ALL's well that ends well -- call it the "city of the rising star", 2014 sees Davao City with major breakthroughs in Information and Communications Technology (ICT).
While the city flexes its ICT industry muscles, not only do the big fish benefit from the rosy prospects but also do the tech startups.
The exponential growth has brought good things that trickled down to the newbies that even encouraged several others to jump on in the industry bandwagon.
Surely, the people behind the ICT Council of Davao, the private group who is pushing the industry wheels, have ended 2014 with happy smiles, as the efforts have yielded a much brighter prospects as they take strides into 2015.
The ICT Council's efforts have significantly doubled, as new groups and individuals have come out to put the city on the investors' radar.
LIFEBIT
Topping the list is the game developer and programmer Eric Clark Su who takes helm of Twidl. Inc. as CEO and founder, the developer of the first social networking site developed by a Filipino.
Built upon the concept of gamifying life, Lifebit does away with the mainstream social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Su and his team went to Silicon Valley, California, USA, a home to the world's largest technology companies, where they showed off their technical chops after winning in the ON3 Pitching Competition in 2012 with their entry Piclyf, a photo-sharing site.
They came to visit universities, among them were Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Standford, where they stirred the interests of the students from these campuses upon their social networking site.
Lifebit is a social networking site about "doing and reinforcing", which lets users enjoy the three pillars upon which it is built: introspection, inspiration, and motivation.
Durianpy
Early, this year a group of young IT geeks hatched the first-ever community of programmers that put together the developers of the city and empower the talent pool into Python programming.
Durianpy intends to unite programmers, be they beginners or professionals.
The exponential rise of ICT calls for more skilled talents who have the skills for online job opportunities.
The group came up with an idea to organize the city's own community after participating in one of the events for Python programmers in Manila dubbed as PyCon Philippines 2014, a volunteer-run and non-profit conference.
"The main goal of this conference is to provide a venue where the Python programming language and surrounding technologies can be explored, discussed, and exercised," Pycon PH website said.
Durianpy is positioned as a driving force of the startup community, which will put the city on the map. In so doing, the city is seen to attract international-based start-up companies to put up headquarters in the city.
Citihub
In the annual Startup Weekend, the team who created a mobile application that helps locals find places and events happening around town outshone 11 others in the 3rd Startup Weekend Davao.
Citihub is comprised of NitishKhemani, Guy RomelleMagayano, Kristine Marie Godoy, Jon Von Louie P. Dagaang, Rey Capuyan Fernandez, Eric Red DecinPolido, Jojie Andoyo Dagohoy and Angely Chi.
Startup weekend is an annual fair where local entrepreneurs, developers, designers, marketers, and even the non-technical individuals learn the best of IT from the IT masters.
The holding of the Startup Weekend is primarily to push the local talents to develop and improve their skills, with IT being the way of the future.
Game development
A dutch-owned company Maata Games joined forces with Next BPO Solutions Inc. (NBSI) to develop a new massive multi-player online game (MMOG).
MMOG is "an online video game which can be played by a very large number of people simultaneously."
Dubbed as "Erectus", the game is about the clash of civilizations of Homo Sapiens and Homo Erectus 130,000 years ago.
The conceptualization, designing, and the development of the gameplay and storyline have been in Netherlands but the programming commenced in the city by five NBSI developers.
The game, a browser-based game, is free.
Grabtaxi
A free-taxi mobile application, GrabTaxi, landed in the city on October 22, 2014. This mobile app is available on iOS, Android, and Blackberry platforms.
This app allows a user book a cab online. It provides the user with the driver's information and keeps a tracking feature that can be sent to any of the user's contacts to make the passenger feel safer.