The face of INQ chief wordsmith Leo Magno caught his attention on the giant video screen. Then fellow IT journalists Erwin Oliva and many more Cyberpress members.

As the scenes unfolded, he recognized the "film documentary". It was a Palawan media conference in 2005 organized by HP and Intel. Apparently Erwin was lent by the PR agent of Sony to road test the camera. When he returned the camera, he failed to erase the tape.

Unknowingly, Erwin’s film docu was shown at the Sony showcase. I could only surmise they were terrific shots that merited exhibition.

Jing was quick on his feet. Before I could rush to the site to view the homemade video, he had politely requested the operator to shelf the video, informed the PR agent of his discovery, and in a jiffy, apologies were issued.

This "not for public consumption" thing reminded me of an incident that hit the Singapore headlines recently. It's about Singaporean teens filming themselves having sex on their camera phones.

The case has been labelled by netizens as the "Tammy" saga. It sent many into a frenzy search to find the video on the Internet.

It all started when a 17-year-old student nicknamed Tammy misplaced her cameraphone, which contained the steamy 10-minute footage.

Right now, what is playing on my mind is neither the Cyberpress docu nor the "Tammy" sex video, but what hot live pleasure activity will hit the thousands of 3G-enabled camera phones. The question is: will it be for public consumption? Who’ll produce it first? — Edison D. Ong

That time of the year

The month of March is always a happy time in the life of a student, especially if he or she is part of the graduating batch. This is also the time when graduating high school students prepare to enter college.

For some who have taken entrance examinations as early as August last year or in the early months of this year, finding out the results surely brings heart-pounding moments.

Unlike my generation (I graduated from high school in 1993) when eager and nervous students would physically troop to the university or wait for snail mail to confirm if you passed the exam or not, students nowadays are spared of this agony.

That’s because most universities now have websites where they announce the list of students who passed the exams. This is helpful in particular to students living in remote provinces who don’t have the extra buck to travel to the big city or wait for the mail that might never even come.

Although today’s youth tend to overlook this type of convenience made possible by technology, it still amazes me how far things have developed since my graduation from high school.

I still remember sometime in April 1993 when, after waiting forever for my exam result to arrive in our house, I, together with my brother, finally decided to go to the registrar’s office in UP Diliman to personally see the results. A website would have made that trip unnecessary.

It’s good to know therefore that a number of schools, UP among them, now have online tools to provide vital information such as test results. Even the Supreme Court has recognized the value of this as it also now releases the results of the Bar exam in its website.

I’m particularly impressed, however, by the efficient system used the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) in displaying the results of its recent entrance exam. The school, through its website, http://www.pup.edu.ph, does not use the traditional mode of showing the entire list of examinees.

Rather, it allows an examinee to search his or her name in the database of successful examinees. A "query manager" gives the searcher the option to search based on his or her last name, first name, or middle name. Only those who passed the exam are displayed in the site.

The beauty of this system is that even if multiple users would search the database all at once, it’s unlikely that it would get clogged up. Also, it eliminates the need to look up one-by-one the names of the examinees and go straight to the name they’re looking for.

This is the way to go. — Melvin G. Calimag