NowShowing.ph -- Upcoming Web and iPhone App

Based on the blurb on their beta launching site, NowShowing.ph is a way for you to discover new movies, get the perfect schedule, and stay updated with upcoming titles. I'm thinking it's kind of ClicktheCity and SureSeats.

NowShowing.ph is a ProudCloud product according to Jason Torres' tweets, which then I assumed that Jason is one of the developers of it.

Haybol.ph -- an interactive Philippine Real Estate Listing

Haybol.ph is a Philippine real estate search tool. Or, if you have a property for leasing or selling, then you can post it on Haybol.ph for free. It's a web-based application so you can do all the listing online by yourself.

It has a ready set of forms online so you will be guided when making your listing.

If you are looking for a real estate properties -- house, building, lots, etc -- to buy or rent, Haybol.ph can help you with that. You might ask, "so what, I can do it in other classified ads sites or listing sites?" It integrates Google maps. What I like with Haybol.ph is that it gives me the different listings in an area in one view. This can free the buyers / renters from the hassle of having to scour the whole area just to find different available properties.

Haybol.ph is free for both seller / leaser and buyer / looker of properties so go and register for an account, and start checking in your property listings.

It is co-founded by Edge Dalmacio. And, it's incubated by Orange & Bronze, a Filipino-owned software development firm.

Photo shows CEO and co-founder of Orange & Bronze Software Labs (O&B) Calen Martin Legaspi (3rd from left), gesturing as he fields a question from the media during the company’s formal launch at the O&B headquarters in Makati City. Looking on are (from left): O&B developer and online search site haybol.ph co-founder Edge Dalmacio, O&B chief technology officer and co-founder Butch Landingin and O&B head of consulting services Mike Mallete.

via newsbytes.ph

Mockaroo Alpha -- Turn your mockups into websites in minutes

Mockaroo is a web-based application for turning your static mock-ups of your web application or site to a dynamic one, giving it a look and feel of the finished product minus the 10,000 hours of coding.

"Mockaroo adds links to your mockup layouts (napkin doodles allowed) to let you create a prototype in minutes. Instead of coding your prototype in HTML and CSS, Mockaroo is the more effortless way of getting your idea in prototype mode. Actually, it's only a three-step process:

1. Upload your mockup images ("Home page", "Dashboard", etc.)
2. Add links to navigate between mockups
3. Invite your collaborators to view and critique your site"

          via mockaroo.com

You can check a demo of Mockaroo in action here.

Mockaroo is a product of Percolait, a UI design and prototype development for startups shop, founded by a Filipino rails developer and designer Bobby Santiago.

Insynchq.com is on Top Recently Installed Apps of 2010

Top Recently Installed Apps of 2010

1. Manymoon
2. Insightly
3. Zoho CRM
4. Aviary Design Suite
5. Mavenlink
6. Outright
7. MailChimp
8. RapidTask
9. Insync
10. myERP.com

via googleenterprise.blogspot.com

Insync, created by a team of Filipinos headed by Terence Pua, just launched last September 2010, and they are now in Top 10 Recently Installed Apps of 2010 in Google Apps Marketplace. This can be a signal of a great 2011 for the Philippines regarding technology and startup in general.

GroupsME -- collaborate via mobile phone

GroupsME's tagline is "Empowering people to collaborate as a group through mobile." So it's mainly a mobile application. They launched first the SMS-based version of it, and I believe they will be later on releasing a mobile web version, and probably a native client for different mobile OS.

The gist of it is that GroupsME will provide you and your group, organization, businesses or whatever association you have a one unique number. So you no longer need to get all your members / friends mobile number, and so the other members of your group just so you can update each other via text / sms. Every one in the group can just text that one number, and all members who are registered to that group number will receive the message.

Following is just a sample that it works. Sorry, it's such a crappy screenshot from a mobile phone. But anyhoo, you can check GroupsME at http://groupsme.nsparks.com/ and use it for your fan club, businesses, and movements.

You can also use it for marketing -- you can send updates to your clients in one go. Then, it can be also a branding to your business since you have that unique number. And, then develop / create a bond with your customers with quick personal updates.

It also has a corresponding web app. I'll just share the public view of it. You can simply sign up a Groupsme account, and you can see how it works.

GroupsME is developed by Next Sparks (NSparks), a software start-up based in Cebu, Philippines. The main guys are Ian Bert Tusil and Stephen Paul Suarez. 

Ian (yellow shirt) and Paul

Over a quick chat, I asked them how did they come up with GroupsME. And, the first answer they blurted out is that they just wanted to do something cool. They just develop their 'first' version for a month, so I believe they're that cool.

I've known Ian years back, and back then he was into e-commerce web apps so I'm kind of surprise as to why he's now doing mobile. Well, I guess some people just wanted to do cool stuff. I guess, without them knowing, they're on the track since, as the statistics God say, mobile is now the new black.

fan pic

Wheedly.com -- want to borrow my stuff?

Wheee, wheedly.com is up. For 2 people who both have full-time jobs and other various projects on the side, it's quite a feat for them to still be able to put up their own web app.

Wheedly is a place where you can find what you are looking for, and where you can share what you already found.

Following are my stuff which are up for grabs in wheedly.com, and there are more from others.

Wheedly is created with love by Paolo Lim and Jimbo Cortes. They skip love and social life for this web app. So let's share and lend them some love, and cash will not be that bad.

You can find me at http://wheedly.com/users/11. I have some exciting love items to share. Sign up, and I'll share them with you.

Kachop -- Picture Crop Tool, 1st Prize Startup Weekend Tokyo 2010

Kachop is a web and mobile application that allows the user to crop pictures easily. The Kachop team won the first prize of Tokyo Startup Weekend (Nov. 14-21), competing against 8 other teams. As the winner, it moved on to Global Startup Battle, where they will be competing with other teams and products from all over the world. (Sadly, the voting time has ended. I felt sad for posting this so late.)

One of the members of Kachop team is Marie Engelene Obien, a Filipina. She used to teach at Atene de Manila University before moving to Japan.

Source: kachop.com

Following are details of Kachop which I lifted from its facebook page:

Description:

Kachop is a web and mobile application that allows the user to crop pictures in 3 very simple steps:
1) Choose new background you like
2) Choose photo to crop
3) Tap to remove unwanted background from photo

The Kachop Team developed prototypes for web and Android. iPhone and Windows Phone apps will come along the way.

Everything will be free so we want everyone to enjoy using it!

Founded:

November 21, 2010

Company Overview:

Kachop is built during Startup Weekend in Tokyo, a 3-day event jampacked with action towards building a new startup.

The idea came from an original one: Around the World. Eventually, it was developed into something helpful, fun, and may probably be.. viral!

Products:

kachop.com
kachop for Android

I hope to download soon the Kachop android app, and will post screenshots and a short review of it on phmobileapps.com. On the other hand, you can check Scribeit and Anywhere Bingo which, I believe, are collaborative work of Marie Engelene Obien and Nico Prananta, who is also part of Kachop team.

TinaPay.com Beta - Free Web-Based Tool for Invoicing / Billing & Receiving Payment

TinaPay.com is a simple no-frills invoicing tool, which you can use for your businesses, freelance or side projects. It is easy to set-up so even if you are not tech-savvy, you can use it without getting lost.

Once you are registered to TinaPay.com, you can get started by going to the Settings to create the profile of you company, and your payment gateway. One thing about TinaPay.com is that it integrates PayPal to its system already, thus setting up your payment gateway is just one step and you're done.

The workflow design of TinaPay is quite well-thought that you will no longer grope as to what to do or set-up next. So after you create your company profile, you will then automatically be asked to create a record or

CHITS - Community Health Information Tracking System

 

CHITS (Community Health Information Tracking System) -- let me quote the whole of their About page to describe CHITS since I do not have exposure to health care.

CHITS is short for the Community Health Information Tracking system, a free and open source software electronic health record system for local government health centers in the Philippines. CHITS was created by Dr. Herman Tolentino through a grant from the International Development Research Centre of Canada. Since 2004, CHITS has been expanding to rural health units around the country.


CHITS is being managed by the UP Manila – National Telehealth Center. It is an integral part of the “Using Computers and Cellphones to Improve Local Health Information Systems” program.


Director and CHITS Program manager: Alvin B. Marcelo, MD

-------------------

So basically CHITS is, imagine, an electronic version of doctor's chart. When you go to your doctor for a check-up or something, her / his secretary will hand her your record which is usually a piece of paper with the history of your past check-ups.

Now, why would we bother with electronic medical record?

Katherin Kuan, an MIT student and part of the SANA team, made a research regarding the health care system in the Philippines entitled, Delivery of eHealth and Telemedicine Services to the Philippines From a Sustainability Perspective. Cited in her paper is the following statement:

"There is a disconnect between what is happening on the ground and what those needs are compared to the policies being made in the PhilHealth headquarters. Hence, there is a tremendous need for electronic documentation of care to ensure quality care."

You might say we don't need computerization of our medical records, we need medicine. But as stated in one of CHITS blog posts, it provides information for decision making. So in case of baranggay health care centers, if their records are in electronic form like CHITS, the concerned departments can easily get a quick overview of the statistics of the diseases. As such, government offices can then provide proper allocation of the correct medicines. Because as reports said, baranggay health centers do not really lack medicine supplies. The problem is that they have the wrong supply of medicines thus stocks going to waste.

CHITS made a pilot implementation in Pasay City, where they also implemented an SMS reminders functionality for pregnant women for their pre-natal check-up. Then, they also expanded to selected areas of Tarlac for pilot testing.

You can take a look at the CHITS application from their demo page. Following are screenshots I made of CHITS application.

Screenshot of Community Health Information Tracking System (CHITS)

Some of the people involved in CHITS are: Dr. Alvin Marcelo (TOYM awardee), Eric Pareja, and Alison Perez. If you are interested to be part of CHITS team, and improve our healthcare system, you may check with them. Just imagine working on a social network site that helps improve people's lives.

ReserveUp -- Upcoming Booking Solutions for Hotels & the Likes

ReserveUp is a booking solutions for hotels, resorts, pension houses, inns, and the likes. This is created by PIGMATA Media Inc., an interface design and web application development company based in Philippines.

At first look, I thought it's a 3rd-party web application primarily for the customers / users where people can find a listing of hotels and resorts where there is a filter feature according to rates, locations, availability, and such. Then, from there people can make their bookings and reservations. But it's more that they are providing their application to the hotels, resorts who will then be the one to introduce the application to their respective customers.

If you are part of the management of a hotel, resort, inns, and for-rent-places, you can now request a beta invite from ReserveUp site, http://reserveup.com/. You can check if it is something that will fit in your business. It's free.

Minglr Beta -- Social Network Aggregator by Globe

Minglr.ph is a social network aggregator created by Globe Philippines. Minglr.ph was created when Globe Philippines found the importance of social media during the Ondoy calamity last year. Thus, it went on private beta in November, 2009, a month or so after the typhoon . By December, 2009, it went on public beta.

Minglr.ph's development team is headed by Joseph Ross Lee, former Philippine country manager of Friendster and is now portal management team lead at Globe. That's why Minglr.ph is probably the only social aggregator tool I came across with that includes Friendster, which I think is just right because Friendster social network has been a big thing in Philippines.

Aside from being able to add friendster, another special feature of Minglr.ph is that you can access it in 3 different ways -- via web, mobile web, and SMS / text. Though, the SMS part might still be under works because I cannot seem to make it work on my end.

Following is the inside, dashboard, of Minglr.ph accessed via web. You have all the social feeds in one page -- think hootsuite or infinite.ly.

Minglr.ph Dashboard via web

You can link your facebook, twitter, friendster, flickr accounts.

Following is Minglr.ph accessed from my mobile phone, Nokia E63. The green theme kind of reminds me of friendster.

Minglr.ph via Mobile Web

It's a pretty neat product created by Filipino developers and powered by Globe Philippines. But I just wonder why Globe (@talk2Globe) is not using their own product, Minglr.ph. If you look at their tweets, they're using hootsuite. Not eating their own dog food, aey?

Chikker -- Chikka's Twitter

Chikker.com is a product of Chikka. Thus the name Chikker, I guess.

In their About Us page, it is defined as:

"Chikker is an online and mobile text service wherein members can submit updates anytime and anywhere via mobile. Followers of the said member receives these updates anytime, anywhere!"   

To update Chikker via web, of course, you simply log in to your account, and update from there.
To update via SMS / text, you simply prefix your update message with 'Publish' then send it to 2354. (More at their FAQ)

Since I am new in Chikker, I have a hard time finding people to connect with. It will be easier if they have a feature where I can invite my friends from twitter or facebook, and other social sites. 

But it looks like Chikker has a different way of letting you find friends or invite friends to Chikker.

• You can invite your friends via text / SMS by texting 'Invite ' to 2354. (P1/text)
• You can also get a random list of Chikker members by sending 'List' to 2354.
• Or, you can randomly follow the members displayed on Chikker's homepage.

For more ways, check the most ever reliable source -- FAQ.

So now what? Well, if you have a group or an organization, you can all sign up to Chikker, and it's a good way of updating everybody with just sending one update. Or, use Chikker for another way of socializing -- web to SMS and vice versa.

Here is my Chikker profile, http://www.chikker.com/profile/view/OWRANGE. You can follow me, or not. =)

oKs.ph -- a shot at creating a Philippine digg version

oKs.ph is a Philippine bookmarking site. It was created by Luis Buenaventura, a Filipino web entrepreneur, as an experiment to have a, as defined by him, "people-powered' site. Lifted from his post, this was how he defined oks.ph experiment:

What oKs is, in a nutshell, is an experiment.

Here’s my hypothesis: that the online Filipino audience hasn’t really matured enough to make use of collaborative Web 2.0-style websites. By that I mean, we haven’t yet figured out that sharing is the standard mode by which the internet really functions. Our perspective is still very much "how much can I take" or "what’s the smallest effort i can exert to get the maximum benefit over my peers"?

And I don’t mean "sharing" as in file-sharing, I mean "sharing" in the more general sense, i.e., informing each other and building things together. As an example, I happen to believe that if wikipedia was debuted exclusively in the Philippines, it would go to shit in a matter of days.

So oKs.ph is basically an experiment to prove me wrong.

Based on his blog post, it was launched on November 19, 2005, which at that time when bookmarking sites like digg, delicious, reddit, magnolia, and many others started and was like the next-big thing.

The oKs.ph is still up and alive right now. But not-so-fortunately, it looks like the experiment was not able to disprove Luis' hypothesis about the Filipino audience.

So aside from disproving Luis' hypothesis, what does oKs.ph tell about the Filipino market on the web? 

Piclyf.com Updates -- Ajax Loading & Posting via Email & more

There are always new updates, big or small, in piclyf. But there are these few new (old) updates that wow me.





Infinite Scrolling

Right now, you no longer need to click on a Previous or Next link / button just so you can browse pictures. In piclyf dashboard, pictures will automatically load once you reach the bottom of the page. Isn't it sweet.

See that loading icon below. Page loads dynamically once you reach the bottom of the page.

Posting Pictures via Email


I've been waiting for this feature. I am just so happy to have it now. I, most of the time, take pictures via my celphone. And, I'm used to just emailing pictures to post to my social sites. I'm too lazy to get the cable, and plug my mobile phone to the laptop to transfer images, or even bluetoothing them.

So being able to directly post to piclyf via email is such a big help to the lazy arse like me. As some mobile theory goes, "With mobility comes greater productivity."

Uploading Images via Twitter for iPhone


This actually came before posting via email feature. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you can use piclyf when you share images via Twitter for iPhone. You can find the steps here on how to set-up piclyf in your Twitter for iPhone application.

And, what's more? Native iPhone / iPod Touch piclyf application soon in your AppStore.

Piclyf Snap for iPhone






I think a few are lucky to get a testing 'unit' of it.

More Piclyf-ers

The best feature: It's amazing to see the growing number of members in piclyf. My dashboard is now so alive with pictures and images in all forms and sizes. I can hardly keep up with all of them.

It's exciting to see a Philippine based web and mobile application created by Filipino developers is getting popular from the local market.

Inifinite.ly Alpha -- a social media monitoring tool or website builder?

Excited to receive the invite to infinite.ly Alpha. Before websites / applications become popular and mainstream, they always go through the Alpha, pre-Alpha version. I guess it's owkei to say it's when they are at their ugly stage, it's before celebrities get into tons of physical enhancements, it's before they are flooded with blingbling. I love to see application in their alpha stage because really it is more exciting, it's when they are the roughest.

I'm quite awed at how powerful their Builder feature can be. It makes creating a web site / portal easy with inline editing and drag-and-drop capabilities. This will definitely come handy to those not-so-adept at tweaking html and css like me. There are few kinks  but still I feel this web application looks like more than Alpha.

Since not all can access the infinite.ly Alpha version yet, following are some screenshots of what you can expect from it.

Welcome

Right after creating an account, you will get the infinite.ly's welcome, where they will also provide you with a step-by-step process on how to set-up your infinite.ly account.

Dashboard

I could feel a Luis Buenaventura's signature look and feel in the dashboard. If you have used some applications created by SyndeoLabs, you can see that similarities in the look and feel. (Note: I don't infinite.ly this is from SyndeoLabs.)

Managing Keywords & Social Networks

Inside the application, there's a BUZZ tab. This is where you can add the social networks you want to monitor. For now, you can add and monitor Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, and Youtube. I believe there will be more coming, but I guess these 6 social sites are more than enough.

Then, you can add the keywords you want to monitor. For example, you are interested about people talking about Justin Bieber, Kpop, and Usher because you are selling posters, merchants, music of these artists. So you want to find the people talking about it who you can engage with, and share your items with them.

Analytics

You can check here your popularity. You can find here if the number of people tweeting about Justin Bieber increases or decreases. If you have launched a promo or twitter hashtag, you can monitor the progress or for lack of thereof. 

Publisher


This is where you can blast updates to all the networks attached to your infinite.ly account.

Builder

This is where you can design your infinite.ly's public web view / portal. When I got to this feature, I kind of double check if infinite.ly is just a social media monitoring tool or a website builder. You can actually build a pretty website from infinite.ly's builder feature. If you are technically challenged person like me, infinite.ly's Builder drag-and-drop and inline editing feature makes putting up your web portal easy. (I kinda notice Luis or his team is fond of drag-and-drop.)

So you can easily customize the look of your site without having to deal with html and css.

Public View 

I created a portal that displays people talking about Justin Bieber, Usher, and KPop in infinite.ly. So if I want to have a bird's eyeview of talks about these 3, I can simply take a quick a look at my infinite.ly.

See, you can easily find people to whom you can sell your Justin Bieber, Usher, KPop stuff, or simply someone you can talk with about your music idols.

Infinite.ly are co-founded by Luis Buenaventura, Hunter Nield, and Yoram Heller.You can check the rest of the team at team.infinite.ly -- Evan Sagge, Mae Paulino, Kindred Pasana, Neil Decapia, and Radamanthus Batnag.

Get an invite at infinite.ly, and check if it's a social monitoring tool, a website builder, or both? You can check here as to how I can personally use infinite.ly. Check here if you are interested.