It’s been a while that I have written a blog, almost a year I guess.  I have been busy at work and doing some other stuffs for the past several months and forgot to post and share it over the internet wire.

I guess no more excuses now, so welcome back for me in the blogging world.

Last April 10, 2008 I attended Microsoft’s Heroes Happen Here event held at SMx Convention Center.  It was Microsoft’s Product Launch Wave for its Server Platform (Windows Server 2008), Data Platform (SQL Server 2008) and Developer Platform (Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5).

IT Pros and Students across the country gathered together for this anticipated event.   It was also a showcase of new and innovative products from reputable software and hardware vendors such as HP, Dell, Sun Microsystems (oh yes you heard it right, they have a demo machine running Windows Server 2008 on their Ultra Sparc server platform) and among others. 

Microsoft users group community are also present as well.  The PHIWUG (Philippine Windows Users Group), PHISSUG (Philippine SQL Server Users Group and of course the most popular PHINUG (Philippine .NET Users Group).  Each UGs presented interesting mini-sessions on their respective booths and showcase some of the newest features of the 3 Microsoft Products during the afternoon.

By the way before I forgot, one of the most eye-catching scenes on the event was the presence of what I called Vendor “babes”.  They are the pretty event models hired by software and hardware vendors to facilitate sign-up and prospective sales pitch.

Overall the event was really great and two thumbs up.  Microsoft Philippines and the event organizer have done a great job.

Last Saturday, I had a chance to attend (thanks to Romansky) the “Morph Code” bootcamp held at the Ateneo de Manila University. The said event was sponsored by Morph Labs, together with PESO and Ayala TBI. The main motivation of the event was to encourage many Filipinos to become technology entrepreneurs (Technopreneurs).

For me this event served as an eye-opener for all of us who are “Technopreneur” aspirants. Speakers during the event are reputable professionals in the business, technology and government who gladly shared their knowledge, experiences and expertise.

One of the keynote speakers was Federico C. Gonzales, president and CEO of Philippine Emerging Startups Open, Inc. He talked about formulating “great” ideas and transforming it into technology business. He also gave some pointers on how to win “Elevator Pitches” and business plan presentation. He was an exciting speaker and I learned a lot from him. I’m not used to jotting down notes during seminars and conferences but while he’s talking I listened attentively and wrote down every words of wisdom he had shared. As he spoke about “ideas” a lot of technology solutions suddenly appeared in my thoughts as well. He was an excellent and effective speaker. Great job Sir, two thumbs up.

David Abramowski was one of the speakers as well in the event. He is the CEO and “main man” of Morph Labs. He shared his expertise on SaaS (Software as a Service) delivery model and discussed his company’s application platform built on Ruby on Rails. I admired his enthusiasm and passion on SaaS and Web 2.0 adaption, how I wish I can work or partner with him as well (but first I need to learn RoR first). I also learned a lot from him and I’m inspired to build my own “morph labs” as well soon.

There were also keynote speakers on e-government, e-health and e-learning sectors. They took this opportunity to reach out to the technology sector to help them out in implementing ICT in their respective sector as well.

Overall the event was a great success. It opened a lot of doors of opportunities for future Technopreneurs like me.

Last week, while doing nothing in the office I suddenly typed and searched in Google the etymology of my name “mannix”.  Why do I did this? I don’t know either, maybe because my subconscious thought is searching for an answer.  Often times a lot of people have been asking me “Where the heck did your name came from?” and my instant reply was this “My dad got my name from his favorite detective character ‘Joe Mannix’, a police detective show in the late 70’s”.  But you know what? That is just my Father’s understanding of it.  For me I have a different explanation.   Read on.  First when you try to deduced my name into two (“man” and “nix”) you’ll got two words with totally different meanings.  The first being “human” and the other one is “A quantity of no importance, null, nil and other not so good related words”.  Now when you combine this two words my name will mean “A human with no importance”, it is so embarrassing.  I’m not like that and I don’t believe that I am going to be like that.  So in my disappointment I started to search for the meaning of my name.  I believe that my name was derived from other ancient languages and to my surprise the name “mannix” is derived from an irish word “manach” or its anglican equivalent “mainchin” which means “monk”.  I am very glad that my name is religious after all and with great importance.  So what does it mean to me now?  Well having discovered some meaningful sense about the origin of my name gave my inner psyche a profound answer that it is searching for.