Thursday, November 09, 2006 Toral: Women in eCommerce By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
I AM ORGANIZING on Nov. 22 a small business forum dubbed as, “Women in Web, Wireless and Outsourcing” (http://digitalfilipinoclub.blogspot.com).
If I’m not mistaken, this is the first event of its kind that highlights the growing number of women embracing e-commerce in the Philippines as an entrepreneurial and empowerment tool.
Encarnacion “Cannie” May of Your One Stop Shopping Network or YOSSN (http://www.yossn.cm) will be in the Philippines to lead this series that will also take place in Cagayan De Oro, Davao and Manila. Cannie is an information technology (IT) project manager for Boeing and is based in the city of Seattle in the United States.
Like many overseas Filipinos who have established themselves abroad, Cannie felt the need to give back to her home country (the Philippines, of course) and decided to put up YOSSN as a means to help small and medium enterprises start selling online and accept electronic payments in an easy manner.
This project, which started two to three years ago, is slowly growing despite the challenges faced in an e-business like this.
Google Philippines country consultant Aileen Apolo will also be in Cebu to talk about the various services available online that helps entrepreneurs to market themselves.
I am an avid user of Google AdWords (http://adwords.google.com). It is amazing to see that Google has lowered the minimum ad budget requirement per day to P50. This used to be P100.
Aileen’s appointment as consultant is a reflection of the growing number of Filipinos that have started using Google’s various value-added tools for marketing and earning online, such as Google AdSense.
I wonder if Orkut.com, Google’s social network platform like Friendster.com, will also achieve similar growth levels here soon.
Cagayan De Oro’s female IT evangelist, Stephanie Caragos, will also be in Cebu to give her insights on outsourcing. For regular readers of Entrepreneur Magazine, Stephanie was featured sometime ago in the “almost famous” section of the publication.
Her company, Syntactics, currently specializes in software/web development and is proof that anyone can get a share in the outsourcing market if one is determined in pursuing business.
Another interesting entrepreneur to meet is Abby Ongyanco Lim of Virramall.com and Alfox.net. Abby, with her dad, started an e-commerce venture after attending the Philippine Internet Expo 2000 in Cebu. Her experience in setting up various e-commerce related initiatives will be most useful to those who are thinking about it or may have not been successful in the past.
I do hope that those who attended the One Internet Day event last September will find this forum as a great follow-up and part of ongoing efforts in making e-commerce knowledge within reach to entrepreneurs. This is especially so with the growing number of payment system providers today.
E-PAYMENT. On Oct. 31, the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department of Finance issued Joint Administrative Order 2. This is the Electronic Payment and Collection System in Government guideline that aims to provide a process and framework to make the Philippine revenue-collecting agencies, state colleges and universities, local government units, government-owned and controlled corporations compliant to Republic Act 8729 or the E-Commerce Law.
Feel free to email me should you like to get a copy.
