The Philippine Online Chronicles

Pinoy Student Project Hits Local Cable TV News

This just in and fresh from former  University of the Philippines Linux Users' Group president Rystraum Gamonez: UnPLUG's flagship project Halalan, the same software used by the Blogwatch-supported and UP-wide mock elections, gets a comprehensive look in the ABS-CBN News Channel this Friday, 7:00 p.m.

Halalan was the first Open Source Software project started by five bored, young and fresh student-developers of the University of the Philippines who viewed software development as more than just hitting the technical problems of businesses or grumpy old computer shop owners. They suggested to the organization's members that with technical superiority comes great social responsibility.

Kudos to the pizza-eating and porn-hating kids of UnPLUG for making students more visible in the map of developing actual production-grade software.

Pinoy Tech Company Insync Inc. Gets Noticed in Singapore

Singapore recently held the premier startup event of the year in the Asia-Pacific Region. Echelon 2010 featured talks about emerging tech startup ideas and procedures, and also showcased the biggest web technologies built by startups in the region. Popular startups blog TechCrunch cited three standout companies in the said event,  one of them coming from the Philippines: Insync Inc., headed by ex-country manager for Friendster Terence Pua. Through its flagship product Insync, the startup promises to deliver to its customers the Dropbox experience (automatic, multi-computer syncing and all) using Google Docs for storage.

Having experienced Insync myself, if ever it pulls off, it will start a new landscape for local tech happenings (which means more local tech news for us to cover... moo-hah-hah!).

Here's an awesome review of the company, sans the inappropriate pic used for the two main members of the company. Sometimes, some people just don't know how to sync with writing ethics...

Google Search By Voice Learns New Languages

And for that obligatory Google article...

Engadget reports that Google Search by Voice, the one that powers the Google iPhone App for the lazy typist in all of us, has just been turned on for 11 more countries: Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, and Portugal. Google Search by Voice already supports English, Mandarin, and Japanese, and now adds French, Italian, German, and Spanish. The only boo-boo in here is detecting accents, as for different countries with the exact same language might have differences in pronunciation and diction. Still, a step forward is still better than dancing in position (uh, what?).

Not only that you can now be lazy about typing “Britney Spears No Underwear” in German, you could also find the nearest hotspot your friend told you (but can't spell it in, say, French) via Google Maps Navigation. The technology that powers your iPhone or Android Maps applications can now understand your fine Spanish or French as input to go from premier point to point de destination.

These features are available in iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia S60 platforms. You could also use any Android devices with Android OS 1.6 or newer.

If I were to give Google a challenge, I'd challenge them to support all of India's languages.

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