Thursday, March 01, 2007 Ng: Some things to be proud of By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
LAST Monday, I attended the opening of Cebu X, which is the international furniture and furnishings show of the Cebu Furniture Industries Foundation (CFIF), at the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel and Casino.
The show will close today, however. If you haven’t been there yet, hurry up and go. The minimal fee of P100 is worth it. The designs will make you proud of the industry’s innovation and enterprise.
The theme of Cebu X is “Everything Inspires,” and indeed it is true. While we are proud to produce world class watches and semiconductors, software and the furniture are something we can be more proud of because these are products that are not only of international quality, but are designed and produced by Filipino entrepreneurs.
The furniture industry in Cebu is getting a lot of support and assistance from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), Center for International Trade Expositions and Missions, local and national government agencies as well as multi-lateral agencies like GTZ, EuropeAid, CIDA/Pearl of Canada and other agencies. The reason they are getting assistance is that they are not only a visible industry, but also well organized.
Which is what we should try to do for the software development and business process outsourcing (BPO) sectors.
In the last 13 years, I have been actively inviting technology companies to relocate in Cebu, either to sell their products or produce their services. But some people chided me for inviting some obvious competitors to come in.
This is not a zero sum game. If there are too few players in Cebu in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector, then we don’t’ have an industry; when we are not visible to potential customers, everybody loses.
However, if we have more players (the target is to hit a hundred companies
and several thousand stakeholders), then we become more visible. And if we know how to organize, then we can create awareness and get hundreds of buyers that CFIF attracts to Cebu every year.
That way, we can manage to raise the water level so that all boats can benefit and rise.
Obviously, too many companies relocating to Cebu creates problems, and every company I talked to complains about difficulties in getting people or losing people to new locators. But last year, the BPO sector in the Philippines earned over $3 billion. It is very important that Cebu focus on playing a key part in this.
The call center industry in Manila is very well organized now through the Contact Center Association of the Philippines and the Business Process
Association of the Philippines. They are getting very visible support from the National Government, and we in Cebu should start organizing stakeholders here to enable us to pursue a united marketing front soon. Let us take our cue from the CFIF and hopefully benefit from what they have done.
On another front, I just recently read about the prevalent use of SMS as campaign tool of some politicians. While other countries seem to prefer email, we Filipinos seemed to have taken a penchant for texting.
The one thing going for email, though, is that it is almost free. One has to pay for every text sent. With unlimited texting promos of mobile phone service providers, however, this is becoming a non-issue.
In our company, we installed an SMS gateway service. This has allowed us to increase our ability to communicate.
How does this work? The gateway service allows an email to texting link and vice versa. Those who want to send a message to the company, for instance, can send it to the email address, support@ngkhai.com. The mail server will automatically forward that mail (at least the first 320 letters) to my cell phone as text.
Most of our staff create an autoforward mechanism for their email. If they are out of the office, the system forwards the messages to their cell phone as text.
We have also created a reverse text to email link. It enables a person to send a message from his cell phone to an email address.
Indeed, it is almost becoming a business requirement that we should never be disconnected from our offices even for just a few minutes.
