ICT

MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines dropped four places in terms of its overall innovation performance in a global survey amid lack of policies to encourage innovation and low spending for education and research.

MANILA, Philippines – With over 9 million registered Twitter users, the Philippines ranks 10th highest in worldwide ratings on the most number of users of the microblogging site.

MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines ranked 10th in the world in terms of the number of registered users of microblogging site Twitter, a study conducted by Paris-based social media monior Semiocast showed. Semiocast said the number of Twitter accounts have reached half a billion as of June 2012, with the US leading in terms of…

Manila, Philippines – A bill seeking to provide equal opportunities to adults and out-of-school youth of high school age to avail of free high school education through distance learning was approved yesterday on third and final reading at the House of Representatives.

MANILA, Philippines – The local information and communications technology (ICT) industry is expected to contribute as much as $50 billion in annual direct revenues to the economy by 2016, a government official said.

I RECENTLY needed to scan and post a book excerpt for a class I teach but wanted the pages to be available as text, not images. That meant using optical character recognition or OCR software that can translate scanned pages from my book to machine-encoded text.

Ericsson Group’s consumer research arm Ericsson ConsumerLab has identified consumer trends for 2012 and beyond, highlighting connectivity becoming as essential as roads and electricity, that social media are redefining news reporting, and that anyone can now be a service provider.

The outlook for IT spending this year isn’t quite as rosy as Gartner previously predicted. Spending on IT products and services is expected to reach $3.8 trillion in 2012, a 3.7 percent rise from last year when spending totaled $3.7 trillion and had climbed by 6.9 percent from 2010.

Filipinos spent an average of 8.7 hours visiting social networking sites in October 2011, landing the Philippines on the sixth spot in the list of social networking countries as reported by research firm comScore.

MANILA, Philippines – A coalition of anti-child abuse groups and the Department of Social Welfare and Development launched yesterday an information campaign via social media sites in a bid to bring the battle against all forms of child abuse to cyberspace.

None of PH companies surveyed have active corporate blogs or video-sharing services MANILA, Philippines – Like many of their Asian counterparts, businesses in the Philippines have been slow in integrating the social media into their operations, a survey by public-relations firm Burson-Marsteller (SEA) Pte Ltd. showed.

DEVELOPING ECONOMIES are slowly growing their share of intellectual assets as multinational firms and increased public spending drive up patent filings and research, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reported last week.

MANILA, Philippines – Mobile Internet usage in the Philippines is growing rapidly on the back of the rising popularity of smartphones, tablets and other non-computer Web-enabled devices.

I would have to end this column with a rant. In the last five days, I have been largely difficult to reach because I lost my cell phone last week. I was issued a SIM card with my old number last Friday and was told that mobile services would be re-established within two hours. It…

Recruit hackers  — lawmaker WHILE the Commission on Audit (COA) can very well ensure that the government is not disadvantaged in all contracts it had entered into, state auditors still lack the technical expertise to effectively sniff out irregularities in national and local government contracts involving information and communications technology (ICT) projects.

THE government had lost at least P1.2 trillion to “high technology” corruption involving the underdelivery, incorrect implementation and non-implementation of various Information and Communication Technology (ICT) projects in almost all local governments nationwide.

PHILIPPINE Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) on Monday said it is building a network of WiFi zones in Metro Manila establishments to provide its subscribers unlimited Internet connection even outside their homes or offices.

MANILA, Philippines – Doubling the broadband speed for an economy increases gross domestic product (GDP) by 0.3 percent, a new report conducted jointly by Ericsson, Arthur D. Little and Chalmers University of Technology in 33 OECD countries revealed.

THE PHILIPPINES slipped a notch in a list of 66 economies ranked according to support they give information technology (IT) firms in a biennial survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit for Business Software Alliance.

MANILA, Philippines – Public school teachers provided with computer laptops and basic computer skills training are using it for administrative clerical tasks, but not to enhance their teaching in the classrooms.

MEDIA tablet sales will continue to experience strong growth through 2015 when sales are forecast to reach 326.3 million units. Apple’s iPad is projected to account for 73.4 percent of worldwide media tablet sales in 2011, down from 83 percent share in 2010.

MANILA, Philippines — Lives of Filipinos revolve around many forms of media and entertainment with television still remains at the top of the list although Internet has been continuously increasing, survey results showed.

“Indeed, as Asian digital communities – from Chennai to Chengdu to Cairns – increasingly spend time consuming information and dynamic content from online sources, we are witnessing a shift in magnitude in how companies need to plan and manage communications for the future. The possibilities are exciting”. – Bob Pickard, Asia-Pacific president and CEO, Burson-Marsteller…

MANILA, Philippines – IP E-Game Ventures Inc. (E-Games), online gaming subsidiary of publicly listed technology firm IPVG Corp., is targeting 1,000 internet cafes in the next 2 to 3 years.

MOBILE and fixed broadband service in Philippines remains a luxury for majority of Filipinos despite falling prices, according to Ovum.

People are only just starting to understand new technological trends such as virtualization and cloud computing, when along comes a phenomenon called “Big Data.”

A DEDICATED job matching Web site for local freelancers and small and medium-sized firms has been set up in a bid to take increased Internet usage by Filipinos.

There’s an angel watching over your child on the Internet. “Project Angel Net,” a 24/7 operation center and website aimed at fighting online sex predators and cyber bullies, was launched on Thursday by the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) of the Philippine National Police (PNP).

MANILA, Philippines – Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) Secretary Ramon Paje has tightened the ban on a number of social networking websites, including Facebook and YouTube, by ordering a software audit of all desktop and laptop computers connected to the department’s central office Internet server.

MANILA, Philippines – Sweden gets the top spot in a global study of “useful connectivity” that measured 50 countries in terms of infrastructure, complementary skills, software and informed use of information technology and communications for socio-economic growth.