MANILA, Philippines - The Philippines is recognized among the leaders in developing mobile banking for the unbanked. Mobile banking utilizes the mobile phone to extend banking services such as deposits, withdrawals including remittances or money transfer, bills payments, and loan payments.

Telecommunications companies (telcos), such as Smart Communications (Smart) and Globe Telecommunications (Globe), were one of the first worldwide to start mobile money. Smart started in 2001 through Smart Money, and Globe followed soon after in 2004 with GCash.

Heritage refers to all those values, skills and practices that make a people unique, In the global market, heritage can create a comparative advantage for Filipino-made products. Proof are the success stories of Filipino products which reinterpret local heritage within a contemporary, cosmopolitan context, and which sell at upscale prices internationally.

Examples can be drawn from furniture and fashion.

The dragons were sitting in an elegant den at the Royal Society in London, Britain’s national academy of sciences. Overlooked by portraits of great 18th-century scientists, the judges heard four powerful pitches for science-based businesses.

These included an image analysis system to assess the facial mobility of people who are suffering from paralysing diseases or have had surgery on the face; a “text mining” tool to extract chemical information from the world’s scientific literature; an educational venture, called Big Bang in a Box, to sell images of high-energy particle collisions at Cern’s new atom smasher; and a lightweight material stronger than steel, for use in body armour and the aerospace industry.

Manila, Philippines – Google recently announced that Filipino Wayne Dell Manuel has won the company's first Google Map Maker Global Competition, which encouraged users around the world to map universities, schools and hospitals in their home countries to help humanitarian organizations do their jobs better. Manuel bested more than 700 other contestants from around the world to win a US$50,000 donation from UNICEF for the Philippines. The donation will benefit projects that empower Filipino youth through technology.

HANOVER—The world's biggest high-tech fair opened Tuesday with IT giants aiming to bounce back strongly from a terrible 2009 by wooing consumers with trendy gadgets.

"Connected Worlds" is the theme of this year's CeBIT fair, with companies showcasing energy and labor-saving devices that use wireless technology to communicate with each other and with users far away.

But, as ever, the CeBIT is not all work and no play.

According to Al Lee, PayScale's director of quantitative analysis, "Even more than where you go to school, the degree you get is a bigger influencer of your pay for the vast majority of Americans." Lee says that an English major from Harvard may end up making six figures, but that person is an exception among English majors.

Which degrees bring home the most bacon? "Ones involving numbers," says Lee. Seven of the 10 highest-earning undergraduate degrees in the report are in engineering, with economics, physics, and computer science filling out the rest.

MANILA, PHILIPPINES - Making Asia’s sprawling urban areas more sustainable, competitive and environmentally friendly is the focus of an Asian Development Bank (ADB)-organized conference that begins in Manila today.

The conference, Cluster Economic Development – Promoting Local Economies through SME-Cluster Approach, will look at a new approach for urban development by supporting conditions for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to flourish around industry clusters, and the vital role played by SMEs for sustainable growth and poverty reduction.

The recently concluded 10th e-Services Global Sourcing Conference and Exhibition saw a marked participation of domestic start-ups doing chip design on a global scale signaling hope for the Philippine semiconductor industry outside manufacturing, according to the Department of Trade and Industry’s Center for International Trade Expositions and Missions (CITEM).

In the past, majority of Filipino chip designers work for large multinational companies, however, following the massive lay-offs and worldwide recession of recent years, ex-Intel IC design engineers formed together a Filipino operation involved in the design and layout outsourcing for a number of US-based memory chips companies.

Money sent home by overseas Filipino workers (OFW) has been a boon for the economy, but has also had a negative indirect impact on manufacturing and exports, a study by an economist from the University of the Philippines (UP) showed.

The study, titled: "The Macro-economic Impact of Remittances in the Philippines," by UP economist Cayetano W. Paderanga, Jr., chairman of the Institute for Development and Econometric Analysis Inc., noted that the steady inflow of dollars from remittances strengthens the peso, making labor and production costs here more expensive than those of competing neighbors in the region.

In my recent BGN blog post (Providing lifelines for our Pinoy start-ups), I mentioned who emerged as the three winners for the Plug and Play start-up pitch event last February 9.

These winning start-ups will head to Silicon Valley and receive exposure and coaching from hard-core VCs in preparation for more competitive and international business competitions.

As a follow-up from last week's activity, the Philippine Daily Inquirer's Abigail Ho supplies us a report on the three lucky start-ups who will gain so much from Plug and Play's mentoring wing.