Gavin and I drove round and round trying to find the place but finally found it after failed attempts at geolocating ourselves using the iPhone. Parking was a mess although we got a spot close enough to walk to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf without breaking a sweat.

We were late looking for the place but eventually arrived to catch the last slide of  Piotr Banasik‘s preso. I hope he shares it with us on Slideshare.

Adam Baechler welcomed us at the registration desk with free CB&T Swirl cards with load!

We got to meet a few interesting folks from the developer community who we quickly invited to Roofcamp. The collection of geeks included meetup organizers  Mike Stephenson and Mark Leduc of OutsourcingThingsDone, Ming Andrada & Vic Zapata of Webbuggers, Elmer Rivera of EXIST, and a few other guys we failed to get business cards from.

Gavin noticed a bar beside CB&T called Izumi Sake earlier so after we wrapped up our coffee laced meet-and-greet, we moved next door for some real networking over beers and chilled Sake.

After an hour or two of kampais and saluds, Gavin and I realized that we hadn’t had dinner yet. On the way home, Gavin suggested a quick run for some Mickey D’s but I told him that I’d bring him to Stackers for some real burgers. The Jack Burgers, fries, and a Coke really hit the spot!

The OTD boys invited us to a party tonight at Kuya’s but since I got home around 2:30am this morning, I’m pretty sure I’ve worn out my wife’s patience for the weekend (I even missed the Argentina-Brazil game).

Thanks fellas for a rocking meetup and the awesome convo over sake!

That location was more conducive to attendance over the Proudcloud HQ located in Libis. Looks like Roofcamp’s got a new home! Thanks to @jcmedina for helping us with the venue.

We started later than scheduled which tells us the next one should have a pre-talk window of around an hour to get the folks in and settled.

First up was Alan Magtoto and Alex Calero presenting the Digital Puppet technology they used for the movie “Dayo”. Good of them to point out that beyond the obvious entertainment application, this technology had very serious potential in child education and medical rehab.

The 2nd talk was given by Michael “Smitty” Smith, Jr., SEA Evangelist for the Yahoo Developer Network. Michael enlightened the crowd on Yahoo’s open developer platform and their keen interest in partnering with the local dev and startup community. He reminded everyone that Yahoo had a pretty hefty user base that could be exploited by app developers.

Michael "Smitty" Smith Jr. on the Yahoo Developer Network

After the talks, the crowd (composed of a healthy number of developers, angels, and VCs) had a good amount of time mingling and connecting with each other.

A Special thanks to Jack Madrid ( @jackmadrid) and Erwin Oliva ( @cyberbaguiboy)  Yahoo! for supporting the event! See you at Roofcamp #7!

Startup teams participate in Technopreneur Bootcamp

24 Tech startup hopefuls were there to listen to the expert advice of Philippine Emerging Startups Open (PESO) President, Dickie Gonzalez, on how to effectively pitch to venture capitalists. Dickie’s preso, combined with his in-depth breakdown of a well structured guide provided by PlugandPlay, truly enlightened the audience about the content of a good VC pitch.

Dickie Gonzalez entertains questions from one of the teams

Each startup team will only be given 4 minutes to pitch on Feb 9, something that Dickie, and Jojo Flores of PlugandPlay, repeatedly emphasized. The startups were therefore advised on how to leave essential information only in light of that small window of time.

The bootcamp was definitely a boon to the nascent philippine startup community and clears up many myths about how to present to VCs, particularly Silicon Valley based ones.

Take away quote from one of the startup teams:

Will there be local VCs on Feb 9? Talking to local VCs is like talking to bankers.

The answer was yes, but the local VCs who would be judging are valley vets savvy enough to know how to really invest in tech startups.

Roofcamp kicks off for 2010 at Mag:Net Bonifacio High Street on Thursday, Feb 11, 2010 from 6:00pm to 9:30pm.

Our speaker will be Michael F. “Smitty” Smith Jr., Director for the YAHOO! Developer Network SEA who will talk on How to Reach the YAHOO! Audience.

The 2nd speaker will be Alan Magtoto, President of Woodpecker Studios who will demo their Live 3D Avatar Technology.

Beer follows afterwards (or before and during if you fancy that).

Come on fellas! Let’s jump start this rocking year! click here for map

Visit the event page on Facebook here or learn more about Roofcamp here.

All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there. Use them together. Use them in peace. –HAL 9000

It’s been a while since we’ve posted and I know that we should really make it a habit of blogging more often. I guess the end of the year is the perfect time to blog about Proudcloud’s future path going into the 2nd decade of the 21st century.

Convoflow

We’re rolling out some awesome upgrades to CONVOFLOW, our real time social media search tool. Social sharing functions are much better now and we’re continuously tweaking the UX.

What’s really exciting us though is the ability to search through more social networks/sources, and personal bookmarking which should be particularly useful for those using Convoflow for brand and news tracking.

Convoflow has been gaining some pretty good (and diverse) global traction and we’re hoping that these upcoming features would make it the real time search tool of choice for more users.

Rumblefish

We’re in the final development stages of a firmware + cloud service combo that we’re rolling out in January. We’d rather not say what it does just yet but we know that it’s going to rock.

Fundspace

We’ve also been working on a social lending platform that just might go into beta in Q1 of 2010. The platform facilitates peer-to-peer lending within a network in contrast to the aggregate style of lending being done by Prosper, Kiva, and Lending Club.

So that’s our last post for the year. We at Proudcloud are pretty pumped up for 2010 and we are confident that this brave optimism is shared by our clients and partners as well.

So a prosperous new year to all!

DisasterAlert! from GeoSpatial Solutions Inc. comprised of Diane Kristine Campos and Gabriel S. Ricalde

RemoteDroid from Blue Chip Designs Inc. comprised of Noel Patron, Nikka Baterina, and Jovilyn Fajardo

Both teams will represent the Philippines at the CONEXUS Android Showcase at the 3GSM Mobile Conference on November 17, 2009.

Although both applications effectively exploited Android’s capabilities, I personally was impressed by DisasterAlert!. The GeoMob team clearly threaded together an inspired technology and use-case framework made more relevant by events of recent times.

Here’s a video of the app in action. A slideshare preso is available here too.

Franklin Naval of Quadraforte giving a sneak peek of Project Hawaii

Terence Pua, formerly the country manager of Friendster PH and now the founder and CEO of XACKUP, explained that US based VCs are often off-put by locally incorporated companies. This is due to their (the VCs) lack of awareness of local business practices, intellectual property matters, and local political dynamics which fails to to provide a comfort level conducive to investments.

However, Jojo Flores, VP Operations for startup accelerator Plug and Play Tech Center, has a self imposed mission to bring deserving filipino startups to the attention of US VCs. Being well entrenched in the community, Jojo is in a good position to allay any kind of apprehensions VCs may have about getting in bed with philippine startups.

Terence and former Google engineer Franklin Naval of Quadraforte are two of a growing stream of filipino-american valley veterans that have found a strong desire to pursue their startup efforts in the Philippines instead of the US. They cite giving back to their filipino roots and the surprising high level of competencies that pinoy tech professionals posses.

The night was capped by demos of (previously) under-the-radar startup apps by Terence, Franklin, and Jay Fajardo of Proudcloud.

Codename Hawaii, Quadraforte (Franklin Naval)
A cloud based application that manages online advertising assets and propagates them throughout multiple ad networks while providing consolidated performance analytics.

Insync, Xackup (Terence Pua)
A file sharing and collaboration application with key features of value to enterprise users such as access permission control and automatic syncing to local folders. The app includes desktop clients for major operating systems including Windows, OS X, and Linux. check it out

Convoflow, Proudcloud (Jay Fajardo)
A real-time search engine that harvests social media content such as micro-blogs, blogs, video, and photos. Users can immediately view video and photos without leaving the site while social sharing options allow immediate re-tweets and Facebook posting of interesting content. check it out

We hope to see you at Roofcamp #5!

Ran into the usual suspects such as Paul Pajo and Franklin Naval of Quadraforte.

Tony and I braved the journey from Libis to Roxas Boulevard at the invite of   Jim Ayson and Edwin Soriano of SMART to join a panel on “How Can We Help the Android Developer Community?”. I primed myself with that topic in mind and headed off to MOA. Unfortunately, when I sat down for the panel, someone pulled the old switcheroo on me and I found myself sitting at the “What makes a killer Android app?” panel.

"What makes a killer Android App?" (L-R) Mark Sergio of HTC, myself, Migs Paraz of SMART, and Jojo Almirante of SMART

The first question asked was “What makes a killer app?” (natch). Migs Paraz focused on the need for a robust back-end with tight and bullet proof code. Coming from the agile and social computing school of thought, I added that today’s apps require a social feature set that enables the user not just to consume the content, but to rate it, shape it, and share it. Particularly with the personal nature a mobile device bears.

When asked on what advise to give to the budding developer population that pretty much comprised the audience, I made sure to point out that today’s killer apps are so not by design, but because the users determined their function and value leading them to embrace and adopt them.

I personally would have preferred a longer panel discussion moderated by someone in the know, but i guess that’s now an opportunity for more discussion elsewhere.

Props to the MOBDEV team for making it happen.

We’ll obviously have the beer flowing with the discussions for a dynamic atmosphere of networking.

The last one we had served well as a reboot attended by a motley crew representing tech, photography, design, and music.

This time around we’ll have a compelling lineup of talks that will inlcude:

Eric Tomacruz, Tao Solutions (15 minutes)
Wiki.Alumni.Net

Jojo Flores, Plug and Play Tech Center
Plug and Play Tech Center – A Startup Accelerator (45 minutes)

Gerry Yu, Mobile Wonders (15 minutes)
Synology Network Attached Storage Solutions

Norbert Aquende, Microsoft (15 minutes)
Windows Mobile 6.5

Eric Tomacruz, Tao Solutions (15 minutes)
Wikimap iPhone App

Paul Pajo, Watunes.com (15 minutes)
Freemium Online Digital Music Distribution Platform

Visit the event page on Facebook.
Roofcamp #2 is sponsored by Mobile Wonders

“For Payne, who oversees Twitter’s API development, your ticket to the web promised land is Scala, the next-generation language developed by Martin Odersky at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Sometime in 2007, Twitter came to the realization that its Ruby-based message queuing system couldn’t keep up with all that Web2.0rhea. “It grew with us for a number of months, and then, at a certain point, it just hit a wall,” Payne said. “And that wall was not so much it code but in limitations in Ruby virtual machine. There’s a lot of things that Ruby is great at, but long running processes? Particularly memory intensive ones? Not so much.”

By mid-2008, one of these Ruby message queues completely crashed and developers needed two and a half hours to shove the dropped Tweets back through the system. When your game is micro-blogging, that’s a lifetime. Then, in his spare time, one developer ported the code to Scala. According to Payne, the Scala queue could process the same message backlog in 20 seconds.”

If you’re a Ruby lover, you’d be asking the same question in your head – why would you want to use Scala (especially for Twitter-like applications)?:

“Bill Venners: I’m curious, and the Ruby folks will want it spelled out: Can you elaborate on what you felt the Ruby language lacked in the area of reliable, high performance code?

Steve Jenson:One of the things that I’ve found throughout my career is the need to have long-lived processes. And Ruby, like many scripting languages, has trouble being an environment for long lived processes. But the JVM is very good at that, because it’s been optimized for that over the last ten years. So Scala provides a basis for writing long-lived servers, and that’s primarily what we use it for at Twitter right now. Another thing we really like about Scala is static typing that’s not painful. Sometimes it would be really nice in Ruby to say things like, here’s an optional type annotation. This is the type we really expect to see here. And we find that really useful in Scala, to be able to specify the type information.

Robey Pointer: Also, Ruby doesn’t really have good thread support yet. It’s getting better, but when we were writing these servers, green threads were the only thing available. Green threads don’t use the actual operating system’s kernel threads. They sort of emulate threads by periodically stopping what they are doing and checking whether another “thread” wants to run. So Ruby is emulating threads within a single core or a processor. We wanted to run on multi-core servers that don’t have an infinite amount of memory. And if you don’t have good threading support, you really need multiple processes. And because Ruby’s garbage collector is not quite as good as Java’s, each process uses up a lot of memory. We can’t really run very many Ruby daemon processes on a single machine without consuming large amounts of memory. Whereas with running things on the JVM we can run many threads in the same heap, and let that one process take all the machine’s memory for its playground.”

Curious now? If you want to learn more about Scala try this site and of course play around with Lift, the web framework for Scala. Here’s a great .pdf file by Debasish Gosh and Steve Vinoski on Scala and Lift

Oh yes, there will still be those who will defend Ruby for Twitter:

“I would be curious to hear what arguments, if any, Twitter had against JRuby, or other message queues. The public arguments I’ve seen, and the decision making process I’m inferring from it, seem like an incredibly inept one. This belies something I’ve heard about those who deal with the Twitter people: their scaling problems come not so much from Ruby but from bad design decisions.

Overall, I think they’re missing the point of Ruby. Ruby shines as an automation and “glue code” language, providing you with a swiss army knife that lets you easily integrate many software components writen in whatever language you want into a single, cohesive application. Message queues are commoditized in the software world, and clients exist for virtually all of them in the Ruby world. AMQP, XMPP, Stomp, you name it and chances are Ruby speaks it. The EngineYard folks are doing wonderful things with Ruby and XMPP/AMQP in their Vertebra and Nanite projects. The Twitter folks are… off reinventing message queues in Ruby, then blaming Ruby when their implementation turns out to be slow.”

Posted by Paul “The Pageman” Pajo