Multinational corporation consultant for a call center: We need good English speakers. Speak and learn to be fluent in English.

To be successful in your business, who do you follow?

Case in point. I and some friends are trying out a unified loading and unified text currency business. We do not own the company. We are retailer participants with an investment of R400 per member.

My friends include an underpaid office worker, a teenaged sewer and a start up tiangge proprietor. Those still saving for the R400 capital are several housemaids, house drivers, townhomes compound security guard, a street food hawker, and a public school teacher.

The founders of this business and technology company (which has moved to a bigger space inside StarMall in Shaw boulevard, Mandaluyong City) made the stake low so that majority of working class and Class E (poverty level) citizens can try their hand at micro-entrepreneurship.

Thus why the profile of the people I have invited to my small group.

Needless to say when targetting and teaching the lower economic class group, Tagalog (and local dialects) should be spoken extensively. Even read by them. Thus, our flyers have to carry a Tagalog version.

But the irony is the company memos, pamplets, promotional flyers, steamers, etc. are in English. The Tagalog version is up to the member to produce.

Any how, who do you follow? Which do you do? It depends. Because, when you speak to listeners on AM radio show, you speak the local language and lingo they understand While, when you are on FM radio, you can get away with all English.

By the way, regarding the IT-enabled company in StarMall, visit it and observe. Join if you wish. (Email us at infotech@mb.com.ph for details).

It has three main rooms. One is for business opportunity meetings. Another is for technical operations seminar. The last is for receiving complaints on technical matters related to the business.

I leave with a final note from Philippine Internet godfather Bill Torres. In 2000, I scribbled this quote from him: "Combine technology with human resources so that as a country, we can make a contribution."

Become tech savvy or text savvy. Be both if can do. — Edison D. Ong

For a long time before its absentee "son" rescued it from the brink of mediocrity, Southeastern College (SEC) stayed in obscurity in one corner of garbage-ridden Pasay.

Enter Conrad "Con" Manalac, whose family owned the underachieving school. Since coming back from New York, where he studied and worked as an educator and network engineer, he has converted the once unknown institution into an IT education powerhouse that now trains teachers all over the country in its capacity as a Microsoft IT Academy.

Manalac presided over the school’s dramatic transformation, both physically and intellectually. He overhauled the school grounds and put up state-of-the-art computer laboratories. More importantly, he beefed up the school’s IT curriculum that is now the envy of more prominent private schools.

The result was impressive: it has now produced a total of 3,000 MOUS (Microsoft Office User) certified graduates. Its 11 IT certified faculty members are constantly hired to train IT and non-IT teachers nationwide.

For these achievements alone, it is but fitting for SEC to treat itself for a job well done. And it is doing just that. On February 13 to 18, its Foundation Week, it will mount festivities to highlight its accomplishments and say thanks to those who made it all possible.

A highpoint of the celebration is the live concert of Bamboo, whose lead singer Bamboo Manalac is Con’s cousin, on February 15. To those who actually walked through the corridors of SEC, there’s Grand Alumni Homecoming on February 18, the last day of the festivities. — Melvin G. Calimag

Now I know why Raymund Maclang vacated his marketing manager post at Intel Philippines.

There are two things that are close to his heart - online games and golf!

At his present job as netGames, Inc. sales and marketingdirector, he gets to do both. Particularly playing golf even though it is raining cats and dogs.

Last January 26, I met again Mr. Maclang - known in the local IT industry as RJ. It was the first time since he left Intel in 2004.

RJ co-emceed the Philippine press launch of PangYa. He underscored that it is not a plain golf game, but a "casual fantasy" golf game.

Fantasy because "PangYa takes the ordinary game of golf and twists it into a fantasy role-playing game." (PangYa means a perfect it. It is an expression of something perfect, exhilirating and aspirational.)

To ignite a PangYa fever and jumpstart a fantasy golf mood, netGames is giving away R1 million. Under the "PangYa 1 Hit Challenge promo", all gamers need to do is purchase and load R50 and hit a Hole-in-One in an 18-hole course from February 7 to April 25, 2006.

Will the more than 500,000 subscribers of netGames’ Khan Online take a break and play PangYa, where the pot money is?

Surely, the money is real. — Edison D. Ong