By Gregg Keizer
Computerworld (US)
June 29, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Just three days after adding crash protection to Firefox, Mozilla rushed out another release on Friday because people playing Farmville complained that their browser was shutting down the Facebook game.

Mozilla added what it calls “out of process plug-ins” (OOPP) — a feature designed to keep the browser up and running when a plug-in crashes — to Firefox 3.6.4, which shipped June 22.

If Adobe’s Flash Player, Apple’s QuickTime or Microsoft’s Silverlight crashes or is unresponsive for more than 10 seconds, Firefox 3.6.4 displays a message telling the user that the browser has killed the plug-in.

But the 10-second pause was too short.

“Following the release of Firefox 3.6.4 we heard from some users, mainly those using older computers, that they sometimes expect longer periods of non-responsiveness from plug-ins, especially with games,” said Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, in a post to the Mozilla blog Friday. “For these users, the default timeout of 10 seconds was too short.”

Mozilla addressed the issue by bumping up the wait-to-terminate period to 45 seconds in Firefox 3.6.6, which launched June 25.

According to messages on Bugzilla, Mozilla’s bug-tracking database, the change was largely driven by gripes from users playing the popular Web-based Farmville game. Farmville is a Flash-based game by San Francisco-based developer Zynga.

“Now that (Firefox) 3.6.4 has shipped, we are seeing an increasing number of reports that some users are unable to play Farmville, because Farmville hangs the browser long enough for our timeout to trigger and kill it,” said Mozilla developer Justin Dolske in a Bugzilla entry Friday night. “Let’s hit this with a big hammer and make it 45 (seconds).”

Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s head of engineering, agreed. “There’s a massive regression in user experience for a meaningful number of users of an extremely popular property, and that a raised timeout remedies it,” said Shaver in a follow-up Bugzilla message. “For now we need to get out of a bad hole before it gets any worse.”

Although complaints about Firefox’s quick killing of hung plug-ins were not limited to Farmville, that game was the squeaky wheel that got the update grease.

“A lot of people play Farmville. To ignore those people for any length of time could have a significant effect on Firefox’s share of browser users,” said Firefox user Jeff Rivett on Bugzilla Sunday. “The problem already existed, but the perceived impact suddenly changed, giving it a much higher priority.”

Users can update to Firefox 3.6.6 by downloading the new edition or by selecting “Check for Updates” from the Help menu in the browser.

Another solution, suggested Mozilla, is to completely disable OOPP. A support document spells out the steps users must take to kill crash protection.

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By Emmanuel Amador
Computerworld Philippines
June 28, 2010

The University of Cebu (UC) and IBM Philippines launched a partnership called the “Earn As You Learn” (EAYL) Program in simple ceremonies at the school’s Banilad campus in Cebu City last June 22.

The first of its kind in the Philippines, the UC-IBM partnership is based on a successful collaboration between IBM and the University of Ballarat in Australia. The EAYL program consists of a new undergraduate course that combines a specialized curriculum with real-world experience in a professional IT environment. The EAYL is incorporated into UC’s eight-semester degree program, Bachelor of Science in Information Technology - Professional Practice.

IBM worked with UC to design the new course, recommending subjects to supplement the curriculum. IBM training material on topics such as business conduct, data security and privacy, database management, data analytics, and software quality assurance will also be provided. IBM subject matter experts will lecture on special topics and conduct continuous training for UC faculty.

“We are excited to work with one of the giants in the IT industry,” said Ms. Candice Gotianuy, UC Chancellor. “When IBM approached us and inquired if we were interested, we didn’t just say yes, we asked ‘when?’”

The EAYL officially began at the start of the 2010-2011 school year last June 15 with 16 scholars. The scholars were formally accepted into the program at the launch event, which was attended by the scholars’ parents’, top IBM executives, school and city government officials, and the media.

This is something exciting for both the university an the students,” said Dr. Ofelia Maña, UC - Banilad Campus Director. “If we provide our students with the right IT skill set and relevant work experience, we help ensure a healthy pipeline of competent IT graduates for the future,” she added.

GEOGRAPHIC EXPANSION

The partnership with UC is part of IBM Philippines’ geographic expansion efforts to reach new markets and transfer technology beyond its traditional Metro Manila client base. “Global demand for IT is growing is growing now more than ever. It spurs economic growth across all industries and economies. This collaboration will help address issues that collectively impact the IT industry,” said Mr. James Velasquez, President and Country General Manager of IBM Philippines. “It will help bridge gaps and address the shortage of competent IT professionals in Cebu City.”

Velasquez further explained that what would attract further investment from large players such as IBM would be a city’s openness to innovation, responsiveness to the demands of industry, and cooperation from the local government.

The launch was also attended by outgoing Cebu City Mayor and Congressman-elect Tomas Osmeña, who expressed appreciation for the new and timely training opportunities brought about by the EAYL program. Osmeña noted that for the first time, Cebu was not facing a shortage of jobs but instead a surplus of job openings particularly in the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) industry without qualified candidates to fill them.

“We can’t keep on doing the same old routine of just cranking out graduates without a clear idea of where they will be going,” Osmeña said. He added that he was confident the new local administration of Cebu City would work with the private sector to train competent graduates who can qualify for high-paying jobs.

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By Gregg Keizer
Computerworld (US)
June 21, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Apple’s iPad may soon put a stake in the heart of netbooks, research analysts said this week.

The momentum is rapidly shifting from netbooks to tablets, said experts at Forrester Research and DisplaySearch in notes issued today and last Tuesday, respectively. And Apple’s iPad is leading the charge.

Although only about 3.5 million tablets will be sold this year, by 2012 the form factor will outsell netbooks, according to Forrester’s projections. By 2015, more consumers will be using slates like Apple’s iPads than use the diminutive, traditional clamshell-style netbook PCs.

“Tablet growth will come at the expense of netbooks, which have a similar grab-and-go media consumption and Web browsing use case as tablets but don’t synchronize data across services like the iPad does,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, a Forrester analyst, in a statement Thursday. “Consumers didn’t ask for tablets…, but Apple is successfully teaching consumers to want this new device.”

Within five years, tablets will account for 23% of all PC sales — Forrester classifies devices like the iPad as personal computers, even though Apple CEO Steve Jobs does not — Epps added.

DisplaySearch’s shorter-term estimates on the iPad-versus-netbook battle were even more aggressive. According to the Santa Clara, Calif.-based firm, Apple’s iPad accounted for about 6.5% of the netbook-tablet combined sales of 10.3 million units in the first quarter of this year.

But for the current quarter — which ends June 30 — DisplaySearch said the iPad would grab approximately 30% of the total netbook and slate sales of 9.7 million.

John Jacobs, DisplaySearch’s director of notebook market research, put the iPad’s grab into perspective.

“The last quarter of 2007 heralded the birth of the netbook [and] Q1 2010 signaled the birth of the slate PC, and possibly by extension, the beginning of the end of the netbook,” he said in a research note posted to the company’s site.

Apple’s iPad has the tablet market to itself at the moment, but Jacobs doesn’t think that would last. “Apple has ported their successful iPhone app business model to the iPad, [but] Android-based phones followed in their footsteps and will surely do the same with slates,” he said, referring to the wave of Android-based tablets that were launched or previewed two weeks ago at the Computex trade show in Taiwan.

“In the second half of the year, as additional slates are launched, the clamshell-style netbook could continue to lose share,” Jacobs added in the research note.

Two weeks ago, Apple said it had sold 2 million iPads in the first two months of availability, a figure that put the tablet’s sales on a 7.6 million unit pace for the year.

One Wall Street analyst believes that Apple will do considerably better than that.

“Due to better than expected demand trends, we are raising our iPad units to 2.5 million in [the quarter ending] June 2010, 10 million in [calendar year] 2010 and 17 million in 2011,” said Brian Marshall of BroadPoint AmTech in a note to investors on June 1.

By Marshall’s forecast — and using DisplaySearch’s estimate of 9.7 million netbooks and tablets sold in the second quarter — the iPad will account for almost 26% of the combined netbook-tablet market, slightly less than DisplaySearch’s prediction.

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By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
September 11, 2009

The IT Association of the Philippines (ITAP) recently sought the help of the Optical Media Board (OMB) for the tariff charges imposed by the Bureau of Customs (BoC) on the shipments of software CDs of PC products.

In a meeting on Wednesday, ITAP members led by its president Victoria “Vicky” Agorrilla, who also sits as country general manager of Lenovo Philippines, told OMB chairman Edu Manzano that tariffs and taxes worth by the millions have been charged by BoC for the shipment of software CDs of PC products.

Agorrilla said the BoC would even hold software CDs that would arrive in the country following the delivery of PCs where they are intended for.

“Usually, PC products have software products also. But sometimes the shipment of CDs come in later and the BoC would charge tariffs. The CDs are actually part of the business purchases of PCs before,” Agorrilla said.

Manzano attended ITAP’s 4th general membership meeting in Makati City last Wednesday as its guest speaker, where he talked about OMB policies and updates. He was accompanied by OMB executive director lawyer Rosendo Meneses. OMB is the government’s arm for regulating the production of all optical discs in the country regardless of content.

Responding to ITAP’s appeal, Manzano advised the association to seek an alliance with OMB in order to clear CD shipment issues with BoC. The move is expected to iron out process on the shipment of PC software CDs, fast tracking their delivery and in getting rid of the tariff charges.

ITAP is a private non-profit association formed by popular product and service providers in the ICT industry such as Intel, Acer, IBM, Lenovo, EMC, Fujitsu, Microsoft, among others.

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By Computerworld Philippines Staff
August 24, 2009

Convergys Corp. announced that it is nearing its target of 20,000 employees this year 2009 and recently unveiled its latest contact center facility located in San Lazaro, Manila, which is the company’s 5th major site expansion in the Philippines since May 2008.

The company’s other new sites now include Cebu Asiatown i3, UP TechnoHub, Nuvali Evozone, and Glorietta 5. The latest one in San Lazaro can hold nearly 740 employees throughout approximately 47,000 square feet of workspace. It is located in an integrated leisure and business community near Manila’s University Belt.

Yet Convergys’ Glorietta 5 facility, situated among one of the largest shopping districts in the country and in the midst of the premier business district of Makati City, encompasses over 17,000 square meters and can hold about 2,700 employees.

Marife Zamora, vice president and country manager of Convergys Philippines, reported the company’s headcount in the country now tops 17,000, with 3,000 jobs added since the beginning of 2009.

“Convergys has reached a major milestone in its Philippines operations,” Zamora said. “With more than 17,000 individuals working for Convergys in the Philippines on behalf of our international array of blue chip clients, we are further distinguishing ourselves as the employer of choice. I celebrate the opening of this new (San Lazaro) facility with the thousands of devoted Convergys employees and look forward to reaching our goal of 20,000 employees in the Philippines at the end of this year.”

Andrea Ayers, president of Convergys’ customer management, said Convergys’ clients continue to demand the experience and expertise so manifestly present among its Filipino employees to drive their customer service operations.

“We have seen tremendous growth in the Philippines due to the support we receive from all levels of government and because of the quality and commitment of our employees,” she said.

Only recently, Convergys won the “Outstanding Exporter” and “Outstanding Employer” awards (Large Enterprise Category) at the 2009 Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) Investors’ Appreciation Day. The company likewise bagged the “BPO Employer of the Year” award at the 2009 International ICT Awards.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, in her recent state-of-the-nation-address (SONA), cited that the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry in the Philippines remains to be “resilient” with ongoing global economic crisis. She said the BPO phenomenon eloquently describes the Filipino’s competitiveness and productivity. – Tom S. Noda

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By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
August 11, 2009

Low price but unqualified. Though it submitted the lowest bid offer for the Commission on Elections’ (Comelec) P1.6 billion Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) project, Comelec rejected the proposal of the SAHI-Tiger IT consortium for failing to pass both of its technical and legal requirements.

In a press release, the Comelec’s Bids and Awards Committee (BAC) has declared the SAHI-Tiger IT (Strategic Alliance Holding Inc. – Tiger IT Bangladesh Ltd.) as “post-disqualified” for the poll body’s P1.6 billion project to “Cleanse the Voters’ List” or CVL for the 2013 elections.

Based on the Post-Evaluation Report submitted by the Technical Working Group (TWG) to BAC last Aug. 6, SAHI-Tiger IT failed to comply with the standards and requirements as set in the legal and technical specifications as required in the Bid Documents.

SAHI-Tiger IT underwent post evaluation screening last week after submitting the lowest bid offer of P1.2 billion, slightly lower than the P1.5-billion bid offer of its only competitor Unison Joint Venture (Joint Computer Systems Inc. and NEC of Japan).

According to TWG, SAHI-Tiger IT failed to comply with the requirement that the bidder’s Single Largest Contract (SLC) should be a contract similar to the nature and complexity to the contract to be bid.

“Tiger AFIS was only fully developed sometime in June 2009. The SLC that the Joint Venture of SAHI-Tiger IT submitted reveal that it was executed on November 2007, more than a year before Tiger IT was able to develop its own AFIS software,” the TWG said.

The TWG also found that many of SAHI-Tiger IT’s legal documents in the past were dubious.

“TWG noted that the Notary Public, a certain Atty. Maximo G. Alvarez, which certified and notarized many of SAHI-Tiger IT’s legal documents, including its Joint Venture Agreement, was found to be without authority to administer any oath, as ‘Atty. Alvarez’ is not a commissioned Notary Public,” the TWG reported.

With SAHI-Tiger IT’s disqualification, the BAC had asked Unison Joint Venture to deliver all the necessary requirements.

Comelec Spokesperson James Jimenez said the poll body’s CVL project has four components, which are: Validation of Existing Registration Records Using Biometrics and Data Capture System (P300 million); Online Data Submission and Synchronization System (P50 million); Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) Matching and AFIS Server Applications (P1 billion); and the Voter ID Cards Generation (P250 million).

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By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
July 27, 2009

“Let us have a department of ICT (DICT)!” was President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s clear command in her last state-of-the-nation address (SONA) on Monday to sustain and improve further the local BPO (business process outsourcing) and tourism sectors in the Philippines.

Speaking over a live nationwide TV broadcast at the House of Representatives, president Macapagal-Arroyo directly dedicated her message to congressmen, for the country to finally have a DICT. It is a development that has long been clamored for in the past seven years.

The president gave the order after stressing how the local BPO sector in the Philippines performed well against global recession. She said unlike the electronics industry, the BPO sector proved to be resilient with the ongoing global economic crisis.

“In the past if the electronics sector grew, today we’re creating wealth by developing the BPO and tourism sectors as additional engines of growth,” Macapagal-Arroyo said. “Electronics and other manufactured exports rise and fall with the state of the world economy but BPO remains resilient.”

She noted that with earnings of $6 billion and employment of 600,000 “the BPO phenomenon stays eloquently of our competitiveness and productivity.”

The president cited that from year 2008 to 2009, the Philippines remained to be “the only country among Asian economies that didn’t shrink.”

“According to Moody’s [Manual], our state of the nation is a strong economy,” Macapagal-Arroyo said.

She added her administration is the only one in Philippine history that invested three times more than any administration on technical and skills training, benefiting present professionals on the voice and non-voice BPO work such as medical transcriptionists.

The president also included in her SONA that her administration is now taking action on calls against telecommunications firms about the missing cellphone loads of subscribers.

“I am asking the national telecommunications commission to take action on calls against missing cellphone loads,” she said in Filipino.

However, the president expressed celebration with the 2010 automated poll project of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), which was legislated by congress almost 10 years ago in December 1997 through the enactment of Republic Act No. 8436 or the Election Modernization Act, authorizing Comelec for the first time to use an automated election system.

“The 2010 automated polls. We got it! Thank you Congress!” the president said.

Macapagal-Arroyo’s DICT request to congressmen signaled her approval for the transformation of the current Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) into a full-blown department, manifesting a command to congress to approve the pending DICT bills. CICT’s existence is only under the executive order (EO) of the president.

Senator Edgardo Angara, head of the Congressional Commission on Science and Technology and Engineering (COMSTE), said in past interviews that the conversion of CICT into a government department is a must in order to have “focus” on the issue of policy direction of related government agencies such as the Department of Science and technology (DOST), Telecommunications Office (Telof), National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), and National Computer Center (NCC).

CICT chairman Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua III, earlier denied that there would be a “bloating of the bureaucracy” once the commission becomes a department, saying there will just be a merger of existing agencies.

“We’re not even asking for an additional budget. But what we’re expecting is a synergy of the agencies to focus on areas that needed attention,” he said.

Roxas-Chua said another concern on why CICT needs to become a department is that the commission’s existence is fragile since it only relies under the president’s order or EO.

“We’re only under the president’s EO and the next administration can always dispose us anytime they want to,” he said, adding there is less than a year to go before the 2010 national elections.

He added CICT currently lacks people for its projects due to rationalization, and Telof with its 4,000 employees will certainly be a big boost in their manpower needs.

“The Telof with its 4,000 people also has regional offices, but due to the advancement of mobile technology their relevance is slowly decreasing,” Roxas-Chua said.

According to a recent study by Ovum, the creation of a DICT in the Philippines could rally the local ICT economy around a maximum of four capability areas such as medical and legal transcription, engineering, software-as-a-service (SaaS), including building businesses around open source technology.

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John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines

Business establishments have a new way of promoting their sites to technology-savvy users through Google Maps, a web application developed by search firm Google.

Developed as a partner application with Google Earth, Google Maps enables users to view road maps, landmarks and establishments in various areas around the world.

Recently, Google has unveiled a “Businesses” layer to the application to aid users in browsing nearby establishments and enabling business to input relevant data—such as name, address, business hours and contact numbers—about their establishments through Google’s Local Business Center.

While these services are currently limited to only a few countries, businesses in the Philippines can instead use Google’s Map Maker application which enables end-users to edit location and other relevant information on available maps.

Since Map Maker’s launch in October 2009, tens of thousands of edits have already been made on Philippine maps, enhancing the available information on the country’s geography. The Philippines currently ranks second in countries with the most edits on the application.

“We have seen an increase in Map Maker edits for the areas outside of the main cities which indicates the interest among Filipinos across the country to map out their local communities and contribute to this national effort,” said Derek Callow, marketing head, Google Southeast Asia.

Dwayne Dell Manuel, a 23-year old student who recently graduated from the National University of Singapore, is one of the top Map Maker contributors in the country. Manuel, along with three other contributors, was sent to the Google Map Maker User Conference in Bangalore, India, where they met with other contributors and developers.

“It was nice to know from the product development team that they are intensely interested in receiving user feedback and exchanging ideas to make Google Map Maker more useful and relevant for local users,” said Manuel. To date, Manuel has added around 7,000 edits to the application.

Users simply need a Google account to begin editing details on available maps and satellite images. Moderation by other users and trusted Google moderators keep data accurate and credible. Google Maps can also be downloaded to the iPhone and several other mobile platforms.

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