality.

In Excel, they have a more cooler feature of already being able to highlight the cells with red, green, yellow highlights easily without doing a complicated formula. For those people who lives and breath excel, this is a good feature to have for your dashboarding needs.

In Powerpoint, the most noticeable feature is the cooler Smart Art functionality. It makes it very easy for the users to create organization charts or pyramid diagrams with one click of a button. I could say this is indeed cool (finally).

In summary, I’m glad Microsoft has finally fixed all the multimedia type functionalities of Microsoft in Vista and Office 2007. Is it worth the upgrade? Wearing my corporate hat, I don’t think there are significant productivity increases with Vista and Office 2007. Not unless, I’m missing something with the demo they provided. Personally, I’m a mac convert already and Vista is at best a catch up with the Mac tiger functionalities which have been there for a year or so. It would just be easy for Mac to leapfrog the functionalities of Vista in a few months time. But definitely, Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 is way much cooler than XP and your current office version. So if you are one of those early adopters, I can give you my beta copy

Anton

I’m blogging straight from the Microsoft CIO summit in Fort Ilocandia, Laoag City. This was my first time to attend the summit and I’m glad that Microsoft is stepping up in the development of the IT professionals in the Philippines.

The first day of the summit was a great networking session and started off with an Amazing quest (ala amazing race). In the span of 4 hours, the delegates went from Batac to Laoag City, to Pasiquin, and back to Fort Ilocandia. It was a fun race. We learned how to cook the famous empanada of Ilocos Norte and ride a provincial bus throughout the race! At night, the IT guys know how to party. There were team presentations that are very innovative which includes guys doing a hawaiian pamulinawen dance, to dwarfs dancing to the tune of an Ilokano song, and government officials in traditional filipino costumes dancing a pop dancing song.

The second day opened with a talk of Mckinsey consulting on the changing role of the IT manager. The traditional view of business on the role of the CIOs is that it is usually the senior IT leader in the organization. These days, the chief information officer of the organization are faced with four possible roles in the new information age. They could be one of the following roles: Head of Scale, Process Czar, a Chief Innovator or a Strategic Tech adviser. It was an eye opening challenge. Let me know if you are interested to know more about these new roles.

Lastly, another interesting thing that the microsoft guys are able to demonstrate was calling via WIFI. Yes, no need for a sim card! It uses a mobile phone that can communicate with voice over IP via a wifi connection. Imagine, if you can go to a free wifi connection, all your voice calls would be free. If I were a telco, I would be scared. Microsoft has a program called one follow me and tuloy/konek project in partnership with OWWA which leverages this technology.

That’s it for now. Let me know if you are interested to know more about the ongoing conference.

 Anton

My latest hobby these days. I’m not sure if you don’t get addicted watching these videos brought to you by Google Video. Stay tuned to google videos of the day to get your daily dose of laughter WARNING: you need a broadband connection to get faster buffering speed when watching the videos.

For bloggers/ website masters out there, check out this fun site assessment on how effective is your website. I’ve run a test on my blog and my overall score is 7.6 I failed in the accessibility design of my site, and I don’t understand how my site can be more attuned to the needs of the disabled. Can anybody explain this? Here is the summary report of what will you get:

This is a cached report of http://anton.blogs.com which was run on Monday 28th of November at 6:50pm.

• Marketing: How well marketed, and popular the website is: 8.8
• Design: How well designed and built the website is: 8.7
• Accessibility: How accessible the website is, particularly to those with disabilities: 6.8
• Experience: How satisfying the website is likely to be: 7.8
• Overall: Summary score for this website: 7.6

So what’s your silktide score, just for the benchmarking purpose? Here’s the link:

Riya is one of the promising photo search engine with a face recognition technology. The idea is if you upload > 1,000 or more photos, you can train it to recognize your face and tag the photo appropriately in the process. I was very much interested with the concept because as I upload most of my stuff in flickr, I had a hard time putting labels in each of the 200 photos/upload.

Finally they are on Alpha stage, the first release to the early adopters community with a lot of disclaimers about Riya being buggy, inconsistent and unstable. It would also be CPU intensive as you upload the first batch of photos. The killer disclaimer is that they may have to flush down all your photos when they go into beta. It is available only available on Firefox/ WinXP, so I’m not sure how do I upload my iphoto pics to this site.

After all this, I’m still willing to try it out because I’m a sucker for all these alpha sites that I believe would do well in the future. Will see. By the way, the alpha is by invitation only so sign up in the Riya homepage.

Technorati Tags: soalphaithurts

Andy Wibbels of easybake weblogs and Darren Rowse of problogger.net was successful in running a six weeks online class on Six Figure Blogging. The original online course which includes the six expert calls archived recordings, a library of resources, links and tools, notes and transcripts costs $325 (USD).

Finally, Andy and Darren have completed all the transcript for the calls and together with the audio recordings, will comprise the version 1.0 of the Six Figure Blogging self study version. If you are just starting with blogging and you want to jumpstart your learning, then this is for you. Otherwise, if you have been blogging for more than a year, you might have learn some of the topics already from blogs, other blog/ seo experts, and ebooks/ reading resources.

The final pricing for the self study version is still being decided and we will hear more from Andy and Darren starting next week. Hopefully it would be half or lower than the original live course.

UPDATE: The self-study course is available at a discounted rate of $245 until Dec. 2 (25% discounted rate).

Last Night, PLDT and SMART held their annual Pasasalamant Night 2005: An Affair in Red for all their corporate customers. I was excited to attend after missing it the last few years and I was expecting that it would be a party to remember. The party formula is simple: Great Bands + Great Food + All night raffle with a Ford Focus as the grand price It was held @ NBC Tent, the Fort and among the bands are Mocha, 8 Track, Route 70, Time and a Half, Freestyle and Geneva Cruz.

Overall, thank you to PLDT and SMART for a great night of open bar, great food even though I went home without any loot bag Aside from that, I can say that Globe still throws the best parties and exciting events in the Telecoms industry. I miss the time that PLDT/SMART use to own this equity in the industry… tough times I guess